Columbia Foundation Articles and Reports October 2010 Arts and Culture CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY $200,000 awarded since 2005 for the Living New Deal Project, including a two-year $100,000 grant in 2008 1. San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 2010 Home sought for 1940 3-D map of San Francisco Gray Brechin has recovered a three-dimensional relief map of San Francisco in 1940. The map was found in a warehouse at UC Berkeley divided among 17 large wooden boxes. The map had been stashed and forgotten. If assembled, the map would be 41 feet long by 37 feet wide, an exact scale replica of the city of San Francisco in 1940. Brechin [director of the Living New Deal Project] believes the relief map was made by artists working for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA), and that it was built for two purposes: (1) to put people to work, and (2) to help regional planners. The WPA presented the map to the planning department in San Francisco in the spring of 1940, and it was apparently donated to UC Berkeley after possibly being on display at the Golden Gate International Exhibition on Treasure Island. The WPA built a number of Bay Area projects, including what became the San Francisco and Oakland airports, and Treasure Island, among others. Brechin is looking for an institution to house and display the map. LOS CENZONTLES $225,000 awarded since 2004, including a three-year $150,000 grant in 2007 for Cultures of Mexico in California 2. Youtube.com, August 17, 2010 Soy Mexico Americano – Los Cenzontles Legendary filmmaker Les Blank directs the classic ranchera, Soy Mexico Americano, performed by Los Cenzontles from their new CD Raza de Oro [video with audio embedded.] 3. Contra Costa Times, August 27, 2010 Our Neighbors: San Pablo Mexican arts center director lauded for work Los Cenzontles executive director and founder Eugene Rodriguez is one of six local leaders honored by KQED for Latino Heritage Month chosen for “their commitment and contributions to their local communities and the Bay Area community at large”. 4. Santa Cruz Sentinel, September 30, 2010 The Bay Area group Los Cenzontles works to revive traditional Mexican music Los Cenzontles’ The Mockingbirds is the public face of the Los Cenzontles Mexican Art Center in San Pablo near Richmond in the North Bay. The group borrows from a myriad of regional traditions in Mexico, and considers itself a traditional roots band. The leader of both the group and the center is Eugene Rodriguez, whose mission is to keep Mexican traditions alive expressly for young Mexican- Americans. Recently, they produced a song challenging the immigration law in Arizona, but mostly the role of the group is to stay engaged in San Pablo and Richmond, an area that has seen significant immigration from Mexico over the last fifteen years. Rodriguez says, “"We really underestimate what 1 culture can do. Only the corporate marketers and the right wing respect it. We need to understand its power better.” NA LEI HULU I KA WEKIU $20,000 awarded in 2009 for this dance-theater company to present original works using hula, chanting, storytelling, and music to create a bridge of understanding across cultures and generations as well as advance the public dialogue about the experiences and contributions of America’s indigenous people 5. San Francisco, Chronicle, September 12, 2010 Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu's ‘25 Years of Hula’: review Review of Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu’s 25th anniversary performance in San Francisco; the writer says, “I doubt that even Patrick Makuakane, the founder of the company Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu harbored such fantasies. Yet, the huge and remarkably diverse crowd that packed the Palace of Fine Arts Theater on Saturday evening for the kickoff to the troupe’s 25th anniversary celebration was a testament to Makuakane’s melding of community interest, serious ethnography, exuberant showmanship and something approximating kitsch. The accomplishment is significant. In his disarming way, Makuakane has made us aware of the potential of hula as more than a national dance of Hawaii. It is a movement language adaptable to various circumstances and musics, suitable for both transmitting narrative and expressing emotional states.” ODC THEATER $276,000 awarded since 1980, including a two-year $200,000 grant in 2009 to renovate, refurbish, and expand the original ODC Theater as a performance space for the dance community 6. San Francisco, Chronicle, September 12, 2010 Brenda Way reshapes San Francisco ODC Theater Brenda Way is about to unveil a $9 million makeover of the company’s ODC Theater at 17th and Shotwell streets in the Mission District, following the 2005 completion of the nearby $10 million ODC Dance Commons, a “light-filled” complex of studios, office space, dance library, and the Healthy Dancers injury-prevention clinic. Together, the two spaces comprise 36,000 square-feet of dance-activity space. The center offers 280 dance classes per week in countless genres, serving more than 15,000 professionals, students, and beginners each year. The newest ODC project will provide “a dramatically enhanced public face for dance and other types of performance”. Well over 100 companies, large and small, are projected to offer a total of 225 performances per year in the 187-seat ODC Theater. SAN FRANCISCO CAMERAWORK $85,000 awarded since 2007, including $25,000 in 2010 for Soldiers' Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan, an exhibition of “staged narrative portraiture” by photographer Jennifer Karady of U.S. veterans suffering from war-related post-traumatic stress disorder 7. National Public Radio, July 4, 2010 Weekend Edition Sunday: Visualizing Memory, Photographing War Stories Radio interview with Jennifer Karady regarding Soldiers' Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan, a photographic exhibition at San Francisco Camerawork featuring symbolic portraits of returned soldiers in re-creations of their most traumatic war moments in their present-day environments [radio broadcast linked.] 2 SOUTHBANK CENTRE $160,000 awarded since 2008, a $50,000 grant in 2010 for The Bernstein Project, a multi-disciplinary participatory program involving community performers in the chorus and orchestra that will culminate in a major performance of Mass, a musical theater work by Leonard Bernstein in July 2010 8. Reuters, July 7, 2010 Alsop resurrects Bernstein's "Mass" in London American conductor Marin Alsop conducts Bernstein’s Mass at Southbank’s Royal Festival Hall in London in July 2010. The production includes 500 people: an orchestra, rock band, marching band, soloists, three choruses, and dancers. Alsop says, “Mass is really a synopsis and summation of Bernstein’s philosophy of offering aspect and inclusion and sort of a big embrace to as many people as possible. That was always his goal – to involve as many people in this art form as possible.” For these performances, Southbank has engaged Britain's National Youth Orchestra, Brazil's Youth Orchestra of Bahia, Iraq’s National Youth Orchestra and America’s Sphinx Organization of black and Latino musicians, among others. Alsop is the first woman conductor of a major American orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. 9. The Independent (London), July 11, 2010 Bernstein Mass, Royal Festival Hall, London 4-out-of-5 star review of Bernstein Mass; the writer says, “The musical juxtapositions come thick and fast in jarring, crunching, shifts of gear; the cheesy rubs shoulders with the sublime, musical genres are crossed and re-crossed. And Mass has things to say about what exactly a “crisis of faith” – the central plank of its thesis – might mean, not just for him but for us all. It asks the awkward questions, challenges the dogma, the hypocrisy. It’s a 1970s piece with a millennium reach and it will always polarise opinions. But it is Bernstein’s masterpiece – of that I am in no doubt – and this culminating blast of the South Bank’s year-long Bernstein Project came as close to nailing it as we could reasonably expect.” TECTONIC THEATER PROJECT $5,000 awarded in 2011 for a San Francisco performance in October 2010 of The Laramie Project, and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center 10. The Patriot Ledger, September 30, 2010 THEATER REVIEW: ‘Laramie’ still resonates 10 years later Review of The Laramie Project and preview of The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later; the writer says, “The fallout from the murder of Matthew Shepard hasn’t dissipated. The country did much soul-searching in its wake, and still does. But the underlying attitudes that allowed it to happen still exist. To see how Laramie, itself, has fared over the years, the Tectonic Theater Project returned on the 10th anniversary of Matthew’s death to re-interview many of the same people. The plan, they have said, was to simply show how the town has moved on.” WORLD ARTS WEST $25,000 awarded in 2011 for Welcome to Ohlone Territory: Right of Return, a series of performances by members of the Ohlone tribal community (as part of the Ohlone Profiles Project) that will take place as part of the 33rd San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival in June 2011, and at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco in November 2011 11. San Francisco Chronicle, August 11, 2010 Ohlones want a voice on Hunters Point project According to state law in California, tribal descendents must be notified when development projects could happen around sacred burial sites. Burial sites around the proposed Hunters Point Shipyard/Candlestick 3 Point redevelopment project are sacred to the Ohlone people. Although no one disputes that the Ohlone were the primary natives living in the area before the Spanish arrived, because there is no consensus on which particular Ohlone tribe lived where, the federal government has refused to grant official recognition to any of the Ohlone tribes, which means they generally do not have to be consulted in connection with federal projects that may affect their homelands.