Issue no. 1 is out! of the Philadelphia Water Department’s Monoshone Watershed Quarterly Water Quality Update. It’s useful to finally have what we all hope will be an on-going, official report about the state of our creek.
Chris Robinson of Northwest Greens brought this to our attention, noting that it is a big step and an improvement for the PWD to be so openly reporting on the watershed. He also points out the extremely high fecal coliform counts registered at Outfall 5 in the latter part of 2008. An opinion article in the Chestnut Hill Local by Joel Hoffman expresses what many folk in the community are thinking. By all counts, this is a stinky issue that’s not going away and has, to date, defied a solution despite mountains of effort and bundles of money.
For all of you who have enjoyed KNEE DEEP and asked for an update, take a look, then seek out Chris Robinson of Northwest Greens, Charles Parsons of the Philadelphia Watershed Alliance or Joanne Dahme of the PWD to help in the efforts to clean up our creek.
Can we, please, bask in the glory of our friend and colleague Fran McElroy’s newest accoloade?
Just yesterday, the 2009 Pew Fellows in the Arts were announced and… there she is! Read below, then follow the link.
Oh! and search this site for our collaborations.
Fran joins our close colleagues Glenn Holsten, Maria Rodriguez, Barbara Attie & Janet Goldwater, Louis Massiah, Margie Strosser, Steve Rowland, Jan Yager and Rufus Caleb as a Pew Fellow. Quite an honor.
PEW FELLOWSHIPS IN THE ARTS ANNOUNCES
2009 AWARD RECIPIENTS
TWELVE ARTISTS RECEIVE $60,000 FELLOWSHIPS
June 3, 2009 Philadelphia, Pa.—Pew Fellowships in the Arts today announced the Philadelphia-area artists who have received $60,000 fellowship awards for 2009—the largest such grant in the country for which individual artists can apply. This year the awards went to artists working in fiction and creative nonfiction, media arts, and works on paper, and were selected from a pool of nearly 400 applicants. The 2009 Pew Fellows are:
Marc Brodzik media arts
Anthony Campuzano works on paper
Sarah Gamble works on paper
Daniel Heyman works on paper
Ken Kalfus fiction and creative nonfiction
Jennifer Levonian media arts
Robert Matthews works on paper
Frances McElroy media arts
Ben Peterson works on paper
Marco Roth fiction and creative nonfiction
Ryan Trecartin media arts
Nami Yamamoto works on paper
This year’s winners have a breadth of talent and accomplishments. Ken Kalfus is a highly accomplished writer of short story collections and novels including A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award. Frances McElroy makes elegantly crafted documentaries that delve deeply into personal stories, while Ben Peterson is a visual artist who makes large-scale and highly detailed fantastical architectural landscape drawings. Marco Roth, a young essayist, is also a founding editor of a well-known literary journal. Ryan Trecartin’s video narratives plumb multiple layers of social identity. This represents just a few of the new Pew Fellows. Biographies of all the artists are attached and visual material is also available at www.pewarts.org.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention our current passion, the Red-tailed Hawk nest at the Franklin Institute. You gotta see it!
The Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) is the most common hawk in North America. It is a large bird with a broad, red tail. The female is usually larger than the male. It appears that a male and a female are co-constructing the nest at The Franklin Institute.
Our friends at Foulkeways have invited me to screen Family Gathering for their casual Wednesday morning salon. So, Lise Yasui and I will meet with folks who have lived that history next week. Living history meets learned history. It’s what makes understanding where we’ve been as a people relevant. And it makes a good case for the personal documentary, I think.
This piece, made in 1989, is still in active distribution. I’m very proud of it’s ‘legs’.
Museum Week celebrates the 2009 AAM conference coming to Philadelphia while allowing the city to highlight the incredible wealth of cultural opportunities available in this region for residents, visitors and conference attendees. But local conference hosts Nancy Kolb of the Please Touch Museum and Gail Harrity of the Philadelphia Museum of Art wanted to create a legacy piece that would live on well after the 2009 AAM Annual Meeting wrapped.
And so the idea of “Spark” was born.
Local filmmaker and director Glenn Holsten interviewed 85 Philadelphia museum fans from all walks of life who shared deeply personal stories about the profound impact Philadelphia museums and cultural institutions have on their hearts and minds. The result is a powerful and emotional short film about chance meetings with things and places that generated a spark and forever changed the way people experienced the world.
Produced by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance in association with the American Association of Museums, “Spark” features a colorful mix of stories that testify to the power and meaning of museums in people’s lives. “Spark” showcases the potential that each visit has for being remarkable; it shows that museums matter.—Silvana Pop, public relations coordinator, Please Touch Museum
Museum Community Kicks Off Museum Week at Independence Visitor Center, Monday April 27th
Fifty-five area museums team up on April 27, 2009 to launch the first Museum Week, April 27-May 3, 2009. The launch event will take place on Monday, April 27th at 10am at the Independence Visitor Center on Independence Mall. It will feature a wide variety of local museums displaying samples from current exhibitions or collections. Press and the public are invited to attend. The event will also feature the debut screening of SPARK, a new short film about the impact that Philadelphia’s cultural institutions have on the hearts and minds of our community. Speakers featured include Peggy Amsterdam, President, Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance; Gail Harrity, Interim CEO, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Nancy Kolb, President & CEO, Please Touch Museum; and Dennis Wint, President & CEO, The Franklin.
Join the region’s cultural leaders as they share details about Museum Week and the special offers available online at www.phillyfunguide.com/museumweek. In addition to appearances by the Zoo on Wheels, Please Touch Museum’s Mad Hatter, and museum leaders from around the region, there will be a special preview screening of SPARK, a short, captivating film about Philadelphia’s cultural institutions directed by Philadelphia filmmaker Glenn Holsten. More than 80 local culture fans appear in the film, including Franklin astronomer Derrick Pitts, Inquirer film critic Carrie Rickey, Dr. Brian McDonough, and Lily Yeh of the Village of Arts and Humanities.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art joins with the Philadelphia cultural community in welcoming the delegates to the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Museums in Philadelphia April 28 through May 4.
Money talk at conventions for museum professionals
By Stephan Salisbury
Inquirer Culture Writer
When roughly 5,000 museum professionals from across the country descend on Philadelphia this week for two conventions, they will represent institutions that exhibit everything from Old Masters to old rocks.
But despite the multiplicity of interests and the range of institutional sizes and locations, there will be one thing on everyone’s mind. Money. read on.
It’s been a great year for cultural unity throughout Philadelphia. We’ve stood shoulder-to-shoulder to view Cézanne’s works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, crowded the gates of the majestic new Please Touch Museum and gathered at The Franklin for a glimpse at Galileo’s famous telescope, whole-heartedly supporting our city’s rich cultural offerings.
We’ve also stood behind various themed events, such as Restaurant Week and Beer Week, both heartily endorsed throughout the city, leading up to the next cultural event inspiring a seven-day celebration: Museum Week, from April 27 to May 3.
Fifty-five regional museums will offer special discounts on admission, shopping and other amenities in a city-wide celebration encouraging residents and visitors to appreciate the role museums play in our city’s cultural sector. read on.
KNEE DEEP has been distributed nationally by American Public Television for several years. We love it! But we NEVER know where it will be on air, or when.
Even in our own home town we find out by chance when it will air. Well, I was pouring over the website stats and saw that Georgia Public Television is not only broadcasting KNEE DEEP but promoting it.
Friday, May 8th at 7pm, at the Scribe Video Center.
As spring beckons, enjoy a program of river stories all from the banks of the Schuylkill and Wissahickon. Hooked: Philly’s Urban Anglers (2008, 14 min), co-directed by Shannon Kane Meddock, Mike Attie and Andrew Schwalm, is an intimate, funny and touching glimpse into the little known world of urban fishing. When a good day fishing has come and gone, Philadelphia’s waterways yield a bounty far more valuable than the fish themselves. Free the River Park (2008, 15 min) by Evolve Strategies chronicles the protracted fight against CSX Railroad’s effort to block the community access to the Schuylkill River. The doc inspires other groups on how to successfully wage grassroots organizing campaigns to improve and protect their communities. Community organizers from Manayunk reveal their “Precious Place” in Manayunk Canal: Past, Present and Future (2009, 10 min). Ann Tegnell and Sharon Mullally’s Knee Deep (2004, 30 min) follows volunteers from the Center in the Park Senior Environment Corps of Germantown who have all taken on the task of sampling and testing water of regional creeks leaving a generation of long-term data they have collected is the joyful legacy of education and commitment to the environment.
Scribe Video Center is at 4212 Chestnut Street 3rd Floor in West Philadelphia
We’ve recently posted STRATHMERE on the GFEM database. GFEM’s primary mission is to encourage their grantmaker colleagues to consider funding, or to increase their funding of, compelling, innovative social issue media as a field. We think STRATHMERE just might be one of these projects.
We are posting a new clip of our Strathmere project. In partnership with Shirley Road Productions, we keep plugging away on this pretty little piece about a precious place under pressure. Click on the photo to take a look! It’s a larger video file, so be patient.
Issue no. 1 is out! of the Philadelphia Water Department’s Monoshone Watershed Quarterly Water Quality Update. It’s useful to finally have what we all hope will be an on-going, official report about the state of our creek.
It’s a shame, really.
