Schedule:
9.45 Zoom space opens - check in early, get comfy and grab a coffee
10am intro and news
10.15 We are delighted to welcome our great friend and activist zooming in from Chicago, Arnold Aprill
break out room discussions
11 -ish break
11.15 Two of our practitioners will share their experience including break out rooms for discussion and sharing…
Kath Melbourne
Kath will share her experience of working with artists in the current COVID-19 climate as well as her personal story of engaging with artists and running programs within the Australia Council for the Arts.
Sharifah Emalia Al-Gadrie
In Emalia’s creative practice she explores identity, heritage and connectivity between people which means also exploring marginalisation. This intersects with her career as a community development worker, where her areas of passion are in creating platforms for marginalised and stigmatised voices to be empowered and heard; with the aim to dissolve the barriers which impede connection between people.
1pm end
Key elements of this session will be recorded and placed back on the site as a resource.
Some of you may have met Arnie when he was here in Tasmania a couple of years ago. Arnold Aprill is the founder and lead consultant for Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE). Aprill is one of the co-authors of Renaissance in the Classroom: Arts Integration and Meaningful Learning, and is a contributor to the Routledge International Handbook of Creative Learning. He consults nationally and internationally on the role of the arts in effective school improvement and has been recognised for exceptional leadership by the Chicago Community Trust and by the Leadership for a Changing World initiative, supported by the Ford Foundation. Aprill worked as a scholar with the University of Tasmania as a Fulbright Specialist. - you can see an interview with him from 2012 here
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/weekendarts/arnold-aprill/4174894
Arnie is based in Chicago and regularly presents, provocations for change in arts education His most recent book is
Education, Arts and Sustainability: Emerging Practice for a Changing World (SpringerBriefs in Education) Paperback – March 3, 2018
by Mary Ann Hunter (Author), Arnold Aprill (Contributor), Allen Hill (Contributor), Sherridan Emery (Contributor)
This is a GREAT book - we have a copy in the all that we are Library.
MOVING ARTISTS FROM BEING BEGGAR ELITES INTO BECOMING CO-CREATORS OF RICHER LIVES WITH OTHERS
Artists get worn out by being perpetual beggars – always waiting for the next grant or contract (that we have little control over) in order to sustain our work and basic survival. Stuck inside an endless horse race consisting of ever-fluctuating winnings and losings, we are placed into permanent competition with our peers.
We often respond to this dilemma by thinking:
How can I better engage the people who control resources (get more grants)?
How can I better get others to appreciate the value of my work (get more respect)?
How can I better get to participate in the making of decisions that directly affect my life (get more power)?
Under these conditions, we experience a limited sense of our own agency to take corrective action, which makes the persistent discounting of the value of our work especially galling. It becomes tempting to think of ourselves as a victimized, under-appreciated community of special contributors to the general good, but a fatal flaw in these thoughts is that they position the under-valued contributions of artists as separate from and more important than the under-valued contributions of other marginalized communities, most of which have been subject to significantly greater levels of sustained disenfranchisement than many artists have had to endure, and with a lot less access to positions of privilege to fall back on. We also need to learn from those of us who are artists within those communities, and who have always had to contend with at least two levels of marginalization.
And we are all up against totalizing systems designed to sort us into who matters, who does not matter, and who matters the least. We can see concrete evidence of who is considered to matter the least in the statistics in the United States for who is left to die from Covid-19, and who is not. While the pandemic has been catastrophic for the arts community, the vast majority of deaths have been among communities of color, factory workers, and the elderly.