“Maria was very wise, kind, determined, and open to the world,” says the granddaughter of Ukrainian self-taught artist Maria Prymachenko (1908-1997). “She incorporated her worldview and philosophy into the paintings she created.” Prymachenko’s vibrant and fantastical artworks (previously) combined her inner thoughts with observations of the world around her, depicting symmetrical floral arrangements, wildlife, and everyday scenes. Her focus on the beauty of daily existence takes center stage at Saatchi Gallery in London next month, marking the first time these pieces, which have been carefully preserved by the artist’s family for half a century, have been exhibited in the U.K.

Saatchi partnered with the Prymachenko Family Foundation and the Ukrainian Embassy to organize this special selection of 23 works, many of which were originally intended for a children’s book and often focus on portrayals of the artist or women spinning fiber on a wheel, herding horses, or sitting outside with baby in a buggy. Many are double-sided, like “Beast of Polissia,” which includes a handwritten narrative on the reverse.

Dozens of Prymachenko’s paintings were once held in the Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum just outside of Kyiv. When Russian forces attacked the village last year, totally destroying the museum, local residents were able to rescue her works from the ensuing fire. The Prymachenko Family Foundation is currently creating a new museum complex on the site of the artist’s house in Bolotnya, the village where she spent her entire life, which will include a residency for contemporary artists. Foundation partner and co-curator Natalia Gnatiuk says, “It will be a place of strength, capable of welcoming guests from around the world after Ukraine’s victory.”

Maria Prymachenko at Saatchi Gallery opens July 13 and runs through August 31.

“Beast of Polissia”

Reverse of above: “On October 15, 1935, I started painting near the Lavra. In January, I had a surgery. I learned from the newspaper that I received a First Degree Diploma and a thousand karbovanets. The doctors congratulated me and made three more surgeries. In seven months I had a device made for 703 karbovanets. I learned how to use it, and now I wear it. A new device will be made for 1908 karbovanets. I continue to paint. M.P. Beast of Polissia”

“I herded horses instead of my father. M.P.” (1982)

“Roses to grain growers” (1987)

“I was spinning on the spinning wheel. M.P.” (1982)

Untitled

Untitled

“Flowers in pots” (1982)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Nearly Two Dozen Exuberant Works by Ukrainian Folk Artist Maria Prymachenko Go On View in the U.K. For the First Time appeared first on Colossal.

Recognized for his elegant, detailed sculptures that coax light and color from the interior of glass, Lino Tagliapietra is one of the most sought-after artists in the medium. Renowned for his technical skill and experimental approach, vibrant patterns float in abstract vessels, suggestive of graceful, viscous motion. Lino Tagliapietra: Sculptor in Glass, a new book published by Phaidon, chronicles the story of the artist, from apprentice to maestro to one of the foremost glassblowers in the world, surveying his extensive career with hundreds of photographs of his captivating, luminous compositions.

Hailing originally from Murano, an island in Venice famous for glassblowing traditions that can be traced back to the 13th century, Tagliapietra was distinguished as a Muranese maestro when he was only 21 years old. A highly sought-after accolade assigned to those who lead the piazza, or the workshop, maestros bear the secrets of the precise chemical compositions and are responsible for the final shaping of pieces.

During his seven-decade career, Tagliapietra developed a signature style, incorporating long, elegant necks and vibrant murrine, or glass canes that are cut into cross-sections to reveal patterns. In 1979, a young Dale Chihuly invited him to visit the Pilchuck School in Seattle to introduce Venetian techniques, which profoundly impacted international practices. While he retired in 2021, Tagliapietra continues to split his time between Venice and Seattle, and you can find his work in numerous galleries and museum collections around the world.

Find your copy of the artist’s monograph on Bookshop, and explore more of his work on his website.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article A New Book Celebrates the Exquisite Patterns and Glowing Colors of Glass Maestro Lino Tagliapietra appeared first on Colossal.

Half a year into the AI boom, the artists embracing AI in San Francisco’s Mission District generally have a tech background. 

“I’m here for it,” said Ashley Herr, who’s visibly excited for the prospects by incorporating AI into her art. Herr’s AI art installation, recently displayed at Gray Area in the Mission, types out letters by recognizing a person’s posture. On June 21 the screen showed a disproportionately large number of Ms and Gs — an indication that it might have been melding different postures together. 

While instructing visitors on how to interact with the installation, Herr kept a computer and the codes by her side. Most tools for AI art require some basic programming skills to maximize its potential. And most, like Herr who is a marketing professional for an NFT marketplace in terms of her day job, share a familiarity with tech. 

Soon, however, the tools to create AI artwork will likely be available to a wider range of users. “My feeling or my intuition is that over the next few years, or maybe even a few months, we’re going to see more and more tools that are made user friendly,” said Karim Jerbi, a professor at the University of Montreal and an associate professor at Mila, one of the world’s leading AI institutes based in Quebec. Jerbi’s team is currently trying to answer the question of whether ChatGPT is creative by measuring its creativity.

For now, however, the AI tech world seems most embraced by the tech savvy. 

Like Herr, sculptor Sophi Kravitz, who is an electrical engineer, is also thrilled about the AI boom. She’s used Midjourney, a San Francisco-based generative AI program, as a source for inspiration in the past seven months. Uniquely, on Midjourney, the process of generating images is open to the public, meaning users can potentially see the creative process of artists they enjoy.

Kravitz’s latest series, “ChimerAIs,” depicts modern day mythological creatures. But to start out, she hunts for inspiration in the work of other artists on Midjourney, attempting to transform and modify certain elements even as she blends them with the work of a dozen others. 

For her, this is a way of capturing the collective imagination she’s seen on AI image tools. “Things change,” she said, sounding like an early cubist making the realization that an object can be depicted on the same canvas from different points of view. 

“For me, AI is just a tool like anything else, like WiFi, like social media, like all these different things that we use,” said photographer Cristina Isabel Rivera, who works in digital production for tech. Her latest work combines a short film of the Amazon rainforest with images of passion flowers generated by AI to raise awareness for environmental protection. 

Currently, she’s looking forward to what she will discover about her own work after training an AI model with her 15 years archive of photos.  

An individual style is what most art departments hope to develop in their students, said Kurt Ralske, department chair of media arts at Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. “The thing that we do in art schools — students come in and four years later we want them to have their own style.”

Nat Schager, a former software engineer at TikTok whose background is in programming, enjoys the feeling of losing control and ceding part of the decision to AI, but he acknowledges how different this is from the traditional experience of making art. “I tried to embrace the chaos,” he said. Recently accepted into Parsons School of Design with a full scholarship, Schager plans to continue exploring making art with code — and he won’t be the only one.

At Tufts, according to Ralske, art professors even planned to offer a course to teach how to write prompts, as AI art is generally generated from a user’s written text. But their failed search was a clear indication of the field’s growth pangs, as they couldn’t find the right person to bridge the fields of art and technology.

Meanwhile, dramatic policy changes have taken place at the Columbus College of Art & Design over the past few months, according to Charlotte Belland, chair of its animation program. Controversially, countless original works have been used to train the AI model without the artist’s consent, but it’s become difficult to treat the resulting student work as plagiarism. 

In classrooms, professors are also delving into the legal and scientific aspects of AI, but a course on how to make better use of AI in art? “It’s about time,” said Belland. “In academia, we also have that problem where we move like a turtle. We will get there eventually, but we move a little slowly.”

Ubiquitous concerns about AI’s ethical downsides

AI almost feels like a buzzword now, said Quinn Keck, a 33-year-old data scientist and artist, and consequently players in this new market “can get away with insane things like no other industry.” 

In particular, she said,  many AI companies even try to make it seem like the model is alive without being under anyone’s control. She sees this as a way to avoid culpability. “Like, what if you went to a restaurant and they couldn’t tell you what was in your food?”

A couple blocks away at hackerspace Noisebridge, Emeline Brulé, who teaches human-computer interaction and design at the University of Sussex, and Michelle Venetucci, a Yale Ph.D student who focuses on anthropologist of technology, are figuring out the edge of AI model by using it in nontraditional ways. 

Instead of making photorealistic images, they ask AI models to design decorative letters on fabric, and mistakes come one after another — the J is reversed, the E has additional loops, and the numbers are never quite right. “I’m working on how we use art to make the general public more aware of the ethical limitations of AI,” said Brulé.

For photographer David Aughenbaugh, who also works as a visual effects artist in the film industry, the ethical burden of using AI was once so unbearable that when the AI boom first came, he was even hesitant to continue using it because of fears of the backlash. “I didn’t want people to say, ‘Oh, he’s one of those AI artists,’” he said. Still, he remains amazed by AI’s potential to produce photos that can be enlarged infinitely, which performs especially well on the abstract images he takes, and the potentials of the technology remain undeniable.

So far, most say the artist remains critical. “The human element of the artist putting in there is what can make it happen. But once you pull the humans out of the equation, the computers can’t do it,” said Steve Piasecki, venue manager and program manager for Artists Incubator, Gray Area.

Despite its many challenges, cannabis is supposed to be one of the most exciting industries in the modern age.

And make no mistake, safe access to cannabis is exciting. But you wouldn’t know it by the lackluster marketing efforts coming out of the space.

Perhaps you’ve heard the complaints: tight budgets, regulatory restrictions, crazy tax laws, and understaffed teams. As painful as these realities are, they shift focus away from the heart of the matter.

The real issue in cannabis marketing: negligent storytelling.

Storytelling is as important as language itself. It’s one of the few things that unites us as human beings. It’s how we achieve clarity and meaning. It’s how we make decisions and inspire action in others.

Nothing happens without a compelling story—except apathy, boredom, or confusion.

And confused people never say yes to something.

By the way, how many people do you think are still confused about cannabis?

Missing in action: story-driven marketing

Storytelling is the backbone of great marketing, but very few cannabis marketers have actually mastered the principles of story.

Pull up the social media channels for almost any brand, and you’ll mostly find announcements for discounts and special offers or an endless line of product glamor shots and other storytelling fails.

Here’s another glaring instance: a dispensary website full of blog posts about quarterly financial updates and recent additions to the board of directors. Instead of targeting prospective customers, investors are the target audience.

“Cannabis brands struggle with storytelling for a few reasons,” said Brad Bogus, a fractional chief marketing officer in multiple industries including cannabis. “For one, most companies struggle because almost no one teaches storytelling in business school or when coaching entrepreneurs. It’s a skill of art, not business, and is left out of most education, training, coaching, and mentoring. Most people just don’t have experience in it.”

The other big issue, Bogus continued, is a lot of cannabis operators simply can’t afford to hire a storytelling specialist. The economic struggle for the majority of operators is very real.

“Most operators have to scale way back on their marketing budget, leading to mostly entry-level hires who don’t specialize—great at executing on tactics, not great on strategy and messaging,” he said. “With more budget to work with, one can expand the marketing team to include specialists capable of great storytelling.”

The disconnect between brands and consumers

Even when funding is available for robust marketing efforts, many cannabis brands don’t have a clue about how to truly connect with consumers.

“Many times I’ve had to create stories out of nothing,” senior brand strategist Bri Smith said of clients who invested in cannabis with no previous point of reference to the plant. “No personal connection to cannabis, no lifelong mission of advocacy, no unique offerings solving a problem. Some brands don’t have a story to tell.”

Brands also struggle with creativity and finding the best ways to reach their audience.

“Billboards and crappy programmatic ads are horrific at storytelling,” said Scott Jennings, founder and chief executive officer at Pantry Food Co. “They’re low-level ads that aren’t convincing a large percentage of potential customers to come into the industry.”

Indeed, demand generation is practically nonexistent in cannabis today, which says a lot when you consider how many people are still trying to overcome 80-plus years of harmful misinformation.

It’s ironic. While cannabis legalization efforts call for powerful storytelling and a relentless drive to change hearts and minds, this intense focus abruptly vanishes after legalization.

Getting clear about your target audience

Who’s your target audience? If it’s “everyone who smokes weed,” you’ve stumbled into the same pitfall as many other cannabis marketers.

Cannabis consumers come from all different backgrounds, and trying to lump them together is trying to be everything to everyone. You’d think cannabis operators would have enough business acumen to avoid this trap, and yet it’s quite common throughout the industry.

“I think there’s a belief that the cannabis consumer is a part of the ‘cannabis community,’ as if we all exist in the same places with similar interests, beliefs, and style,” Bogus said.

Cannabis consumers actually don’t identify as “the cannabis community,” he continued. Some like to mellow out around jam bands; others are into punk and street protests. They’re corporate professionals with minivans full of kids, or they’re weekend warrior outdoors junkies.

“What will make your marketing the most effective is to pick one or two target customer profiles and absolutely nail it with your marketing and messaging to them,” Bogus advised. “If you can slam dunk for those customers, you can expand and win others. Focus. Be something specific to someone and you’re likely to pick up others along the way. Stand for something or stand for nothing. Those are your choices.”

Along these lines, most cannabis marketers are guilty of the same oversight that plagues marketing departments in many other industries: not talking to the customers. Is there a worse blunder in marketing than not knowing your audience? If you want to compromise your marketing efforts from the very beginning, that’s how you do it.

“I’d also blame investors, distributors, and sales reps,” Jennings said. “A well-known [consumer packaged goods] expert pointed out to me how all of these groups are incentivized to push operators or brands to grow as fast as possible and into as many accounts, stores, or markets as possible. Meaning sell to everyone because everyone is your customer. How wrong that is.”

Guiding people toward your brand

“Oh, but come on! It’s weed! It’ll sell itself,” said countless cannabis stakeholders. That sort of attitude is probably why the cannabis industry has yet to achieve any real market penetration.

According to a 2022 Gallup poll, only 16 percent of Americans consume cannabis. Meanwhile, the country is evenly split regarding cannabis’s overall effect on society—49 percent say it’s positive and 50 percent consider it negative.

Imagine the successful marketer as a safari guide who knows the terrain and the wildlife (the product) inside out. They’re also deeply attuned to their guests (the audience)—their interests, fears, and expectations. The guide creates an unforgettable experience by skillfully navigating the landscape and its creatures to match their guests’ desires.

Now imagine the opposite with a safari guide who doesn’t know the lay of the land and/or is clueless about their guests. You see these sorts of trainwrecks in cannabis marketing all the time.

“For a lot of the early brands on shelves in legal states, I think it became easy to believe that none of this disciplined brand-building really mattered. They probably felt they were going to do well no matter what,” noted Tim Naughton, founder of Heady, a cannabis digital marketing agency. “And instead of the ‘green rush’ drawing in competitors that were better at storytelling, the space became saturated by lots of brands that didn’t have much unique about them.”

Naughton believes the problem is compounded by brands overthinking content creation.

“They think they need production value and creative agencies, rather than just getting started with simple, authentic stuff,” he said.

In essence, it’s not just a marketing issue or a content-development issue.

It’s not just a public relations issue.

It’s a storytelling issue.

NEW YORK and CANNES, France, June 27, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Stagwell (NASDAQ: STGW), the challenger network built to transform marketing, took home top honors at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the largest gathering in the creative marketing community. Network agencies including 72andSunny, Allison+Partners, Forsman & Bodenfors, and GALE won a combined 12 Cannes Lions awards across the categories of creative, design, digital, entertainment and PR.

“I want to applaud our team and amazing agencies for an excellent showing at the festival in our second year. The success of Sport Beach was widely recognized as a clear demonstration of our creative ingenuity,” said Stagwell Chairman and CEO Mark Penn. “As we do for our clients we challenged the conventional,” he added. 

Overall, Stagwell agencies including Anomaly, Doner and Observatory were put on nearly 40 shortlists.

Cannes Lions Winners

Gold Lions

• Creative Data: GALE – “Chipotle Doppelgänger”

Silver Lions

• PR: Forsman & Bodenfors – “Kami”

Bronze Lions

• Creative B2B: Forsman & Bodenfors – “Pure Waste”
• Design: Forsman & Bodenfors – “The Shuffle Ticket”
• Design: Forsman & Bodenfors – “Kami”
• Digital Craft: Forsman & Bodenfors – “Kami”
• Entertainment Lions For Music: Forsman & Bodenfors – “The Shuffle Ticket”
• Industry Craft: 72andSunny – “The Cathedral of Diablo”

Stagwell Agencies Credited on Integrated Work with Non-Stagwell Agencies

In addition to the above, Stagwell agency Allison+Partners supported PR efforts for several winning campaigns with non-Stagwell agencies:

Titanium Lions

• Titanium: Allison+Partners and Budweiser – “Bring Home the Bud”

Silver Lions

• PR: Allison+Partners and Budweiser – “Bring Home the Bud”

Bronze Lions

• Creative Effectiveness: Allison+Partners and Corona – “Plastic Fishing Tournament”
• Creative Strategy: Allison+Partners and Budweiser – “Bring Home the Bud”

About Stagwell
Stagwell is the challenger network built to transform marketing. We deliver scaled creative performance for the world’s most ambitious brands, connecting culture-moving creativity with leading-edge technology to harmonize the art and science of marketing. Led by entrepreneurs, our 13,000+ specialists in 34+ countries are unified under a single purpose: to drive effectiveness and improve business results for their clients. Join us at www.stagwellglobal.com.

Media Contact
Sarah Arvizo
[email protected] 

SOURCE Stagwell Inc.

Silvia Filippini Fantoni and Darryl Dwayne Walker share the strategies and techniques that have helped them to dramatically increase the diversity of museum visitors and successfully engage local communities.

The Newark Museum of Art is New Jersey’s largest art museum and features a wide collection of American art as well as arts of Asia, Africa and the Americas. Established in 1909 by John Cotton Dana to promote the appreciation, understanding and enjoyment of the arts and science, it has garnered a reputation for being among the country’s most progressive cultural institutions.

After emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic, the team have sought to do more than ever to deliver on the museum’s mission of providing “inclusive experiences that spark curiosity and foster community”.

At the heart of these efforts has been an engagement strategy delivered by a dedicated team of experienced professionals including Darryl Dwayne Walker, Manager of Community Engagement and Silvia Filippini Fantoni, Deputy Director, Learning & Engagement.

Silvia’s remit includes school programmes, public programmes, community engagement, interpretation and more. Having worked in a range of museums across Europe and the US, Silvia says that she feels truly at home in Newark at a museum that reflects her own passion:

“My love for museums doesn’t really stem from objects,” she says. “It stems from people and their experiences. At The Newark Museum of Art community engagement is hugely important to what we do and I love seeing people discover our institution.

“Here we try to ensure that we serve a diverse community. Because that is the community that we are embedded in.”

As a city with a population that is 90% comprised of people of colour, Silvia, Darryl and the broader museum team work hard to ensure that community engagement genuinely spans the full breadth of the Newark community and the surrounding areas.

Modern challenges to community engagement

As a museum professional on the frontline of the museum’s effort to connect with its communities, Darryl has a clear insight into the hurdles that need to be overcome in order to build relationships and, ultimately, drive footfall.

“It all begins with awareness,” he says. “Information is slow to filter through to underserved and underrepresented communities for the most part. In more affluent areas with well-established resources and channels it is much easier to connect with people.”

Darryl continues, “I also think there’s an important hurdle of perception to overcome. In some communities it is hard for people to see art in a way that they can relate. For too long museums have told stories with a narrative that doesn’t include the voices of people of colour. And it is very difficult to change or shift that narrative.

“But part of my role is to help people feel excited who maybe haven’t always felt welcome or represented in a museum environment. I love introducing people to the museum for the first time – particularly those who are born and raised here but had never heard about us before. Getting those people to visit us and see them enjoy what we have to offer is a joy for me.”

He continues, “Of course money is the other big issue. We have a challenge to face in terms of accessing funding to grow our museum’s presence – in the way that some larger, internationally recognised museums and galleries may not. Making a difference on a smaller budget is hard – but not impossible.”

Silvia adds that despite The Newark Museum of Art being founded to serve a largely immigrant population and with a heritage of helping to serve local communities (as a safe space during social unrest in the 1960s, for example) staying front of mind with Newark’s residents can be tricky:

“If people don’t feel represented in the stories we tell, the art we exhibit or by the staff they engage with, they won’t want to spend time here.”

As she explains, turning that around requires cultural institutions to be self-reflective and : “We have had to understand that the way we have worked as a museum in the past isn’t the way community organisations work. So, in order for us to open up our doors and make these important groups feel welcome we must become more nimble, flexible and agile.

“Unlike museums – which are used to programming months in advance – the community groups we need to be engaging with work more reactively and focus on the short term. As a community engagement team, we need to be able to accommodate that.”

Creating a flexible and collaborative strategy for community engagement

At the heart of engagement for The Newark Museum of Art is a commitment to collaboration. Crafting new initiatives now includes a range of community voices as standard. Darryl says, “Normally museums programme internally and then push it out to the audience. Our process is different because we draw on a community advisory board to inform decision making.”

The advisory board is comprised of local artists, businesses, city representatives, cultural institutions and what Darryl refers to as “local tastemakers”. This group meets with the museum four to five times a year to help shape community engagement programming for the period ahead.

“The board’s direct access to the community helps to ensure that what we plan is appealing to a diverse range of groups. It also helps to get the word out about our exhibitions and programmes because these stakeholders go back into the community and tell people about what we are doing.”

The Community Advisory Board also plays a vital role in helping the museum extend its reach beyond its doors, by fostering connections with the wider community. This is achieved through active participation in citywide festivals and events, where the museum offers artist residencies (in local schools), facilitates artmaking activities, and share information about upcoming programmes.

The proof of this activity can be seen clearly in the pudding. Attendance and diversity figures have increased dramatically at the museum since the pandemic, and a growing range of community partners have come forward looking to collaborate with the museum on an ongoing basis.

In the last year alone, the diversity of programme attendees has increased by an incredible 30% – resulting in a total of 80% BIPOC visitors. In addition, the under-45 programme audience has grown by 32% and the number of families has also increased by 19%.

Silvia says, “This community advisory board was really the starting point for us, which we actually created during the pandemic to inform our virtual programming. The format for working with the board has been refined over time but, essentially, they serve to curate our programmes – like our Community Days and our signature Art After Dark events.

“In addition, we’ve successfully opened up our museum to host events run by our partners. That’s been a great opportunity for us to showcase our museum spaces to people who may not have been inside before. It’s an important part of our mission of growing the museum as a place for the community in Newark.

“What we have shown is that the museum is a space for them to meet, to get together and to socialise.”

These events can involve business gatherings, film festivals, celebrations, showcases and more.

The advisory board has also helped the museum to establish a space for showcasing work from within the community – a Digital Community Art Gallery. Designed to provide a platform for local artists, this popular showcase (which is presented on a projector in the museum’s welcome center) has helped get contributors’ voices heard and artworks shared.

According to Silvia and Darryl, the key to collaboration is a willingness to be flexible and shape the offering around what our community partners would like to achieve, rather than what the museum thinks they want.  Sometimes, however, we need to be creative and figure out ways to give our partners what they want within the limitations and constraints of our institution . Silvia says,

“For example, we often get our community partners coming forward with ideas for  exhibitions. But as museum professionals know, it can take years to put together full-scale exhibitions. So, we typically look at ways we can pivot to a different format and give them what they want through a different medium, one that we can implement in a short amount of time”

Darryl adds, “What’s important is that sense of ownership and inclusion that we can cultivate by collaborating and ensuring that community voices are feeling heard.”

Bringing external voices into the galleries

In addressing the issue of inclusivity within The Newark Museum of Art, Silvia explains that the museum’s curatorial team have been working hard to find new and innovative ways to incorporate diverse voices and narratives, as well as perspectives form the local community.

The museum is keen to reflect perspectives on some of the historical events and corresponding artworks  that have been previously untold or under represented. Silvia says, “We’ve been on a journey to understand the stories that have been missing from our collections – particularly in our 18^th and 19^th century American galleries. By consulting with focus groups that include local teachers, museum visitors, artists, as well as front line staff, we’ve explored new stories and new ways to tell those stories.”

Of course, being more inclusive is more labour intensive. But as Silvia notes, “We have a commitment to prioritising diverse voices and community engagement and, for us, the additional time and effort is worth it for the awareness it raises and the platform it provides the community and underrepresented groups.”

Another area of focus for the museum in its drive to enhance inclusion and accessibility lies in language. With a growing Latinx community (now 36% of the Newark population) and a fast-growing community of people of Caribbean descent in recent years (many of whom speak Creole as their first language), this is an area the museum knows it must be proactive in.

From labels to marketing materials that go out into the community, Darryl and Sylvia are quick to point to the importance of making diverse groups feel comfortable and accommodated wherever possible.

Silvia notes, “Really, that is the first step in convincing the community that we offer a safe and inclusive space for them. By overlooking their needs we would be almost letting them know that they are not welcome.”

Find out more about The Newark Museum of Art’s engagement strategy here.

ATLANTA, June 27, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Pye-Barker Fire & Safety – the largest private full-service and fully integrated fire protection, life safety and security services provider in the United States – unveiled its new branding at Saturday’s NASCAR Xfinity Race at Nashville Superspeedway. The new brand mark – the letters P and B shown suppressing a life safety threat – adorned the No. 20 racecar sponsored by Pye-Barker and driven by John Hunter Nemechek. Pye-Barker collaborated with top students from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) to create the new brand mark that comes on the heels of exponential growth for the company, which now operates more than 160 branches across 37 states.

Pye-Barker’s new brand mark reflects the company’s full-service capabilities and unites its service lines – fire extinguishers and suppression systems, fire alarms and security systems, and fire sprinklers – under one brand. It replaces a flame and extinguisher mark which became outdated as the company significantly expanded its capabilities through an aggressive growth strategy that’s resulted in over 100 acquisitions since 2016.

Twenty SCAD students, juniors through graduate level, teamed with Pye-Barker through the college’s SCADpro program, which connects high-achieving students with influential businesses for marketing and design contract projects.

“We knew we wanted to redefine our logo in a way that would unite all of our services under one brand, reflect our values and honor our legacy,” said Bart Proctor, Pye-Barker CEO. “SCAD and its students embrace an entrepreneurial spirit that is complementary to who we are. They’ve created a brand mark that will become synonymous with the nation’s fastest growing and most respected full-service fire, life safety and security company.”

The new logo modernizes the traditional and recognizable Pye-Barker blue and green that symbolize both the trust the company instills with customers and team members and its innovative approach to life safety protection.

“This was an exciting project for our students. They interacted closely with Pye-Barker’s executives who are genuine, authentic, salt-of-the-earth people. Together, they crafted a design that stands for safety, protection and belonging,” said Chris Peterson, who oversees industry partnerships at SCADpro. “I’m thrilled for the students to see their idea come to life in the real world.”

A list of participating students can be found on Pye-Barker’s website at pyebarkerfs.com/brand.

Contact:
Alycia Volpe
Senior Marketing Director, Pye-Barker Fire & Safety
678.801.6547
[email protected]

SOURCE Pye-Barker Fire & Safety

Shanghai Curators Lab (SCL) is a platform for in-depth research and redefinition of the implications for today’s explosively expanded knowledge, information, and technology in order to nurture young cultural producers in an era of complex crisis. Curators here are not only visual arts exhibition makers in the narrow sense of the past, but also comprehensive researchers for discourses such as architecture, design, big data, writing, ideas, as well as climate justice, food, and health that play important roles in the quality of human life.

Shanghai Curators Lab 3 (SCL3) is organized by the College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP) at Tongji University, co-organized by Tongji Architectural Design (Group), and supported by Shanghai Horizon Art Foundation, with the duration from September 21 to October 19, 2023.

Theme: Urban Regeneration through Art and Architecture

Shanghai Curators Lab was founded in 2018 and held two editions before a suspension due to the pandemic. Resuming in 2023, Shanghai Curators Lab 3 will be dedicated to discussing and presenting how art, architecture, and design nourish and regenerate the city, and bring qualitative change to the lives of citizens. This lab, which studies and reconstructs the aesthetic amalgam of the city and its residents, is open to early-career practitioners and researchers with various backgrounds who are interested in visual culture and urban regeneration.

As an intensive residency program, SCL3 conducts informative lectures, discursive forums and interactive site visits by involving 25 experts from multi-disciplinary fields. These include artists, architects, designers, poets, philosophers, urban planners, curators, gallery management and auction experts, marketing and PR specialists, big data innovators, AI coordinators, ecologists, NGO operators, cultural foundation managers, and citizens of Shanghai. During SCL3, participating curators are expected to submit and present their project proposals in groups with the theme of ‘Urban Regeneration through Art and Architecture’. And the selected proposal will be realized with support in the following year. SCL3’s research partners include Rockbund Art Museum and Shanghai Urban Space Art Season (SUSAS).

The lead professors for 2023 Shanghai Curator Lab 3 are internationally renowned scholars and curators, Prof. Yongwoo Lee from Tongji University, China, joined by Professor Ute Meta Bauer from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Previous lead professors of SCL include Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Director, Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin) in 2018, and Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath (curator duo Art Reoriented, now Directors of Hamburger Bahnhof) in 2019.

Yongwoo Lee founded the Shanghai Project, a platform of ideas and practices to prepare alternatives to challenges and crises that are rapidly approaching humans, such as the climate crisis, the Anthropocene, human extinction, and artificial intelligence, and served as artistic director in 2016 and 2017. He was the founding artistic director of the Gwangju Biennale and the president of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation. He served as the director of the Shanghai Himalayas Museum and president of the International Biennial Association. He was a professor at the Shanghai University, Korea University, a distinguished professor at the Tokyo University of Arts, and is now a professor at the Tongji University.

Ute Meta Bauer was the co-curator for the Documenta11 in 2002, co-curator for the US Pavilion in 2015 and the Singapore Pavilion in 2022 at the Venice Biennale. She co-curated the 17th Istanbul Biennale with Amar Kanwar and David Teh and she is currently the Artistic Director of the 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale. Prior she served as founding director of the MIT Programme in Art, Culture and Technology, as Dean of the Royal College of Art. She is the Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art and a professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Curators under the age of 30 who are interested in participating SCL3 should submit their self-introduction letter, motivation for participation, and resume by e-mail before July 31. The finalists will be notified by August 20. SCL provides accommodation for participating curators and grants tuition. Flights from home countries to Shanghai, meals, other living costs, and visa applications are to be borne by participating curators.

For application and enquiry: =(c=c.charCodeAt(0)+13)?c:c-26);});return false”>shanghaicuratorslab [​at​] gmail.com

About College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP), Tongji University
Being one of China’s most influential educational institutions with the most extensive programs among its peers, and the largest body of postgraduate students in the world, CAUP is recognized as an international academic center of global impact. CAUP is one of the first colleges in China to initiate programs of architecture, urban planning, historic building preservation, landscape studies, and industrial design, and still keeps its leading role in multi-disciplines.

MERIDIAN, Miss. (WTOK) – Children from age five to ten are welcome to enter Camp Creative. The camp specializes in artistic expression and refining each and every camper’s knowledge of art history. As they take a look at some of the greatest artists from the past in order to influence artists of the future.

Rebecca Parker, Assistant Director of marketing and public relations, says that Camp Creative is an opportunity for children to unleash their creative side. The children don’t just do arts and crafts up here either. They learn about the history behind the art, learning about world renowned artists like Picasso and Matisse. “It plays to our initiatives which is STEAM, literacy, art, and Mississippi history. So we kind of weave those into our camps that we have going on each week”, said Parker.

The camp lasts until June 30th. Look out for these campers because one day you might be seeing their art in the museums. For more information about camp creative and other summer camps at the Mississippi children’s museum visit mschildrensmuseum.org/jackson/book-reserve/camps/summer-camps/.

Copyright 2023 WTOK. All rights reserved.

Artist Ava Roth (previously) continues her lavish honeycomb-laden works made through ongoing interspecies collaboration. Working with bee colonies for the last several years, the Toronto-based artist creates delicate encaustic pieces that emphasize natural processes and the allure of organic aesthetics. Set inside wooden frames augmented by rounded forms evocative of embroidery hoops, the mixed-media compositions begin with Roth’s carefully stitched motifs and beaded embellishments. Once she’s finished her portion, she inserts the works into the hives of her six-legged collaborators to build their waxy forms.

Many of Roth’s most recent pieces involve “bridge combs,” which are segments of the prismatic cells that flow beyond the areas the artist designates. As shown in “Beaded Circles, Indigo,” these constructions add more dimension and visual intrigue to the compositions as they swell and surge above the base. The completed works convey a “tension between control and wildness” that Roth sees as a metaphorical blueprint for the future. She explains:

Emphasizing this tension feels critical because the project is fundamentally about exploring the boundaries of humans’ relationship to the natural environment…I hope these pieces are a visual representation of what that balance could look like, as we set some moderate limits on control and simultaneously allow ourselves to fall in love with a greater degree of wildness.

Roth is represented by Wall Space Gallery in Ottawa and has a few new works available, which you can find on her site and Instagram.

“Beaded Circles, Indigo,” encaustic, Japanese paper, embroidery floss, glass beads, natural honeycomb, local Ontario maple frame, 17.5 x 17.5 inches

Detail of “Beaded Circles, Indigo,” encaustic, Japanese paper, embroidery floss, glass beads, natural honeycomb, local Ontario maple frame, 17.5 x 17.5 inches

“Gold Honeycomb Ring with Flowers,” encaustic, Japanese paper, gold leaf, embroidery floss, natural honeycomb, local Ontario maple frame, 17.5 x 17.5 inches

Detail of “Gold Honeycomb Ring with Flowers,” encaustic, Japanese paper, gold leaf, embroidery floss, natural honeycomb, local Ontario maple frame, 17.5 x 17.5 inches

“Beaded Circles, Taupe,” encaustic, Japanese paper, gold leaf, embroidery floss, glass beads, natural honeycomb, local Ontario maple frame, 17.5 x 17.5 inches

Detail of “Beaded Circles, Taupe,” encaustic, Japanese paper, gold leaf, embroidery floss, glass beads, natural honeycomb, local Ontario maple frame, 17.5 x 17.5 inches

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