Lessons from Social Entrepreneurs: How to Add Value to Your Organization and Career

Emerging Arts Leaders/Los Angeles presents its day-long 2012 Creative Conversations Event

Tickets Available Now!

Social entrepreneurs seek to satisfy unmet needs within the community by growing an organization that often has a heartfelt and unprecedented mission that aligns with the founder’s personal values. At Emerging Arts Leaders/Los Angeles, we represent a groundswell of young professionals coming up in established organizations or looking to start our own. Often our members have a young, fresh perspective on social/community needs that no one else is addressing. Indeed, many older arts organizations often find themselves behind the curve when it comes to spotting new trends or opportunities for growth in the community.

April’s Creative Conversation will give us insights from entrepreneurs as to how we can identify unmet needs in our community or organization, and show us how we can shape our work to meet those needs. We will explore challenges our speakers have faced and the creative and logistical know-how they drew upon to face those challenges. By looking at our work through an entrepreneurial lens, even if it’s just an exercise for those who do not seek to build our own organizations, we will make ourselves and our points of view invaluable to our organizations and community, and find opportunities to advance our careers.  We’ll have the opportunity to join one another in group discussions and activities – who knows, you could meet your next collaborator on an entrepreneurial venture!

Saturday, April 21, 10:15am-3:30pm
Plaza de la Raza
Cultural Center for the Arts & Education
3540 North Mission Road
Los Angeles, CA 90031

PARKING: Use the lot directly in front of Plaza de la Raza or nearby street parking.

A catered lunch from Panera Bread is included in your ticket price. Within your purchase confirmation email you will be provided with an email address in case you need to indicate any dietary restrictions.

Finally, we hope you’ll join us afterward for Happy Hour at: Barbara’s at The Brewery
620 Moulton Avenue #110
Los Angeles, CA 90031

Driving directions to our Happy Hour location will be provided at the event.

10:15-10:30am: Registration

10:30-10:45am: Opening Remarks

10:45-11:45am: Keynote

Terence McFarland, Chief Executive Officer, LA Stage Alliance

11:45am-12:45pm: Lunch & Youth Mariachi Ensemble Performance

12:45-2:05pm: Your Arts Career Through an Entrepreneurial Lens

• Rebecca Ansert, Founder & Principal, Green Public Art Consultancy
• Edgar Arceneaux, Executive Director, Watts Tower Project
• Molly Cleator, Owner/Founder, A Place to Create
• Judy Tatum, Independent Non-Profit Consultant

2:05-2:45pm: Applying Entrepreneurial Thinking to Your Personal Goals: Small Group Discussions

2:45-3:15pm: Right Brain Entrepreneurism: Creative Collaborative Activity

Molly Cleator will lead us through a fun and energizing creative activity.

3:15-3:30pm: Final Wrap-Up & Depart for Happy Hour at Barbara’s at The Brewery!

Tickets Available Now!

Over the past 6 years the students at the high school, under the guidance of Tammy Bird, have transformed a neglected lot on school grounds into a thriving educational garden. The project has been fully funded by small grants or donations. Organizations like Tree People donated over a hundred fruit trees to the neighborhood, many of which found homes in the Carson High School Garden. The organization has also hosted tree pruning events to teach the students how to maintain their orchard. Kellogg Garden Products has donated soil and organic fertilizer.

Tammy likes to operate under the radar which allows her a certain amount of freedom. She encourages the students to take ownership of the projects that take place in the garden. Some recent inventions include re-purposing discarded industrial materials (AC fans, trash cans, a tractor, many of which are found in their schools “graveyard”, a place adjacent to the garden where discarded materials remain until they are taken to the dump) into planters, functional wind machines, and a slow roast pit. Tammy and the students proudly showed off their newly installed windmill (the first in the neighborhood!), functional solar panels (recycled from CAL Trans) to circulate the pump in their micro-climate pond, composting bins, and plans for a green wall and mosaic art wall.

Thanks to maverick teachers like Tammy Bird a population of children in Los Angeles is being introduced to nature in a meaningful way. I am hopeful that there are more stories like this one out in our broken education system. **I failed to take any pictures during my tour (big fail!) but have included these which I found in a google search.

The second edition (scheduled release unknown), will include pros and cons, lifecycle carbon costs, and more detailed diagrams of the technologies.

The competition is free and open to everyone. Designers, artists, engineers, architects, landscape architects, university students, urban planners, scientists and anyone who believes that the world can be powered beautifully and sustainably are encouraged to enter. Download the RFP here. Deadline: July 1, 2012

Robert Ferry & Elizabeth Monoian conceptualized the Land Art Generator Initiative in the fall of 2008 shortly after moving to Dubai. The project was strongly founded by the spring of 2009 and they continue to work tirelessly to nurture and promote the concept of aesthetics and renewable energy with the goal of seeing to the construction of the first large-scale public art works that generate utility grid electricity in clean and sustainable ways.

In January of 2010 LAGI put out an international call to artists, architects, scientists, and engineers to come up with both aesthetic and pragmatic solutions for the 21st century energy crisis. The 2010 LAGI design competition was held for three sites in the UAE and received hundreds of submissions from over 40 countries. View entries from the last competition.

Green Festival, the nation’s largest and most trusted green living event comes to Los Angeles October 29-30, 2011. This unique experience celebrates positive solutions working in our communities. Festivities include presentations by more than 125 renowned authors and visionaries, DIY workshops, cutting-edge films, enriching kid’s activities, organic beer and wine, delicious organic vegan and vegetarian cuisine, music and art and an amazing marketplace of hundreds of green local and national businesses and organizations.

Sustainable Materials in Public Art:

Easy entry points into using green materials

Environmental Graffiti

Paint with plants to create living walls

Sustainable Sites: Reduce the Heat Island Effect with creative paint schemes. LEED awards projects that reduce the urban heat island effect on the roof or non-roof surfaces. Molly Dilworth‘s Cool Water, Hot Island served as a temporary project designed to offer temporary relief to the hot asphalt of NYC’s Times Square.

Molly Dillworth, "Cool Water, Hot Island"

Commission artists to restore or protect native habitats and maximize or create better open space for a LEED point in the Site Development category. Gitta Gshwendtner‘s Animal Wall matches the number of new homes with about 1,000 next boxes made from custom woodcrete cladding.

Gitta Gschwendtner, "Animal Wall"

Water Efficiency: There are several artists working with stormwater and wastewater, many of which could contribute to the Innovative Wastewater Technologies LEED point category. Buster Simpson is renowned for his water-centric sculptures and his project Whole Flow relies non-toilet wastewater which is distributed to the top of the sculpture, is then aerated as it flows from one basin to the next and is finally retained in the basin before being distributed to the near by landscape.

Buster Simpson, "Whole Flow"

Jackie Brookner‘s Urban Rain makes the natural filtration process, which normally occurs underground, visible to the public.

Jackie Brookner, "Urban Rain"

Materials & Resources: It should go without saying now that if a project is intended to be green it should use recycled content, post-industrial or post-consumer recycled materials. Also, all materials should be sourced within 500 miles of the project site.

Artist Erwin Timmers collected glass from the demolition of a building on the project site, melted it and recast it into a new public artwork for the new building. This project could have potentially contributed to the Construction Waste Management LEED point which requires a diversion of construction waste from landfills towards recycling or reuse.

Erwin Timmers

Energy & Atmosphere: Artist team Didier Hess has been experimenting with a variety of materials and installation techniques at their non-profit Materials & Applications, located in Los Angeles. Two installations are focused on measuring elements in the atmosphere. The first, HouseSwarming, a temporary project, was designed to detect impurities in the air quality. The green nodes lit up and flashed as it detected more pollutants. The second, a permanent installation on a Firestation, detects levels of moisture in the air. The color of the hidden LEDs within each node will change in hue as the air becomes dry or humid. As a result the artwork will act as a visual awareness tool for the surrounding community.

Didier Hess

There is great potential for artists to use the following materials in projects to aid in the management of a building’s heat load.

Solar Glass

Lumisty

Artists are utilizing renewable energy in large scale public artworks. Harries Heder‘s Sunflowers, An Electric Garden contributes energy back into the grid. The greatest challenge with solar at the moment is the limitation in the shape of the panels.

Harreis Heder, "Sunflowers, An Electric Garden"

Temporary Solar Energy Project

Piksol will not be the most energy efficient material but they can collect energy at locations where otherwise no solar panels would be welcome for aesthetic reasons.

Piksol

Innovation and Design: One of the most coveted point categories in LEED. Projects that include an educational outreach plan, making the building actively instructional are eligible for an ID LEED point. Tatfoo Tan worked with grade school children to re-appropriate the pledge of allegiance with a  green message which was then engraved in the entry way of their school.

Tatfoo Tan's "S.O.S. Pledge"

Artworks that introduce strategies which demonstrate quantifiable environmental benefits are eligible for Innovative Performance points. Matthew Mazzotta‘s Park Spark Project requires community participation from the community to deposit dog waste into a large container and crank the wheel to begin the methane digestion process which ultimately generates enough energy to illuminate the street lamp.

Matthew Mazzotta's "Park Spark Project" (L) and Freya Bardell and Marco Luyten's "Hot Air" (R)

The City of San Jose has challenged artists with the Climate Clock Initiative which tasks them to conceptualize a 100-year public art project to help measure climate change, make the process more visible and engage and inspire the community to personally explore their individual carbon footprints.

Climate Clock Initiative

Artist designed charging stations are our future such as Sol Design Lab's project on the left

Art that Works: At the top of each stack is a LED light fixture which changes color from blue-orange-red relative to the heat output of the plant.

False Creek Energy Centre

Piezoelectric technologies are being implemented all over the world. Toulouse, France installed trial tiles in the city center to generate electricity to run streetlights. Club Watt in the Netherlands is the first dance club to use the technology to light up their dance floor. In Tokyo, Japan the ticket booths are powered by piezoelectric. And supermarkets have installed piezoelectric into the speed humps in the parking lots which generate enough power for the checkout registers.

Piezoelectric Technology

Windstalk, an entry for the Land Art Generator Initiative's 2010 competition

The material used in Catalyst was originally developed for use on pavements in congested urban areas to improve air quality. Sunlight initiates a reaction where the active concrete surface converts harmful nitrogen oxides into harmless nitrate, this in turn reacts with the calcium hydroxide of the concrete surface and drains off with the next rainfall into soils where plants can use it.

Dalziel + Scullion, "Catalyst"

Boysen’s KNOxOUT Cleaning Paint also reacts with sunlight to reduce nitrogen oxide and other air pollutants found in car emissions. Boysen Paint Inc. conducted a trial last year at the Guadalupe MRT station, Manilla, Philippines,  and claims that the paint extracts enough toxins from the air so that it is like 30,000 have been removed from the roads daily. There is a large public art mural project underway in Manilla where a number of artists have been commissioned to paint large scale murals alongside of the highways using the KNOxOUT paint.

KNOxOUT

A link to the mural project as well as the other projects mentioned in this post can be found in the downloadable resources located on the home page of greenpublicart.com.

Remember, Public art can be green, functional and beautiful – and what better way to encourage and educate our communities about the environment!

HERE IS HOW THIS FREE WORKSHOP WORKS!
• There will be a series of 5 round-robin sessions (25 minutes each).
• Locate and join the table that has the topic you want to learn more about.
• After 25 minutes an announcement will be made, indicating that the session is over.
• Then rotate to other tables as the sessions repeat.

Topics for Visual Artists:
• 10 Things to Know About Fabrication Before Submitting A Proposal
• Arts Education In-School Resources & Working in Arts Education (K-12)
• Becoming a Facebook Ninja for Beginners
• Best Foot Forward: Creating Compelling Presentations
• Every Artist Insured: Understanding Health Insurance and Healthcare Reform
• Fundraising for Individual Artists
• Getting Your Sh*t Together
• Green Art Initiatives
• Individual Artist Resources
• Licensing for Visual Artists
• Marketing for Visual Artists
• Mediation & Dispute Resolution Services
• On Your ‘A’ Game, Things to Know When Interviewing for a Public Art Commission
• Public Art 101
• Working In Context

REGISTER ONLINE through SurveyMonkey by visiting this website: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ATU-EagleRock

QUESTIONS? Contact Anji Gaspar-Milanovic, Los Angeles County Arts Commission
Telephone: (213) 202-3981 E-mail: amilanovic@arts.lacounty.gov

OFF THE GRID: Recharging Public Art + Design, a full-day symposium hosted by the City of Austin’s Art in Public Places Program, will feature an intimate look at existing and future public art and design in the Seaholm District, a former industrial section of southwest downtown Austin that is undergoing a transformation into a vibrant urban neighborhood. A uniquely Austin adaptive reuse project, the Seaholm District serves as a model for sustainable urban revitalization nationwide. Panel speakers include Jana McCann, McCann Adams Studio; Greg Kiloh, Economic Growth and Redevelopment Services Office, City of Austin; and John Rosato, Southwest Strategies Group.

In addition to the Seaholm District presentation, the symposium will feature:

• Interactive building game and presentation by Alex Gilliam of Public Workshop
• Exploration of sustainable materials in public art with Rebecca Ansert of Green Public Art
• Panel discussion about the integration of art in urban agriculture with Randy Jewart, Austin Green Art; Jake Stewart, Sustainable Urban Agriculture, City of Austin; and Jessie Temple, Festival Beach Community Garden
• Networking opportunities with breakfast and lunch provided by Ecstatic Cuisine
• Resource materials from event presenters and information on upcoming AIPP opportunities

The symposium will take place from 9:00 am – 3:30 pm on Saturday, October 8, 2011 at the decommissioned Seaholm Power Plant located at the terminus of West Street at 3rd Street. Check-in and breakfast begin at 8:30 am. REGISTER BY OCTOBER 5 at www.cvent.com/d/fcqjff. SPACE IS LIMITED! Admission is $20 (includes breakfast and lunch). Parking is available in the surrounding neighborhood. Be sure to wear comfortable clothes and shoes.

The Art in Public Places Program is partnering with the Solid Waste Services Department and the Austin Convention Center to make this a zero waste event. Participants are encouraged to bring reusable water bottles, coffee mugs, silverware and dishware to aid in reducing waste. Please note that there will not be facilities to clean reusable items on site.

AFTERWARDS: The symposium will be followed by an interactive workshop sponsored by the Downtown Austin Alliance and conducted by Alex Gilliam of Public Workshop and Austin AIA members. The Old Bakery Block Idea-a-Thon will be held in and around the Old Bakery Building on the west side of Congress Avenue, between 10th and 11th streets from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm. Symposium attendees are encouraged to participate. For more information, visit: www.aiaaustin.org/event/old-bakery-block-idea-thon.

NOTE: Both the symposium and the Idea-a-Thon are held in conjunction with Austin x Design, a month-long community celebration of design in Austin. To find more events, visit: www.austinbydesign.org or www.facebook.com/AustinbyDesign.

Questions? Contact Carrie Brown, Art in Public Places Coordinator, at 512-974-9310 or carrie.brown@austintexas.gov. Visit AIPP at www.austintexas.gov/aipp.

As an intern for Green Public Art, I have been in the process of researching new materials for artists to make their works be more environmentally responsible.

Art can act as a function for people’s imagination. It’s difficult to envision what the future could or will look like. As a society, we are currently thrusting our environmental missteps into the limelight everyday and immediate recovery does not seem imminent; but art has the potential to positively inspire people without the discouraging and overwhelming undertones.  All progressive green inspired projects take on an artistic form in one way or another.  Organic light emitting devices, a new emerging technology,  have been an exciting topic for researchers; offering new advances for displays and screen. OLEDs are composed of organic materials [made from a variety of phosphorescent elements including iridium, platinum, and iron] in pressed in layers. With a connection to an electrical source the OLED produces a light energy. See how OLEDs work.

The benefits of OLEDs is a brighter, crisper, display on a more durable and lighter electronic devices that consumes less power so batteries last longer and your energy bill gets lower. It also has a thinner and more flexible quality so it can be more purposeful. OLEDS potentially could be the future of all displays, screens, and much more, however there are difficulties. These devices do not handle water very well and as these are still a new technology, the costs of production are expensive.

There are many different types each with a different purpose: passive-matrix [better for small screens such as cell phones and MP3 players], active-matrix [best for large screen televisions, computer monitors and even billboards], transparent [allows light to pass through both directions even when on], top-emitting [can be reflective or opaque and also used in large displays], foldable [durability and flexibility makes this great in cell phones], and white OLEDs [with better colors and a brighter projection]. There are color options in OLED lighting as well; the color of the light emitted is determined by the components in the different layers.

Here are a few examples of how (OLED) can inspire people in different communities. When this light and display technology is made affordable and efficiently it could potentially replace all other forms of light because of it being brighter and utilizing less materials allowing it to be smaller and eventually cheaper for all forms of light: televisions, billboards, signs, electronic communications, cell phones, computers, appliances, and light bulbs. Because OLEDs can be made in large sheets, they can replace fluorescent lights that are currently used in homes and buildings and their use could potentially reduce energy costs for lighting.

Artists whom are making the strides to be more environmentally friendly could incorporate OLEDs in many different types of work: installations, sculptures, murals, photography, earthworks, video, graphic, and standardized fixtures including street lights, gates, and benches.

An OLED can be integrated as a direct component of a piece and it can also be used in the presentation of the artworks.  These devices can be artistically utilized to illuminate public spaces including parks and walkways, outdoor works of art, and also as the light source in an art piece.  By using solar power to charge and power the OLEDs, the environmental impact is minimal. Because this medium is flexible and be malleable it can be constructed in many forms, leaving many opportunities open to harness this new technology. Below you see some pieces that have encompassed the use of light and/ or digital media as a significant role.

Jason Bruges "Mimosa"

Both, Jason Bruges “Mimosa” and “You Fade to Art” by rAndom International have employed OLEDs for Philips Lumiblade.

Bruges is internationally renowned for his work with green technology. Mimosa, commissioned for Milan in 2010, is an interactive artwork displaying behavior that mimics responsive plant systems.The piece was inspired by the Mimosa family of plants, which change kinetically to suit their environmental conditions. The studio has used the slim form of individual OLEDs to create delicate “light petals”, forming flowers, which open and close in response to visitors.

rAndom International "You Fade to Art"

rAndom International’s projects emphasize the interaction between the audience and the inanimate object. In their work “You Fade to Art” the team designed a large wall of multiple mirrors to interactively follow the viewer’s body movements with light. The work was exhibited at the International Design Museum, Munich in 2010.

The works of Jason Krugman embody the use of light and sometimes video and I think that his work ultimately could use OLEDs, making his illuminated figurative sculptures brighter, malleable, and even interactive with the public.

And, think of Chicago’s Millennium Park where artist Jaume Plensa created a gorgeous glass block tower titled “The Crown Fountain” with flowing water, fountains, and flickering images of a thousand Chicago natives. Now imagine that same project replacing the glass and projection machines with OLEDs and solar energy – not only is the image brighter but it is more crisp and now energy efficient.

Organic Light Emitting Devices used in public art pieces could make art more educational, interactive, and astonishing. They should be considered in the future of artistic expression.

About the blogger: Jessica Kimmel is a graduate student at Antioch University Los Angeles studying Urban Sustainability. Through her internship at Green Public Art Consultancy and ecoartspace, Jessica’s hope is to encourage environmental discourse in the local community and solidify artists as relevant stakeholders in the green movement.

Evenings in the Garden – Artist Talks begin on Wednesday, July 27, 2011 from 5:00-7:00pm

Register by email info@thegarden.org or call 619-660-0614

Participating artists include:

Christopher Puzio

Bociek & Bociek

Benjamin Lavender

Terri Hughes-Oelrich

Dia Bassett

Artists will discuss their inspiration, materials they chose to use and give the audience a deeper insight to their individual art practice.