WHY COMMUNITIES SHOULD SUPPORT THEIR LOCAL ARTISTS
I was asked to give a lecture to a local community group on this subject a few weeks ago. I began roughing out the talk and want to test it with readers here on Absolutearts.com Do realize that this was originally written for community movers and shakers in a small up and coming Columbus annex. Here at absolutearts I’m simply preaching to the choir. But your opinions are valuable to me all the same.
Walter King on 04.30.07 @ 05:27 PM EST [more..]
I had never given much thought to the matter until somebody pointed out that they seldom see me in the usual hangouts – the ‘insider’ ones I used to go to in the wilder years and the IN ones I barely know the names or locations of today. I guess I have to discipline myself a bit more for fun. This isn’t normal, right? Normal is needing to discipline yourself to keep focused on work. Not me, I have a hard time finding the time to put aside for all the fun everybody seems to be having, although the definition of fun may differ greatly and what some conceive to be having a great time might actually end up being a waste of time depending on the perspective.
From my best recollection Chris and Kevin left Tulsa at the same time. But Chris says he left Tulsa in sixtyeight since he was already out of high school and Kev in sixtynine so he could finish his last year in high school. However it happened I lost the two people who made me feel like I was a creative person. Kevin, I found some years later, went on to get his BFA and MFA and moved to Brooklyn New York with his wife and two daughters, Jessica and Lauren. He had a loft space during the late 70’s. He was primarily trained as a photographer. He eventually had an exhibition at Holly Soloman‘s Gallery in New York. She had him take photos of her openings and she gave him a show of his celebrity shots. For most of us that would have been the high point of a life time. A show at Holly Soloman Gallery during the 70's would make most of our careers, or so we think. But she wouldn’t let him show his more creative and experimental work so at some point he left her gallery and went back to California. There he paid the bills by renovating homes for a while. He had a family to raise. Meanwhile he was experimenting with video. Kev couldn’t keep his mind limited to just photography. Video was still a very new medium and Kev loved performance…all those stories, lies and pranks were a great training ground for his experiments. 
A few months ago, I went to Istanbul for a wedding on a boat in the Bosphorous. I was there for four days, and between the ceremony and the party afterwards, I had a lot of time to wander, and think about this country and its people, who live just across the border from Syria, Iraq, Armenia and Iran. I drank a lot of tea in carpet shops, ate lunch with Turks I had only just met, and heard a lot of calls to prayer echoing from one minaret to another. In one carpet shop, I carried on a conversation with a salesman as another faced Mecca, bowing up and down on his personal prayer rug. 
