I HEART ART @ "THE WALLS BELONG TO US"...EVENT PICS 2

I HEART ART @ "THE WALLS BELONG TO US"...EVENT PICS 1

I HEART ART @ "THE WALLS BELONG TO US"...SET-UP

Pre-Event action.....

CENSORSHIP: AN EXHIBITION BENEFITING ARTISTS IN DISTRESS

Please come out and support this event. It benefits the struggle of artistic freedoms.

November 8 – December 6, 2007 / opening reception: Thursday, November 8th; 6 - 9pm* / closing reception: Friday, December 6th; 7 - 10pm*
CENSORSHIP: AN EXHIBITION BENEFITING ARTISTS IN DISTRESS

freeDimensional and L2EL ARTS Host Multi-Media Gala with Local and Global Artists Who Fight Back

New York, NY – From November 8 through December 6, 2007, freeDimensional and L2EL
ARTS will bring together twenty-seven local and global artists who create art that rejects the complex systems that presently dominate humanity and prevent free expression. The exhibition is located at the Brecht Forum on 451 West Street, New York between Bank Street and Bethune Street.
Visit www.brechtforum.org for directions.

Artists including Issa Nyaphaha, a Cameroonian artist who was imprisoned and tortured for his journalistic drawings, and Pierre Mumbere Mujomba, an award-winning Congolese playwright, will exhibit along side artists such as Mike Diana, the first artist ever to be convicted of obscenity in the United States, and Natasha Mayers, Commondreams.org's first resident artist.

The Opening reception on November 8, 2007, 6:00pm-9:00pm, will feature over forty works by twenty-seven visual and performance artists and global activists, interactive sessions, multi-genre musical performances, and multi-media displays. There will be a suggested donation of ten dollars at the door to help raise money for the freeDimensional network. Sponsors for the opening reception include Peripheral Media, Pearl Vodka, and Rogue Ale with catering by Little Giant, Lime, KUMA Inn, Tiapol and Stinky Bklyn. For further details on the event please visit www.L2ELARTS.org and www.freedimensional.org.

freeDimensional is a global platform that organizes community art space and local resources for the support and protection of individuals who create dialogue on global issues and inequalities through their art and media. freeDimensional has over thirty sites across the globe and has assisted dozens of artists in distress. For more information please visit www.freedimensional.org.

L2EL ARTS From Brooklyn to Philadelphia, L2EL ARTS curates, promotes and organizes
artistic events for emerging artists. With an emphasis on social, political and environmental concerns, it is our goal to bring artists working within these realms and their work into the public's awareness. L2EL ARTS was formed in the summer of 2007 by artists, Thomas Bell and Jennifer Harris. For more information please visit www.L2ELARTS.org.

November 8 – December 6, 2007
opening reception: Thursday, November 8th; 6 - 9pm*
closing reception: Friday, December 6th; 7 - 10pm*

THE SOA Presents..."THE WALLS BELONG TO US", 11/08/07

Please come out and support the most highly anticipated event of the year!!! It goes down this Thursday, November 8, 2007. See you there!!!!!

THE SOA WOULD LIKE TO INVITE YOU TO "THE WALLS BELONG TO US II"
Many of you, see that the SOA is associated with the "The Walls Belong To Us" fundraiser and are charged with excitement and are ready be a part of this 2nd exhibiton/ movement. But to those that dont know the Walls Belong To Us II will be the second art benefit to support Alan Ket in his effort to pay legal expenses and raise money for his case's fines.

So you are all invited to join us for an evening of music, drinks, and art. We will have great new art for sale from artists like Chickens N Robots, Barry McGee, JA ONE, Joe Buck, M.Tony Peralta, Tony Philippou, DAZE, Charnier Corey, CRASH, Fiorentina DiBiasi and many more.

This is more than an art exhibit, this will be a statement!

LOCATION:
55DSL store
281 Lafayette St., Soho, NYC

TIME:
7-9pm

MUSIC:
DJ Soul

OPEN BAR

SUGGESTED DONATION:
$20

Generous support provided by: 55DSL, Complex magazine, Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, From Here to Fame, Actual Creative, Sound of Art and Mass Appeal
Venue: CLICK HERE TO BE A PART OF THIS IMPORANT ART EXPERIENCE WHY SUPPORT KET WITH "THE WALLS BELONG TO US 2" EVENT?
THE WALLS BELONG TO US 2 will continue to serve as an instrument to raise funds in support of Alan Ket's recent legal challenges. Since his March 2007 arrest for graffiti crimes in three separate legal jurisdictions, Ket recently pleaded guilty to three felony charges and is facing thousands of dollars in legal fees and fines. Ket has no prior criminal record.

Since 1986, Ket has documented the New York City graffiti art movement and been an active participant as a painter and supporter. From launching STRESS (1995) and COMPLEX magazines (2001) to serving as an art curator for the 2006 video game "Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure," he has ensured that graffiti art is recognized as an important and legitimate art movement by documenting its pioneers and its protagonists. Traveling to universities nationwide, Ket has been an outspoken advocate on graffiti history and issues concerning public art. Today, as US publisher of From Here to Fame Books, Ket publishes work that celebrates Hip-Hop, street movements and graffiti history.
Venue: CHECK OUT MORE INFO. ON SUPPORTING KET...BY CLICKING HERE
THE SOA WOULD LIKE TO INVITE YOU TO "THE WALLS BELONG TO US II"

Museum News: George Pataki wasted $3M in tax dollars for pet project

George Pataki wasted $3M in tax dollars for pet project

BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Monday, November 5th 2007, 4:00 AM



A rendering of the Museum of Women

A rendering of the Museum of Women
The prime site of public land in Battery City that Pataki set aside for a 10-story museum is likely to finally find use as a badly needed school.

The prime site of public land in Battery City that Pataki set aside for a 10-story museum is likely to finally find use as a badly needed school.

Former Gov. George Pataki wasted nearly $3 million in taxpayer money on a plan to build a women's museum that today is just an empty lot in lower Manhattan, a Daily News investigation has found.

Dreamed up by a commission chaired by his wife, Libby, the Museum of Women burned through state subsidies by hiring dozens of consultants, including two fund-raisers who raised no money.

When the nine-year saga finally sputtered to a quiet end in September, the Patakis' "museum" had raised less than $23,000 from the private sector and procured one "artifact" - a wagon used in suffragette rallies that wound up in an upstate hay barn.

Now that Pataki is gone, Gov. Spitzer and Mayor Bloomberg are expected to announce the plot of highly coveted state land in Manhattan will finally serve a public purpose as the site of a badly needed new school.

"This was a prime site that was frozen in place for years, with no public review, during a school overcrowding crisis in lower Manhattan, because the museum was a pet project of Pataki's," said Julie Menin, who heads Community Board 1.

The museum's saga began in 1998, when Pataki asked his wife to head a 53-member Commission to Honor the Achievements of Women that would celebrate that year's 150th anniversary of the Women's Rights Convention in upstate Seneca Falls.

Funded by a $500,000 state grant, the panel recommended building a museum as a "permanent tribute to women."

The Patakis were honorary co-chairmen and deeply involved in the project. She courted would-be donors while he let the museum work out of the executive chamber, tapped top aides to run it and gave it a prime site in Battery Park City.

By 1999, Pataki steered the first of four discretionary grants that eventually would total $2.2 million from the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation to start the museum.

He provided valuable state office space in midtown and installed two key loyalists to steer the nonprofit organization - Zenia Mucha, his top political operative, joined the board, while Lynn Rollins, his senior adviser on women's issues, was its president.

"I think we're going to see a lot of support for it," the then-governor said when he announced the plans in March 2000.

Plans called for a 10-story, 125,000-square-foot building at Battery Place and First Place with exhibits on the 500-year history of women in America. There would be a roof garden, a leadership center, a trove of artifacts, an electronic zipper to feature news about women - even sculptures of women by womanizing artist Pablo Picasso, planning documents show.

Also on the drawing boards: a depiction of the "Earth Mother," representing Native American ideas of women, and the "Republican Mother," showcasing the role of women in raising U.S. citizens, according to design materials.

None of it happened.

At one point, the museum estimated its price tag would be $146 million, including $27.5 million for exhibits and artifacts.

Consultants - hired with the state funds- called the goal reachable. Business plans were drafted that projected tens of millions of dollars flowing into museum coffers from corporations, foundations and wealthy individuals.

Since the project got underway nearly a decade ago, the museum, which spent $121,000 on fund-raising, raised only $22,650 in private funds, tax filings show.

There wasn't a single corporate donor and only one $20,000 foundation gift. That didn't stop the museum from spending taxpayer dollars on accountants, architects, lawyers, Web masters, public relations consultants and others.

Among the things it wasted money on were:

The wagon. Museum brass harbored big plans to build a world-class collection but obtained only one object, an early 19th century horse-drawn wagon used by the women's suffrage movement for parades and rallies on Fifth Ave.

It was valued at $6,130, but taxpayers shelled out $8,750 to remove pigeon droppings, store it in a barn, turn its wheels every three months to prevent rot and buy insurance.

"A wagon wheel is meant to be moving and rolling to maintain the integrity of both wheel and wagon," said Mary Betlejeski, whose family owns the farm property near upstate Guilderland.

"It's in splendid shape and it's a relatively rare object," said Geoffrey Stein, a senior historian and curator at the New York State Museum, where the wagon wound up.

The phantom Web site. Museum documents also claim "extensive work was done in preparation for launching a Web site." It was never launched. One consultant was paid $19,959 "to plan the architecture of the Web site."

Fund-raisers. Stephen Briganti, the $276,905-a-year CEO of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, got $54,000 from the museum for part-time work as a fund-raising consultant. He didn't raise a dime. Briganti didn't return calls.

Barbara Groves, a development consultant, was paid more than $30,000 after boasting she could "raise an immediate $1 million." The largest individual contributor kicked in $2,500. "We were very optimistic and enthusiastic, but obviously things stalled and we were hobbled by post-9/11 financial difficulties," Groves said.

History Advisory Board. The 18-member board of women's history professors worked with design consultants to plan future exhibits. The museum jetted them from Idaho, Illinois, Michigan and Mississippi to attend meetings in Manhattan, paid them $250-a-day stipends and put them up at the Yale Club. Total tab: $19,405. Rollins said only, "I'm heartbroken that the museum didn't work out."

In late 2005, the community began scouring the neighborhood for a site to locate a desperately needed new public school as families began returning to lower Manhattan.

They saw the museum site as the answer to their needs but were repeatedly told it was "locked up" for the museum.

That changed at the end of last year, when Pataki left office. Museum board members started quitting, state funding slowed to a trickle and the Spitzer administration started reviewing some of its expenditures.

The museum didn't have a lot to show for the money it spent, said Eileen Larrabee, a spokeswoman for the Office of Parks, which administered the grants.

"We reviewed their lack of progress, lack of a product and lack of accomplishments, and it raised a red flag for us," she said.

The museum board met for the last time in April and went out of business. In September, the museum filed dissolution papers, records show.

A spokesman for Pataki said the former governor is disappointed the museum project "wasn't able to gain the traction it needed to move forward."

Review: American Legacy "The Art of Liberation"

American Legacy's Fall 2007 issues profiles the art of Emory Douglas and how effective his images spoke to the black community on change and showed The Black Panther Party in true light. After creating a poster announcing the arrival of Betty Shabazz to speak at a rally at City College, the then-student was approached by Black Panther members Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale to aid with their newspaper and the rest remains history. Douglas went on to produce the cutural history of The Panthers through an array of vivid and sometimes self-defensive collages, illustrations, cartoons, prints,posters, and cards, many which are now documented and curated in a new book by Rizzoli publishers and an exhibit at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, CA which opens later this month.

The majority of Douglas's work depicts themes of the oppressed vs the oppressor, manipulation, struggle, brutuality as well as beauty; it reveals a side of the Panther Party that was not allowed to be shown. They were often incited to violence or urged people to go out and kill the police but the truth was a "new policing" to create a sense of consciousness in the black community. Most of Douglas's posters announced free social services such as health clinics, breakfasts for children, transportation, food banks, and screenings for sickle cell anemia.

The article also reveals those who are closest to Douglas and express their opinions and sentiments on this silence icon who fought the system through the power of the pen instead of power of violence.

To read the article in its entirety, American Legacy Fall 2007 issue is on newsstands now or visit the site at www.americanlegacymag.com

Upcoming Exhibitions @ The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Album Quilt, 1853
Possibly made by the members of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, American
Printed and solid plain weave cotton with applique of printed, solid, and glazed plain weave cotton, wool twill, silk velvet, cotton velveteen, silk satin and plain weave silk; wool, silk, and cotton embroidery in chain, buttonhole, stem, cross, satin, and herringbone stitches; glass beads; ink; quilted in cotton
87 x 87 inches (221.0 x 221.0 cm)
Gift of Elizabeth Albert, 2001
2001-204-1

Costume and Textiles: Recent Acquisitions from A to Z
November 3, 2007 - March 2008

The inaugural installation in the Costume and Textiles Study Gallery features a selection of the textiles, historic costume, and contemporary fashion that were acquired by the Museum during the past decade, and which illustrate the encyclopedic nature of the costume and textiles collection. The objects on view include works of amazing beauty and rarity, examples of exquisite workmanship and design, items of historic significance—and sometimes the unexpected.

All of the approximately 50 objects on view—from a circa-1800 Neoclassical dress with whitework embroidery to a 1990s futuristic man's T-shirt by Belgian designer Walter van Bierendonck—are now part of the Museum’s permanent collection of costume and textiles. Remarkable for their depth and breadth, these holdings currently number more than thirty thousand objects, making the collection one of the largest in the country. These recent additions, acquired thanks to the generosity of numerous donors both of works of art and of funds for purchases, illustrate the continued growth and amazing scope of this valuable public resource.


Curator
H. Kristina Haugland • Associate Curator, Costume and Textiles

Location
Costume and Textiles Study Gallery, Perelman Building, second floor




Necklace with Pendant, 1970
Olaf Skoogfors, American
Silver gilt, amethyst, tourmaline, and sodalite
9 x 6 1/2 inches (22.9 x 16.5 cm)
Gift of the artist, 1970
1970-141-1

Precious Possessions celebrates the breadth of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s American craft collection, with its luxurious works of art in glass, metal, clay, fiber, and wood. The objects on view demonstrate the Museum’s early commitment to contemporary craft, as seen in the ceramics of Gertrud and Otto Natzler acquired in 1945, and encompass a wide range of highlights from the collection: old favorites that have not been displayed for some time and several works that are making their first appearance in the galleries. Many of the pieces selected were received by the Museum as gifts from generous collectors, relatives of artists, and in some cases, the artists themselves. Others were purchased with funds raised by the Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art through its highly successful and esteemed annual Craft Show.

In mid-winter, a selection of fiber art from the Museum’s craft collection is being rotated into this gallery to coincide with the University of the Arts’ international fiber symposium Materiality and Meaning: Examining Fiber and Material Studies in Contemporary Art and Culture in March 2008. Precious Possessions salutes the many generations of donors, and most especially the Women’s Committee, in their commitment to the growth of the Museum’s American craft collection.

Curator
Elisabeth Agro • Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Decorative Art

Location
North Auditorium Gallery, ground floor




www.philamuseum.org

All information courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

First Fridays @ The Guggenheim

Enjoy a drink with friends, explore the galleries, and listen to some of the best DJs in town, all in the spectacular Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. Open from 9 PM to 1 AM, admission is $25. Free for all Guggenheim members!

NOV 2
Alex Barck of Jazzanova and Toby Cornish of Jujoto

Celebrating it's 10 year anniversary with record label Sonar Kollektiv, Berlin-based DJ collective, Jazzanova, will be hitting up November's First Friday event in collaboration with the city wide festival Berlin Lights. Alex Barck will be representing Jazzanova and Toby Cornish from design group Jujoto will provide a live site-specific visual set to accompany the music in the rotunda.

Become a member and attend First Fridays for free.

Our Program Highlights podcast includes a feature on First Fridays.

In partnership with ST. GERMAIN

Media Sponsor Village Voice

Photos by Aarona Pichinson and Virginie Blanchere

All information courtesy of The Guggenheim Museum