This month’s Awesome grant goes to Randy Peterson and Ageless Art – Randy’s small but growing program helping seniors in assisted living facilities uncover the artist inside. Randy started with one student 3 years ago and now serves over 200 LA-area seniors a month – many saddled with serious neurological and health issues but, says Randy, with creativity just waiting to bust out: I’ve seen people who really have no mobility and expression come to life through art. THAT is worth a thousand bucks in paint brushes. Here’s just a few of thousands of works created by Randy’s students. Later this summer, we’ll update you on an Ageless Art Gallery showing – stay tuned for more info!
The Awesome Foundation New York is proud to present our latest grant to Kylin O’Brien and her awesome project, the LEGOmandala. Congratulations! Kylin O’Brien is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her LEGOmandalas combine the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of creating and ritualistically dismantling ornate sand mandalas with the contemporary medium of LEGO. A meticulous work of art, once complete it is taken apart by a group of adults and children invited to transform it into their own creation. The deconstruction of the piece represents the acceptance of material impermanence. The reconstruction of the LEGO represents the importance of imaginative co-creation and joy in transformative work. LEGOmandala brings people together, raises awareness and gives voice to Tibetan culture in a Western context – making its deep philosophical concepts accessible, contemporary and relevant. View a time-lapse video of a LEGOmandala event on Vimeo.
After a hiatus, Awesome NYC is springing back with our April grant to 596 Acres. Here they are in their own words: 596 Acres distributes information about publicly owned vacant land in Brooklyn by publishing print maps, creating and hosting an interactive map, holding land use visioning sessions, and providing advocacy and support for community-based groups all over Brooklyn as they negotiate with city agencies for permission to use currently vacant and fenced-off lots for community-determined projects. Since we tested our tactics in a pilot project in June 2011, three vacant and warehoused lots in Brooklyn have become official sites of community projects: 462 Halsey Street, Feedback Farms, and the Java Street Garden Collaborative; Myrtle Village Green and Patchen Community Square are nearly official, too. Twenty-seven other communities are organizing for control of different pieces of Brooklyn using our tools. The April 2012 Awesome Foundation grant will be used to fund a dramatic extension to our current project by adding the publicly owned vacant lots in the other four boroughs to our site. This will give the communities in the rest of the city an idea of which vacant lots are owned by the city. It’s extra Awesome that this part of… read more →
We’ve been quiet here at Awesome Foundation San Francisco for a little bit, but excited to say that we’re back this month with a duo of amazing projects that we’re thrilled to be a part of. One is a dance party, another is a game festival. Presenting… 1) The Balloon Powered Dance Party George, Will, and Issac are these three guys that we met recently who in their free time have been launching various items into the stratosphere using hundreds of helium balloons (see, e.g. a Christmas tree). They’ve teamed up with the good people over at the Million Fishes Art Collective in the Mission to do an installation that will fill their massive 22,000 cubic feet gallery floor to ceiling with balloons. We’re funding them to do as much. This alone would be probably awesome enough to warrant an Awesome Foundation grant, but the added twist is that they’ve been playing around with little radio receiver/speaker/LED units that will fit inside a few hundred of these balloons, allowing them to broadcast some bumpin’ tunes and shine a weirdo ethereal light through the morass of inflated elastic that people will be allowed to wander through. The results, we expect, will… read more →
Wednesday, November 16, 2011:
It was a dark and stormy night, but that didn’t keep our legion of loyal supporters from representing.