|
April 2009 News
Rose Brooks Partnership Award
Chameleon and the Kansas City Art Institute have been awarded Partnership Awards form Rose Brooks Domestic Shelter for our arts and youth development programming this spring. Chameleon, working with Hugh Merrill’s Community Art and Service Learning class at the Kansas City Art Institute, has been providing Rose Brooks arts classes two days a week, and on Saturdays students have been decorating the walls with wonderful murals. The long-term goal of the project is to develop a sculpture park on the Rose Brooks campus. The first sculpture is a concrete and mosaic tree over 10 feet tall. The resident families have been working with students to paint birdhouses concerned with their hopes and dreams and these will be hung from the sculptural tree. Theo Bunch, a junior in sculpture at KCAI, has been the lead artist on the project and has done a fantastic job of conceptualizing and managing this complex project. He has developed a creative community of students from a variety of departments from KCAI and has led them in teaching art classes, creating the mosaic tree and painting murals. Chameleon is using funding from the R. A. Long and Sosland Foundations to support the program. Chameleon will be submitting grants to other foundations to support continued programming and further development of the sculpture park in the summer and fall of 2009.
Green Day Parks & Recreation Community Center Events
StoneLion Puppet Theatre, a Chameleon Arts Caravan partner, along with Bridging the Gap, Lakeside Nature Center and Esoke African Drumming and Dance and others, is providing Kansas City interdisciplinary arts and environmental events this spring. The first event took place at the Tony Agurrie Community Center on Saturday March 21. Over 500 people participated in the daylong event, watching puppet performances, making art, dancing, and learning about recycling and other environmental practices. Hope to see you at the other upcoming Green Day events!
April 18 @ Lakeside Nature Center
11am–4pm (Earth Day Festival activities run until 4pm)
Free and open to the public.
For more information, call 816-221-5351
Join StoneLion for this day of activities including puppet shows, live animal demonstrations, environmental activities and puppet-making!
April 25
Chalk Walk @ Concourse Park - St. John Ave. KC, MO
11am–3 p.m., 11:30am and 1pm Down the Drain puppet show
Free and open to the public
Join us at the North East Chalk Walk as Saturday becomes A Picnic for the Planet!
Environmental puppet shows, puppet workshops, art projects and educational activites all celebrate the planet. Lakeside Nature Center touch table, Bridging the Gap games, MARC activites and more. This event is a collaboration with Mosaic Brain.
Funded in part through The Francis Family Foundation and The Metropolitan Arts Council ‘08 Kansas City and The Missouri Arts Council, a state agency.
According to StoneLion artistic director, Heather Nisbett-Lowenstein, “These are such great community events because we are showcasing the incredible artistic talent we have in Kansas City, while we’re educating the community on the importance of taking care of our environment. Families love the variety of hand-on activities and entertainment that reaches across all ages and cultures.” 
For the third year StoneLion Puppet Theatre is sponsoring the series of Green Day festivals in metropolitan neighborhoods. These events are part of a series of six public festivals leading up to A Picnic for the Planet, a giant environmental puppet pageant in the sculpture garden of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art July 19, 2009. Other festival dates include:
May 1 @ Line Creek Elementary
5801 NW Waukomis
Kansas City, MO 64151
May 2 @ Wyandotte High School
2501 Minnesota
Kansas City, KS 66102
May 9 EarthFest @ Theis Mall KC, MO
Oak Street & East 47th Street
Kansas City, MO 64111
We hope to see you there!
21st Century KCMO After-School Programming
Chameleon is partnering with the KCMO School District to provide after school arts and academic programming to King, Whittier and Pinkerton elementary schools in April and May. Working with the Hip Hop Academy, Chameleon artists are teaching dance, creative writing/poetry and using the visual arts to teach science and math to the students. The project will continue in the Fall and is supported by a three year federal grant.
Office of Homeless Liaison Summer Camp
Will there be a Chameleon’s Summer Arts and Academic Academy for homeless students in KCKS? Presently we do not have funding in place for this important program. For the past three years Chameleon has provided an arts and education summer program designed to teach at-risk and homeless children and youth academic, creative and life skills. In partnership with the Office of the Homeless Liaison, Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools, Chameleon has developed a curriculum and program for inspiring the academic and social progress of homeless students attending USD 500 schools. Working for the past 3 years with a core group of 30 homeless students, Chameleon has offered Saturday and after-school programming, which integrates academics with creative arts. The use of inner city originated art forms such as Hip Hop, Rap, Crumping (street dance form) and graffiti permits the engagement of our urban core students in areas of established interest. This creative work is highly integrated with academic training supported by use of the ArtWorks curriculum, a standards-based set of instructional modules developed by the Institute for Children and Poverty for shelter-based students. Without funding we will not be able to serve up to 80 homeless students over a six-week period this summer. Does the program work? Yes, alumni of the program are attending Drake University and 3 past students are studying Pre-Med at Park University. If you can help, please contact Hugh Merrill 816-686-8626 or Cheryl Kimmi 816-516-4750.
Foundation: Art, Theory Education Conference (FATE) Portland Oregon
Hugh Merrill was invited to address the FATE conference and present a paper on Chameleon, community art and service learning. Artist/educators from universities and colleges from across the United States attend the conference to discuss new educational strategies for Bachelor of Fine Arts programs. More and more colleges are looking for successful models for developing community arts and service learning programs and curriculum. Chameleon’s programs over the past three years, working with the Office of Homeless Liaison, Rose Brooks Shelter and the Kansas City Art Institute provide a highly successful model for developing arts programming that comes from and provides value to disenfranchised communities.