Critical Perspectives

Lucy Lippard, an introductory essayist for Critical Perspectives, is a writer and activist, author of 20 books on contemporary art cultural criticism, including one novel. She has done performances, comics, street theatre, and has curated some 50 exhibitions in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. For thirty years she has worked with artist’s groups such as the Artworkers’ Coalition, Ad Hoc Women Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, The Alliance for Cultural Democracy (co-editor of" How to ’92" in the Campaign for a Post-Columbian World), and WAG (Women’s Action Coalition). She was co-founder of Printed Matter, The Heriesies Collective and journal, PADD (Political Art Documentation/Distribution) and its journal Upfront, and Artist Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. She continues to lecture frequently at museums and universities. At home, she has served as member of the Santa Fe County Open Land, and Trails Planning and Advisory Committee, edits her community newsletter, El Puente de Galiseo, and is on the Sante Fe Railyard Design Competition committee (and juror) with the Trust for Public Land.

Lippard graduated from Smith College (BA 1958) and the New York University Institute of Fine Arts (MA in Art History, 1962), has received Honorary Doctorates in Fine Arts from the Moore College of Art, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Maine College of Art, and the Massachusetts College of Art, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Criticism from the College Art Association, two National Endowments for the Arts grants in criticism, the Claude Fues Award for Public Service from Phillips Andover Academy, a curating award from the Penny McCall Foundation, a citation from New York Mayor David Dinkins, the Frederick Douglass Award from the North Star Foundation, the Smith College Medal, and the Art Table Award for Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts. Lippard has been included in "Who’s Who in America" for over a decade. She is a Research Associate at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and recently received a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant for a book on the Galisteo Basin, where she lives.

The Dentalium Project, Dell’ Arte Company, Blue Lake, California

Ferdinand Lewis has been writing about the arts since 1990, and his journalism has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and Daily Variety, as well as in the magazines American Theatre, Animation, Logik and Audio Media, and on websites for Discreet and the Community Arts Network.  He is the editor of “Ensemble Works: An Anthology,” from TCG publishers, as well as “Ensemble Works: Traditions, Approaches, Strategies,” funded by the Flintridge Foundation. Lewis was one of nine writers engaged to participating in Animating Democracy’s Critical Perspectives project. He studies cultural planning at the University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development, where he is a Dean’s Merit Scholar, and consults on a variety of public art, education and cultural planning projects. Lewis has taught in interdisciplinary arts environments since 1988, including the California Summer School for the Arts and special workshops for the California Community College system, and he was on the full-time faculty at California Institute of the Arts for ten years. He is currently consulting on the redevelopment of the City of Pasadena’s Centennial Square, and on curriculum development for Cornerstone Theater Company. Lewis was a founding member of the Los Angeles-based theater company Ghost Road, and is the author of three plays, including “Note From the Bottom of a Well,” which he developed for Cornerstone’s Festival of Faith.    

Jim O’Quinn has served as editor in chief of American Theatre since the monthly national arts magazine was founded in April of 1984. He has also been editor of the biannual Journal of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation; managing editor of The Drama Review; and editor and publisher of The DeQuincy Journal, an award-winning weekly newspaper in southwest Louisiana. He reviewed theatre regularly for the now-defunct Manhattan weekly 7 Days, and his articles and reviews have appeared in Stagebill, Theatre Heute, Tatler, High Performance and other publications. He has also worked as a city-desk reporter for the New Orleans Times Picayune, and as a composer and music arranger for theatre. His children’s opera The Littlest Emperor was produced in 1978 at New Orleans’s Contemporary Arts Center.

David Rooks   Born in Phoenix, Arizona March 21, 1956, I began life beside my twin brother, James. At the age of 10 my family moved from a pleasant middle-class suburb in Tempe, Arizona to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. My Dad, an Oglala Lakota native brought his wife and seven children to his homeland. There began my deeper education. My Mom, English and French from Georgia, demonstrated her love's commitment by agreeing to the move. A naturally gregarious woman, henceforth she was socially isolated. For the next eight years my brothers and sisters and I attended Red Cloud Indian School, a Catholic boarding school. The period was the 1960's to early 1970s, a period of energetic, often restless and violent, cultural awakening among the Oglala Lakota. As both a tribal member and a semi-outsider, I became both participant and observer to regular occurrences of rebirth and tragedy.

Like many Oglala Lakotas, alcoholism became part of my education. Sober now for 10 years, I take few things for granted. For 10 years I have been working as an area journalist, chronicling life in western South Dakota. My two main gigs have been as a senior staff writer for Indian Country Today, and as a columnist for the Rapid City Journal.  My wife, Sandra, and I have six children and we currently reside in the southern Black Hills near Hot Springs, South Dakota.

Michael Fields is a founding member and the Managing Artistic Director of Dell’Arte and the Producing Director for the Dell’Arte Mad River Festival. He is currently the Director of the California State Summer School for the Arts Theatre Program. He is the President of the American Center of the International Theatre Institute and on the board of directors of TCG. He was the Resident Director with Het Vervolg Theatre of Holland. Michael has taught at the American Conservatory Theatre, the California Institute for the Arts, the Dutch National Theatre School and the Danish Dramaturg Institute. He has directed productions nationally and internationally, including a new adaptation of A Clockwork Orange in Aarhus, Denmark. He received 1984 and 1986 Dramalogue awards and a 1984 S.F. Bay Area Critics award. He holds a B.A. in Communication Arts from the University of San Francisco and a M.F.A in Directing from Humboldt State University. 

Ties that Bind, MACLA, San Jose

Lydia Matthews is an educator, writer, curator and arts activist based in San Francisco, California. She received a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies at The Colorado College in 1981, and completed her graduate studies in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, England and the University of California, Berkeley. As Associate Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC), she is Co-Founder and Chair of CCAC's Graduate Studies in Visual Criticism Program. Her graduate and undergraduate courses address issues in contemporary visual culture with an emphasis on feminist and postcolonial perspectives. Her publications include Site to Sight: Mapping Bay Area Visual Culture (1995), a book and CD Rom project co-created with CCAC students on the histories of local art exhibition spaces and their curatorial practices. Her critical essays and reviews have appeared in The Drama Review, Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts, Artweek, Hi Performance, Arcade, and Visions Art Quarterly. Her website: www.lydiaslist.com, helps to bridge the Bay Area's art and scholarly communities by listing exhibitions and lectures occuring regionally. She has lectured on a variety of contemporary art topics at venues including the San Francisco Art Institute, Stanford University, Mills College, the Bronx Museum of Art in New York, the Georgio de Chirico Center of Art in Volos, Greece, Project 304 in Bangkok, Thailand, The Yunnan Nationalities Institute in Kunming, China, and Salon Natasha in Hanoi, Viet Nam. Currently she is an educational advisor at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Southern Exposure gallery, and serves on the curatorial board of SF Camerawork Gallery. In 1994 she was Public Programs Director at Headlands Center for the Arts, an international artist-in-residence program, where she curated a series of 10 public programs that brought together artists, scholars and political activists to discuss community-based interdisciplinary art projects flourishing in urban areas.

Renato Rosaldo is a Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences at Stanford University.  He has done field research among the Ilongots of northern Luzon, Philippines. He spent 1975-76 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey and 1980-81 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford.  Rosaldo’s published works include:  Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History in 1980 and Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis in 1989. His co-edited work, The Inca and Aztec States, 1400-1800: Anthropology and History appeared in 1982 and Anthropology/Creativity appeared in 1993. He has been conducting research on cultural citizenship in San Jose, California since 1989, and contributed the introduction and an article to Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights, published in 1997.  Rosaldo has served as President of the American Ethnological Society, Director of the Stanford Center for Chicano Research, and Chair of the Department of Anthropology. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Michael Rosenfeld is an assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University.  I study race, ethnicity, immigration, and assimilation. My current research agenda focuses on intermarriage. I'm interested in how patterns of intermarriage have changed in the U.S.in the last century, and I'm interested in how current levels of intermarriage may reshape the ethnic and racial landscape of the U.S.  I do statistical analyses of census data, and I also do ethnographic research with intermarried couples.  I had former lives as a freelance journalist and as a political activist.

Maribel Alvarez, Ph.D. teaches at the University of Arizona.  She was the founder and former executive director of MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana in San Jose, CA. MACLA is the premier Latino alternative arts space in the area known as Silicon Valley. A scholar, curator, and art administrator, she was named in 1998 one of the “Outstanding Women of Silicon Valley.” She holds both a B.A. and an M.A. in Political Science from California State University, Long Beach and has a doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Arizona. Under her leadership, MACLA experienced an unprecedented level of innovation in programming. Born in Cuba, she grew up in Puerto Rico and has lived in California since 1980 where she has worked closely within the Chicano cultural arts community in the Southwest. In San Jose, she has also been actively involved in neighborhood revitalization issues in the downtown Guadalupe-Washington area and most recently as a founding board member of Downtown College Prep, the first charter school in San Jose. Maribel also serves on the Board of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, the only national service organization for Latino cultural organizations. She is currently writing a dissertation based on her field research on the production of tourist crafts in the US-Mexico border. Her dissertation is entitled “Marginal Workers/Marginal Arts: Power and Taste on the US-Mexico Borderlands.” Her curatorial experience includes the landmark exhibition at MACLA “Lowrider Bicycles: Art and Identity Among Mexican-American Youth.”

The Slave Galleries Restoration & Preservation Project, St. Augustine’s Church and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, New York

Lorraine Johnson-Coleman is a nationally respected consultant in the areas of cultural preservation and community programming who counts among her clients, The Kellogg Foundation, National Parks Service, and National Trust for Historic Preservation. Known for her "down home wisdom" Lorraine is enjoyed by millions annually as a regular contributor to NPR Morning Edition. In addition to her consulting work, Lorraine is a sought after speaker in the field of heritage preservation as well.  Lorraine is the best selling author of three books on Southern culture.  Lorraine's first book, Just Plain Folks, was a November 1998 featured selection of the Literary Guild and the audiobook on which Lorraine performed the stories, won a 1998 Publishers Weekly Listen Up Award. The Tale Tellin' Blues episode of the nationally aired Just Plain Folks public radio series won a 1999 Crystal Jade Award of Excellence from the Communicator Awards. Her current literary work, Larissa's Breadbook is a celebration of the diversity of American culture through two of its staples - storytelling and food. The third book, Talking Mules & Other Folks, a collection of Southern storytelling and humor, is due out in December 2001. JOURNEYS HOME™ - An African American Heritage and Cultural Arts Initiative developed by Johnson-Coleman has been recognized as a national model for cultural preservation and heritage tourism development. This initiative was being implemented in Battle Creek, Michiganand Lorraineis working with 15 counties in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansasas part of the Kellogg Foundation Mid-south Delta Initiative. In addition to her consulting and writing, Lorrainealso tours nationally, a one-woman show of comedy, storytelling and poetic narrative based on her work.

Rodger Taylor  Born in Brooklyn. Grew in New York City.  Music, poetry, songwriting and writing are passions.  Public Librarian supervising downtown branch in Manhattan.  Hamilton Fish Park Library. Wife best pal. Married since 1985, father. Got a great son. Love jazz and the history of African American New York and history. Discovery of the African Burial Ground.  Wrote about, went down there often, sponsored and recorded events at the archeological site; liaison for State Senator Paterson’s Public Over-site Committee. Like to jog. Published New York Newsday Part II Magazine, etc., speaking and performing engagements, schools, church, a few television and radio interviews. Working on a book about Albert Einstein and race. Starting local history website for teens and others.

John Kuo Wei Tchen is a historian and cultural activist.  Since 1975, he has been studying interethnic and interracial relations of Asians and Americans, helping to build cultural organizations, and exploring how inquiry in the humanities and society can help deepen the quality of public discourse and policy.  Dr. Tchen is currently the founding director of the Asian/Pacitic/American Studies Program and Institute at New York University.  He is an Associate Professor of the Gallatin School for Individualized Study and the History Department of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences.  In 1980 he and Charles Lai co-founded the New York Chinatown History Project that has enabled the largest Chinese settlement outside of Asia to document and explore its 160-year long history.  Recently renamed the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, the museum has broadened its scope to document, analyze, and compare the diaspora of settlers and sojourners in the Caribbean, along with north, central, and south America.  Dr. Tchen’s most recent book is the award-winning New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882.  He has authored Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown (1984) which won an American Book Award.  Dr. Tchen serves on the editorial board of the Journal of American History, the publication of the Organization of American Historians.  He has also written and spoken on museums, immigration, race relations, New York City, and cross-cultural studies.

Lisa Chice, Program Associate at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, received her BA and BFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1994. As a Program Assistant for the National Trust, Ms. Chice coordinated the Northeast Region's Emerging Preservation Leaders Program, an effort to provide scholarships and training to community leaders to help them preserve local places.  As a staff and later Board member of the membership based, grassroots Asian American Resource Workshop, she coordinated the first annual meeting of the Asian Pacific American Agenda Coalition and Campaign to Protect Parcel C, the last parcel of community space in Boston's Chinatown.  At the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Ms. Chice supports the Project Director in recruiting and coordinating Community Preservationists and dialogue participants for the Lower East Side Community Preservation Project and the collaboration with St. Augustine's Episcopal Church on the "Slave Galleries" project.  In her work with the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience she assists with administering a network of historic sites around the world committed to using their histories to address contemporary social issues through dialogue programs.

Animating Democracy

Andrea Assaf is a performer, writer, educator and activist. She has a Masters degree in Performance Studies and a BFA in Acting, both from NYU. With a training background in theatre, she is currently a solo artist creating original multi-disciplinary work. She has taught Meisner Technique, creative writing, and has facilitated text and movement workshops for people of all ages. Her community arts experience ranges from a year of intergenerational work as an apprentice with Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, to creating original collaborative performances with the Filipino/a/American community in NYC, to street theatre with youth in East Harlem, to performance-based conservation education with young adults in Tanzania, East Africa. Her theory interests include post-colonial studies, critical pedagogy and cross-cultural performance.  She is an active member of Alternate ROOTS, and of The Writers Roundtable in NYC. Andrea speaks Kiswahili and is currently studying Spanish.

Caron Atlas, coordinator of the Critical Perspectives project, is an independent consultant working to further the connection between art, culture, and social change. Recent consultancies include working to conceive and direct the Critical Perspectives project of Animating Democracy; the Leeway and James Irvine foundations, Urban Institute, Arab Arts Project, Advocacy Institute, National Arts Administration Mentorship Project, and Appalshop, where she was formerly director of development. Caron was the founding director of the American Festival Project (AFP), associate producer for Dance Theater Workshop, and programmer for WMMT radio. Recent writing includes essays for Inside Arts, Theater, A Cultural Blueprint for New York City, Why Fund Media?, and the Community Arts Network.  Caron serves on the boards of the Educational Video Center and Appalshop. She has a masters degree in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and was a Warren Weaver Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation.

Pam Korza is Co-Director of the Animating Democracy Initiative and provided research for and co-wrote the previous Animating Democracy study.  She works jointly with Barbara Schaffer Bacon in organizational assessment and planning and program design and evaluation for cultural organizations.  For seventeen years, Pam worked with the Arts Extension Service (AES). While at AES, she coordinated the National Public Art Policy Project in cooperation with the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, which culminated in the publication, Going Public: A field guide to developments in art in public places which she co-wrote and edited.  She directed the Boston-based New England Film and Video Festival, a regional independent film festival.  She was co-editor and contributing writer to Fundamentals of Local Arts Management, also published by AES.  Other writings include:  “INROADS: The Intersection of Art and Civic Dialogue,” with Andrea Assaf and Barbara Schaffer Bacon for Art in the Public Interest’s online Community Arts Network (www.apionline.org),  “Evaluating Artistic Quality in the Public Realm,” OnView: A Journal of Public Art and Design, and “The Community Connection in Public Art,” essay for TALKBACK/LISTEN, published by Visual Arts Division, First Banks, Minneapolis.