Recently the Art Haus SLC launched a new program featuring local artists' work in people's living rooms called, you guessed it, Art In The Living Room.  It is a wonderful program bringing members of the community together with local artists to share their work, discuss new ideas and connect with each other in a comfortable environment!  

While we also plan to create many opportunities for members of the SLC community to engage with new artistic endeavors (in living rooms, classrooms, galleries, store fronts, wherever!), we also recognize that works of art are all around us; sometimes all we have to do is take a moment to notice it.  That is why we are launching an interactive, mini-program documenting works of art in our different communities and sharing them online.  Art In The Neighborhood will be a chance for you to recognize works of art in your area, to observe what and where they are, and to ponder why they're there, who created them and what inspired these artists.  It can be anything from a wall mural, to a street band, to a school-groups' class project, to an installation at a bus stop.  We ask that you to stop, wonder and share what it is you see and hear in your neighborhood.

To kick off this mini-program, I'd like to share with you a unique community arts project that started in my community about four years ago in Boston, MA, my community.  Although I had walked through Downtown Crossing many times, it wasn't until I was waiting to meet friends to see a movie that I was even aware of all the art around me!  

I now notice these painted boxes all over the city as I walk around it.  Sometime I am able to check online and find out more about the artist or their process, like this artist who documented her work on her Flickr page and an article she wrote for the Examiner.com. But I can also take just a moment to wonder about this small work of art in the middle of Boston, snap a quick picture and share it with friend.

TAHSLC hopes that you will do the same.  As Henry David Thoreau once said "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." When you are traveling through your own community, and you come across a work of art or a performance, take a minute to Stop, Wonder and Share it with us!  

Go ahead and share with us on Facebook, Twitter (@TheArtHausSLC) or in our comments section below.  Or check out what other members of your community have found in their neighborhood.

Anne Wright
Co-founder of TAHSLC 

* For some community art projects that are paintings or sculptures, I would suggest downloading Google Goggles.  You can take a picture of the artwork and through Goggles, and it searches through Google's image database to list websites where the image is listed.  

In the US, art making is often treated as a privilege. Our very conception of “the artist” as someone separate from and different than the rest of us — the moody recluse or the superstar genius — privileges the few who show the requisite talent early on. But this attitude is nowhere more striking than in our public schools. As art experiences are cut in schools serving primarily poor students of color to make room for “core” courses and test prep, private schools continue to make art courses central. Art education has become a privilege offered to those already economically and racially privileged. As evidence of this trend, a study by the NEA found that young Black and Latino adults interviewed in 2008 were 49% less likely to have had arts education as children than those interviewed in 1982; for Whites the decrease was only 5%.

At the risk of overstatement, this is a human rights violation — at least, according to the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 27 of this document reads: “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” This is a powerful statement that reaches far beyond equal access to paint and brushes.

Art becomes a right when we begin to understand it not only as a form of individual creative activity, but also as one of the central ways that culture is created, critiqued, shared, and shifted. To cut off individuals, or even whole groups, from these conversations is to deny access to a certain type of power — the power to have a say in who we are, who is included in our “community,” and how we should be with one another. This conception of art as a right rather than a privilege is foundational to the community arts movement. But what does it mean for practice?

First of all, it means recognizing the ways that people are already participating in cultural life. Arts practice is taking place all around us, but often in ways not appreciated by mainstream arts and educational institutions. Second, it means sharing power and decision making in artistic spaces — moving from a service model to a collaborative model. Third, it means taking a serious look at how power and privilege — racial, cultural, economic, gender — shape our lives, our aesthetics, and our art spaces. Fourth, it means challenging institutions of artistic power, such as art schools and museums, to break down walls both physical and cultural. And finally, it means creating new artistic spaces that reflect the values of democracy, collaboration, and critical multiculturalism.

In several of our previous blogs, TAHSLC staff and our guest blogger talked a little about the communities and homes from which they came.  Inherently when we speak about those places, we're also talking about the culture of those communities and the people within them.  I grew up just outside of Salt Lake City and you can be sure that there are a lot of cultural norms that exist there!  Religion of course is one of the largest cultural influences in my life growing up in Utah, but I also had a small slice of Latin culture provided by my Puerto Rican born mother.  Sometimes for Christmas dinner, instead of having a traditional American turkey and stuffing, we had Lechon (Roast Pork) and Arroz con Habichuelas (Rice and Beans).   As small as that Latin culture was, living in a predominantly white neighborhood, it created a different lens in which I viewed the world. 

Food and art are two of the simplest ways to connect to other cultures and get a taste (pun intended) of what they're like.  For me, art creates an experience where not only do I feel that the artist is communicating something to me through their chosen medium, but also expressing some of their cultural ideologies within that expression.  As Sara asked in her post, "what do you get when you put an installation artist from LA in a room with a Japanese choreographer and a painter from Utah?", I say you get a collaborative work that reflects elements from each artist's own culture and community.

But art isn't one sided, there is an audience.  (Although one might argue, like the old adage about a tree falling in a forest, if art is created and no one is there to see it, is it really art? But perhaps that is an entirely different blog post).  If I were viewing our theoretical collaborative work by those three artists, my religious, Latin, feminine roots would color my experience as well.  And I would have a very different experience from the next person in the room who may come from Russia with no particular religious background. 

What interests me most as an arts educator and a co-founder of TAHSLC is what happens when you get those who viewed the exhibit to talk about their experience together and share what they saw and how the work affected them personally.  This is why I sincerely hope we get the opportunity exhibit TIMEless, where multiple artists express their interest in kinetic composition, and impart a little of themselves in their work.  And when we do, what cultural influence will you bring to that experience and who in the room do you want to talk to about it? 

If you're interested in supporting TAHSLC in putting on the TIMEless exhibit, go here and donate!

By: Anne Wright
Co-founder of The Art Haus SLC

Let's take a minute to talk about Community. Isn't Abed insightful? And Jeff's speeches! Annie's hair. The pure genius of that one episode where they rolled the dice a whole ton. Let's also talk about those communities where there are no magical (racist) trampolines. Just regular trampolines and soft undertones of racism that usually have nothing to do with trampolines.

I grew up with a community that made me the person I am today (and if you are wondering, the person I am today can be summed up in one word: awesome).  This place was in Amarillo and the community was the local theatre, Amarillo Little Theater.  This was the place where I learned what it was to accept and be accepted because you're unique and your ideas are crazy and potentially awesome. It was a place where I learned that there was such a thing as Beauty with a capital B and it could be shared and sought after by a group of people.  It's also where I learned about love, the kind you give to people because they are desperate for it, because they'd do anything for you, because you've lived in empty spaces together dreaming things into the world that didn't exist before. 

This is my first and most personal experience with community.  We are everywhere now, LA, Chicago, New York, to name a few and we are still defined and driven by that small town in Texas that made our hearts and heads go BA-boom.  Now the world is our community.  I've been around the world and crossed continents and I've seen people all searching for the same things, I would call the search one for God while others might say Beauty, Truth, or Story but we all mean the same thing.

My own community was based in a small town but the world is much more open now. We can build a community from Texas to New York.  From Utah to London.  From Los Angeles to Eastern Europe.  You might ask why even bother doing this?  (and how can we do this?) And to you I would say, "Because it's stinking awesome! That's why."  But also because I think we are all hungry for each other in some way and we all have a little piece of the puzzle in what we are searching for.  I might call it joy and find it in jumping through the air but maybe in Cambodia they'd call it faith and find it through their feet hitting the floor.  Let's blow the world up a little by making it a smaller place.  We have the technology to do it, so why not give it a go already?

Now why art?  Because the earth without art is just 'eh' (that's a popular poster I like to quote when I can feel the need to really rile up a crowd).  I think we all want to create and we are all creative people.  Think about your day- did you make something exist today that didn't exist yesterday? A piece of text, a thought in someone's head? Well hello fellow artist, nice to meet you.  What are we supposed to do in the course of a day other than create? The end product might be different for "artists" but we are all guilty of the creative process.  But what can artists do when they are able to bring their communities together from around the world?  What kind of new community can we create? What stories, truth, and holiness can we find in this newly expanded and yet accessible space?  Aren't you curious?  Think of it like this: what do you get when you put an installation artist from LA in a digital space with a choreographer from Japan and a painter from Utah?  Well, hell, I don't know but I'm dying to find out.

By: Sara Moncivais
Go here to make this crazy/awesome rant a reality.

**Sara would also like to mention the overuse of the word "awesome" in this post.  She would like you to know that dictionary.com defines awesome as "very impressive."  Now if you can think of a better word to use, Sara would like to know.  Cause very impressive just doesn't cut it and her other alternative is "dynamo."