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Knight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts are launching an eight-city competition seeking new models for local arts journalism in the digital age. Details will be announced by Knight and NEA July 6.
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Mariana Muñoz, director of "Amores de Cantina," spoke with Knight Arts about her upcoming performance during Teatro Avante's XXIII International Hispanic Theatre Festival. Based on the work of Juan Radrigán, the Chilean playwright whose work addresses issues of a marginalized society living under a military dictatorship, "Amores de Cantina" is... -
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"Animals Are Outside Today," the photography exhibit at Dina Mitrani Gallery, has been extended through Aug. 20. Keeping shows up, especially in the slower summer season, for several months is a good idea and one that a number of galleries are... -
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Spending time with Olayame Dabls’ public art is in some ways essential to understanding Detroit’s recent history. In his hands, the rusted, discarded and broken bones of industry cohere into beautiful, monumental forms that address the racism, deindustrialization and abandonment that have wreaked such havoc on the city and its... -
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Dancer Silas Riener is currently on tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's Legacy Tour, a Knight Arts granteee. Today he checks in with his first (of several) reports from the field. I begin here a series of missives from the last six months of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company... -
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There are some common threads that bind us. A universal principle is there will always be a “new crop” coming up: new artists, musicians, actors, teachers, business leaders, etc. This is an exciting concept to embrace, knowing there is another cool artist to discover around the corner. Remy St. Claire... -
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By Tiffany Du, Arts & Science Council Thanks to a Cultural Innovation grant from Knight Foundation and the Arts & Science Council, the Carolina Actor’s Studio Theatre (CAST) can now call a spacious facility equipped with efficient lighting, expanded seating and innovative tools its new home. From 2003 until recently,... -
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Above: iGeigie from Joi on Flickr Yesterday, we looked at crowdsourcing in crisis, taking the Middle East as an example. The thoughts came from Al Jazeera’s head of New Media Mohamed Nanabhay, who spoke on a panel at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference. Today, we turn to the experiences of Joi Ito, new director of the MIT Media Lab, who has been crowdsourcing radiation levels in post-quake Japan: On the panel, Ito said he was frustrated with the lack of useful information from Japan’s news organizations in the first few hours after the earthquake. As he monitored events from the U.S, he was glad for the rapid Twitter updates. “People sitting in pitch dark rooms, phones aren’t working and they’re on the net or watching TV. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know if they should be running away. Twitter was offering instruction long before news organizations offered any information. In that way, they were more effective in the early hours of the crisis.” After the nuclear plant meltdown at Fukushima, Ito’s frustration was compounded by the ongoing misinformation from the government on safe levels of radiation. Rather than relying on inaccurate reports from government agencies, Ito began... -
ArticleA new report for The Chicago Community Trust analyzes news flows in Chicago and provides a thought-provoking analysis of the city's emerging news ecosystem and the roles of key information providers and sharers. It also shows the potential power of Web savvy community news start ups and nontraditional information providers as a new news environment takes shape. In the national, often web-ideology-driven, debate about value on the Web, news aggregators often take a big hit as parasites on organizations doing the expensive work of actually producing original content. Any aggregator who takes advantage - by stealing significant chunks of material from other sites and/or by failing to credit and link back to the original - deserve our disdain and more. After all, content producers (many of whom are professional journalists) need a paycheck just like the rest of us. But the aggregators who play fair deserve another look. At least on the ground on the local news start up scene, where I spend most of my time, aggregators have a valuable role to play in an increasingly diffuse news ecosystem. In a world where news is abundant but traditional bundles are dissolving, smart curation (which we used to call editing) and thoughtful selection and outbound linking is a service that stands alongside creating content. Right now, it is vital both to information consumers as well as producers, including many journalists who are desperately trying to get their work in front of people now that corporate-owned news organizations have shed them by the thousands. Nowhere is this more apparent than in my home base, Chicago, where feisty news start ups like Gapers Block, Windy Citizen and dozens of others, frequently link to the best content on other, lesser known sites. As Andrew Huff, editor and publisher of Gapers Block told me this week in an e-mail: "Having grown out of the weblog community rather than the traditional media community, we've had a philosophy from the beginning that linking is the coin of the realm on the web. We link to other websites because that's what makes the Internet work -- if you can't trust your readers to come back to you after...
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Above: Delphia Simmons, who has received a microloan. What if you could make a loan to your favorite new art gallery in town? What if you could connect with others lending to the art gallery and, together, discover other small businesses in need that your community might rally around? Now, you can: today, we’re happy to announce the launch of Kiva Detroit, an innovative effort to empower Detroiters by enabling them to lend to and champion the success of local businesses through Kiva.org. Knight Foundation is contributing $250,000 to Kiva Detroit: our grant will match citizen lending dollar-for-dollar on Kiva.org, while also helping the program scale. Kiva Detroit is the organization’s first locally-organized effort in the United States. Other partners are helping, too. Michigan Corps, a network of local and global Michiganders committed to social change across the state, leads a volunteer community of Detroiters who source businesses for Kiva Detroit and builds enduring, productive relationships among lenders, borrowers, and the community at large. ACCION USA, a U.S. microfinance institution, approves and administers loans. -
Article"Mujeres de Shakespeare" (Shakespeare’s Women), written and directed by Neher Jacqueline Briceño, opens July 8 during Teatro Avante'sXXVI International Hispanic Theatre Festival, which runs from July 7 through 24. According to Briceño, Mujeres de Shakespeare is inspired by and a tribute to Shakespeare'smost beloved female characters. In this interview, Briceño...
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The coming long weekend brings the Fourth of July, and, with it, an annual chance for Americans to focus on American music. And I don’t mean the kind of American music that conquered the world’s popular culture. That’s one of this country’s great contributions... -
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By Wing Young, Wing Young Huie Photography Gallery The University Avenue Project (UAP), a six-mile exhibition of photographs taken by me and produced by Public Art Saint Paul, officially ended Halloween night 2010, but the ripple effects continue. In December, I traveled to Beijing, China for the opening of an... -
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Locust Projects' The LAB (Locust Arts Builders) is officially under way! Under the direction of renowned contemporary artist Monica Lopez de Victoria of the TM Sisters. Thirteen South Florida high schools students will experience the invigorating and arduous process of conceiving and executing original artworks. Stop by Locust Projects Monday... -
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By Candice Hardie, the Mann Center for the Performing Arts Introducing new audiences to classical music, the Mann Center for the Performing Arts will bring music fans of all generations together this season with “Cross-Over Classical.” Thanks to support from the Knight Arts Challenge, these performances will feature classic rock...