STATE OF THE ARTS

 

News for and about the greater Saint John arts and cultural community

 

August 13, 2008.   Volume 8, Issue 5

 

IN THIS ISSUE…
1.   Saint John Energy awards two Percent for Art commissions.

2.   City’s art program a good investment.

3.   Richard Florida to speak in Saint John.

4.   Building Communities through Arts and Heritage.

5.   Artist Space Development: Making the Case.

6.   Social Effects of culture.

7.   Canada Council appoints new Chairman.

8.   What is Fringe?

9.   Don't blame us for Tory arts cuts says Toronto band.

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1.   Saint John Energy awards two Percent for Art commissions.

 

In conjunction with the construction of its new headquarters facilities at 325 Simms Street, Saint John West, Saint John Energy became the first organization to implement the City of Saint John’s One Percent for Art Program.  Saint John Energy is proud to announce the selected artists from this prestigious competition:  Bruce Gray, of Douglas, New Brunswick, and Peter Powning, of Markhamville, New Brunswick.

 

Bruce Gray’s winning entry, to be installed inside the front entrance vestibule, will consist of a tall wood mural and complementary furniture.  The three-panel mural, made from warm cedar shingles, will run from waist height to approximately fourteen feet tall.  It will depict a graph of Saint John Energy's consumer base layered with an abstract depiction of the natural energy web. This will be overlaid with half a dozen stylized silhouettes of the business and services of Saint John Energy.  The complementary eight foot long bench and table bring the piece down to a level that will welcome public interaction.  Made from single slabs of Fredericton elm, these two pieces feature striking elements and sweeping natural edges.

 

Peter Powning’s sculpture “Bolt” will consist of a stylized 20 foot high “bolt” of electricity, made entirely of stainless steel.  It will be installed outside the headquarters building in a prominent location that will be readily seen from the Throughway and many west side locations.

 

The One Percent for Art Program is part of the Saint John Arts and Culture Policy adopted by Common Council on September 20, 2005.  The purposes of the One Percent for Art Program are to enhance culture and the arts in Saint John; to provide opportunities for established artists to exhibit quality works of art in public spaces; and to enhance public awareness of the visual arts in the City.

 

This past March, Saint John Energy invited all professional artists in New Brunswick to submit formal proposals to create permanent public artwork.  A three person jury was faced with the initial challenge of shortlisting candidates from the 24 submissions received in response to the request for submissions.  After fully considering the recommendations of the jury and the Saint John Energy Public Art Advisory Committee, the Board of Commissioners of Saint John Energy selected Bruce Gray and Peter Powning as the winning artists.

 

Chairman of the Saint John Energy Board Chris Titus says, “We’re extremely proud to be the first organization to support this marvelous and innovative program and equally proud to work with Peter Powning and Bruce Gray in this exciting installation of artwork at our new Saint John Energy headquarters".

 

President and CEO of Saint John Energy Eric Marr adds, “We are grateful to the members of the Saint John Energy Public Art Advisory Committee for their constant support and expertise in helping our organization see this competition through to a successful conclusion.  In addition, we look forward to the late fall to host a formal unveiling, when all Saint John Energy customers and residents of the greater Saint John area will be able to begin to enjoy the new artwork from Peter Powning and Bruce Gray.”

 

Peter Powning Biography:  Since 1970, Peter Powning has lived and worked as an artist in the hills of southern New Brunswick. His life is characterized by intense periods of work preparing for exhibitions and commissions, punctuated by periodic travel. While Powning’s award-winning work is shown internationally, it is imbued with qualities distilled from a life lived close to the silence, space and seasonal rhythms of his home, the fields, forests and shorelines of Canada’s east coast.

 

Peter Powning is married to author Beth Powning. They have one son, Jake Powning, a swordsmith who shares studio space with Peter and lives nearby with his family.

 

Bruce Gray Biography:  Born in San Diego California in 1957, Bruce  traveled widely with his parents, living in Europe and Hawaii.  As a youth he began to design and build flying model airplanes and electric powered radio controlled boats.  He helped his skilled father on numerous building projects including their passive solar retirement home in the mid 1980’s.  His mother is an accomplished artist who focuses primarily on seascapes in oil on canvas. 

 

Bruce graduated from Colorado State University in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science in Fish and Wildlife Biology and two years later earned a Bachelor of Arts in Technical Journalism. In 1990, he received a Master of Science in Engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle and moved to New Brunswick.  He eventually settled in Fredericton in the mid 1990s. He has been designing and building furniture and art pieces professionally since 1991.

 

Bruce Gray is married to Marilyn Merritt-Gray, a professor at University New Brunswick, Fredericton.  They have one daughter Carri who is an accomplished speed skater and budding road cyclist.

 

Source:  Saint John Energy, Media Release (via Punch Productions), 11 Aug 08.

 

 

2.   City's art program a good investment

 

The bolt of electricity that will soon appear at the new Saint John Energy building could be the first symbol that the city is leaving behind the dark ages of municipal planning.

 

In a city that tore down the General Hospital and allowed two of the ugliest and blockiest buildings imaginable to be built in its place, the city's One Percent for Art program is a welcome initiative.

 

Peter Powning's six-metre-high stainless steel lightning bolt outside, along with a wooden mural inside by Bruce Gray, will be created because the city has agreed to spend one per cent of any new building's construction budget on public art.

 

The city's North of Union plaza development and the new Saint John Transit building will receive the same treatment.

 

Allowing New Brunswick's best artists to make the city a more vibrant, livable place can only be positive. The John Hooper sculptures in the uptown have already proved as much.

 

We hope that other companies and governments that are building in Saint John follow the city's leadership.

 

The price is negligible compared to what the community gets in return.

 

Source: Telegraph-Journal, Opinion section, Page A4, 13 Aug 08.

 

 

3.   Richard Florida to speak in Saint John.

 

New York Times best-selling author Richard Florida, author of “The Rise of the Creative Class” and one of the world’s most

sought-after speakers on innovation, will be the guest speaker at a Gala Event presented by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation and Aliant. The Gala Dinner will be held Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at the Saint John Trade and Convention Centre, One Market Square to celebrate three of the province’s top commercially-driven researchers.

 

Florida now heads the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management, at the University of Toronto.

 

Tickets may be ordered online at www.nbif.ca or call 1-877-544-668.

 

 

4.   Building Communities through Arts and Heritage.

 

The Government of Canada's Building Communities Through Arts and Heritage program offers support for activities that are intended for and open to the general population and celebrate local heritage, artists and artisans.

 

Funding is available through two components:

 

1) Local Arts and Heritage Festivals will provide funding for recurrent local community events and activities that feature the public presentation of local artists and/or local heritage.

2) Community Historical Anniversaries Programming will provide funding for local community events and activities that commemorate the 100th anniversary or greater (in multiple of 25 years) of a historically significant local event or person.

 

Eligible organizations include local non-profit incorporated organizations, groups that are not legally incorporated, and Band Councils, Tribal Councils and other Aboriginal governments or equivalent authorities.

 

For more information, visit http://www.pch.gc.ca/communities/

 

Source: Canadian Heritage, 11 Aug 08.

 

5.   Artist Space Development: Making the Case.

 

The Urban Institute

http://www.cultureandcommunities.ca/downloads/artist-space-development.pdf

 

This report considers how artist space developments have been positioned and the arguments made to garner support for them, the advocacy strategies used, and the impacts claimed or anticipated.

 

Source: Synergy (Alliance for arts & culture), August 2008 – Vol. 19. No. 7, Email, 08 Aug 08.

 

 

6.   Social Effects of Culture.

 

Hill Strategies

http://www.hillstrategies.com/resources_details.php?resUID=1000274

 

This report provides strong evidence of the social effects of culture through detailed statistical models of six social indicators: Feeling trapped in a daily routine; Volunteering; Donating; Doing a favour for a neighbour; Sense of belonging to one’s province; and Sense of belonging to Canada. Building on a previous report in the Statistical Insights on the Arts series, the statistical models in this report examine whether cultural activities have an impact on social indicators above and beyond demographic information.

 

Source: Synergy (Alliance for arts & culture), August 2008 – Vol. 19. No. 7, Email, 08 Aug 08.

 

 

7.   Canada Council appoints new Chairman.

Businessman and philanthropist Joseph L. Rotman will be succeeding Karen Kain as the chair of the Canada Council.

 

Mr. Rotman is currently Chair of Roy-L Capital Corporation, a private family investment company. His business career has focused on establishing a number of private and public companies active in oil trading, petroleum distribution, oil and gas exploration, merchant banking, real estate, and venture capital. He is the founder of Clairvest Group Inc., a Canadian-based merchant bank, for which he is still a board member. He was involved with numerous other corporate boards, including the Bank of Montreal, Barrick Gold Corporation, and Canada Northwest Energy Ltd.

 

Source: Canada Council for the Arts, 11 Aug 08.

 

 

8.   What is Fringe?

 

Fringe season is upon us. But does anyone really know what "fringe" means anymore? A new article by the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph's Rupert Christiansen chafes at the idea that the meaning of the word has gotten completely lost.

Christiansen waxes lyrical about the "good old days" when the fringe was truly special:

"I first went there as a schoolboy some 40 years ago, when the programme consisted of a narrowly conceived menu of high culture - classical concerts, opera and ballet, serious drama - with a late-night cabaret or bonne bouche, plus a Fringe that consisted of some representatives of the European avant-garde presented by Richard Demarco (a buccaneering showman who outraged Morningside proprieties), and a smattering of students and amateurs mounting humble shows and innocuous skits in a few bleak church halls. Visiting the Festival was akin to a pilgrimage, matching the austere dignity of this beautiful city. There was only one shop of note (Jenner's), its windows decorated with photographs of celebrated conductors and prima donnas. Finding anything edible was a struggle, the licensing laws were draconian, and sex was what the coal came in. But it was still fabulously thrilling and liberating fun."

But I wonder if this view of Edinburgh's long-lost "fringe-iness" is too narrow? Like many other critics of the Edinburgh Fringe these days, Christiansen believes that the festival has lost its meaning largely because of commercial reasons. It's "a monster devouring its own children," according to Christiansen.

Yet surely the idea of fringe extends beyond such concerns as the high prices of accommodation during fringe season, overcrowding, escalating ticket costs etc. There are, for instance, important aesthetic issues at stake of which many commentators have lost sight. What makes a show a fringe show beyond the fact that it's produced on a shoe-string?

Well, for one thing, there's the venue. Fringe venues tend to be small. They're often converted into theatres for a fringe production from other uses. For another, there's content. Fringe productions focus on showcasing new scripts, provide unorthodox readings of classic plays (often truncated to fit into a shorter time frame) or work with otherwise experimental material. In addition, Fringe shows also seem to define themselves by the sizes (small) -- and typical ages (young) -- of their casts. Design and technical elements are often sparse, though I've seen some pretty elaborate Fringe shows in my time, so I'm hesitant to add this to the list of aesthetic issues that come into play when trying to pin down what Fringe theatre means.

I think, overall, what we must not forget in discussions about Fringe (or, for that matter, "off-off" and "off-off-off" Broadway) theatre is the spirit in which this kind of work should be created: one of rebellion. Many of the great original Fringe festivals that grew up in the latter half of the last century (e.g. Adelaide, Edinburgh) came about in retaliation against mainstream, juried arts festivals. Any fringe event which has lost this spirit of rebellion cannot be counted as a fringe festival in my opinion.

It's therefore tempting to see a monster like Edinburgh in this light. The fact that it's become so huge that it might (as Christiansen hopes) cause the Edinburgh's original arts bastion -- the International Festival -- to happen at another time of the year indicates that the fringe no longer exists on the margins as it once did, but right at the center. This image is, of course, decidedly anti-fringe.

Similarly, as events like Edinburgh become increasingly beholden to the laws of commerce, there's a possibility that the spirit of wild experimentation might be compromised as theatre makers may be concerned with focusing on recouping the high costs of being at the festival each year at the expense of creativity. But neither this theory, nor the common sense point I made above about the front-and-center (as opposed to marginal) position of the Edinburgh fringe can be taken at face value. Just because a fringe festival is, as Christiansen puts it, "raucous, filthy, drunken and commercialized," it doesn't mean that the renegade spark has disappeared altogether. There's as much -- perhaps even more -- danger to being in the eye of the storm as there is to being on the edges.

 

Source:  Blog: lies like truth, Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world, 12 Aug 08.

 

9.   Don't blame us for Tory arts cuts says Toronto band.

The bass player with Toronto indie group Holy F--- says it's not right that his band has been held up by the Conservative government as an example of misplaced arts funding.

The Tories cut the PromArt funding stream, which subsidizes international promotional tours of Canadian artists, with one spokesman saying the groups getting the money were not ones the government believes should be representing Canada.

The prime minister's press secretary, Kory Ten-nike, said "the [funding] choices made were inappropriate … because they were ideological in some cases, or the money was going to fringe arts groups that, in many cases, would be at best, unrepresentative, and at worst, offensive."

Among the examples cited by Anne Howland, a spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister David Emerson — the Toronto indie band Holy F---, which got money in 2007 to help with a tour of the U.K.

Bass player Matt McQuaid said it's "silly" for the Tories to lay the blame on the band.

"I guess more than anything it's a little bit annoying that we've been made the scapegoat when you consider how much money we receive relative to the budget for the entire program," McQuaid said.

The program costs about $4.7 million a year and supports hundreds of different arts groups, from ballet and theatre companies performing overseas to author readings out of country.

"I think our funding comes in at something less than 0.1 per cent of the whole program," McQuaid told the Q cultural affairs show on Tuesday.

"So all of these other larger groups who need money more than we do to travel abroad — like ballet and symphonies — we become the scapegoat for the cutting in their funding."

Nontheless, Holy F--- is on a tour of Germany right now, paying their own way as they have been able to all year — because their growing popularity and an album deal with a record label in the U.K.

McQuaid says he realizes the band's name makes it an easy target, but still shouldn't be held up as an example of a way Canadians would not want their money spent.

He can't understand the arguments being made by supporters of the cuts that arts groups who need support are not "mainstream" enough. The band was shortlisted this year for the $20,000 Polaris prize.

"We've been nominated for a Juno award — that's as mainstream as you get for popular music in Canada," he said, pointing out that the band's videos appear on MTV and MuchMusic. "That argument falls flat in our case and from what I've read … for a lot of other people as well."

But he says other musicians and ballet troupes and authors and filmmakers sometimes need help to start out.

"All the funding programs, including FACTOR and the Canada Council and they just help to bolster Canadian artists as they're achieving their goals — whether it be music or whatever they do. A lot of times people are doing things that are valuable and meaningful but not necessarily commercially viable."

The PromArt program will wind down by March 31, 2009. A second program, the $9-million Trade Routes program, which helps promote cultural exports abroad, also is to be cut.

Source: CBCNews.ca, 12 Aug 08.

 

 

 

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