First Person Festival
How do you build a museum of the people? If you’re First Person Arts, you start by bringing together an amazing team of museum specialists well-versed in user generated content, artists skilled in capturing stories from real life and historians from some of the top universities in the country. And then you brainstorm. And throw out questions. And ideas. And more questions. And disagree. And say really great things like, “The object is a vessel for the story.” And share stories about personal objects that matter in our lives. A bunch of really smart people in one room can be both an inspiring and dangerous thing.
Today has been the first day of a two day planning session for the First Person Museum. Spearheaded by museum development consultant Kathleen McLean, we are figuring out the most effective process for capturing the objects, stories and historical contexts that will go into creating the First Person Museum, to be on display at the Painted Bride Art Center in conjunction with the First Person Festival in November thru December 2010.
One of our artistic partners is the popular NPR program Radio Diaries. Radio Diaries will be producing the audio commentary for a selection of the objects submitted for the Museum. Producer Samara Freemark was on hand today voicing her opinions and questions about the project. Hear Samara’s thoughts on the Museum so far.
Our other artistic partners include photographer JJ Tiziou, Inquirer writer Dianna Marder and filmmaker David Kessler. Each will be using their particular medium to capture the personal narratives behind our collection of objects. Tomorrow we meet with the community organizations that will help spearhead object collection throughout the city. We’ll meet them tomorrow!
Root for Olga in July's Grand Slam!
Our first Grand Slam is Saturday, July 24th at 8pm with a pre-Slam Block Party, all at the Painted Bride Art Center. The block party will feature bbq, booze, and the Brooklyn band, Peculiar Gentlemen. We’re keeping the theme a secret till the end of this month, so all storytellers will have the same shot at prepping their story. Stay tuned for the big reveal! In the meantime, buy your tickets here.
Our second Grand Slam kicks off the First Person Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art on Wednesday, November 10th at 8pm, also at the Painted Bride Art Center. Then stick around the Bride for four more days of innovative, collaborative, funny, touching programming based on our lives. We’ll be closing things out on Sunday, November 14th with what promises to be one of the top cultural events in the city. We’ll be revealing more details over the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
To recap:
Grand Slam #1: Saturday, July 24, 8pm with a Block Party featuring Peculiar Gentlemen at 5pm. $30 for Block Party and Grand Slam ($24 for members)/ $15 for just the Grand Slam ($12 for members).
First Person Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art: November 10-14, 2010
Grand Slam #2: Wednesday, November 10, 8pm
All events at the Painted Bride Art Center.
And to get you in the mood, here’s our winning story from the last Grand Slam, featuring Ky Mettler!
Maybe you’ve picked up on the buzz about First Person Arts being one of eight art organizations to win the $75,000 Engage 2020 Grant. First Philebrity gave us props, followed by City Paper’s Critical Mass blog.
Well, that’s actually only half the story. We also won a $86,250 Interpretation Planning Grant from the Heritage Philadelphia Program, a program of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Both grants will enable the development of a museum of the people, to be installed at the Painted Bride during the 2010 First Person Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art. That’s nothing but a tease, I know. Stay tuned as we roll out more details on the project over the summer.
We have such amazing company among our co-grantees, plus we were selected by a national review panel for both grants. It’s really an honor. So yeah, it’s been a good couple weeks on the 17th floor of 1 S. Broad. There’s even been dancing. Seriously. And if you want to come celebrate with us, we’ll all be at APO tonight, 5-6pm. (102 South 13th Street) Come grab a drink with us! (Disclaimer: no grant money will be spent on fancy cocktails.)
A champion of first person arts (and First Person Arts), Miss Koco’s established a nice archive of projects in what we might as well call Distributed Documentary: “Distributed,” because it is not all collected at one time, but “Documentary,” nevertheless, because it does adhere to a single collection point. Here’s one she conducted for a year in 1998-1999:
the door, 1998-1999
For a year I asked people who came to visit me to sign and leave something from their wallet, bag, or purse on my door.
It’s a visitor tax, levied entirely in ephemera:
Check out the rest of the collection HERE.
Davy Rothbart, with Found Magazine, has built the world’s largest ‘door’ and encouraged millions of people across the world to deliver to it an astonishing array of found items-scraps from the lives of others–fragments of stories that form a far less time-bound or geographically centered picture than Miss Koco’s “the door.” But for what his found objects lack in narrative coherence, they gain in sheer wonder and, in some cases, voyeuristic indulgence.
Rothbart will be at the First Person Arts Festival, Friday November 14th with a collection of some of his found items. Miss Koco, we’re guessing, will probably be there too.
Found
Location: Painted
Bride
Time: 7-8PM
Cost: $10
Davy Rothbart,
founder of the wildly popular underground magazine Found (also
a book and website) weaves some of his most fascinating finds into an
energetic presentation. Join Rothbart for his entertaining
elaboration on the stories behind the cast-off notes and letters
plucked from the nation’s subways, schools, streets and
sidewalks.
Davy
Rothbart, creator of Found Magazine, is a collector,
author, filmmaker, and frequent contributor to the public radio show
This American Life. The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, a
collection of Rothbart’s short stories, was published in 2005
by Simon & Schuster, and Geffen Records recently released
Rothbart’s documentary film How We Survive about
the punk rock band Rise Against. Rothbart lives in his hometown of
Ann Arbor, Michigan.
And exhibit of
Found items will be on display in the Painted Bride Gallery
throughout the Festival. Audience members are invited to contribute
their own discoveries to Found’s collection of anonymous
ephemera.
Tickets are available for advance purchase here.
