The 53rd Street Community Garden

The goal of the 53rd Street Community Garden was to create a sustainable community garden with colorful artistic components and outdoor classrooms. Students would utilize this outdoor space to discover scientific exploration of plants, insects, and animals, while fostering a respect for the neighborhood.

Although this project is still pretty fresh and constantly evolving, we have seen an amazing community effort in building a space where education, cultivation, and neighborhood come together. It has been beautiful to have a place where teachers can bring their classrooms outside to plant vegetables, where community members tend to their plots and interact with the youth, and where two schools that rarely socialize now have some common ground.

We are currently working with the school on plans for developing a culinary arts program, installing a gazebo, and scheduling a community harvest event. We are excited about expanding the school/community garden model, which we’ve named Growing Great Gardens (3G), to other Milwaukee Public Schools.

Jaime Austin

ZER01 is an arts organization based in Silicon Valley, a place renowned globally as a hub of entrepreneurship and innovation. So lately I’ve been pondering the questions: How can the arts more visibly contribute to this culture of innovation? And how can we as an arts organization better reflect the area where we are based?

One of the main projects I work on is organizing the ZER01 Biennial. The fourth iteration of the biennial will take place in September 2012. Any organization that plans a biennial should always ask the question “why another biennial?” each time they embark on another planning cycle.

Recently, biennials are a dime a dozen. There are the longstanding biennials like Venice and Sao Paulo, and then there are a growing number of new biennials that are often used as vehicles to put non art centers on the map.

In my mind, one key to a successful biennial is that it reflects the location and history of where it is based. For example, the ZER01 Biennial in San Jose is a relatively new biennial. San Jose isn’t Venice or Istanbul or Sao Paulo. It’s the capital of Silicon Valley. Being situated here has inspired me, as the curator/organizer, to experiment with models outside of the arts so that the structure of the biennial more closely reflects the modes of operation that thrive here.

Price Tower Arts Center

One of the wonderful things I’m re-discovering about Oklahoma is that art, culture, and innovation aren’t just thriving in OKC, but all across the state!

Tulsa, the state's second largest city, is chock full of arts and culture innovators - from the Greenwood Cultural Center to the Philbrook Museum, which is currently exhibiting a collection of Robert Rauschenburg's iconic prints, multiples, and other projects that resulted from his long-term relationship with Los Angeles-based publishing workshop, Gemini G.E.L.

Tulsa’s Living Arts, a unique contemporary art space, organizes an annual New Genre Festival with the support of the Warhol Foundation and the National Performance Network. Going on its 19th year, the New Genre Festival brings provocative contemporary art and performance to Oklahoma and endeavors to challenge the preconceptions around the role of art in culture by supporting artists working in nontraditional media, action-based performance, and unsanctioned guerilla methods.

Students display a bench they created for their school/community garden.

I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s Americans for the Arts Annual Convention in San Diego. One of the most engaging ideas that I took home with me was the relationship between innovation and impact.

We talked about how these two ideas are often assumed to go hand-in-hand and although many innovative ideas do have significant impact on large groups of people, sometimes innovation is for the sake of innovation.

One member of my table used the analogy of the space pen – how NASA spent tons of money and research developing a zero gravity pen that could write in space, which is a cool, I want one, but pencils always seemed to work just fine in the past. Was this innovative, probably, did it have a significant impact on a large group of people or was it a catalyst of great purpose, probably not.

I must admit I am a bit biased on what we termed ‘The Space Pen Theory’ because of my arts education background. We are trained to weigh much more heavily on the impact of a project than the novelty of the idea, not to say that we aren’t often able to bring those two elements together but for educational purposes, the process is often more closely examined than the product.

We deliberately tried to balance impact and innovation with the 53rd Street School Community Garden Project. Community gardens and school gardens are not super fresh ideas but the fusion of the two in a project that uses the arts to engage the entire community from the inception, brings new life to both.

Stage Center in Oklahoma City

I remember as a teenager vowing to never return to this place. Oklahoma City was by no means 'cool,' and the record-breaking, triple degree summer heat doesn't help. But thanks to the Thunder, a recession-resistant economy, low cost of living, and a booming energy industry, Oklahoma City has become a bonafide destination spot. And its arts sector is responding. What’s even more surprising is that I’m starting to think this place isn’t SO bad.

Local art walks have gained a lot of attention as economic activators and community redevelopment tools, see: downtown Los Angeles. In fact, in researching for this blog post, I read that Columbus, OH, is using art walks as public health stimulators! Oklahoma City's Plaza District employs a similar model.

Though not as large as downtown Los Angeles and without the express interest of improving people’s heart rates, the art galleries and small, independently owned businesses along NW 16th Street have banded together to breathe new life into the once blighted area. Second Fridays are always LIVE on the Plaza, featuring music, rotating exhibitions, special events, and local shopping.