Finished!
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September Update
About 570 people, children through senior citizens, met with Nina in brainstorming, drawing, and cut paper design sessions. About 100 people of all ages worked on broken-tile mosaic practice pieces. Preschoolers through those in their nineties worked side-by-side on a multitude of tasks: washing and sorting tile, tessellating, sweeping and other clean-up, telephoning, construction, collecting and cutting cardboard, and installation. Businesses, community members, and the City of Spencer have been generous with supplies, services, discounts, and monetary donations. Nearly 1,000 people have had a hand in the ParkArt project. It has been a monumental task, but the area now has a new monument which celebrates community spirit. It is truly The Gathering: Of Time, of Land, of Many Hands.
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| With major funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artists & Communities: America Creates for the Millennium will see our country's finest community artists working side-by-side with people in local settings, using arts activities to illustrate and address issues of community significance. |  |
Artists & Communities is made possible by major funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Prudential Foundation, the Earle I. Mack Foundation, and The Brimstone Fund. This program will support 56 residencies across the United States during the year 2000 - the first time the value of community arts will be demonstrated simultaneously on a national scale. Spencer will be the site for Iowa's only millennium creation. The overall goal of the program is to demonstrate the positive role the arts, and in particular the artists, can play in society at a unique historical moument, the beginning of the new century.
| Chicago-area artists Nina Smoot-Cain and John Pitman Weber work as a creative team. In Spencer they will guide the public in the creation and completion of a ceramic tile mosaic to be applied to a combination of walls and pillars surrounded by a plaza and curved benches near the southwest corner of East Leach Park. They will re-visit Spencer in March and be in residence from mid-April through August. |  |
"For me, art making is a deeply spiritual act that honors the creator
in all of us."
Nina Smoot-Cain
The underlying goal of "community" public art must always
be the creation of a sense of community. Community is not a given, it is a process and a
goal. It always involves a re-imagining and a re-imaging of history, values, identity and
the uncovering/redefinition of new common ground."
John Pitman Weber
If you have questions about this project, you can contact the ParkArt Coordinator, Judy Hemphill, phone 712-260-1373 or email her at hemphill@nwiowa.com.