Ronald McDonald Brings the Beat to Hospital Schools

Arts Horizons is pleased to highlight and recognize the support of Ronald McDonald House Charities of NYC Tri-State Area in bolstering our Art Beat program for this fiscal year through a generous grant. Art Beat is partnership between Arts Horizons and Hospital Schools, a division of the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) that provides educational services for all special education students who are hospitalized for extended stays.  Art Beat provides interactive music and visual art workshops to promote rehabilitation, learning and cultural experiences for special needs students in an arts-rich, safe, creative, and emotionally uplifting environment.

The program merges the fields of art, healthcare, and academics, to create a space of comprehensive education, healing and expression for special needs students with extended, and in some cases residential, hospital stays. This collaborative effort was established in 2009 and has since been integrated into more than a dozen of the NYCDOE’s hospital school locations. Arts Horizons’ aim to expanding our arts education offerings to hospitals through Art Beat aligns well with Ronald McDonald House Charities of NYC Tri-State Area’s mission to “help as many children as possible achieve their fullest potential by supporting programs in education and the arts.” Arts Horizons is grateful for Ronald McDonald House Charities of NYC Tri-State Area’s generous support, and we look forward to nurturing and sustaining this fruitful partnership for years to come.

Our 2017 Hospital Schools programs supported by the Ronald McDonald House Charities of NYC Tri-State Area take place at four hospital sites. Mr. Yah’aya Kamate leads percussion programs at Metropolitan Hospital Center and Mt. Sinai-St. Luke’s Hospital Center. Mr. Shidaun Campbell leads students in Beatboxing and Dance at Bronx Lebanon Hospital – Fulton Center, and Ms. Tira Bluestone presents music programs to students Sunshine Children’s Home and Rehabilitation Center (part of Westchester BOCES). AH Program Coordinator, Kiran Rajagopalan, had the opportunity to see students play pulsating African rhythms on djembe drums at Mt. Sinai-St. Luke’s Hospital Center with Yah’aya. He also saw students use their own bodies as percussion with Shidaun at Bronx Lebanon Hospital – Fulton Center. Let’s take a quick peek into their Art Beat classes!

A dancer, instructor, choreographer, masquerade artist, and fire-eater from Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire, Yah’aya Kamate is a dynamic performer and a longtime teaching artist with Arts Horizons. For his classes at Metropolitan Hospital Center and Mt. Sinai-St. Luke’s Hospital Center, he arranged students in a drum circle and taught them some basic hand movements and sound patterns on djeme drums from West Africa. Yah’aya used a variety creative methods for engaging students to play for long periods of time including:  handclapping, numbers signifying where to hit on the drum (“1 2 2 1”), and a carefully constructed sentence embedded with a rhythm to be played (“We walk the big dog now”). Oscar Riquelme, site coordinator at Metropolitan Hospital Center, stated that Yah’aya was an “outstanding residency choice…and an amazing teacher,” and that “the kids were in rhythmic heaven!”

Yah’aya leading students in a drum circle at Mt. Sinai-St. Luke’s Hospital Center

Shidaun Campbell is a sought-after dancer (Hip Hop, modern, jazz, and African), spoken word artist, and published author who formally joined Arts Horizons roster of teaching artists this year. His sessions at Bronx Lebanon Hospital – Fulton Center focused on beatboxing and elements of Hip Hop dance. The first part of his class began with a simple breakdown of the fundamental sounds in vocal percussion:  “Everyone say ‘base!’ Say ‘ba!’ Say ‘b!’ Now say ‘pbf!’“ This exercise was followed by a “beatbox cipher” in which students gather in a circle and add a single word or sound to a rhythmic pattern in a round-Robin manner. Finally, students learned “tutting,” a basic move in Hip Hop dance directly inspired by the reliefs in Ancient Egyptian art. Gym teacher Eric Gentry noted that it was a pleasure to work with Shidaun because he made sure to “showcase his expertise in dance” so that students “could understand what they can possibly practice into with hard work.”

Shidaun teaching “tutting” to students in his Beatboxing & Hip Hop dance residency at Bronx Lebanon Hospital – Fulton Center

For more information please contact Mr. Kiran Rajagopalan, Program Coordinator at kiran@artshorizons.org or Ms. Dena Malarek, Program Director at dena@artshorizons.org.

Rotary Club of Englewood supports AH Creative Spirits Program

Arts Horizons received a generous grant from the Rotary Club of Englewood. This grant supports Arts Horizons’ “Creative Spirits” program which provides visual and performing arts workshops to seniors around the state of NJ. With the funding from the Rotary Club of Englewood, Arts Horizons will be able to provide the Southeast Senior Center for Independent Living (SESCIL) in Englewood with a series of Zumba and Movement workshops led by Arts Horizons teaching artist Yahaya Kamate on Fridays and Mixed Media Art workshops with teaching artist Mansa Mussa on Mondays. These workshops take place from April through September at SESCIL. Arts Horizons is excited to continue this partnership with the Rotary Club of Englewood and to be able to provide the workshops to seniors in Englewood.

 

For more information contact Michele Renaud, Senior Program Manager of NJ at michele@artshorizons.org

 

VALERIE MAYNARD: Artist in Print in exhibit at the Arts Horizons LeRoy Neiman Art Center

A major exhibition, VALERIE MAYNARD: Artist in Print, in celebration of Women’s History Month in on display at The LeRoy Neiman Art Center in collaboration with The Romare Bearden Foundation. This valuable and timely exhibition highlights the art of Valerie Maynard, a prominent contemporary African American artist, whose portfolio of prints has been placed in the collection of the United States Library of Congress.

Exhibition dates are March 10-April 15, 2017; Opening Reception – Friday, March 17, 6:8:30pm; and Artist Talk – Saturday, April 8, 4-6 @ Arts Horizons LeRoy Neiman Art Center, 2785 Frederick Douglass Blvd., Harlem, NY.

Valerie Maynard, “Senufo,” 1987, Artist Proof, Serigraph, 30″ x 22″, on BFK Rives paper

A sculptor, painter, printmaker, designer and educator, Valerie Maynard was the first Artist in Residence in the Studio Museum of Harlem and is recognized as a distinguished artist of both the Black Arts Movement of the sixties as well as a contemporary artist today. Maynard has worked as a professional artist and as a conscious and contributing member of the creative community for over 60 years.

Her work is featured in private collections around the globe including the private art collections of Stevie Wonder, Lena Horne and Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison. In 1977 Maynard was part of a contingent of hundreds of African-American artists who represented the North American Zone exhibiting in FESTAC’ 77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria. Maynard embraces all aspects of the art world, working as a fine artist, an educator, a curator, and a set designer. She has exhibited her artwork all over the United States and abroad.

Throughout her career, Maynard has received many awards including residencies in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and New York, The Studio Museum in Harlem where she was a part of a group exhibition Labor, Love, Live Collection in Context, held November 14, 2007 – March 9, 2008, as well as a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in Printmaking. As an Artists’ Book Resident, she produced Lost and Found, a portfolio of ten black and white silkscreen prints that forms part of the artist’s ?No Apartheid? series expressing the terror and injustice of apartheid. Her accomplishments are unparalleled in her ability to create art on a board scale. Her technical abilities supersede what would be expected of most artists.

The literature on Valerie Maynard is scanty. Despite her creative and technical skills, there are few publications on her. “Valerie is one of our unsung women artists, who very little has been written about, ” explained Johanne Bryant-Reid, Co-Director/Co-Curator, Romare Bearden Foundation. “This exhibition gives us an opportunity to bring the spirit of her art to community and to remind us of the struggle, survival and salvation.”

Maynard embraces all aspects of the art world, working as a fine artist, an educator, a curator, and a set designer. She is a versatile, multi-media artist expressing herself through a variety of mediums including wood, glass, stone, paint, collage, printmaking, and set design. Because she uses art as a language, the medium she chooses to work with at any point in time depends largely on what her message is going to be.

This exhibition, Artist in Print, focuses exclusively on a variety of Maynard’s prints providing an entry on Maynard and her visual interpretation of the African and African American experience. There are approximately twenty-five (25) prints and two pen and ink works in the exhibition representing over three decades of a blend of expression, gesture and spirituality elements recurring in the African and African American cultural and artistic practices. A portfolio of ten black and white silkscreen prints were produced as part of the artist’s “No Apartheid” series. This work was done in 1989 with the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York. Using found materials and photographs as a starting point, these beautiful prints express the terror and outrage of apartheid. The suite of ten prints featured an introduction by Toni Morrison. The Lost and Found portfolio is in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum.

The apparition of images assembled in this exhibition draws upon the sculptural presence of African art and engages the viewer in what looks like an apocalyptic drama of protest, passion and pride. These compositions are full of striking binaries that also reflect a conscious harmony. The black and white forms and spaces complement one another while exploring the interplay of light and shadows offering spectral images of faces, bodies and communities. By and large, Maynard’s visual metaphor relates art to life and carries along a narrative and a sense of history that proclaims her identity as an artist.

“We are pleased to host this exhibition at The Center in collaboration with the Romare Bearden Foundation,” stated Marline A. Martin, Executive Director/Curator, LeRoy Neiman Art Center. “Printmaking was one of Mr. Neiman’s primary art forms, he was a champion of serigraphy, lithography and etching; and in the case of Romare Bearden, his serious work in printmaking included over one hundred editions in etching, lithography and screen print.”

Born in Harlem in 1937, Valerie Maynard apprenticed as a portrait painter with Elaine Jourmet before studying painting, drawing and printmaking at the Museum of Modern Art and the New School for Social Research in New York City. She received an M.A. in Sculpture from Goddard College in 1977 and has worked with wood, clay, fabric, stone and a variety of other materials over the past 50 years. She is represented in many important collections including the Brooklyn Museum, National African-American Museum, National Museum of Mozambique, National Museum of Nigeria and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

The Harlem-born and raised printmaker and sculptor has left a lasting mark on her hometown with one most notable piece – a permanent installation at the 125th Street Subway Station in Harlem. 

Valerie Maynard in conversation with Chalres Daniel Dawson at the Arts Horizons LeRoy Neiman Art Center

 

Oringaly published on March 16, 2017 by Marline Martin, Executive Director of the LeRoy Neiman Art Center

Rally to Save the Arts on the steps of NYC City Hall!!

Although the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has faced threats of closure and survived major cuts to its funding in the past, this new administration’s current proposition could make its total demise a harsh reality.  The proposed Fiscal Year 2018 budget calls for the complete elimination of the NEA along with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Corporation for National and Community Services (Americorps) and other federal agencies.  It even threatens to retroactively cut monies awarded to these agencies during this Fiscal Year!

In response to such ominous developments, the NYC arts community gathered in large numbers at City Hall on Monday, April 3 for the Rally to Save the Arts.  This rally, organized by NYC City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Majority Leader Jimmy Van Bramer, was the platform through which Arts Horizons and other organizers, peers, allies and arts advocates galvanized the steps of City Hall and fervently demanded the full restoration of federal funding for the arts, culture, and humanities. Our organization had to be part of this rally as we believe that the arts are integral to the life cycle of individuals, schools, communities, ideas, humanity and collective progress.

 

List of News Media from the April 3^rd Rally to Save the Arts at NYC City Hall

 

• “Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne joins NYC rally to save the arts from Trump cuts”, BY ERIN DURKIN -NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Monday, April 3, 2017, 6:02 PM

• Hundreds protest proposed federal funding cuts for the arts, By Miriam Kreinin Souccar, Crains NY

• Pols and Creatives Rally in Manhattan to ‘Save the Arts’ from Trump’s Budget Cuts, By Madina Toure • 04/03/17 5:38pm, The Observer

•  FIGHTING FOR THE ARTS! APRIL 03, 2017 AT 6:29 PM, Thirteen Metrofocus

• Queens Cultural Leaders Join Citywide Protest Against President’s Proposed Budget Cuts, By Lisa Voyticki, NY 1, Tuesday, April 4, 2017 at 06:00 AM CDT

• A Rally at New York City Hall Calls on Trump to Fund the Arts, Hyperallergic

• Watch as Broadway Artists and Politicians Come Together at the Rally to Save the Arts, BY RYAN MCPHEE APR 04, 2017

• Arts Horizons photos from the Event on Facebook

 

For more information, contact Dena Malarek, Director of NYC Residencies and Special Populations at dena@artshorizons.org