Breakfast with artist, Gregory Sale, weekend of PSU's Open Engagement Conference this month, talking about his screening of It's not just black and white: a video and mediated performance at the Phoenix Art Museum on June 20 at 7pm. The film documents the creation of an installation of black-and-white striped walls painted last year for Gregory's residency at the ASU Art Museum with the participation of inmates in a Maricopa County Sheriff's Office rehabilitation/reentry program, correction officers, and artist collaborators. Over three months, this installation at the ASU Art Museum served as an instructional platform for public forums, panel discussions, performance and social actions.
Visible Tomorrows
"A pressing need, Today our country is experiencing an extraordinary rate of imprisonment, a "mass incarceration," so high that it affects not only the individual offender, but also society as a whole, whether measured by cost, recidivism the failure of rehabilitation, or the impact on children and families."
"The seeds of this project come from a series of questions: How can a country that prioritizes freedom and democracy be the world leader in incarceration? Could this be the first generation in America to spend more on incarceration than education? Can the aesthetic focus and reflective quality of a museum be activated to build communal support and civic dialogue?"
"The plan and promise of a project, We - artist Gregory Sale and poet TC Tolbert - propose a social and aesthetic project designed to engage at-risk young adults in the Maricopa Country area who are often without familial or communal support or who have experienced foster care, homelessness, juvenile detention, adults jails or prison. They risk being caught up in Arizona's system of criminal punishment. Many have aged out of the foster care and juvenile detention systems. The challenges they face are considerable and often invisible to the pubic at large and muted in public discourse."
"Visible tomorrows, draws on previous artistic projects by Sale and on the ongoing youth and prison programs facilitated by Tolbert. This existing work addresses the issue of incarceration. Working in collaboration with Tumbleweed Center for Youth Development, we will design a series of workshops to open spaces for creating personalized visual and poetic materials that can impact the lives of these young adults. Participants will examine their personal court documents as a means to contemplate new ownership of personal narrative and an opportunity for revision. Centered around collaborative workshops and exhibitions, visible tomorrows aims at allowing young men and women to find ways to go beyond invisibility to self-recognition and the possibilities of imaging a new future."
http://asuartmuseum.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/it%E2%80%99s-not-just-black-and-white-gregory-sale-social-studies-project-6/
It’s not just black and white:
ReplyDeletea video and mediated performance by Gregory Sale with videographer Jason Dillon
Wednesday, June 20, 7pm
Whiteman Hall | Phoenix Art Museum
Please join us for this special screening presented in conjunction with Gregory Sale’s exhibition Beware! Artwork (and modest proposal for it) Ahead! on exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum until July 1.
This video and performance grew out of Gregory’s 2011 Social Studies residency exhibition at the ASU Art Museum , which created a framework in which to consider the criminal justice system in Arizona . Developed through a number of public/private partnerships with different ASU departments, government agencies, and community organizations, it greatly enhanced the Museum's role as a vital gathering place. A major first step, and the subject of this project, was the creation of an installation of black-and-white-striped walls painted with the participation of inmates in a Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office rehabilitation/reentry program, along with corrections officers and artist collaborators.
Beware! Artwork (and modest proposal for it) Ahead! continues through July 1, 2012. Two collaborative bodies of work led by Sale comprise this new installation. At its center is a proposal for visible tomorrows, a project designed to engage and disrupt on an individual level the social mechanisms that often appear to destine young men and women for entry into the criminal justice system. The other body of work is a suite of works on paper, Life is Life, that grew out of artistic workshops with ten men serving life sentences without possibility of parole in Pennsylvania . Together these projects are events and conceptual statements for reflection and analysis. They create a novel context, shaped by the artist and the museum siting, for recognizing the complexity of a contemporary social and political problem and a way of redefining it, or seeing it anew while progressing toward solutions.
Beware! Artwork (and modest proposal for it) Ahead! was realized in collaboration with poet TC Tolbert; artistic contributors Claes Bergman , Therese Grossmeyer, Ann Morton, Barry Sparkman , and Eric Susser ; and organizational partner Tumbleweed Center for Youth Development. This project is supported in part by a Contemporary Forum Artist Mid-Career Artist Award (Gregory Sale, 2011) and the generous contribution of Elaine and Sid Cohen. Collaborators for Life is Life include Van, Stan, Tom, Roy , John, Zafir, Spel, Chuck, Toan, and Felix; organizational partner Mural Arts’ Restorative Justice Program; and the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Graterford. Additional support came from the Ford Foundation and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art Museum. It’s not just black and white at the ASU Art Museum received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts, and the Friends of ASU Art Museum.
The June 20th screening and performance event is the first program in the Phoenix Art Museum ’s Summer Film Series.
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