Our friends at WonderRoot (directors Witt Wisebram and Chris Appleton) will take the mic at noon EST today in an interview with Radio Free Georgia. Tune in via radio or stream the interview at WRFG.org.
WonderRoot is an Atlanta-based 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization committed to uniting artists and community to inspire positive social change.
Branding is a thing typically left to corporations with the money to invest in coordinated marketing plans, but Jerry Stifelman and Sami Grover don’t believe it ought to be that way. The Change is the name of their firm, and they are bringing brand-building services to nonprofits and “good-for-the-world” businesses.
Visitors to the company website are immediately confronted with the motto: “The truth is your best tool.” Making use of an organization’s conviction, personality, and sense of mission are key to brand-building in their view. They conceive of their free-market activism as apolitical, and feel right at home working with folks whose politics might not mesh perfectly with their own. Such a stance caught my confused eye here at Groundswell, and I invited our friend Marc from Osocio to participate in interviewing Jerry and Sami, in order to get a better picture of their work and their approach.
Nicki Sucec’s Home Is the Most Important Place in the World addresses homelessness in Seattle by honoring 270 deceased men and women who faced that struggle. The exhibit recently wrapped up at Henry Art Gallery as part of the University of Washington MFA Thesis Exhibition.
Read more about the exhibit at Real Change News, and listen Nicki speak about the project on the Henry Art podcast.
Photo courtesy of the artist.
Grupo Soap del Corazón is organizing Grafica Politica #2, a community-oriented call for art aimed at getting political posters out onto the streets. Submissions require that you include a photo of the piece out on the streets, and that the posters are multi-run prints, so that they can paste them up when the RNC comes to town. By organizing this way, they’ve cleverly organized an exhibit, archive, and protest all at once.
Groundswell is organizing artists to submit - please get in touch if you’d like to participate!
Odds are, your community suffers from oppression, monoculture, apathy, or boredom (or maybe all of the above.) If so, an infringement festival could provide inspiration and amusement - and help raise awareness for positive social change and global justice.
The infringement is a democratically run, non-hierarchical interdisciplinary arts festival open to all critical artists - theatre, music, film, street performance, visual arts, and more. It began in Montreal in 2004 as a protest against the co-option of experimental and DIY theatre by the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals, and has since spread to Ottawa, Toronto, Buffalo, Regina, New York City and Bordeaux, France, with new communities joining regularly. They don’t charge a registration fee, and have guidelines to keep the festival independent.
Interested in hosting an infringment in your community? Click here for a PDF guide to starting one!
