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October Issue 2007

Accessibility 2007 Directs Sumter, SC, to Focus on Sustainability

Accessibility 2007: Sustainability - Green Art - The Art of Reuse, Recycling, Repurposing and the Environment, takes place from Oct. 1 through Nov. 2, 2007, in Sumter, SC. The month-long event will include five unique, interrelated and integrated projects, all of which are designed to engage the community in conversations about sustainability.

The community of Sumter is embarking on an ambitious public art project which will focus on environmental sustainability. The annual project, in its tenth consecutive year, is titled Accessibility 2007 and is themed around philosophies and concepts of sustainability and the protection of the environment. The Accessibility project is a community-based initiative using 'the arts' to inspire the Sumter community to address global warming and other timely environmental issues which will impact all citizens of Sumter, the nation and the world.

The original concept for Accessibility was predicated on the power of the arts to connect people with both time and place and to help define the commonality of the community. The annual art-project also promotes abstract, conceptual and out-of-the-box thinking. The 2007 version will use nature-based ephemeral sculptures, clothing and art constructed from recycled and reused materials, nature-based poetry, music, Hip Hop, spoken-word and film to address issues of sustainability and global warming and to demonstrate how we can all genuinely impact and influence sustainability on both the individual and collective levels.
 
The month-long Accessibility 2007 event will include 2 ten-day artists' residencies each involving 8 invited artists. The invited artists were selected from applicants living and working throughout the USA. All participating artists will be working in a public forum and will be fully accessible to visitors who are encouraged to tour the work sites and studios.  Accessibility 2007 will also include a "Green Art Festival" which will provide poets and filmmakers an opportunity to address environmental issues through their art forms. The Green Art Festival will also provide a unique forum for musicians, Hip Hop and spoken-word artists to respond to our changing environment and help raise awareness of how these changes will have an impact on all life on earth. The Accessibility event will also include a weekly series of free public lectures, films and discussions about sustainability and what we can do to protect our fragile environment.

All Accessibility projects will incorporate a holistic and multifaceted approach using a variety of creative art-projects to inform the community about theories and philosophies of reuse, consumerism and recycling in order to generate a public awareness of environmental problems and to encourage people to start talking about sustainability and the conservation of natural resources.

The projects include: Project 1 - Invitational Recycled Art Project. The eight artists participating with the Accessibility 2007 Invitational Recycled Art project will focus on the use of found, reused and repurposed materials to create site-specific installation art. The selected Accessibility artists will be living with Sumter-area families and working in a public forum at the Sumter County Cultural Centre for the duration of the residency. The curator for the Invitational Recycled Art Project is Mark McLeod, who is an art instructor at Sumter High School. He will be assisted by Scotty Peek, Assistant Director and Curator of the Sumter County Gallery of Art.

The participating artists include: Benjamin Entner, Rochester, NY; Leah Brown, Brooklyn, NY; Blaine Siegel, Philadelphia, PA; Kate Shearman, Ithaca, NY; Jonanthan  Brilliant, Charleston, SC; Janet Orselli, Columbia, SC; Jennifer Wightman, Ithaca, NY; and Christina Bowdler, Providence, RI.

Project 2 - Green Art: Exploring Reuse and Recycling through Clothing Design. Project Curator, Adrienne Antonson offers the following description, "Transforming found materials into clothing encourages environmentally sound and resourceful thinking. In a fragile global community, it is essential for responsible consumerism and sustainable concepts to provide alternative and non-traditional materials the ability to function as effective methods against the compounding detriments of waste. By minimizing what we waste by placing stock in what we buy, it is possible to investigate the creative process as a means to reconsider how clothing is used. The history of recycled garments makes them unique, and their sustainability makes them vital to our culture. If fashion is a series of recycled ideas, personal style becomes vibrant and inspirational when it's considered at a resourceful level. The two-week Sumter 'Designer's Invitational Residency' will provide the platform for collections of artful garments made from local and found materials. I will search the county for useable waste streams from local industries and businesses. This 'palate' of materials will then serve to inspire collections of work based on the Sumter experience. The work of the ten visiting artists will be exhibited on a catwalk in downtown Sumter on Oct. 20, 2007. Vendors offering organic food, eclectic live music, informational booths offering educational environmental information, and a space selling sustainable/natural products will accent the runway performance. The Sumter resident designer project will also include a downtown Sumter Storefront Fashion Showcase featuring Main Street merchants, salons, wig shops, galleries and antique shops."

The participating artists include: AmyLynn Warfield, Sumter, SC; Heather Koonse, Charleston, SC; Leigh Magan, Charleston, SC; Holly Streetstra, Baton Rouge, LA; April Karlovit, Columbia, MO; Ellen Kochansky, Pickins, SC; Lisa Iglesias, Queens, NY; and Donny Floyd, Sumter, SC.

Project 3 - Green Art Festival. The Accessibility Green Art Festival will be a week-long 'public' event designed to encourage artists, poets, musicians, filmmakers and other performers to address issues of sustainability and the environment. It takes place from Oct. 8 - 13, 2007. The festival will celebrate the Earth, the artists, the creative process and the power of the arts to address and connect social issues that impact the community. The unique festival will culminate on Oct. 13 and will feature live music, poetry, screenings  and the award ceremony of the winning "recycled" poetry competition. Performance poetry, Hip Hop and original music will also be featured throughout the week-long festival. There will be a festival awards evening and special reception for participating artists and the public. Project directors include Audrey Jones and Booth Chilcutt.

Two creative, process intensive competitions featuring the use of Recycled, Repurposed and Reused components include: Recycled Words - Participants will be encouraged to explore concepts of "Reused Words" and "Recycled Poetry" in the creation of nature-based "Found Poetry". All participants will be required to create a "found" nature-based original poem by using "recycled" words, word combinations, phrases  and themes from the poetry, essays and other writings of Henry David Thoreau and William Wordsworth as well as selected Native-American poets. Found poems are built from lines of existing poems, allowing writers to search through popular writings like sculptors on trash heaps. The poems created are original poems; their themes and their orderings invented. Their lines, when extracted from existing poems, are not. The creation of found poetry allows writers to closely examine literary devices, syntax, semantics, and meaning.

Recycled Film - The Recycled Film project will feature the screenings of videos made from "recycled," film and video. Participants are required to incorporate "found footage" in the production of an original narrative piece that addresses issues of sustainability and/or the environment. A second film/video project titled "Visual Poetry" will ask participants to address the theme of Accessibility 2007 through poetry, recycled words, imagery and the mediums of film and video. The screenings will take place during the month-long Accessibility event, in the historic Sumter Opera House and at non-traditional venues located throughout downtown Sumter.

Project 4 - Film, Discussion and Field-Trip Series. Project directors are scheduling a month-long series of educational and informative sustainability-based films, discussion sessions and field trips. The discussion groups and field trips will be facilitated and lead by artists, environmentalist, scientists and other professionals. The objective of this series is to inform participants about issues relating to global warming and the depletion of our natural resources and to encourage a dialog about how we can individually make a positive impact on the environment through adopting sustainable lifestyles. Project directors include Audrey Jones and Booth Chilcutt.

Project 5 - Ongoing Educational Opportunities Relating to the Accessibility 2007 Project. Educators from Sumter-area schools will be encouraged to develop curriculum guidelines and study plans that would implement, develop and expand upon Accessibility's sustainability-based project. Visiting resident artists will be encouraged to visit area schools to conduct in-school workshops and discussions. Sumter-area schools will also be encouraged to maintain an on-going dialogue about sustainability, recycling, reuse and the environment. The project education Director is Amanda Cox.

The objectives of Sumter's Accessibility 2007 project include: (1) Challenge and encourage Sumter-area residents to think about their individual responsibility to adopt a sustainable, environment-friendly, life style. (2) Help foster a new perspective about art by providing opportunities to see and experience how art can be used as a framework for interpreting the connection between man and his environment. (3) Identify opportunities for collaboration and partnership between civic organizations and the industrial sector which can be facilitated through creative arts programming. (4) Promote participation in the arts through inclusive programming that utilizes process driven, insightful, creative projects that use 'the arts' to help define the commonality of the community. (5) Provide diverse, ongoing opportunities for artists to experiment with and explore installation and other nature-based art forms.

For further information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings, contact Martha Greenway at 803/436-2260, Peggy Chilcutt at 803/468-2390, or Booth Chilcutt at 803/436-2616 or visit (www.accessibilitysumter.com) and (www.accessibilityeducation.org).

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