Proposal for the 2007 Accessibility Project
Accessibility2007: Sustainability
Green Art - The Art of Reuse, Recycling, Repurposing and the Environment
The community of Sumter, South Carolina is embarking on an ambitious public art project which will focus on environmental sustainability. The annual project, in its tenth consecutive year, is titled Accessibility2007 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 help communicate, elucidate and connect people to abstract ideas and to promote conceptual, 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, folk 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.
Accessibility2007: Sustainability
Green Art - The Art of Reuse, Recycling, Repurposing and the Environment
October 1 through November 2, 2007
The month-long Accessibility2007 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. Accessibility2007 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 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.
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Projects: 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.
1. Invitational Recycled Art Project:
The Accessibility2007 juried art exhibition will focus on the use of found, reused and repurposed materials to create site-specific installation art. Selected artists will be invited for a 2-week residency, meals, lodging, and small honorarium included, to create work in and around the grounds of the Sumter County Cultural Commission. The ten artists chosen will be living with Sumter-area families and working in a public forum for the duration of the residency, providing many unique opportunities for the public to gain insight into the 'process' of sculpture and for social interaction with the visiting artists. The Curator for this years Accessibility is Mark McLeod, Assistant Director and Curator of the Sumter County Gallery of Art mark@sumtergallery.org. Sponsored by Sumter County Cultural Commission and Sumter County Gallery of Art. Exhibition will use the grounds, building exteriors and gallery spaces of Patriot Hall Fine Arts Center and the Sumter Gallery of Art.
2. GREEN ART: Exploring Reuse and Recycling through Clothing Design, Poetry, Music, Hip Hop and Film.
"The Green Revival Collection:” “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. Curator, Adrienne Antonson, 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 October 20th 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.” Statement by Curator - Adrienne Antonson
Curator - Adrienne Antonson, Adrienne@spinster-design.com
Project Co-Directors:
Peggy Chilcutt, pegchilcutt@yahoo.com
Martha Greenway, patriot_hall@sumtercountysc.org
Booth Chilcutt, bchilcutt@sumter-sc.com
3. THE GREEN ART POETRY, MUSIC AND FILM FESTIVAL: Exploring Reuse and Recycling through Poetry, Music, Hip Hop and Video.
The Green Art Festival will be a week-long ‘public’ event designed to celebrate the artists, the creative process and the work created for the festival. The unique festival will be scheduled for mid-October during the Accessibility2007 exhibition. Festival will feature the screening of winning video entries and readings of the winning poetry submissions. Performance poetry, Hip Hop and Folk 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 director: Booth Chilcutt at bchilcutt@sumter-sc.com
Two creative, process intensive Green Art competitions featuring the use of
Recycled, Repurposed and Reused components.
“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. Guidelines for the Recycled Words Competition are available by email at bchilcutt@sumter-sc.com
To access guidelines and application online, click here.
Sumter’s “Recycled” Film Project: A competition requiring participants to ‘recycle’ existing film and video (found footage) to produce an original narrative piece that addresses issues of sustainability, the environment. Guidelines for the “Recycled” Film project are available by email at bchilcutt@sumter-sc.com
1. Ephemeral nature-based projects and art created the use of recycled and reused materials.
The objectives of the nature-based and recycled art projects are:
- Challenge participants to create an environment-friendly, temporary, site-specific nature-based installation.
- 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.
- Identify opportunities for collaboration between civic organizations and the industrial sector which can be facilitated through creative arts programming.
- 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.
- Provide ongoing opportunities for artists to experiment with and explore installation and other nature-based art forms.
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Ongoing Educational Opportunities Relating to the Accessibility2007 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 made available for short in-school workshops in Sumter-area middle and high schools. Area schools and businesses would also be encouraged to maintain an on-going dialogue about sustainability, recycling, reuse and the environment.