Art21 Season 4 PBS Station Mini-Grant Awards

Each new season, Art21 offers a limited number of grant awards to PBS stations for administering outreach efforts in conjunction with local broadcasts of the Art in the Twenty-First Century series. These mini-grants are a springboard for inspiring outreach that is truly collaborative, bringing together organizations and individuals at the local level to explore the vitality of contemporary art.

After a competitive application process, four PBS stations received a $3500 mini-grant to create action-based involvement encouraging wide audience viewership and community engagement around Season 4 of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century series, premiering in Fall 2007. These stations and their initial plans for multi-part Season 4 programming are: KPTS, Wichita, KS
KPTS is partnering with Wichita State University’s Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita’s premiere museum for contemporary art and visual culture, to host weekly public screenings at diverse sites in the Wichita area throughout the month of October. Events will take place each Tuesday at Tangent Lab, a downtown gallery; the WATER Center, a water treatment plant and educational facility; Interfaith Ministries, as part of an event co-hosted with the Peace and Social Justice Center of South Central Kansas; and at the Ulrich itself. After each screening, a guest speaker will facilitate a discussion with attendees. In addition to the preview screenings, KPTS will provide Art21 materials, including DVDs and Educators’ Guides, to art instructors at each high school in Wichita. Finally, to deepen the impact of the film series and extend the project beyond October, the Ulrich Museum will collaborate with the Salina Art Center in Salina, Kansas (about 90 minutes north of Wichita), to bring Season 4 artist Mark Dion to Kansas for an artist’s talk in Spring 2008 at both institutions. WDSE, Duluth, MN
WDSE is a small station in northern Minnesota that has achieved success in its community outreach. By broadcasting Season 4, WDSE hopes to increase public awareness of contemporary art, stimulate use of the series as a significant resource for learning, and increase station viewership and, ultimately, membership. The station is greatly connected with its community, where it has initiated various art related projects, and in connection with Season 4, it will partner with the Tweed Museum; the Department of Education, University of Minnesota Duluth; the Visual Arts Department, University of Wisconsin-Superior; the Arrowhead Regional Art Council; the Duluth Art Institute; and more than five area art galleries and at least 10 area high schools, with the aim of integrating the series into the taught curriculum. These collaborations will focus on the promotion of the series, dissemination of materials related to the series, use of the Art21 Web site, public screenings, and at least one public art exhibit. WXXI, Rochester, NY
WXXI and cultural partners the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) of the University of Rochester and Rochester Contemporary Art Center (RoCo) will join forces to host four free and open to the public screening events launching Season 4 of Art in the Twenty-First Century. The screening events are an important element to this community outreach that will introduce new and existing audience-goers to the forthcoming broadcasts, a lecture at the MAG featuring Season 4 artist Alfredo Jaar and the opening of TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art exhibit at the MAG, featuring work by Season 4 artists Jaar and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. WXXI will also publish an article in the October issue of its Education Electronic Newsletter promoting the broadcast and accompanying events. Through this project, the station hopes to inspire future outreach collaborations, provide the general community as well as educators and students additional Art21 resources that can be used in the classroom, drive participants to the Art21 broadcasts and Web sites, and connect local viewership with Rochester’s art community, thereby reciprocally building an audience for Art21 and contemporary art in Rochester. Louisiana Public Broadcasting, Baton Rouge, LA
For its Art21 project, Louisiana Public Broadcasting (LPB) will collaborate with a local art council, two art galleries, and the Louisiana Department of Education to offer two community events and a formal education initiative. To accomplish this, LPB will host two events in early October: one at its telecommunications center in Baton Rouge, in collaboration with the Baton Rouge Gallery, and one at Southeastern Contemporary Art Gallery, located on the campus of Southeastern University in Hammond, LA. At each event, local artists, some of whom are also university faculty members, will elaborate upon the topics presented in the Art21 segments and lead an open discussion with the audience. LPB will also develop a formal education initiative, "The Three C's: Contemporary Art Crosses the Curriculum," to demonstrate ways to use contemporary art in diverse subject areas. The Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge will develop, with input from the educational staff from LPB and the Arts Content Supervisor for the Louisiana Department of Education, educational materials to model ways to use contemporary art across the curriculum. These resources will be accessible on LPB Learning Port, LPB’s educational website which has more than 1.6 million visits by Louisiana teachers and students a year.