The Creative Placemaking Convocation for State Arts Agency Community Development Coordinators

Divergent Thinking: Making New Connections

In this plenary, participants learn about, observe, and discuss ways of working and partnering for effective creative placemaking in diverse, challenging, and ever-changing circumstances. We hear about examples of effective, unconventional partnerships and ways to help form and support responsive and flexible collaborations. Speakers explore working with mixed goals and organizational cultures to identify synergy as well as potential pitfalls among key community players. They explore when it is appropriate for public sector agencies to push, when to follow, when to get out of the way, and how to better understand and help practitioners navigate complex partnerships.

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Please join me on March 1, 2018, at the Utah Museum of Art at 5PM for a preview of Epicenter's new exhibit, "Our Futures." An artist talk, “Designing Our Futures,” by me and my co-creators Ryan Baxter, Bryan Brooks, and Jarod Hamm will follow at 7PM.

The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) presents the second exhibition in its ACME Lab, a new space dedicated to community engagement and art experimentation in the Museum’s Emma Eccles Jones Education Center. Our Futures, designed by Epicenter, invites visitors to “time travel” to the year 2039 and experience four potential futures for the residents of Green River. In doing so, visitors, specifically teens and young adults, are asked to consider the role they each play in shaping their own community’s future.

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As a part of the Sierra Nevada College's Interdisciplinary Arts Low-Residency MFA program Maria Sykes will lead a 3-hour workshop that builds on the exhibit co-curated with Bryan Brooks (Epicenter Citizen Designer) for Epicenter, This Place: Selections from the Frontier. The workshop is an exercise in co-creating a temporary exhibit which revolves around personal objects and stories. We'll examine narrative, myth, criticality, community engagement, place, perception, documentation, and accessibility; discuss the nature of integrated and interdisciplinary practice; and explore the artist's position within a community as an outsider, local, visiting, or recurring.
 

"This Place: Selections from the Frontier" is an exhibition of recent work by Epicenter's Frontier Fellows that explores boundaries, borders, extraction, tourism, and the physical and cultural impact of land use on the rural, western town of Green River, Utah (pop 952). Featuring work by: Sarah Baugh & Nicole Lavelle, Pete Collard & Alice Masters, Shawn Creeden, Grayson Earle, Eliza Fernand, Corbin LaMont, Rob Loucks, Ashley Ross & Jarod Hamm, Kirsten Southwell, and Hannah Vaughn & Damien Delorme.

Tahoe Gallery, Sierra Nevada College from January 7–March 3, 2017
Opening Lecture: Sat. January 7, 5-6pm
Opening Reception: Sat. January 7, 6–8pm

A presentation at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah, as a part of their Art Talk Series, curated by Amy Jorgensen.

Maria Sykes will be giving a private tour to the Friends of Contemporary Art of Epicenter's A Call to Place exhibition at the Rio Gallery in downtown Salt Lake City.

Utah is unlike any other place on the planet. Local artists who are engaging Utah’s spectacular and varied landscape will give short slide presentations about their work. A moderated panel discussion will follow. Participants are Julie Rada, Raymond C. Morales Post-MFA Fellow, College of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City; Adam Bateman, executive director/curator, Central Utah Art Center (CUAC), Salt Lake City; Maria Sykes, principal of arts & culture, Epicenter, Green River; and Levi Jackson, photography manager, Weber State University, Ogden.

This program is part of the Utah Museum of Fine Art’s ongoing series ARTLandish: Land Art, Landscape, and the Environment, sponsored by the S. J. and Jessie E. Quinney Foundation and presented in partnership with the College of Fine Arts, University of Utah and the J. Willard Marriott Library, and the Salt Lake City Public Library. 

Common Field Presents: Hand-in-Glove 2015, a national convening for the field of alternative art spaces, artist-led projects and artists' organizations held September 17th - 20th in Minneapolis / St. Paul, MN.

Panel: Place, Race, Geography & Power

Panelists: Maria Sykes, Chaun Webster, Dylan Miner, and Shawn(ta) Smith

Description: Artists and arts organizers propose, create and advocate for alternative projects, spaces and institutions in a variety of communities and contexts. Place, race, geography and power matter to the field. Popular narratives about artists and arts organizing often simplify our roles, the contours of our identities and our artistic work, as well as our participation in broader social movements. This session will consider assumptions and alternatives to widely-held notions about artistic centers and margins, provoking new questions and possibilities for the field.

The Community Foundation of Utah has recognized fifty individuals who are making a measurable difference in the lives of Utahns. Called the ‘Enlightened 50’, or E-50, members were nominated by members of the community and inducted into the network at a reception held in their honor. The 2015 ‘E-50’ includes individuals from all parts of Utah and all walks of life, who share one thing: a commitment to the common good. The criteria for this recognition are: 

• An innovator – pioneering original and sustainable approaches to the critical issues facing our state and its people
• A builder – committed to community engagement and the common good
• A visionary – most likely to make a profound mark on Utah’s quality of life

The Governor’s Leadership in the Arts Awards honor those who have demonstrated exemplary leadership in the arts. Today, the Governor’s Leadership in the Arts Awards recognize those qualities that advance the arts for the people and communities in our state and are Utah’s highest honor in the arts.

The  recipients will be honored on May 5, 2016 in conjunction with the Mountain West Arts Conference. 2015 recipients: Plan-B Theatre Company (Organization), Carrie Trenholm (Education), Epicenter (Local Arts Agency), and Kathy Cieslewicz (Individual).

Emerging Gulf States 2014 will bring a diverse group of speakers together to discuss how emerging professionals are reaching beyond the traditional modes of practicing architecture to successfully collaborate with allied professionals and their communities and make meaningful change through design.

As part of the Mountain West Arts Conference, Maria Sykes will be presenting with Savannah Barrett of Art of the Rural and Bryan Cottam, director of Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands.

“ . . . to dwell between heaven and earth, man has to “understand” these two elements, as well as their interaction.”

Join the AIA Utah YAF and the University of Utah College of Architecture and Planning in the continued discussion of art and architecture borne of the Mountain West. The extended landscapes of this place have long attracted explorers, pioneers, seekers. Artists such as Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson positioned their works in the remote basins of Utah--works that pull the willing viewer more deeply into the landscape. What brings us to the Mountain West? How do we, as artists and architects, interpret place through art and architecture? How is our understanding of this extended landscape heightened as viewers and inhabitants?

Panelists: Frank Ferguson, Jose Galarza, Jack Forinash, Hikmet Sidney Loe, and Maria Sykes.