THE ARTS MAKE AMERICA GREAT

Let's get back to basics, you can prove true value of something if you can not imagine not having it. Can you Imagine A World Without The Arts? Can You Imagine What it Would Look Like? Would love your responses and please ask everyone you know the question? If you want to free PDF download of the poster email me at lois@theartsdothepublicgood.com

I want to wish everyone a very happy New Year, may this year be filled with creativity,art,peace,and equality.  We are starting the year off with our effort to raise money for arts organizations.     This note card project utilizes art created by participants in ARTWORKS, The Naomi Cohain Foundation. Help us support these amazing programs by purchasing a pack of 10 beautiful note cards with envelopes. Go to https://theartsmakeamericagreat.ecwid.com Get creative and personal with these cards in this new year.

How planning with the arts has made me a more creative planner By Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP Executive Director, The National Consortium for Creative Placemaking Except for an art class in high school and too few guitar lessons, I have no formal training or background in what most people would call the arts. I’m mostly an urban planner, a person trained to think like an ‘objective’ social scientist.  My teachers and mentors treated the arts like decorations on the urban fabric. Usually, we never talked about arts. I was trained to focus on ‘serious’ subjects like housing, parks, roads, and economic development. About seven years ago, I was running a training institute for urban planners at Rutgers, and was asked to do some classes on improving communities through the arts. The request came from Karen Pinzolo, a former student of mine who now heads the South Jersey Cultural Alliance in Hammonton, NJ. ‘Sure, ok,’ I said.  At the time, like many planners, I thought the arts w...

                                                                                      Photo by Edward Allen Santos My Name is Edward Allen Santos, NYC native, born and raised in the Bronx. I’m a father of 3 grown children, two boys and one girl, girl being the oldest and who has given me my first grandchild. Having been raised in the Bronx wasn’t easy be any means. My dad who passed away when I was seven and my mother forced to raise four boys on her own made it difficult for any of us to get a lot of things we wanted growing up. After having my daughter at the age of 18 I worked odd jobs throughout NY. I worked retail, construction, delivery until a friend landed me a job as an electricians apprentice. I finally had a decent job in which I...

Tim Shields and how the Feast of Crispian has helped him. What the arts have done for me is showed me a way to unpack my duffle bag of emotions, and repack them when I’m done with them. In the military you’re trained to push down your emotions as they just get in the way of the mission. Your buddy gets blown away but you can’t stop, man the battle is still going on. Drive on! You kill a bunch of people, what’s the big deal “they’re the enemy”. No they are guys just like me, a father, a son, a brother, an uncle. I started with the Feast of Crispian group in Dec of 2016, they are a Shakespeare Theater Group that works with Veterans here in Milwaukee. My wife saw a piece on a local news program and called for me to come watch. So we got in touch with them, in late November. I went to my 1 st weekend event in December, if I had not, I may not be here today. I was 2 weeks away from celebrating our 20 th wedding anniversary and I had just moved out of the house, my PTSD was in ful...

In honor of Veteran's Day we want to use this month to highlight the arts serving veterans. How do we recognize and experience ourselves as human beings? Of all the living beings on this little planet, we are unique. We ask questions about the meaning of existence. We explore and express those questions through imaginative creation. Art is how we tell stories about ourselves that words alone cannot communicate. Stories are how we make sense of what we cannot understand. Military service veterans come from an elite group; a tribe that trains, lives, works and – sometimes - fights wars - shoulder to shoulder.  Less than half of one percent  of Americans serve in the armed forces. When their service is over and they return to an overwhelmingly civilian community, the transition can be confusing and lonely. Some return with life changing physical and psychological wounds that further isolate them as strangers in a strange land. Veterans don’t know how to explain to ci...