Some schools, especially those lacking in funds, may choose to exclude art education from their curriculum. However, the students at these schools may be missing out on some important benefits of an education in the arts. Whether its painting, sculpture, band or theater, the arts provide students with an excellent opportunity to increase their academic success and develop important skills.

Cognitive Stimulation

Art education has been linked to advanced cognitive development in children. In a 1998 report, “Young Children and the Arts: Making Creative Connections,” researchers found that art education can contribute significantly to a child’s cognitive, language and motor skills. Another report from 2000 entitled “Learning and the Arts: Crossing Boundaries” stated that brain scans proved that all parts of the cerebral cortex are active while musicians are playing.

Many students involved in art classes perform better in school. According to Howard Gardener’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, students who take art classes develop an increased capacity to learn because they expand their learning styles beyond linguistic and mathematical reasoning in their traditional classes. Dr. James Catterall from UCLA found that students who took arts classes performed better on standardized tests and had higher grades than students who did not participate in art education.

Art education can lead to a fruitful career. In 2002, the The National Governors Association reported that art education can directly contribute to the acquisition of job skills such as problem solving, creative thinking and communication. Furthermore, USA Today reported in 2006 that, over the next 10 years, jobs in the arts would increase twice as fast as those in the engineering field.

Students pick up important life skills from their education in the arts. Also reported in “Young Children and the Arts: Making Creative Connections” was the fact that students pick up excellent skills from a education in the arts, such as better memory, enhanced understanding and an ability to communicate symbolically. Education Week also reported in 2005 that art education can have a positive impact on a student’s drive to succeed and their ability to take on new challenges.

In general, the public supports the inclusion of art programs in schools. A 2008 Imagination Poll found that 88 percent of voters believe that art education is essential for helping students set high standards for themselves and work toward achieving their goals. Furthermore, a 2006 Harris Poll reported that 96 percent of school principals found a correlation between involvement in the arts and attendance and graduation

I’m looking forward to working with the Para/Site Art Space in Hong Kong in a couple of days. I’ve been organizing a workshop for student’s of Para/Site’s curatorial program and I’m quite excited about the experiment. Students have for the last weeks been finalizing their exhibitions-in-progress and we’ll be conducting what I’m referring to as a curatorial defense. The online experiment will attempt to leverage the new communications technologies to create an environment, similar to a masters thesis defense. Students will be uploading text and images that best communicates their curatorial concepts and organization. I’ve assembled a team of fantastic Asia-based curators that will be critiquing their projects.

The curatorial critics:
+ Russell Storer. Curator, Contemporary Asian Art. Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art. Brisbane, Australia
+ Zoe M. Butt. Deputy Director, Long March Space, Beijing, China
+ Joselina Cruz. Independent Curator. Manila, The Philippines
+ Biljana Ciric. Independent Curator. Shanghai, China
+ Simon Soon. Independent Curator. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
+ Naoko Horiuchi. Curator. Arts Initiative Tokyo (AIT). Tokyo, Japan
+ Online facilitator: R. Streitmatter-Tran

I’m also now preparing my presentation as a part of the International Curator’s Talk Series: I’ve posted below information from the Para/Site press release.

Public Lecture
“Curatorial Engagements in the Mekong Subregion of Southeast Asia”
by R. Streitmatter-Tran

Date: Friday 17 April 2009
Time: 7:30 PM
Venue: Room C01, Hong Kong Art Development Council
14/F, East Warwick House, Taikoo Place
979 King’s Road Hong Kong
Limited Seats: 60

Para/Site Art Space is honored to present a Public Lecture by Rich Streitmatter-Tran, Co-curator with the Asia Pacific Triennial (APT6)

Streitmatter-Tran is going to introduce some of the conditions in the Mekong sub-region that affect contemporary art practices with a particular stress on the curator-artist relationship. He will draw upon his previous research with the Mediating the Mekong project, which is a connection to his current curatorial research with the development of a Mekong-based platform for the Asia Pacific Triennial. He will attempt to provide some insight from the perspective of an artist working with curators and what an artist might consider a “good curator” as opposed to an art critic, institution, and the public at large.

More info
+ Para/Site Art Space
+ Curatorial Engagements in the Mekong Subregion. Press Release. (PDF)

We’ve talked about denim’s planetary impact and even explored some eco-friendly denim options before, so you can imagine how happy I was to run across a new company offering Earth friendly denim!

Why Denim Matters

Denim production is seriously tough on the environment. Conventional denim is made from pesticide-laden cotton – one of the most sprayed crops in the world.

Not only is the fabric a problem, but all of that dye has a huge impact. This CNN report highlights the enormous impact that the denim industry has had on China’s Pearl River:

Clariant Advanced Denim

That’s where companies like Clariant come in. Clariant Advanced Denim uses 92% less water and 30% less energy to produce denim fabric that wastes 87% less cotton than its conventional counterparts.

The company uses indigo free dyes, which is huge. Indigo is a large part of what contaminated the Pearl River. Their dye process produces a fraction of the waste, and unlike conventional denim dyes, the waste water they produce is sulfite free. The process also adheres to stringent US and international standards for textiles.

While their waste reduction and dye processes are admirable, I would love to see Clariant switch over to organic cotton for their denims. Conventional cotton is genetically modified, which means its production supports big agriculture firms like Monsanto. It’s also responsible for 10% of the world’s pesticide use and 25% of the insecticides. That’s a huge amount of chemicals!

So what do you think? Do Clariant’s benefits outweigh the costs? Would you use it in your denim craft projects?

[Image Credit: Photos via Clariant]

Over the last months, Chaw Ei and I were able to meet students and share our work in several cities including Boston, New York, Chicago, Providence, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore. It has also been a good opportunity to catch up with old friends and to meet new ones and foremost to remind ourselves of the pleasure of learning. We even attended an evening mold making workshop in New York and in the span of an hour learned more than days scouring books. Below are some images of some of the locations and people we’ve engaged.

School of the Art Institute Chicago (SAIC)

Chaw Ei speaks about her work and performance art in Burma

Professor Nora Taylor of SAIC and Chaw Ei moments before her presentation

Northern Illinois University, DeKalb

Art Students from NIU DeKalb

Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston

North Hall at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Sharing work with the Studio for Interrelated Media at MassArt

New York City

Chaw Ei delivers an art presentation at the Open Society Institute in New York.

Providence, Rhode Island

Chaw Ei speaks at the International Writers Project at Brown University

Tokyo, Japan

L-R: Mitsunori Sakano (Command-N), me, Naoko Horiuchi (Arts Initiative Tokyo)

Presentation at Kandada, as a part of the Regional Code Asia program and my exhibition.

Hong Kong

I had the pleasure in April to work with a unique group of students with the Para/site curatorial program. Students enrolled in the Para/Site curators program presented and defended the concepts for their exhibitions-in-progress. A select team of international curators based in Asia shared their experience, critique and insight through a special platform utilizing Facebook.

The curatorial student team (Nana Seo, Kathy Lam Hoi Sin, Iris Lo and Evangelo Costadimas) will present their final exhibition, Feigned Innocence, at the Osage Gallery Kwun Tong in Hong Kong on May 29, 2009.

International Curators’ Talk Series: Public Lecture
“Curatorial engagements in the Mekong Subregion of the Southeast Asia”

Source: Satori Smiles

Satori Smiles is a glimpse into the lives of an inquisitive young girl and her mother homeschooling with an eclectic mix, mostly influenced by classical education, and making it come alive with tons of read-alouds, books, crafts, field trips and more books.

This weekend also marked our very first foray into our new art enrichment program, Meet the Masters! Satori and David had been coloring on the living room floor, so I snuck a laptop in front of them and started playing the lesson. This program is online, so we watched both the Preview and van Gogh Unit lessons. This viewing was Step 1, and we loved the lesson and enjoyed listening to “Starry, Starry Night” by Don McLean.

We are now seeing van Gogh’s paintings everywhere! Now that we studied him in just this initial lesson, we can’t miss his unmistakable art techniques, colors, and subjects. This is exactly what I wanted in starting an Art Appreciation program!

Read the entire blog post here.

TIME LIGAMENTS – Contemporary Vietnamese Artists
Exhibition dates: 14 May-16 August, 2009
Venue: 10 Chancery Lane Gallery ART PROJECTS and ANNEX
Chai Wan Industrial City Phase One, 6/F, 60 Wing Tai Road, Chai Wan, Hong Kong

Participating Artists:
Khanh Cong Bui, Tiffany Chung, Phu Nam Thuc Ha, Christine Nguyen, Thi Trinh Nguyen,
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Tuan Thai Nguyen, Tu Duc Nguyen, Rich Streitmatter-Tran

Co-curated by Dinh Q. Lê and Zoe Butt in cooperation with San Art, Ho Chi Minh City

Circulating within our image-burdened world are creative wanderers that ponder the vestiges of mediated fact and control — the crumbling layers of paint on government walls; the memory of a burning, martyred monk; the quasi-morphing of local habit with the experiential remnants of a ‘European Elsewhere’ — these itinerant image makers of Vietnam contort such hidden shifts into concrete form in Time Ligaments.

In this exhibition nine perspectives grapple with the persisting memories of a country where the past stubbornly lingers in the literal and mental landscape of the everyday. Their stories traverse the experience of migration and return; the metamorphosis of popular foreign trend with local custom; the stymied struggle of resistance against historical ideas of social control; or the increasing urban dilettante whose material desires lay waste to their history and surroundings. Time is schizophrenically warped in the photographically paused moments of Tu Duc Nguyen, while Phu Nam Thuc Ha’s lens captures the surfaces of crumbling government walls marveling at how time is the nascent agent of change. In Tuan Thai Nguyen’s careful paintings, where working life holds hostage to ideas of individual social worth, a crouching headless figure dressed in office garb faces a corner of an empty room. Such psychological influence of a neo-liberal world is also of great import in the gouache rendered drawings of Khanh Cong Bui and the conceptual sculptures of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, where ideas of deterioration and control are given broader metaphorical context in examining how the tools of a game operate as political strategy in pacifying conflict and terror, not just in Vietnam.

This is but a brief glance of the layered complex narratives in this exhibition where nine provocative artists will be showcased through painting, video, photography, sculptural installation and works on paper.

Title: Lao Tzu Dreams of the LHC (2009)

Sculpture. Stainless steel, copper, brass

The installation began with an observation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most expensive scientific endeavor to date. The LHC is a particle accelerator whose mission is to replicate the conditions of the universe during the first fractions of a second of the Big Bang, and to validate our current models explaining the nature of reality. Particular components of the LHC appear strangely similar in form to the Ba Qua mirrors used in Feng Shui geomancy found throughout Asia that aim to properly align natural forces. Both the LHC and the Ba Qua mirrors aim to harness and understand the power of nature and yet are tools separated by thousands of years.

Some of most recent observations of the quantum world are also very close to descriptions found in the ancient texts, such as the I Ching (Book of Changes) and the Tao Te Ching, such as the fundamental nature of all things being movement and change. The number 8 has for long been considered lucky and primary to the Chinese as the trigrams represents all possible human and cosmic interactions. Eight has also become fundamental to our modern conditions, as the number has become the cornerstone of the binary code of our digital world (for example, 8, 32, 64-bit), and it has extended beyond into other areas of thought such as the 8-fold path in Buddhism.

This installation reconsiders the unique relationship between ancient texts and the most advanced cutting-edge frontiers of science and wonders if both are the same, as if Lao Tzu had once dreamed of such an experiment.

For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory… [we must turn] to those kinds of epistemological problems with which thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence. – Neils Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge.

Similarities in visual form: The LHC and the Ba Qua

Work in progress

Work in progress. Completion of the polygonal faces

Opening night at the 10 Chancery Lane Gallery Annex

A view through the sculpture