Young Professionals

EAL/LA Creative Conversations

This post comes to you from Green Public Art

Lessons from Social Entrepreneurs: How to Add Value to Your Organization and Career

Emerging Arts Leaders/Los Angeles presents its day-long 2012 Creative Conversations Event

Tickets Available Now!

Social entrepreneurs seek to satisfy unmet needs within the community by growing an organization that often has a heartfelt and unprecedented mission that aligns with the founder’s personal values. At Emerging Arts Leaders/Los Angeles, we represent a groundswell of young professionals coming up in established organizations or looking to start our own. Often our members have a young, fresh perspective on social/community needs that no one else is addressing. Indeed, many older arts organizations often find themselves behind the curve when it comes to spotting new trends or opportunities for growth in the community.

April’s Creative Conversation will give us insights from entrepreneurs as to how we can identify unmet needs in our community or organization, and show us how we can shape our work to meet those needs. We will explore challenges our speakers have faced and the creative and logistical know-how they drew upon to face those challenges. By looking at our work through an entrepreneurial lens, even if it’s just an exercise for those who do not seek to build our own organizations, we will make ourselves and our points of view invaluable to our organizations and community, and find opportunities to advance our careers.  We’ll have the opportunity to join one another in group discussions and activities – who knows, you could meet your next collaborator on an entrepreneurial venture!

Saturday, April 21, 10:15am-3:30pm
Plaza de la Raza
Cultural Center for the Arts & Education
3540 North Mission Road
Los Angeles, CA 90031

PARKING: Use the lot directly in front of Plaza de la Raza or nearby street parking.

A catered lunch from Panera Bread is included in your ticket price. Within your purchase confirmation email you will be provided with an email address in case you need to indicate any dietary restrictions.

Finally, we hope you’ll join us afterward for Happy Hour at: Barbara’s at The Brewery
620 Moulton Avenue #110
Los Angeles, CA 90031

Driving directions to our Happy Hour location will be provided at the event.

10:15-10:30am: Registration

10:30-10:45am: Opening Remarks

10:45-11:45am: Keynote

Terence McFarland, Chief Executive Officer, LA Stage Alliance

11:45am-12:45pm: Lunch & Youth Mariachi Ensemble Performance

12:45-2:05pm: Your Arts Career Through an Entrepreneurial Lens

  • Rebecca Ansert, Founder & Principal, Green Public Art Consultancy
  • Edgar Arceneaux, Executive Director, Watts Tower Project
  • Molly Cleator, Owner/Founder, A Place to Create
  • Judy Tatum, Independent Non-Profit Consultant

2:05-2:45pm: Applying Entrepreneurial Thinking to Your Personal Goals: Small Group Discussions

2:45-3:15pm: Right Brain Entrepreneurism: Creative Collaborative Activity

Molly Cleator will lead us through a fun and energizing creative activity.

3:15-3:30pm: Final Wrap-Up & Depart for Happy Hour at Barbara’s at The Brewery!

Tickets Available Now!

 

Rebecca Ansert, founder of Green Public Art, is an art consultant who specializes in artist solicitation, artist selection, and public art project management for both private and public agencies. She is a graduate of the master’s degree program in Public Art Studies at the University of Southern California and has a unique interest in how art can demonstrate green processes or utilize green design theories and techniques in LEED certified buildings.

Green Public Art is a Los Angeles-based consultancy that was founded in 2009 in an effort to advance the conversation of public art’s role in green building. The consultancy specializes in public art project development and management, artist solicitation and selection, creative community involvement and knowledge of LEED building requirements. Green Public Art also works with emerging and mid-career studio artists to demystify the public art process. The consultancy acts as a resource for artists to receive one-on-one consultation before, during, and after applying for a public art project.
Go to Green Public Art

ashdenizen: representing the unrepresentable

In this guest post, Kellie Payne, reports on Bruno Latour's recent talk at the Tate.

The French sociologist Bruno Latour gave the keynote address at this month's Tate Britain’s symposium Beyond the Academy: Research as Exhibition. His address considered the environmental crisis as a particular challenge which would require natural history, art museums and academia to join forces. The challenge, he said, was that “climate change is currently unrepresentable”.

In an effort to address this, Latour has embarked on a number of projects. One is the School of Political Arts at the Sciences Po in Paris. The school, which will be formally launched this year, will bring together young professionals in the social sciences and arts to attempt to represent the political problem of climate change. Latour says the school will “not join science, art and politics together, but rather disassemble them first and, unfamiliar and renewed, take them up again afterwards, but differently.”

Latour is also working on establishing a new type of Biennale in Venice, which will incorporate social scientists into artistic production. By bringing together social scientists and artists, Latour wants to address these issues in new ways. He expressed interest in Avatar, calling it the first ‘Gaia’ film, beginning this task of rethinking the ecological crisis and exploring ways of making it representable.

His engagement with climate change includes his participation in the Nordic Exhibition of the year Rethink: Contemporary Art and Climate Change which was staged in Copenhagen during COP15. He contributed to the Rethink exhibition catalogue with the essay “It's Development, Stupid” Or: How To Modernize Modernization. It is a response to Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through – From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. In this essay, Latour argues that the separation of the subjective from the real into dichotomies such as 'nature' and 'culture' must end. In order to begin to tackle the challenges we are facing, we must acknowledge just how closely human and nature are entwined. He has given a lecture on ‘Politics and Nature’ at the Rethink The Implicit venue at the Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art.

Latour spent most of his Tate talk discussing two of his previous exhibition projects which combined the talents of artists and social scientists. Both exhibits were produced with Peter Weibel at ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. The first, Iconoclash (2002), which brought together a team of curators, including Hans Ulrich Obrist from the Serpentine Gallery, examined how iconoclasts are represented in art, religion and science. The second, Making Things Public, partnered artists with social scientists to create individual exhibits. The exhibition was centred on a number of themes: Assembling or Disassembling; Which Cosmos for which Cosmopolitics; The Problem of Composition; From Objects to Things; From Laboratory to Public Proofs; The Great Pan is Dead!; Reshuffling Religious Assemblies; The Parliaments of Nature. The exhibition sought to materialise the concept of a ‘Parliament of Things’.

Latour conceptualised his exhibitions as thought experiments, but found the exhibitions themselves to be failures, saying that most of the individual projects within the exhibition failed as works of art. The books that accompanied the exhibitions, in particular, Making Things Public, a large book created after the exhibition, were more successful.

This was one of the themes that emerged from the day at Tate: whether certain exhibitions work better as books. Latour said that working on exhibitions has been one of the most interesting parts of his academic life. Exhibitions, he said, have a different rhythm and intensity of work and creating the ‘thing in the space’ adds to intellectual life. But creating an exhibition must be different to writing. When exhibitions merely illustrate a point, no gain is made.

Latour’s interests have now moved towards ecology and the role of the arts in representing our environmental challenges and the need for artists and social scientists to collaborate on these issues. He said he himself is writing a play on climate change.

Kellie Payne is a PhD student in the Geography department at the Open University researching culture and climate change.

via ashdenizen: representing the unrepresentable.