Augusto Boal

Boal-web-2International Theater of the Opressed Organization
Augusto Boal, Founder of the The ater of the Oppressed, Dies at 78

Story and Interview from Democracy NOW : Augusto Boal, the legendary Brazilian political playwright and popular educator, died Saturday at the age of seventy-eight. He was the founder of the Theater of the Oppressed, a popular international movement for a participatory form of theater as a means of promoting knowledge, democratic forms of interaction, and transformation. We play a never-before-aired interview on his life and work. [includes rush transcript]May 03, 2009

Augusto Boal Passes

Boal.jpg CAN website
Augusto Boal, the Brazilian theater director and playwright known for the interactive genre called the “Theater of the Oppressed,” died Saturday, May 2, 2009. He was 78. Boal died of respiratory failure following a long battle with leukemia, says an AP story (5/3/09). Boal, who studied theater arts at New York City’s Columbia University, created Theater of the Oppressed in the early 1960s as a way to establish a dialogue between audience, playwright, director and actors that encouraged political activism. Seen as a threat to the dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985, Boal was arrested, jailed and tortured before being exiled to Argentina. He returned to Brazil after the fall of the military regime. His impact on the field of community-based art is incalculable. [LINK]

Finally, the NYTimes Obit on Boal

ArtWork Collaborations

Check these projects out that engage with teens, youth, and community groups

Dread Scott: Or Does It Explode?
“…Or Does it Explode?” is a collaborative artwork with Dread Scott and Philadelphia youth. The project is commissioned and coordinated by the ArtWorks! program of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. …Or Does it Explode will be an outdoor public artwork that consists of 12 human scale full body photographic portraits of the teenagers in illuminated lightboxes. The boxes are supplemented by an audio component of the youths speaking about their hopes and dreams. [more]

Pawel Althamer and children from Kassel, Frühling
Twelve years after his participation in documenta X, Kunsthalle Fridericianum presents the new exhibition project Frühling (Spring) by Pawel Althamer (Warsaw, 1967). For Frühling the artist invited several hundred children from Kassel to occupy over 1.000 square metres of the Fridericianum, the historically charged, world-famous exhibition site, which had been a library and a parliament building in the past. Althamer’s main aim is to enliven and transform the museum with the help of the children’s youthful, bold, and above all “unbound creativity”. The children are the project managers, the main actors, while Althamer plays the role of their guest and assistant. [more]

Project Row Houses, Houston, Texas
Founded by artist Rick Lowe in 1993, Project Row Houses believes that art—and the community it creates—can be the foundation for revitalizing depressed inner-city neighborhoods [more]
Explore both the art and community sections

SPARC
Social and Public Art Resource Center, Los Angles, CA
view murals and/or public art projects
SPARC was founded by artist Judy Baca in 1976, and she continues as the artistic director

Suzanne Lacy, an internationally known artist whose work includes installations, video, and large-scale performances on social themes and urban issues.

Public Art as Social Intervention
Project out of Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
I found site map easier way to navigiate through site

Wendy Ewald is also an interesting artist to look at in this context
LINKS: Wendy Ewald, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley (only up to 1998)
Wendy Ewald, Blackbird

Categories
Education

Cai Guo-Qiang @ the Guggenheim

hey everyone-
i think this would be a good show to take our students to- we were planning on going to a museum this week. this artist really extends what we can call installation art, while making really beautiful things. it’s pretty powerful because his work is amazingly informed.
http://guggenheim.org/exhibitions/exhibition_pages/cai_overview.html

i’m also taking my other class to ICP tomorrow- to the archive fever show- and having been to that already with a college class, i’m not confident that they will enjoy it, but i’ll let everyone know about that.
http://www.icp.org/site/c.dnJGKJNsFqG/b.3639335/

 

posted by Sophie Lvoff

Categories
Education

Alfredo Jaar

Hello all,

In our discussion in class last week about the complex relationship between social action and social embarrassment, I was reminded of Alfredo Jaar, an artist that discussed this extensively during his talk to one of my classes last semester. Jaar is actually an architect, but also a filmmaker and photographer (he doesn’t identify with one medium). One aspect of his work is something he calls “public interventions,” which are projects that are initiated by and have heavy involvement from various communities. One which he titled “Lights in the City,” involved the homeless population of Montreal in raising awareness of their situation through a different form of visual representation (they did not want to be photographed, so he placed a button in each shelter that would light up a central dome in the city each time it was pressed). He also did a participatory photography project of sorts (though it is unfortunately not mentioned on his Web site) in which he gave 1,000 disposable cameras to the citizens of Caracas, Venezuela, asked them to fill the cameras and to choose their favorite photo, and displayed them in the city’s new museum (this was a museum that the citizens were opposed to for various reasons, and it was a way to allow them to conquer the space and to speak out about the conditions in their community). Though not always specific to photography, his work provides some interesting examples of some of the themes we’ve discussed.

His Web site: http://www.alfredojaar.net

Another site containing photo galleries of pictures taken by the homeless:

http://www.homelesscamera.com/index.html

Posted by Nicolle Bennett