Art Project Grant
Art Project Grant
HARMONY: Environmental Justice, Community, and the Power of Art.
Adam Guggemos: graphic designer, art events promoter; Michelle Ronning: jewelry designer and maker; Tara Makinen: Executive Director of Itasca Orchestra and Strings, musician; Moira Villiard: visual artist, Cultural Programming Coordinator at American Indian Community Housing Organization; Jeanne Doty: Retired Associate Professor UMD Music, pianist; Amber Burns: choreographer, dancer, actor, middle school art teacher; Margaret Holmes: visual artist, poet, and former Children's Theatre employee; Tammy Mattonen: visual artists, co-founder of Crescendo Youth Orchestra; Kayla Schubert: Native American craft artist, writer, employee at MacRostie Art Center; Ariana Daniel: mixed media artist, arts instructor; Emily Fasbender: student liaison, visual artist
Michelle Ronning: jewelry designer and maker; Tara Makinen: Executive Director of Itasca Orchestra and Strings, musician; Jeanne Doty: Retired Associate Professor UMD Music, pianist; Amber Burns: choreographer, dancer, actor, middle school art teacher; Margaret Holmes: visual artist, poet, and former Children's Theatre employee; Kayla Schubert: Native American craft artist, writer, employee at MacRostie Art Center; Ariana Daniel: mixed media artist, arts instructor
ACHF Arts Access ACHF Arts Education ACHF Cultural Heritage
HARMONY will create a diverse collaboration of performing artists from our region who use their performance to engage with community concerns related to the environment, neighborhood, and community. Our two main outcomes from the event are to: 1. Attract (through marketing efforts, co-sponsorship by community organizations and relationships forged through our work during the past 12 years) community members from a diverse set of cultural communities and socioeconomic backgrounds to be energized and enriched by the performances. 2. Inspire future connections, conversations, and creative partnerships that continue to build toward a just, respectful, and sustainable future for our community. Our most straightforward criteria for the project's success are attendance numbers and a measure of the degree of diversity among our attendees. The next level of complexity will be captured through an electronic survey following the event and using the results to inform our future programming. In this evaluation we will assess how attendees' understanding of cultural values about environmental justice has been impacted. We will also ask respondents to share further actions they may take as a result of the event. We will also be alert to evidence of future collaborations that arise out of of the performances, which will demonstrate success in catalyzing cross-cultural partnerships.
Outcome 1: Attracting (through marketing efforts, co-sponsorship by community organizations and relationships forged through our work during the past 12 years) community members from a diverse set of cultural communities and socioeconomic backgrounds to be energized and enriched by the artistic performances. Results: We drew speakers and audience members from a broad array of organizations, congregations, and socio-economic backgrounds to our event, including members of Veterans for Peace, the St. Scholastica Monastery, the Duluth Branch of the NAACP, Temple Israel, Peace United Church of Christ, and our sponsoring organizations (AICHO, Community Action Duluth, CHUM, Zeitgeist, the City of Duluth, and Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light). While the artists and speakers of the event were a culturally-diverse group of people (Native American, African American, and White), and our audience included members of all groups just mentioned, our attendance was smaller and less diverse than we had hoped, perhaps in part because of our weather-related rescheduling and the fact that we had to relocate from St. Scholastica to Peace United Church of Christ. Outcome 2: Inspiring future connections, conversations, and creative partnerships that continue to build toward a just, respectful, and sustainable future for our community. Results: A truly unique and inspiring set of connections, conversations, and creative partnerships were forged through this work. A small creative team of artists helped formulate the questions posed to our speakers for the event, so that these questions informed both the discussion and the performance in meaningful ways. As a result, artistic performance was interwoven with discussion, and the performances provided profound commentary. Several speakers noted how moved they were by the synergy, and the artists repeatedly expressed their wishes to revisit the collaboration for the purposes of performing together again through this framework.
Other,local or private