AAYC Grant submitted!

Written and sent. On the way to the post office, I leaned in through the library director’s door.

“Here’s my grant,” I said, waving the envelope.” She turned.

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” she said. “State funding is awful, and I suspect that arts and culture programs are going to be the first to go.“

“Maybe the NEA can step in with their $50 million in stimulus — prop ‘em up,” I joked. She gave me a look.

“It’s hard to fund the arts when people can’t eat.”

She’s right, of course, but I figured this would be a good exercise, that it would really legitimize this endeavor if I received external funding.

So, for the curious, here’s the Arts Alliance of Yamhill County’s grant application form, and below is what I sent. If you have any tips for writing better grants, by all means, weigh in. I’m a novice at this.

 

Breaking all sorts of records

Progress!

Some tidbits and tidbats, laid out in front of your very eyes like twitter tweets poured from a teacup:

* The Evergreen State College photo center interns had their show last weekend, and I went, and there were lots of people. I didn’t get a chance to mention this project to barely anybody, but I did talk to a few people, all of whom are on board, at least provisionally. Those people are:

Beck Nelson — currently working in analog color photography, his recent work comprises images of buildings, landscapes, birds, etc. printed with brightly colored yet ghostly shapes emerging from the subjects. Everything seems held together with scotch tape. Definite design sensibility yet unafraid to show the imperfection of the underlying materials.

Rachel Lang — recently completed a series of transparent color portraits, which she embedded in thick chunks of glycerin and lit from behind, evoking at once both the feeling of a glowing jesus votive and a body frozen in ice.

Julia DeConcini — a playful explosion of southwest american motifs in large prints with a strong, almost leatherlike presence. She explores the underlying nature of black-and-white photographic materials by subjecting the prints to certain chemical processes and adds color to the work with paint and varnish.

* Additionally, I had a good, long talk with former TESC photo services intern Vanessa LaValle who is now on board as well. Vanessa’s moved off to Cleveland, where she reports that there are no darkrooms nor any meaningful photographic community, so she’s resorted to low-tech photoshop drawings that I find simultaneously hilarious and evocative. Since none of them actually exist on paper, so far as I know, she’ll probably be sending me some files to print. Bro grabs 40 inches high, anyone?

* The deadline for the Arts Alliance of Yamhill County is fast approaching; the amount is very small indeed at only $100, but securing even a small amount of funding would help give me the encouragement I need to get these folks’ work out into the world AND it would cover the cost of printing flyers — so, nothing to sneeze at! Stay tuned, as I plan to post the grant application soon.

 

Getting it organized

The plan is simple.
I am starting a lending library for artwork. The library will function like this: Community members will look through the collection online and indicate a piece or two that they would like to check out. Then I will load the artwork into my truck and drive it out to their homes, where it will stay and where they will be able to enjoy it privately for four to six weeks. When the piece is due back, I will drive out and pick it up, returning it to circulation.

What could possibly go wrong?

* * *

Recently I helped a painter friend move into a new house and we had to pack up all of her paintings. For one project, she had painted on door blanks. The body of work was substantial, I believe there were about ten. Several of them were stored in her laundry room, wrapped in blankets. I remember packing them into the u-haul last summer. “You know what we should’ve done” I joked, hollering down the loading ramp, “you could’ve called your friends and told them they could come pick up a painting at three, and then they could ‘store’ it for you until further notice.”

Somehow this germ of an idea of using one’s friends as a distributed network to ‘store’ artwork — after all, what friend of mine would actually turn down such an offer? — has gained in clarity and strength. After rolling the concept around for several months and exploring some ways that such an institution could actually be put together, I believe I’ve carved it down to a shape that strikes a balance among several concerns, namely that I wish to do something for the arts on a local scale, bolster the connection between artists and their community, avoid money, and stay out of trouble. In that order

I don’t do announcements well, so let me throw down some details. First, as I’ve been discussing this project with my friends, a long litany of questions has come up, most of which I think I’ve been able to address. And since I wish to be pragmatic, here are some highlights.

• I can’t purchase artwork from artists. The work has to be put freely into circulation by the artist.
• Artists who put work into circulation have to be ready to accept some amount of damage to their work, and the risk of losing a piece entirely.
• Artists should be able to recall their pieces if necessary, even if the piece is currently checked out.
• One day per week will be scheduled as the pick-up / delivery day; as volume demands, that can be revisited.
• Check out duration will probably start between 4 to 6 weeks.
• Patrons should be treated to a short bio of the artist who made the work and the artists should be encouraged to release their contact info to the patrons in order to create an open channel of communication.
• No forms of artwork will be excluded from circulation, permitting the artwork is durable enough withstand circulation. (I’m quite compelled by the prospect of “checking out” an installation or even a performance piece).
• Though this project will be serving the community of McMinnville, the artwork will be sourced from wherever I can get it.
• If a piece cannot be recovered, the patron’s contact info will be released to the artist. (When you check out a book from interlibrary loan, you’re often informed of the replacement cost
• Even though it has virtually no point, everybody will receive library cards!

Now, the things that I’m still wrestling with are the following:

• I have identified no satisfactory solution to keeping “fragile” work like photos and printed pieces pristine. As a photographer, I know how absurdly easy it is to kink a print. That’s what frames are for, right? But artists can scarcely afford to frame their own work. So I’m searching for the most inexpensive way of presenting flat work, something that’s likely to lead me down the path of suggesting that people simply dry mount their work to some sort of board.
• I don’t have time to put together a fancy website with a searchable catalog and online checkout. As awesome as it would be to design and implement my own system of a simplified library cataloging / checkout system in SQL, resources and good sense will find me doing most of the ledger work on paper, by hand, and probably updating some static content for the web component. (The complex and whimsically esoteric MARC specification, which is substantial and nuanced enough to satisfy even the most voracious cataloger, is absolutely mind-bending to implement as a relational database).
  But! I was shown ning today, and I’m excited about this social networking tool — not only does it fulfill my wish for providing a forum for patrons and artists, but it’s also extendible through some API, free, and I believe I can put static content up. So that’s a promising vector.

More updates to follow, of course. Thank you for your interest, and feel free to jump in any time if you have any thoughts.