When she’s not directing our development efforts, Deborah Klein coordinates Lotus visual arts projects. Here’s Deborah’s look back at this year’s fab festival Arts Village. The visionary visual arts crew this year: Gail Hale (chair), Cem Basman, Amy Brier, Suzanne Halvorson, Deborah Klein, Bruce Norton, Keith Romaine, Alec Slinde, and Yolanda Treviño.
Every year, as we devise projects for the Lotus Arts Village, one of our biggest challenges is simply wading through the flood of ideas that evolve into project plans.
Deborah (in red skirt) helps assemble a Tiny House
Gail Hale's hanging fabric sculpture (upper left)
We want structures – bigger, taller, thoroughly accessible. Large sculptural pieces that activate space and incorporate repurposed materials. Everyone transformed into fevered fantasy figures. Color and movement, things that go bump in the night and burn brightly. All created by four to six sets of hands on the smell of an oily rag. AARRGGHH!!
Amy Brier (left) and Alec Slinde work on set-up
“Village” connotes structures, homes, community:
Each year, our Visual Arts Committee experiments with how to bring a microcosm of the world to life on the blank canvas of 6th Street in downtown Bloomington, Indiana. It has been said that the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival creates a small town virtually overnight; well, the Arts Village is Lotus’s wild-child, ready-made neighborhood.
The urge to “go big” is strong, even though resources are always limited. But the artistic imagination recognizes few boundaries, and the Festival is an opportunity for all of us to dream of new realities … and to stretch ever further to create beauty.
This year, my personal favorites were Keith Romaine’s Tiny Houses,
based on design experiments addressing pop-up emergency housing. I gladly helped saw and screw together pre-fab frames for many weekends prior to the Festival. The outcome was a cluster of sweet structures whose outlines speak of house and home.
Lotus Tiny Houses
Suzanne Halvorson’s vision of an ephemeral Jewish wedding canopy, and an authentic tipi indigenous to the Great Plains native people (courtesy of a last-minute offer from a community member), rounded out the “structures” part of our vision.
Suzanne Halvorson during set-up
Gail Hale’s suspended sculptures and Alec Slinde’s growing community of costumes nailed the “activation” and “fantasy” dream. But the hands-down, all-in, most-popular feature of the Lotus Arts Village was the chalk art created by community members themselves.
Chalk art "rugs" -- an all-ages project
Admiring a lighted figure created by Ivy Tech students
At the hands of visitors, what was conceived of as a nod to the rugs that soften austere nomadic structures expanded and expanded, becoming a magic carpet of colors and images that extended the full length of the Village. That something so simple could be so effective is a lesson that my karma tosses up to me from time to time, and this year’s chalk art project revived that little voice in my head that says, “I told you so!”
Deborah Klein is Development Director of the Lotus Education and Arts Foundation. She’s also an artist whose work has been exhibited in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. See some of Deborah’s dimensional paper illustrations here.
2010 festival images courtesy of Pat Glushko, Andy Qualls, Michael Redman, Levi Thomas
