Art Education

Dispositions of Mind aka K-12 "HIGHER ORDER" THOUGHT PROCESSES ARE:
classifying, inferring, hypothesizing, generalizing,
valuing, relating, and synthesizing."

"Liberal arts is the weapon that science needs to overcome mythology, popular misconceptions, and those who denigrate science for self-interested reasons." Liberal arts give scientists and technologists the means to reach outside of their narrow group of peers and speak to the rest of us, to inform the rest of us, and to convince the rest of us. Our political culture is turning against science in part because those who speak against science are better skilled at persuading than those who speak for science. Liberal arts education gives us the tools we need to fight back and win.

Turns out when chaos reigns she with the most infrastructure and relationships wins. The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself ; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart. Art and commerce go hand-in-hand but executives can't manage artists. The business between creatives and business is a dance, a collaboration with a shared end goal.

H.Res.642 - 2016 Recognizing magic as a rare and valuable art form and 'national treasure" ~ Texas Congressman Pete Sessions

Arts Education Reduces Stress Level of Low-Income Students
Music and dance training can have an immediate, physiological benefit. Poverty leads to stress, which in turn leads to poorer health. Breaking this cycle is certainly a challenge, especially with children. But promising new research provides evidence of an effective, low-cost intervention: arts education.

3 Reasons Music and Arts Education is a Shining Light in a School System that Values “Sameness” By Anthony Mazzocchi a Grammy® nominated music educator

• Individuality matters
• Talent is not a scarce commodity.
• Music grades students the "right way".

Ron Clark: the dancing teacher who started ​an international movement
Almost every student at his fun-filled, Atlanta-based Ron Clark Academy has gone on to college . The Ron Clark Academy is a highly acclaimed, nonprofit middle school in Atlanta. 2016
Ron Clark's grandmother taught him respect, rules and expectations. And he didn't forget those Southern values when his teaching methods took him to the national spotlight. Knowing how many tests students take in a single year - on average, 10 standardized exams in grades 3 to 8 - this free-spirited middle school educator set out to battle student and teacher burnout. He brings music , dancing and fun into the classroom at his Atlanta-based Ron Clark Academy (RCA), and the results are impressive. All but one student in the academy's nine-year history have gone on to college.
Ron sees a big problem with the pressure placed on pupils and sees many American students and teachers getting exhausted. Schoolkids spend hours worrying about exams - they take up to 20 standardized assessments annually. And Ron says he believes when teachers work hard for little pay, many of them burn out, and also that frustrated kids don't always appreciate their efforts. He sees lack of freedom as the biggest problem: when educators have to teach to a test, they can't be as creative. "If teachers could be more animated," Ron says, "we'd see more unique and successful things in a school system."
Ron connects with his students by breaking tradition. He literally dances and sings with them: one day the kids asked him to join in, and then he couldn't stop. "It's all about relationships - once kids know you care, they'll work harder for you and want to do well," Ron explains. Says seventh grader Tim Calhoun: "It really motivates us to push ourselves to become great academically, and to be amazing citizens."

The major music lables are not in the incubation business. They want you to prove success before they're interested. Outsiders start, live. You don't start outside as a supernova, you evolve there, via trial and error. You generate sales and the big boys come 'a knockin'. The corporations wanted nothing to do with the Beatles, they were too scruffy...and then everybody wanted a piece. Major corporations ran from hip-hop, now they embrace it. The public has no loyalty to the corporation, only the sound. Since inception not only have record labels given artists bad deals, they haven't even paid on those deals. You can't get an accurate accounting, and the deals are written to ensure that you don't. But with Kobalt , you can access all your info on a regular basis. Transparency is coming to the recorded music side. As well as fairer deals.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE NEA

4/17/14 Artists 'have structurally different brains'
Participants' brain scans revealed that artists had increased neural matter in areas relating to fine motor movements and visual imagery. The research, published in NeuroImage, suggests that an artist's talent could be innate. But training and environmental upbringing also play crucial roles in their ability, the authors report. Those better at drawing had increased grey and white matter in the cerebellum and also in the supplementary motor area - both areas that are involved with fine motor control and performance of routine actions.
No 'right' side Ellen Winner of Boston College, US, who was not involved with the study, commented that it was very interesting research. She said it should help "put to rest the facile claims that artists use 'the right side of their brain' given that increased grey and white matter were found in the art group in both left and right structures of the brain".

8/19/14 Child's drawing 'predicts later intelligence' The pictures with more physical features scored more highly. The way children draw at the age of four can be a predictor of later intelligence, a study has suggested. What surprised us was that it correlated with intelligence a decade later. The Draw-a-Child test has been used to assess early intelligence since the 1920s. "The correlation is moderate, so our findings are interesting, but it does not mean that parents should worry if their child draws badly. "Drawing ability does not determine intelligence, there are countless factors, both genetic and environmental, which affect intelligence in later life."

National Council
on the Arts

4 New Members 2013

Bruce Carter 's work focuses on issues of creativity and the intersections of social justice and arts participation. Among the journals that have published his work are the Journal of Research in Music Education and the Oxford Press. This year, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, School of Education designated the Bruce Carter Qualitative Research Center as a place for graduate students to pursue meaningful qualitative research agendas.

Maria Rosario Jackson is an expert in the fields of urban planning, comprehensive community revitalization, and arts and culture. Her work appears in a wide range of professional and academic publications. She has served on numerous research and project advisory boards dealing with topics such as museums in communities, arts institutions and shifting demographics, arts and cultural activity in strategies to improve health outcomes, arts and cultural participation, and economic and social impacts of the arts. For 18 years, Jackson was director of the Culture, Creativity and Communities Program at the Urban Institute http://www.urban.org/ a Washington, DC-based national public policy research organization.

Maria López De León has been with NALAC http://nalac.org/ for 14 years and has served as executive director for ten years. She has been involved in all aspects of development and implementation of the organization's programs and initiatives. Under De León's leadership, NALAC launched three grant programs, the NALAC Fund for the Arts, the Transnational Cultural Remittances, and the NALAC Diverse Arts Spacesprogram. Among other achievements, she has directed the development of 12 editions of the annual Leadership Institute and the Latino Arts Advocacy Institute and completed production of Visiones, a six-part documentary series on Latino art and culture for PBS.

David "Mas" Masumoto is an organic peach and grape farmer and the author of six books, including Wisdom of the Last Farmer, Heirlooms, Letters to the Valley, Four Seasons in Five Senses, Harvest Son, and Epitaph for a Peach. A third-generation farmer, Masumoto grows certified organic peaches, nectarines, grapes, and raisins on an 80-acre farm south of Fresno, California. He is currently a columnist for The Fresno and Sacramento Bee, and was a Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy Fellow from 2006-08. He is currently a board member of the James Irvine Foundation and the Public Policy Institute of California.

The Rational for Arts Education:

Arts for Arts Sake vs. The Instrumental Arguments used for Arts Advocacy.

Let me spell it out for you .

We need the training we get from the arts.

We need to be trained to see it.

The artist can pull out the creative idea where non existed before. They see it.

Americans for the Arts: arts education program.
2013 The National Council on the Arts , the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) revealed their new four-point plan for arts education, under the leadership of new Director of Education Ayanna Hudson. The NEA wants to weave arts education into the very fabric of every school so that ALL students have access to the arts. And given the scope of the NEA, they want to focus on the following four key areas to achieve.

Arts Advocacy: Arts at the Core
The Arts at the Core Initiative is part of The College Board's Advocacy & Policy Center, created "to help transform education in America." Part of the Center's work involves the Arts at the Core project, whose goal is "to empower education leaders, particularly in under-resourced districts, to implement rigorous arts programming in their schools." Under the Our Progress section, visitors learn about some of the resources created to achieve this goal. Moving on, the News & Events area contains links to recent success stories of bringing arts education programs to schools, along with updates from the field of research into this area. The Publications area, which contains a brochure about flagship programs and a summary of key recommendations for school systems seeking to move arts to the core of their mission .

Early Childhood Arts Drive STEM Learning
Teaching artists from the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts and preschool educators are pioneering an innovative approach to teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects through the arts as part of high-quality preschool programming. Presently in classrooms in the Fairfax County (VA) Public Schools, the Early STEM/Arts Program will soon be replicated in 16 locations nationwide.

Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts and Wolf Trap Classroom Residencies
A Wolf Trap residency is a partnership during which an artist comes to the early childhood classroom and demonstrates for the teacher how the performing arts can be used to teach curriculum topics.
1645 Trap Road
Vienna, Virginia 22182
(703) 255-1933
1(800) 404-8461 education@wolftrap.org

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." ~ Charles Darwin

ARTIST ZAKIR HUSSAIN SAYS "THEY ALL SAY THE SAME THING" LOVE THY NEIGHBOR

Knowledge
vs. Data

The seemingly impossible becomes possible. It isn't enough to collect the data. We have tons of it. We need to turn the data into information. The arts help us turn the data info something we can comprehend which we can now call is information. Knowledge is based on that information. We can only understand the information through the skills of the artist who helps us comprehend and manage knowledge .

"We can get access to the data BUT the trick is to turn raw data into information ; and only by using the arts can we turn information into the Knowledge - that can explain us to ourselves. " ~ K.E.

Art Is Technology

Youtube Founders

Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world." He said Students and Professors know less about the world than Chimpanzees .

In an interview with Alan Kay he said, "I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me. [4]

Story Teller - Pioneer Alan Kay : Father of Object-Oriented Programming" Ted Talk A powerful Idea about Ideas - "Learning in a situated fashion" and "Children Are The Future We Send To The Future" :-)
Better techniques for teaching kids by using computers to illustrate experience in ways - mathematically and scientifically — that only computers can.

Multi Touch Screens making the technology more intuitive. Jeff Han of Perspective Pixel is changing how we interact with machines. Research
At TED2006 computer scientist Jeff Han demonstrated his prototype of a revolutionary multitouch screen (watch video). At TED2007 he brought along a larger, wall-size version that TEDsters could try out. The interactive media wall, built by Han's company Perceptive Pixel, will be sold by Nieman Marcus in the US. Price tag: $100,000 USD.

Mathematics and Art : The Good, The Bad, and the Pretty

The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) sponsors an annual MAA Distinguished Lecture as an occasion to celebrate the many joys of mathematics. Professor Annalisa Crannell of Franklin and Marshall College used this opportunity to talk about "The Good, The Bad, and the Pretty" of mathematics. Her wonderful talk can be found here, along with an interview that gives her the chance to talk about her own work. In her talk, she focuses in on the use of mathematics to create realistic art. Specifically, she talks about how most realistic art attempts to depict a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional canvas. Of course, this presents certain challenges, and she draws on examples from the work of Albrecht Durer to offer some perspective on this dilemma. One of the many highlights of her talk is when she presents a challenge to the audience involving an artist, a pedestal, and a squirrel.

UNITED STATES ARTISTS
We invest in America's finest artists and illuminate the value of artists to society. We do this by advocating for living artists and providing a community where the public can connect with, learn about, and support America's greatest artists. They site support from Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and reference $50,000 fellowship awards.

Jerome Kagan, Ph.D., Keynote: Why the Arts Matter Six Good Reasons for Advocating the Importance of Arts in School, part of Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain

What is the Root of Art and Culture?

"WHAT IS SCIENCE?"

answer:
"science is like art."
~ 7 year old

Narrative intelligence is the ability (or tendency) to perceive, know, think, feel, explain one's experience and influence reality through the use of stories and narrative forms. The Art of Story Telling
"It forms one of the underlying structures of reality, comprehensible and responsive to those who possess what we call narrative intelligence. ..."

"WHAT IS ART?"
Answer:

"Art is like Science"
~ 50 YEAR OLD
Science is the master analysis of the human mythic narrative because it offers a neutral language with which to assimilate the perspectives and beliefs of so many people. Science is the human family mediator.

What are the K12 Core Curriculum Standards and do they include Art or get the student ready for college?

The Ideal Approach and the Real Goal of All Education

CREATIVITY AND THE ROLE OF ART IN THE K-12 SCHOOL CURRICULUM
For me, it is all about the process which carries into writing, science and all other parts of the curricula. After all of these years, I still meet students who remind me about a piece of work they did in my classroom. It touches their soul and not one of them saves their math tests or essays or science tests. That is reason enough for art to be in the curricula. Now if Administration could only figure it out, this would be a giant step forward." ~ Anon

Scientists
are Artists

They are the new rock stars.
Mindsharelabs becomes SyynLabs run by Doug Campbell , cofounder Eric Gradman , labcats Brent Bushnell, David Guttman , Chris Hughes, Chris Nelson, Dan Busby, Geoff Emery, Erik Reckase. Yo Yo Ma was the musical center piece for a collaborative project of art, music and science at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC.

Project Zero was founded at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1967 by the philosopher Nelson Goodman to study and improve education in and through the arts. Goodman believed that arts learning should be studied as a serious cognitive activity, but that "zero" had been firmly established about the field; hence, the project was given its name.
Today, Project Zero is building on this research to help create communities of reflective, independent learners; to enhance deep understanding within and across disciplines; and to promote critical and creative thinking. Project Zero's mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as humanistic and scientific disciplines, at the individual and institutional levels. Project Zero's research initiatives build on and contribute to detailed understandings of human cognitive development and the processes of learning in the arts and other disciplines. They place the learner at the center of the educational process, respecting the different ways in which an individual learns at various stages of life, as well as differences among individuals in the ways they perceive the world and express their ideas. Many of these initiatives involve collaborators in schools, universities, museums, or other settings in the United States and other countries.

DID YOU KNOW ABOUT PUNCH CARDS? INTERSECTION OF ART -DESIGN - WEAVING - SILK - CLOTHES AND COMPUTERS
French Inventor Jacquard Produces a Weaving Loom Controlled by Punch Cards (1801), Facilitating the Mechanized Mass Production of Textiles; the Punch Card System Also Influences Early Computers in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1801, Joseph Marie Jacquard, a silk-weaver, invented an improved textile loom. The Jacquard loom was the first machine to use punched card. These punched cards controlled the weaving, enabling an ordinary workman to produce the most beautiful pattern. Jacquard's loom mechanism is controlled by recorded patterns of holes in a string of cards, and allows, what is now known as, the Jacquard weaving of intricate pattern. Patent: The French government claimed the loom to be public property.

Arts and
Public Policy

EQUITY IN ARTS FUNDING
The recent publication of Holly Sidford's study on equity in arts funding entitled " Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change: High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy " has stirred quite a bit of conversation about equity in arts funding, including an ongoing blog conversation about the study at the Grantmakers in the Arts web-site:

In addition, the Occupy movements have also sparked a lively conversation about the haves and have-nots in the arts world, including an Occupy Lincoln Center demonstration in New York. Here are links to a few of the blog-sites that I thought might be of interest:
therestisnoise.com | theatreideas | Equity in Cultural Funding | What Inequality Looks Like

SAVE THE COUNTRY

What's happened to our country?
The youth have power.
And who do they take their instructions from?

MUSICIANS have armies

The Top Five people on Twitter are all musicians.

• Lady Gaga #1 with 22,131,698 followers
• Shakira, #5 with 15,264,505
• In between, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry and Rihanna.
• Britney Spears is #6
• Taylor Swift #9

In other words, the bankers may have all the money, but musicians have all the power.
And they didn't get there by tying in with the financial fat cats, but by making music that resonated with their fans. Musicians are beholden to their fans, they control an army, and it's about time they did something good for our country.

"Save The Country": Laura Nero
Written shortly after the assassination of Robert Kennedy

"I got fury in my soul
Fury's gonna take me to the glory goal
In my mind
I can't study war no more
Save the people
Save the children
Save the country, now"

---

“I want an extreme experience,” he says. He wants his audience to leave the arena, as he commands them, “with your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated!”

So the display of exuberance is critical. “For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself,” he says. “Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in. Music, when it's really great, pries that shit back open and lets people back in, it lets light in, and air in, and energy in, and sends people home with that and sends me back to the hotel with it. People carry that with them sometimes for a very long period of time.” ~ Bruce Springstein

Wynton Marsalis couldn't explain why he was crying so hard during the speech he gave at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. for the Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy. "Man, I don't know," he told me. "I'm not really a person that's effusive. I'm a quiet type of person. His speech, which he titled "The Ballad of the American Arts," was a bravura 50-minute survey of how our country has used "homegrown arts to make us into one people, to teach us who we are." Marsalis's eloquence and easy humor made his tears at the finale all the greater a surprise. He bowed and cried, and bowed and cried, which made the crowd cheer even more. Though he couldn't articulate what brought on this emotion, he told me it came from feeling "overwhelmed"—from putting into words the full weight of the tragic, glorious history bound up in our arts, and vice versa: "That's our life, that's the life I live, so it started to hit me." Yet amid all the demands for better funding for the arts, hardly anybody addresses the graver shortfall, which is for better thinking about the arts. If more people joined Marsalis in calling for "a new American mythology," one that granted greater prominence to the arts because they "demand and deserve that we recognize the life we have lived on this land together," the appropriations would almost certainly follow. When someone who thinks about these issues as much as Marsalis does grows so profoundly affected by talking about them, it shows how utterly we fail at discussing culture in America. The champions of the arts speak of them today largely in functional terms: as businesses, or as subjects you teach because they'll make kids more employable.

Arts Education and Advocacy

STUDIO THINKING:
THE REAL BENEFITS OF VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION

IS THIS THE BOOK THAT WILL CHANGE ARTS EDUCATION?
These authors will settle for nothing less than “changing the conversation.”
First Review: September 12, 2007
by John Broomall
Executive director of the Pennsylvania Alliance for Arts Education

Arts in Education-Model Development and Dissemination Grant Program (see http://www.ed.gov/programs/artsedmodel/) and the Arts in Education-Professional Development for Arts Educators Grant Program (see http://www.ed.gov/programs/artsedprofdev/).

Teach art for its own sake, researchers say (NY Times) 2007
"The "intrinsic" vs. the "instrumental" value of arts education Debate is an intellectual construct that serves little or no useful purpose except to divide advocates of arts education.
Two Project Zero researchers, who published findings in 2000 that art classes don't improve overall academic performance, nonetheless advocate strongly on behalf of arts education in their new book, Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education . Winner and Hetland say we need to "change the conversation about arts" and "figure out what arts really do teach." They claim to understand the need to advocate for arts as NCLB shrinks the curriculum to a few subjects but believe that advocates should stick to plausible arguments. Their book focuses on the broad, indirect benefits of participation in various art classes.
“Habits of mind” developed in art classes that are not unique to the arts at all. Winner says, “Students who study the arts seriously are taught to see better, to envision, to persist, to be playful and learn from mistakes, to make critical judgments and justify such judgments.”
"HABITS OF MIND" sound like -- K-12 "HIGHER ORDER" THOUGHT PROCESSES ARE: classifying, inferring, hypothesizing, generalizing, valuing, relating, and synthesizing" to me!!

Winner and Hetland said "We concluded that the instrumental claims about the effects of arts education on learning in other subjects go far beyond the evidence, a point supported by the Rand report, Gifts of the Muse: Reframimg the Debate About the Benefit of the Arts (McCarthy, Ondaatje, Zakaras, & Brooks, (2004), and also made in Britain by Adrian Ellis (2003). Anger greeted our report. Some characterized us as enemies of the arts, arguing that publishing our research would destroy quality arts education for children in the United States. One scholar told us that we should never have asked the question, but having done so, we should have buried our findings.
We were shaken. Our goal had been to find the truth behind the claims, and to change the conversation from glib and superficial arguments for transfer, that in the long run may weaken the case for arts education, to a more thoughtful consideration of what the arts really offer. Arts advocates told us to give up they called our approach an arts for arts sake argument, a tack they insisted was both elitist and doomed to fail. Advocates, they told us, must do what works and that meant arguing for strengthening the kinds of basic skills stressed by No Child Left Behind and making the case whether or not there was evidence to support it. (Italics theirs) "

Improve literacy through arts education and advocacy
by providing collaborative and interdisciplinary resources for understanding world culture.

THE ART OF SEEING

#Warning - High School Opportunity
Some Foul Language used but worth using as a "Teaching Moment Tool" for media literacy and art.

Learn how and why the Arts Change the Learning Experience in Special Ways .
Find information about K12 Best Practices, and curriculum. Topics about art and the computer include how to archive digital files to video production curricula for the classroom.

Study Links High School Graduation Rates with Arts Education PDF
High school graduation rates and access to arts education are closely linked, according to a new study by The Center for Arts Education Correlating data collected by the NYC DOE, CAE found that schools with the highest graduation rates offer the most access to and benefits of quality arts instruction . Richard Kessler, CAE executive director, said: “The findings strongly suggest that arts play a key role in keeping students in high school and graduating on time.” “This report is of national significance,” said Diane Ravitch, NYU. ”It clearly demonstrates the linkage between high school graduation rates and availability of arts education." NY State Senator José M. Serrano said, “The strong correlation between the inclusion of arts education in schools and high school graduation rates emphasizes the urgency with which the policy recommendations outlined in the report should be implemented.” NYC Councilman Robert Jackson said: “CAE's study has highlighted the outrageous inequities of how arts programming is delivered. Students of color, ELL pupils and students from families below the poverty line are definitely getting the short end of the paint brush. This is illegal, shortsighted, and counter-productive.”

The Arts Database
Includes information and articles about jobs, law, how to protect online art,watermarks, government, websites, ascii, emoticons, symbols, color, clip art, fonts, graphics, icons, buttons, art search engines, directories, culture, film, folktales, storytelling, performing arts, traditional arts, video production, and infotainment.

" WHEN POWER leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.
When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment." John F. Kennedy- Address, Amherst College, October 26, 1963

• The arts reach students who are not otherwise being reached.
• The arts reach students in ways that they are not otherwise being reached.
• The arts connect students to themselves and each other.The arts transform the environment for learning.
• The arts provide learning opportunities for the adults in the lives of young people.
• The arts provide new challenges for those students already considered successful.
• The arts connect learning experiences to the world of real work.
• The arts enable young people to have direct involvement with the arts and artists.
• The arts support extended engagement in the artistic process.
• The arts encourage self-directed learning.
• The arts engage community leaders and resources
• 3-year-old Reese: "Our Father, Who does art in heaven, Harold is His name. Amen." :-)

20th Anniversary of Adobe Photoshop - John Knoll, Thomas Knoll, Russell Brown, and Steve Guttman - tell the story of how an amazing coincidence of circumstances, that came together at just the right time 20 years ago, spawned a cultural paradigm shift unparalleled in our lifetime.

WHAT IS ART

Computers might be eclipsed technologically in short order, but not art. Great art is lasting. - Bob Lefsetz

"To create is to celebrate one's connection to the cosmos." -Burnell Yow!

"Art, to me, is a question. It should never be an answer." -Marilyn Manson

"I do not want to go until I have faithfully made the most of my talent and cultivated the seed that was placed in me." -Kãthe Kollwitz

"Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither." -Jasper Johns

"The only limits are,as always, those of vision." -James Broughton

"The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis." -André Malraux

"No one looks at a flower garden and tears their
hair out trying to figure out what it means." -Jackson Pollock

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art." -Susan Sontag

"In every culture, in every time, artists have always
been the weather vanes, the truth-tellers, the bearers of beauty, and the ones who make visible
the invisible values of their world." -Cay Lang

"Creativity, to me, is basically closing one's eyes and letting it happen." -Ellen Sall

"All good ideas arrive by chance." -Max Ernst

If one wants integrity of content there is only live performance. Art starts as an individual effort that serves a purpose for the individual and the community. If the community enjoys and values the art then it will be shared with others becoming a grassroots effort often crossing geographic boundaries. Once the art becomes well known, business/commerce will move in to monetize it and business will make the commerce of art into the art of sales.

A Complete all-in-one resource for teaching the arts.

Modest Needs gives Help Donors Choose Teachers Ask, You Choose, Students Learn, micro-philanthropic integration.