By Anne Ream

I believe in anger.  Righteous anger, justified anger, the kind of anger that leads to real change – because there has never been, and probably never will be, any major social movement without it.

I believe in anger, which is one of the reasons I believe in rap. And though the genre has grown older, arguably tamer, and infinitely more mainstream over the last thirty-plus years, its best beats are often angry ones.  We live in a world characterized by inequality and injustice, and the musical mirror we hold up to that reality needs to be a gritty, jagged one. This is something that the most evocative rappers – think Public Enemy, The Roots, Lauryn Hill – seem to understand instinctively. Their songs aren’t just lyrical. They’re political, and they make demands.

I believe in anger, and I believe in rap, and that’s why I can’t stop thinking about Rick Ross, the Miami-based rapper and Reebok spokesperson whose musical seemed nothing more than an extended shout out to his favorite brands – punctuated by regular references to guns, gangstas, and bling – until he released  “U.O.N.E.O,” a single that celebrates a drug-facilitated rape. “Put molly all in her champagne/She ain’t even know it/I took her home and enjoyed that/She ain’t even know it,” Ross raps on his newest release.

Ross is rightly being condemned for his rape-glorifying lyrics, and Reebok is facing a slew of on and offline protests, as well as calls to terminate the rapper’s contract. In the face of a firestorm that has the potential to engulf his pocketbook, he issued the inevitable apology, one that wasn’t so much a mea culpa as a “maybe you misunderstood me.”  ”Things like date rape shouldn’t be glorified,” Ross clarified for his fans, “[but] with that being said, I don’t think taking rap lyrics as straight facts is ever the way to go … In reality some people do these things, and shouldn’t it be brought to light so young women can protect themselves? The term ‘rape’ wasn’t used … you know I would never use the term rape in my records.”

The implication of Ross’s statement – that a rape that that goes unnamed isn’t a rape at all – is only part of the problem. The truth is that Ross’s lyrical celebration of violence against women isn’t really shocking. It’s a symptom of a particular, and arguably particularly American, strain of misogynistic rap music, one in which musical rage against the politically powerful has been replaced by rage against, or indifference to, the powerless. Call it bully rap.

But there is another world out there, and another way.  I’m writing this piece from Dakar, Senegal, as part of a project sponsored by Art Works for Change, where I’ll be spending the next week with Sister Fa (real name: Fatou Diatta), a woman who is the very definition of a rapper with the right to rage. The hip hop scene in Senegal is active musically and politically – many of its musicians have strong ties to local human rights groups and NGOs – and Fatou is at the forefront of that community. Her music is a sort of fusion-rap that marries soul, hip-hop, dance, and just a hint of reggae. Her lyrics address race, class, poverty, and female empowerment (and they still make you want to dance). But it is her mission, Education Sans Excision (Education without Cutting) – a concert tour and Art Works for Change workshop series created to educate Senegalese villagers on the consequences of female genital cutting – that has encouraged a countrywide conversation about a practice that was outlawed in Senegal in 1999, but continues in far too many regions even today.

Female Genital Cutting is a subject that Fatou knows heartbreakingly well: she was a victim of FGC before she went to primary school. “I feel that I am not a total woman now,” says Fatou of the experience that has scarred her in both literal and figurative terms.  “And I am angry that this still is going on.  Just weeks ago I learned that they cut a girl, in my own village, who was not yet one year old. So I use my voice and music to tell the truth, to make people think about what is still happening.  When we (Education Sans Excision) go into the villages in Senegal, we are doing more than making music for music’s sake.  It’s not just about the words – it is about taking action.”

“Hip-hop, rap, they are supposed to be about protest,” adds Fatou. “That’s the history. I’m a rapper, but when you ask me how I define myself, I have to say that I am a human rights activist first. Music is how I put my beliefs into action.  It can bring people together, get people talking about things that they have been silent about. It reminds people that they can be a part changing this.”

It’s an old school, purist’s definition of rap, and a vision of music-as-changemaker that feels worlds away from Rick Ross’ particular brand of self-expression. But on a clear night in Senegal, with the sound of Fatou and her band rising up from the courtyard below, it’s a definition that seems, and sounds, exactly right.

Anne K. Ream is a founding board member at Art Works for Change and the founder of The Voices and Faces Project.  She will be blogging from Senegal during Sister Fa’s Art Works for Change-supported Education Sans Excision concert tour.

Art Works for Change has a number of our projects out in the world. We are also partnering with allied organizations such as Artefacting to help them extend their reach by sharing blogs “from the field.”

Two projects currently in the field are our AWARE/OWARE game, being played by secondary school children in Senegal, and “Reconciling Ecologies in the Millennium City,” in Gurgaon, India.

We will be reporting on both these projects during April and May, so stay tuned to our blog and AWFC Facebook page.

AWARE/OWARE in Senegal
AWFC has joined the hip hop musician, human rights activist and Art Works for Change Ambassador, Sister Fa, in Senegal for the Education Sans Excision Campaign and Tour during April. We will be using our AWARE/OWARE game as an educational and integrative tool for storytelling to promote female empowerment and positive health practices. Thank you to the African Women’s Development Fund and the Oak Foundation, who helped AWFC fund this tour.

Our team of three is now in Senegal and traveling to several schools and communities in Kolda, in the south. Our Director of Community Partnerships, Susan Mensah, is leading the AWARE/OWARE game play; our board member Anne Ream is writing for Thomson Reuters and blogging for AWFC; and a talented photographer, Natalie Naccache, from Beirut is documenting the project to create a future photographic exhibition. We are joined by the educational facilitators from the NGOs World Vision and FAWE (Forum for African Women Educationalists).

To catch a glimpse of what we will be doing from a past tour, check out Sister Fa visiting Senegalese school children here.

Look for Voices and Faces’ Anne Ream’s blog within the next few days from Senegal — you can also follow and Like us on our AWFC Facebook page.

Reconciling Ecologies in the Millennium City
Alex White Mazzarella is leaving today for Gurgaon, India, to partake in Reconciling Ecologies in the Millennium City, produced by his organization Artefacting. The project is aimed at engaging communities to recognize their agricultural ecology and find opportunities for inclusion within the growing commercial and residential complexes and new cities of wealth. In Gurgaon, 40% of the agricultural land had been lost in the past five years to multiple shopping malls, golf courses, and luxury housing. Little attention is paid to the agricultural loss in the face of the burgeoning economic development.

The project, set up as an art intervention and inquiry-based practice, surveys how agriculture is morphing to fit Gurgaon’s transforming built environment, and test notions of how Gurgaon’s natural ecology can be regenerated. Central questions revolve around the relationship between sustainability and speculation as seen through Gurgaon’s development. The project will ask such questions as:

• What is the Gurgaon model of development and why is it not sustainable?
• What role does agriculture have in the urban growth of Gurgaon?
• What opportunities for sustainable solutions and prototypes can we find within urban agriculture?

We will be sharing the blog from Artefacting this week so look for the link on our Facebook page. Art Works for Change is in the process of creating an online exhibition platform so you will also see the artistic creations from both of these projects hosted on our website very soon.

by Marcia Tanner

It looks like an al fresco Quaker prayer meeting, this image of a tranquil gathering in a sunlit forest glade. What could be more peaceful?

Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller chose this copse of trees in the city park in Kassel, Germany as the setting for “FOREST (for a thousand years),” one of two site-specific installations they created for dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012.

“FOREST” compresses a millennium of the history of Kassel, Documenta’s host city –which was almost totally destroyed by bombs in World War II — into an impressionistic sound installation half an hour long. The sequence is repeated on a continuous loop, with the implication that it could go on forever, possibly representing a history of humankind as well.

It wasn’t easy to find this piece in the park, but some sounds wafted out — mysterious loud booming, ethereal choral music — luring you to discover their source. This was a circular clearing in the woods, with tree stumps and logs for seating. Speakers and amplifiers placed high up in the trees and on the ground surrounded the space. People sat, stood, circulated; they came and went silently, as if in a place of worship. Although you could choose to sit facing outward, toward the trees, most people chose to face inward, toward each other.

The sounds emanating from the speakers were so realistic, and often so in sync with the physical surroundings, that it became difficult to distinguish among your sensations. When the sound of rain began pattering on the leaves, then falling torrentially, you looked up to the sky and wondered why you weren’t getting wet. Was the bird song real, recorded, or both? You heard a shout, the crackle of horses’ hooves and wagon wheels on dry leaves and fallen branches, airplanes rumbling, laughter, a tree being chopped down and crashing to the forest floor, the noisy progress of a bulldozer.

This 6-minute video by Cardiff and Miller offers a vivid sense of the experience. (Audio on!)

Soon, though, the sounds became ominous: marching troops, a fife-and-drum band, intermittent gunfire, screams, then an all-out military attack with machine guns and bombers overhead, louder and louder, closer and closer. Bombs “exploded” nearby, culminating in one gigantic explosion silencing everything.

The disjunction between what you were hearing and what you perceived through your other senses — sight, smell and touch — and the physical and cognitive conflicts you experienced as a result, reached its climax at that point. You felt shaken and frightened yet provisionally safe in this communal setting, under its canopy of leafy green. Amidst your disorientation, you suddenly heard the voices of an angelic choir soaring up around you into the trees.

This video includes short excerpts of the “bombardment” and the music. Although it omits the presence of others, it gives a sense of the disparity between the piece’s setting and the aural experience.

The piece the choir sang — an exquisite setting of “Nunc dimittis,” St. Simeon’s prayer in Latin, by the contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt — was sublime and comforting following that horrific onslaught. Simeon’s story appears in the New Testament Gospel of Luke. He was a devout Jew whose dying wish to God was to let him live long enough to see the Messiah. His wish was granted, and his prayer asks God to let him die now in peace. It affirms that he is gladly letting go of this life, secure in the belief that eternal Salvation is at hand.

Here is a link to Pärt’s “Nunc dimittis” performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Paul Hillier conducting. This is the version used in “FOREST.” (It cuts off just before the end, unfortunately.)

How are we meant to interpret the placement of this devout Christian text and worshipful music in “FOREST”? What was the artists’ intent? Obviously the music functions as a profoundly soothing antidote to the intense experiences they’d just put us through. But is it also a call for resignation as a genuine profession of faith in the redemptive powers of the Divine? Is it a comment on the role the Church has played in Western civilization, offsetting the violence and suffering in this life with the promise of an eternal reward in Heaven?

The composer’s art offers us a vision of peace in the afterlife, based on religious belief. But as Cardiff and Miller remind us by immersing us in such a sensuously rich, insistently physical, history-laden environment in the here and now, the world around us may be showing us something else. It may be calling on us to DO something to end the seemingly endless cycle of human warfare and incessant destruction in the midst of so much earthly beauty, while we are still among the living.

In “FOREST,” Cardiff and Miller make use of Augmented Reality (AR), a term for contemporary technologies that combine your perceptions of everyday reality with overlays of fictional elements.

Augmented Reality is a questionable phrase: all human activities, including and maybe especially the activities of artists, have augmented reality since the beginning of what passes for civilization. What we know of “reality” (itself an ambiguous term) is a continuously evolving human construct.

In “FOREST (for a thousand years),” Cardiff and Miller enable you to inhabit, consciously, several different layers of reality at once: a particular time and space in the present; historic times and spaces specific to your physical location yet evocative of times and spaces elsewhere; and your own mental, physical, emotional and psychological realities as you respond to these complicated stimuli.

Whether heightened consciousness inspires action, or activism — or not — depends on the individual. But even feeling heightened empathy for those who’ve suffered under aerial bombardment is a step in the right direction. “FOREST” certainly imbued me with that, among other things.

Disasters of War, still playing in a theater near you: Part 2.  An ongoing series by Marcia Tanner

War and militarism were preoccupations of many of the hundreds of artists participating in dOCUMENTA 13 last year in Kassel, Germany.(1) The city of Kassel was a major center for the manufacture of armored tanks during World War II, and was bombed to smithereens as a consequence. So artists commissioned to make new work for the 2012 exhibition, which took over the entire town, frequently chose to create pieces referring to that painful history.

“Continuity” (2012), a video by the Israeli video artist Omer Fast, and the sound installation “Forest: For a Thousand Years” (2012) by the Canadian artist duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, were, for me, among the most compelling and memorable works in this genre. Both revolve around the theme of war, its immediate impact and its aftereffects. Both use contemporary media to create fictional narratives that involve and engage their audiences in ways that are specific to those media. And both were installed in Kassel’s beautiful Karlsaue Park, which appears, miraculously, to have been spared from aerial bombardment.

Whether these artists would describe themselves as antiwar activists is moot. But their pieces expand and intensify whatever feelings and thoughts you might have about war as a seemingly inevitable default mechanism for resolving human conflicts.

In Omer Fast’s Continuity, an upper middle class German couple appear to be enacting a strange, perverse ritual: a compensatory drama to cope with the death of their son in the Afghanistan War. They drive together to pick up a young soldier waiting for them at a tiny train station in the middle of nowhere.

They have a tearful reunion with him as their son Daniel, bring him home (blindfolded), take away his cell phone, then lead him to a bedroom which the mother tells him is exactly the same as he left it. They have dinner and listen to Daniel’s stories about the war in Afghanistan. Daniel goes to bed and is never seen again. There are intimations of incest from the beginning, and the mother may have gone to bed with him. On what may be the morning after, the father loads a heavy bundle shrouded in a plastic bag into the trunk of his car.

This scenario is re-enacted in two more iterations, each with bewildering variations, with three different men playing Daniel. One Daniel neglects to bring his rucksack with him to the station, causing distress to the couple; the rucksack is obviously an important prop in their drama. Points of view shift among son(s), mother and father. Although the young men seem to be call boys, they may be war veterans as well.

The narrative, dreamlike from the beginning, becomes more and more enigmatic and surreal as the video unfolds. Its climactic scene is a direct reference to the artist Jeff Wall’s 1992 work “Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol Near Moqor, Afghanistan, 1986)”. In Wall’s staged photograph, a dozen or so dead Soviet soldiers scattered on a desolate landscape talk among themselves, cheerfully enacting a macabre imitation of the realm of the living.

In “Continuity,” Omer Fast uses cinematic conventions every contemporary audience is familiar with, and manipulates them to undermine our notions of cinematic continuity. The status of the narrative is continually in question. You are led to believe but cannot believe what you see and hear; each scene is improbable and contradictory yet somehow plausible, faithful to some sort of incredible truth.

What you experience watching this film is derangement. Every character in it is deranged, the narrative is deranged, the world it depicts is deranged. If this is all a dream you have no idea whose dream it is, only that is it unbearable, cyclical, with no escape. Which is what I imagine war must be like, to those caught in it.

Here is a link to a short video clip from “Continuity”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7jevcFXWPw

Here’s a link to the full 40-minute-long video, in German without English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erWFf0T0Gpk&list=PLhNQSm6WmNZSBkXGki8Jw65vIGQCihokC&index=2

In next week’s blog I’ll take you deep into the Forest, with musical accompaniment

(1) Documenta, begun in 1956, is a city-wide international art exhibition that happens every five years, organized by a different curator. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev was the curator for dOCUMENTA 13.

The Disasters of War, still playing at a theater near you, Part 1. An ongoing series by Marcia Tanner

Does anyone reading this know where and when anti-war art began on this planet, and which artists created it? So far I haven’t found answers to my questions about its origins. But if Francesco Goya was not the first, his series of eighty-two etchings/aquatints The Disasters of War (Los Désastres de la Guerra), 1810-1820, was certainly the most profound — and most profoundly influential — body of work to protest war’s insanity, atrocities and misery in the last 400 years.

Although there is no evidence that Goya saw the actual events of the conflict during Napoleon’s occupation of Spain, he presents these horrific black, white and shaded images as unsparing first-hand eyewitness accounts. They’re almost photo-journalistic. His captions — incredulous, sardonic, disillusioned (he’d been a supporter of Napoleon), enraged and despairing — implicate him as an observer and commentator with no pretense toward objectivity. “Yo lo vi.” (“I saw this.”); “Por que?” (“Why?”); “No se puede mirar.” (“One can’t look.”); “Grande hazaña! Con muertos!”  (”Great feats! With dead men!); “Y no hai remedio.” (And there is nothing to be done.”)

Goya makes himself a (partly fictional?) character in his visual narrative. His unflinching, anguished revelation of his own moral, emotional and psychological responses to the hideousness of combat on his native soil, with horrors enacted on both sides, add a dimension to his work that makes it unique — particularly in light of the fact that artists were traditionally employed by their monarchs to celebrate the glories of war.

Picasso’s Guernica,1937, probably the most powerful anti-war artwork of the 20^th Century, is also a homage to his compatriot Goya. The monumental size of his painting dwarfs Goya’s intimately scaled prints, yet both are indelibly imprinted on our collective consciousness.  But to what effect?

Despite all the anti-war art produced between Goya and now, it’s hard to argue that much has changed in the world. Maybe that was one point of Insult to Injury, 2003, the British bad-boy-brothers/artists Jake and Dinos Chapman’s “rectified” version of the Goya series. Long obsessed by Goya’s Disasters in their work, they bought a mint collection of the prints and painted over them, replacing all the victims’ faces with clown faces and adding Mickey Mouse ears to some.

The Chapmans’ series shocked people, as it was meant to do. It was decried as defacement, vandalism, a cultural outrage. Yet could it also be viewed as the brothers’ bitter commentary on the seeming futility of art to change human behavior? Would Goya have understood? Possibly even approved?

Artists haven’t given up yet. In my next blog, next week, I’ll talk about contemporary art works that reflect upon the disasters of war through the media of our time.

^[1] Documenta, founded in 1955, is an international art exhibition that takes over the city of Kassel, Germany every five years. The curator for dOCUMENTA 13 was Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.

^[2] Roberta Smith, “Ambushed by Sundry Treasures,” The New York Times, January 3, 2013.

^[3] Quotes are from the AWFC mission statement.

^[4] “Transformation: Lehel” was produced by pilotraum01 e.V. as part of “overtures ZeitRäume,” a project series on sustainability. Curators Serafine Lindemann (artcircolo) and Christian Schoen (kunst | konzepte).

Recently in India, public outrage for better protection for women’s rights and safety erupted after 23-year-old Jyoti Singh Pandey died following a brutal gang-rape on a bus in New Delhi. Together with the Ethnic Arts Foundation, AWFC will be launching an online exhibition in March of the traditionally stylistic Mithila paintings, created by women living in northern India at the Nepal border. Many of their works tell the stories of their daily hardships, reflect cultural attitudes towards women, and continue the debate and need for laws and reforms.

In the Mithila image below, the community takes a positive action against bride-burning, a form of domestic violence in many countries in which the bride is killed by her husband or his family often due to dissatisfactions over the bride’s dowry. Although bride burning is a crime, the perpetrator often goes un-punished.

To the left in the painting, “The Abortion Clinic,” a pregnant women lies on a gurney looking at the ultrasound image of her fetus. Her mother-in-law insists that she abort the child because it is female, while the daughter begs against it.

In this image, the artist Rani Jha states, “In the past we could only peek through the curtain, now we have joined together and our breaking through the curtain.”

Artist Cecilia Paredes has been in many Art Works for Change exhibitions and recently returned from the Kathmandu Arts Festival. It was a remarkable event, with artists from around the world focusing on climate change and its human impact.

Though Nepal has contributed less than most other nations towards climate degradation, it was one of the first countries adversely affected because of its high altitude in the Himalayas. Millions of people are suffering from changing weather patterns and the threat of “glacial lake outburst floods” (GLOFs) is reaching a point of inevitability. Driven by concern and a hope to bring policy changes in the yet-to-be written Constitution, the festival, like AWFC, took up the challenge of turning contemporary art into a tool for social awareness and change.

Here are some examples of images from the Katmandu festival:

Cambodian Leang Seckong has taken over the Kathmandu Zoo, to install a majestic water serpent constructed from salvaged polythene bags, which he calls Naga.

Jyoti Duwadi’s Shades of Seeds – mounds of brightly colored seeds on a cracked mud floor — reminds us of threats posed by monoculture, genetic mutation and the scarcity of water resources in an increasingly fragile natural balance.

Cecilia Paredes applies paint on herself and then photographs her image into wallpaper

Wolfgang Stiller, Match Stick Men | Wood, acrylic, gouache and PU | 15-20 square meters.

According to legend, the ancient Mayans’ long-count calendar ends at midnight Thursday, ushering in the end of the world.
“This is not the end of the world. This is the beginning of the new world,” Star Johnsen-Moser, an American seer, said at a gat

hering of hundreds of spiritualists at a convention center in the Yucatan city of Merida, an hour and a half from the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza.

“It is most important that we hold a positive, beautiful reality for ourselves and our planet. … Fear is out of place.”

With this hopeful vision in mind, we share the photography of AWFC exhibiting Venezuelan artist, Antonio Briceno, from the “Gods of the Americas” series.

Dear Supporters of Art Works for Change,

I want to thank you for your generous contributions to help Art Works for Change bring the AWARE/OWARE Game for Female Empowerment to Senegal

as part of the hip hop musician/human rights activist, Sister Fa’s tour. We are hugely grateful for your support.

Because we are short of our target goal, Sister Fa and Art Works for Change have decided to postpone the tour which will now take place in April, 2013. We will continue our fundraising efforts so we can participate more fully as we originally envisioned — to include photo documentation and video of the tour and game play; provide strong social media and blogging on the Thomson Reuters site; and bring the AWARE/OWARE game play in the schools and community as an educational and integrative tool to promote positive health practices. If you know anyone who might be interested in supporting the project, please feel free to let us know.

We’ll continue to keep you updated. Also, please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns. We’ll be sending the AWFC “perks for contributions” from the Indiegogo campaign of the Sister Fa’s “Sarabah” music CD and AWFC t-shirts in the coming month. To learn more about the fundraiser and tour, check out the videos below.

With much appreciation,
Randy Rosenberg / Art Works for Change

Help bring AWARE/OWARE to Senegal as part of Sister Fa’s Tour, read our story, and please DONATE!

We believe that being a part of change is being a part of the most important work in the world.

At Art Works for Change, we create contemporary art exhibitions and innovative projects that address social justice and environmental issues across the globe. We harness the power of art to promote awareness, provoke dialogue, and inspire action.

Recently, we created a new adaptation of Oware, an ancient game from Africa. Our version of Oware, called AWARE/OWARE combines storytelling, art, and gameplay to promote positive health practices and human rights in Africa. In 2011, Art Works For Change debuted the game in Cape Town, South Africa, and it’s traveled throughout that country over the past year. We now have an opportunity to bring AWARE/OWARE to Senegal, in partnership with Sister Fa, the country’s inspirational “Queen of Hip Hop” and a tireless human rights activist.

In Senegal, as in many countries, advances in children’s health are impeded by a lack of awareness, limited resources, gender bias, and discrimination. Simply put: girls and boys don’t learn about and adopt positive health practices, and understand why they matter.

Through gaming, art and wordplay, AWARE/OWARE starts conversations that increase awareness of critical health issues among young people, inspiring the next generation of Senegalese to take action on malaria, HIV/AIDs, and reproductive health.

We’re hoping to raise funds to join Sister Fa on tour in December. However, plane tickets are expensive and we’re asking for your help to get us there.

Your financial support will allow us to bring a 4-person team of organizers, artists and bloggers to travel with Sister Fa for one week this December. During the tour, we’ll directly engage more than 1,500 children at schools in five Senegalese cities, and leave behind the tools and techniques to keep the game and the conversation going after we’re gone.

Please play a part in our AWARE/OWARE Senegal campaign and make a donation today.

Thank you.

The Bio-inspired online magazine, Zygote Quarterly, is a platform to showcase the nexus between science, technology and creativity in the field of biologically inspired des

ign. Art Works for Change is delighted that the “Nature’s Toolbox: Biodiversity, Art and Invention” exhibition has been featured in the recent publication. Please take a look and share! http://bit.ly/VktWod

Isabella Kirkland | 2011 | archival ink jet print 61.75” H x 50.75” W | Courtesy of Feature Inc., New York

Art Works for Change recently teamed up with the Chicago-based Art Resources in Teaching (A.R.T.).

A.R.T. reaches over 10,000 elementary students each year t

o seek out opportunities to further the City of Chicago’s goal of making art instruction a part of every child’s education and use art as a means to unlock creativity and engage children in the core academic subjects.

Earlier this summer, on an A.R.T. field trip though their Bridges – Art and Architecture program—4th- and 5th-grade students from Chicago’s Tonti Elementary School, visited the Art Works for Change exhibition, Nature’s Toolbox: Biodiversity, Art and Invention, at The Field Museum to learn how biodiversity can inspire design. Students were overhead remarking at the artist Joyce Hsu’s Robotic Dragonfly, “It’s a machine and a dragonfly!” and were amazed at Vincent Callebaut’s vision of an environment based the Amazon Lilypad.

In response to the experience, the students created and constructed “Powerhouse,” a trellis that functionally and aesthetically interacts with nature, and gained insights as to how an artist works, and in-turn, designing and building their own bio-inspired structure.

We’re grateful for all of the partners who have been inspired and engaged with our projects. Thank you A.R.T., for being on this journey with us.

Art Works for Change is working with a talented group of game designers and artists to design an interactive game for the Microsoft Kinect gaming system! “BioHarmonious” centers around 2 universes trying to live in environmental balance, and we’re

very excited to have the game join our “Nature’s Toolbox” exhibition on tour in the near future! Check out some behind-the-scenes notes & images from lead artist/animator, and AWFC guest blogger, Anthony Sixto: http://bit.ly/PZFpDk and http://bit.ly/OYGQDb. Stay tuned for more info soon…

Having the exhibition at a Natural History Museum is a very new experience for AWFC, as well as for our audience and the Field Museum itself. It was great to see all the busloads and large groups of children and teens visiting the exhibition along with the many families. With the more interactive presentations at the Museum, we see a very different etiquette than we find within the quiet more contemplative experience of most fine-art venues and we are (usually) seeing our Museum audience shift into a slower gear when they come into our space.

The Field staff, who did a great job with the installation, also had some adjustments dealing with living artists and works in progress rather than their more typical objects and artifacts. We are excited to be pushing boundaries and the reaction seems to be very positive.

We are continuing to receive press on a number of online magazines and blog sites (some are upcoming), including Fast Company; Celsias; Mother Jones; Trendhunter; Leonardo Journal; New Scientist; PopTech; Treehugger.com; the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Art— just to mention a few.

AWFC is in conversation with a number of high profile venues around the world interested in the exhibition. With the high costs for transportation and the economic challenges faced by many countries around the world, AWFC is looking for a major three- city sponsor for Delhi, London and Singapore where we have serious interest. If you have any ideas, we welcome your input.

I just returned from a week in Bogota, Colombia, with the intent to familiarize myself with the artists and venues there. I went with some trepidation regarding safety. The trepidation wasn’t misspent — they do have problems there — but I had a wonderful time, met many incredible people and came home with a number of great opportunities for Art Works for Change.

The day I arrived, even without reading Spanish, I got the gist of a newspaper article by Natalia Springer in El Tiempo, about the growing epidemic of violence against women in Colombia.

All the more reason, I was particularly pleased by my meeting with Maria Elvira Ardila, curator at MAMBO — the Modern Art Museum of Bogota. The good news: they are eager to host our “Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women and Art” exhibition.

Good news continues — Art Works for Change was invited by the FOTOMUSEO de Bogota to propose a project for the 2013 Fotographica Biennale of Bogota. We were excited to learn that several AWFC exhibition artists — Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Cecilia Paredes, and Antonio Briceno will also be participating in the event.

I toured many galleries. My favorite, similar to AWFC with a social/political activism mission, was Valenzuela Klenner Galeria, located in the charming Macarena neighborhood, considered Bogota’s SoHo. On view was the architectural relief work of Edgar Cortes, depicting the poverty and resourcefulness of the southern Bogota community.

I was invited to lunch by the gallery director, Jairo Valenzuela, and joined by Elisabeth Vollert, Director of La Otra or “The Other” art fair. La Otra is intent on bridging the various communities of the Bogota region through the contemporary arts and reviving some of the forgotten architectural spaces within the city. We exchanged many ideas and look forward to the prospect of a future collaboration.

I was fortunate to be accompanied to my meetings by a fabulous guide, Lisa Neisa. Lisa is doing some amazing work through her young company, ClickArte, creating interactive children’s books that explore complex topics such as human rights, tolerance, and power. Her books incorporate literary works, drawings and creativity to help children integrate and become conscious of their own ideas, feelings and stories. In the short time we spent together, Lisa and I found many opportunities to incorporate her books as tools within the learning centers that accompany Art Works for Change exhibitions.

It was very good visit for AWFC. There is no question we will be returning to Bogota.

Our three-year-long running exhibition “Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women and Art” continues to draw attention and momentum after traveling to Oslo, Mexico City, Tijuana, San Diego, Chicago, Atlanta, Dakar, and New Orleans, reaching an audience of over 300,000 people. It’s next stop on the tour is the Redline, a contemporary art center in Denver, Colorado, to open June 1. The show will then travel to the Calgary Art Gallery and the South African National Gallery in 2013. We were recently mentioned in The Economist and the show is spawning offshoot projects and exhibitions such as Off the Beaten Path/AFRICA, and the AWARE/OWARE: A Game for Female Empowerment, which has both a life-size physical version and an electronic version, currently in the making.

Our newest exhibition, “Nature’s Toolbox: Biodiversity, Art, and Invention,” is set to open at The Field Museum in Chicago on May 22. Inspired by nature’s amazing design concepts, “Nature’s Toolbox” offers innovative, eye-capturing images and stories that help visitors understand and appreciate the interdependence between the millions species on earth — including humans — and the quality of the environment we share. We asked artists to use nature’s wisdom as the inspiration for new artworks. They explored its genius and found opportunities for invention by employing the lessons nature offers. We learn, for example, how by mimicking nature we can harness energy from algae, create fabric with the strength of a spider’s web, self-medicate like a chimp, create amphibian cities with the structure of a lily pad, and build walls made from sugar. See the full list of participating artists and more about “Nature’s Toolbox” here.

I hope you can join us at the opening of our exhibitions. Whether you can attend or not, please check back on our blog and Facebook pages for updates on our projects.

Art Works for Change and Sister Fa, an Art Works for Change Ambassador for Change, celebrated International Day of Women with this terrific video. Check out this post with wonderful footage by Sista Fa! You can see the entire campaign here.

Our positive experience in South Africa with the life-size physical game has inspired Art Works for Change to create an electronic version using the stories and imagery inspired from the physical game. Initially, we are developing avatars who represent points of view reflecting female empowerment and basic human rights in the US, Africa, India, and China.

To develop this project, we are working with a talented team of recent graduates from Columbia College Chicago in the Department of Interactive Arts and Media, who are developing AWARE/OWARE into the electronic version. We plan to release this version by January 2013 to be played on electronic tablets and smart phones through both Android and Apple systems as well as Web-based.