Starting tonight through March 4th, the University of San Francisco will feature the art of Richard Kamler, who throughout his  career has maintained that “art can make the world a better place… art is an agent for social change… our fuel and our glue.” Kamler spent two years as Artist-In-Residence in San Quentin Prison, where he created the “central works of his career: “Tablee of Voices,” a sound installation giving voice to both victims and perpetrators.” (USF event information)

Tonight beginning at 7pm at Intersection for the Arts, in an event free and open to the public,  Kamler will moderate the Art Activism discussion with four other Bay Area artists, who will talk about their work and strategies for engaging the  community. The conversation will include the audience.

Richard Kamler: A Retrospective” (www.richardkamler.org) includes early sketchbooks, installation works, drawings and photographic documentation that trace his career using art as a catalyst for social change.

See the USF Thacher Gallery web page  for full information.

• Four Decades of Art Activism
  A fishbowl conversation moderated by Richard Kamler with Tom Ferentz, Judith Selby Lang, Peter Selz and Scott Tsuchitani (see full description below).
  Fri, Jan 27, 7-9 pm
  Intersection for the Arts, 925 Mission (at 5th Street)
• Richard Kamler and Robert Atkins in Conversation
  Thurs, Feb 2 and Wed, Feb 8, 2:30-3:30 pm
  McLaren 250, USF (at Clayton)
• Opening Reception and Birthday Celebration
  Thurs, Feb 2, 4-6 pm
  Thacher Gallery
• Meet the Artist
  Saturdays, Feb 4, 11, 18 and 25, 11 am to 1 pm
  Thacher Gallery

Links:

Conversations with Richard Kamler and Richard Whitaker for “Works and Conversations”

KQED’s Spark on Richard Kamler

• First phase of African opera village completed
  from: Art News Headlines
  BURKINA FASO. The first phase of late artist Christoph Schlingensief's African opera village was completed on 8 October with the opening of a school in Burkina Faso. The remaining two phases are the b...
• Don't Quit Your Day Job?
  from: AltWeeklies.com Culture
  New and unique artist residency in Summer Lake, Oregon, offers safe haven for aspiring artists.... From Eugene Weekly.
• comScore: LinkedIn & Twitter Mobile Access Growing Faster Than Facebook Mobile Access
  from: Mobile - SocialTimes.com
  comScore, an Internet market research firm, released information from data about mobile social media usage changes during the period of August 2010 to August 2011. comScore’s data, if accurate prov...
• Government Could Hide Existence of Records under FOIA Rule Proposal
  from: ProPublica: Articles and Investigations
  by Jennifer LaFleur A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requestin...
• Artists of the 99%: A Call to Action
  from: blog.sfmoma.org
  Open Space is the blog of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• Artists of the 99%: A Call to Action
  from: OPEN SPACE
  Over the past month I have witnessed and participated in the local contingent of the now-global movement known as Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Together. The goal of this nonviolent movement, fueled by...
• Duke Foundation creates nation's biggest artist-grant program
  from: Culture Monster
  Jazz, contemporary dance and theater artists who now dream of getting a phone call from the MacArthur Foundation telling them they’ve won a $500,000 “genius grant” can add another plausible fant...
• more->

Lately, I’ve been writing about things such as digital humanities, art as research and a somewhat new field called Creative Inquiry, mentioned in the last post as an academic program founded at New College and thriving today at CIIS in San Francisco, as well as other colleges and universities. I remember reading comments about creative inquiry on a social network one day and someone posted, “Creative Inquiry! What??? They’ve got to be kidding.” The assumption quite clearly being, that creative inquiry could never be taken seriously as a field of research.

One might ask how could one realistically do research into the arts without such an epistemological construct. Of course science can and has a place in research of the arts, but the two are not mutually exclusive. According to the CIIS Creative Inquiry MFA Program website, creative inquiry explores how artists can collaborate with and feed each other across disciplines, experiment with cross-disciplinary approaches to art-making, and explore how artists can collaborate with and feed each other across disciplines, and learn to contextualize their art and investigate how it can reflect or aid social change by transgressing or breaking through personal and cultural barriers.

Such inquiries can be approached for unimaginable numbers of perspectives, including art history and theory, aesthetics, philosophy, social research, communications and media theory to name just a few. One example is the long posed artistic question, “Is a work of art changed in some way by virtue of the fact that it is observed.” Many artists base their work on a question like this, and was studied at length by the late, German philosopher, writer and social activist Walter Benjamin, among others, whose work I will write about soon.

Well I wanted you to hear more about it from one of the faculty in CIIS’ Creative Inquiry MFA Program, Kris Brandenburger, whom I know, and has been in the vanguard of cutting-edge art education for many years. Thank you, Kris.

What is Creative Inquiry? 
By Kris Brandenburger, writer, mechanic, and faculty member in the Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts MFA Program and the Bachelor of Arts Completion Program 

“To be an artist is to ask questions, to probe material in search of its weakness, strength, durability, vulnerability, in search of some unknown thing that is and is not the material, to make associations with or to find the correspondences between the limited matter at hand and the larger world, to articulate—visually, aurally, structurally, metaphorically—something intuitively if not intellectually known, to configure/constrain matter within a conflicting and/or contrapuntal form in order to persuade the invisible (the unknown) to emanate”. Read the rest of this entry »