Yoonmi Nam

Percolator Artists’ Lecture Series

Yoonmi Nam

Wednesday, April 29
7 pm

Please join us for a lecture and discussion by Yoonmi Nam, an artist working primarily in printmaking and painting. Her work is influenced by her Korean and Canadian upbringing, which exposed her to the dynamics of both Eastern and Western art concepts. “This experience enriched my view and my understanding of both cultures, but at times, it also made me feel like an outsider,” she said. “Eventually, I realized that they are both part of who I am as a person and an artist. The training I had in Western art technique and the Eastern way of my thinking found its balance and its place in my work both visually and conceptually. In my work I seek to visually represent what we cannot see in space—the unseen space. It is in a way a landscape, but it lies in between the visible and the invisible.”

Nam is currently a professor of printmaking at KU. As a Spring 2009 Hall Center for the Humanities Fellow, she is working on a project entitled “Arranged Flowers,” a portfolio of five prints using a traditional Japanese water-based woodblock printmaking technique that combines research on seventeenth century Dutch flower paintings and Japanese prints that depict the art of Japanese flower arrangement (Ikebana).

The lecture is free and open to the public.

(Image photo by Aaron Paden)

"Cultural Recovery" by Arlene Goldbard

"Cultural Recovery"
A talk by Arlene Goldbard
Tuesday, April 21st
7pm
Lawrence Arts Center (gallery)
940 New Hampshire, Lawrence, KS

Discussion will follow, and Arlene's latest book New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, will be available for purchase.

Arlene's topic is "Cultural Recovery." She says: "Most policy-makers seem to have given little or no serious consideration to culture's role as a crucible for supporting resilience and recovery. It appears we may have reached an end-point for the old 'support the arts' arguments (which haven't been working for a long time). As more and more organizations face funding cuts, we need to stimulate a new understanding that sustainable recovery demands cultural recovery." Her approach to the topic includes suggesting ways for artists and organizations to respond to the crisis, facing the challenges of bringing about a real shift in thinking about the arts and public purpose, and finding ways to be integral to national recovery. The actions needed now, she says, must be equally and simultaneously powerful as art, as political action and as spiritual practice.

Arlene Goldbard is a writer and consultant whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her blog and other writings may be downloaded from her Web site http://arlenegoldbard.com/ She was born in New York and grew up near San Francisco. She now lives in Kansas City, Missouri. Her most recent book, New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development was published by New Village Press in November 2006. She is also co-author of Community, Culture and Globalization, an international anthology published by the Rockefeller Foundation and Clarity, a novel. Her essays have been published in In Motion Magazine, Art in America, Theatre, Tikkun, and many other journals. She has addressed countless academic and community audiences in the U.S. and Europe, on topics ranging from the ethics of community arts practice to the development of integral organizations. She has provided advice and counsel to hundreds of community-based organizations, independent media groups, and public and private funders and policymakers including the Rockefeller Foundation, Global Kids, the Independent Television Service, Appalshop and dozens of others. She is currently focusing on three projects: a book about artists working to heal the prison-industrial complex; a film about Rabbi Arthur Waskow; and a campaign to create a “new WPA” for artists. She serves as President of the Board of Directors of The Shalom Center.

Be a Tree

By David Horvitz

"The Wheel of Willing Diversion" Celebration

at the Spencer Museum Arts Festival
(outside between the Spencer and the Kansas Union)
Saturday, May 2nd from 12 - 4

Press play for one last spin of The Wheel of Willing Diversion.
The Percolator will be showcasing the Wheel and all of the responses participants have crafted from following its directives. Remember to drop off your responses at the front desk inside the Museum before May 1st so they can be included. (If your response requires special attention, audio/visual equipment for example, please contact the Percolator asap).

Writings from the Illuminated (nearby) Tree

Below are examples of writings incorporated into the Illuminated (nearby) Tree. A booklet containing all of the writings is available at the Percolator for $2.

I would play hide – and – seek with my brother and then find the best most comfortable spot where I could see everyone and no one could see me, then forget I was in the middle of a game and just hang out for hours.

When I was about 8 my best friend and I would find dead birds around our backyards – so we buried the birds at the base of a tree and made little shrines and a cross and did farewell rituals for the little birds.

The orange tree that I grew from a seed that came from an orange I had @ Thanksgiving 1984 – I still have it.

I’m out on a limb. What a view. I think I’ll climb down some – that’s a little more stable but I can’t see as much.

In Hong Kong the trees have vines that drop into the streets. These trees can get so large they are their own islands in the rivers in southern China – Fred Yung from Hong Kong.

I used to hide small items in a knot-hole for the neighbor children. Wait, that was Boo Radley.

Trees are pretty cool, but so is paper.

Lone Star Lake – August 1983 – lying on my back, peaking on LSD, looking up through shimmering leaves.

I’m so tall I feel like a tree. People don’t cut me down.