|
Studio Watts Workshop
The Studio Watts Workshop was an arts organization founded in 1964 and based in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, dedicated to providing working space for artists and offering a broad range of arts workshops for the local community. History The principal organizers of the Studio Watts Workshop were jazz musician Jayne Cortez and accountant and arts patron James Woods. Woods, who worked at a local savings and loan, and his wife Margo Woods, a probation officer, provided the funding for the workshop's initial operating costs, because of their conviction that art could be a tool for social change. Woods found a location for the workshop, renting an empty furniture outlet on 104th Street and Grandee Avenue, and called together a group of eight artists to begin to plan what would become the Studio Watts Workshop. After the Watts riots led to renewed attention on the neighborhood, there were new opportunities for support and donations that led to the group being able to provi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Watts, Los Angeles
Watts is a neighborhood in southern Los Angeles, California. It is located within the South Los Angeles region, bordering the cities of Lynwood, Huntington Park and South Gate to the east and southeast, respectively, and the unincorporated community of Willowbrook to the south. Founded in the late nineteenth century as a ranching community, the arrival of the railroads and the construction of Watts Station saw the rapid development of Watts as an independent city, but in 1926 it was consolidated with Los Angeles. By the 1940s, Watts transformed into a primarily working class African-American neighborhood, but from the 1960s developed a reputation as a low-income, high-crime area, following the Watts riots and the increasing influence of street gangs. Watts has become a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood with a significant African American minority, and remains one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in Los Angeles despite falling crime rates since the 1990s. Notable civ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. But jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisationa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jayne Cortez
Jayne Cortez (May 10, 1934 – December 28, 2012) was an African-American poet, activist, small press publisher and spoken-word performance artist whose voice is celebrated for its political, surrealistic and dynamic innovations in lyricism and visceral sound. Her writing is part of the canon of the Black Arts Movement. She was married to jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman (1954–64), and their son is jazz drummer Denardo Coleman. In 1975 Cortez married painter, sculptor, and printmaker Melvin Edwards, and they lived in Dakar, Senegal, and New York City. Biography Jayne Cortez was born Sallie Jayne Richardson on the Army base at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, on May 10, 1934. Her father was a career soldier who served in both world wars; her mother was a secretary. She is the second-born of three children with an older sister and a younger brother. At the age of seven, she moved to Los Angeles, where she grew up in the Watts district. Busby, Margaret"Jayne Cortez obituary: Poet who ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a US$25,000 gift from Edsel Ford. By 1947, after the death of the two founders, the foundation owned 90% of the non-voting shares of the Ford Motor Company. (The Ford family retained the voting shares.) Between 1955 and 1974, the foundation sold its Ford Motor Company holdings and now plays no role in the automobile company. Ahead of the foundation selling its Ford Motor Company holdings, in 1949, Henry Ford II created the , a separate corporate foundation that to this day serves as the philanthropic arm of the Ford Motor Company and is not associated with the foundation. The Ford Foundation makes grants through its headquarters and ten international field offices. For many years, the foundation's financial endowment was the largest private endowment in the world; it remains among the wealth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Doris Duke Foundation
Doris Duke (November 22, 1912 – October 28, 1993) was an American billionaire tobacco heiress, philanthropist, art collector, horticulturalist, and socialite. She was often called "the richest girl in the world". Her great wealth, luxurious lifestyle, and love life attracted significant press coverage, both during her life and after her death. Duke's passions varied wildly. Briefly a news correspondent in the 1940s, she also played jazz piano and learned to surf competitively. At her father's estate in Hillsborough Township, New Jersey, she created one of America's largest indoor botanical displays. She was also active in preserving more than 80 historic buildings in Newport, Rhode Island. Duke was close friends with former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and in 1968, when Duke created the Newport Restoration Foundation, Kennedy Onassis was appointed the vice president and championed the foundation. Her philanthropic work in AIDS research, medicine, and child welfar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Wyatt, Jr
Richard is a male given name. It originates, via Old French, from Old Frankish and is a compound of the words descending from Proto-Germanic ''*rīk-'' 'ruler, leader, king' and ''*hardu-'' 'strong, brave, hardy', and it therefore means 'strong in rule'. Nicknames include "Richie", "Dick", "Dickon", " Dickie", " Rich", " Rick", " Rico", "Ricky", and more. Richard is a common English, German and French male name. It's also used in many more languages, particularly Germanic, such as Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Dutch, as well as other languages including Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Finnish. Richard is cognate with variants of the name in other European languages, such as the Swedish "Rickard", the Catalan "Ricard" and the Italian "Riccardo", among others (see comprehensive variant list below). People named Richard Multiple people with the same name * Richard Andersen (other) * Richard Anderson (other) * Richard Cartwright (other) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Los Angeles Music Center
The Music Center (officially named the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County) is one of the largest performing arts centers in the United States. Located in downtown Los Angeles, The Music Center is composed of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Ahmanson Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Roy and Edna Disney / CalArts Theatre, and Walt Disney Concert Hall. Each year, The Music Center welcomes more than 1.3 million people to performances by its four internationally renowned resident companies: Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Master Chorale, and Center Theatre Group (CTG) as well as performances by the dance series Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at The Music Center. The center is home to on-going community events, arts festivals, outdoor concerts, participatory arts activities and workshops, and educational programs. History In April 1955, Dorothy Chandler, wife of Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler, began fundraising toward a permanent home for the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Melvino Garretti
Melvino Garretti (born 1946) is an American multidisciplinary artist who works in ceramics, painting, and performance. His visual works are known for their recognizable abstract motif, which often includes a variety of colorful emblematic shapes, and symbols. He is an original member of the Studio Watts Workshop art collective, and a 1978 MFA graduate of San Francisco Art Institute. Early life and education Melvino Garretti was born in Los Angeles. While he was at an early age his family moved to Compton. In 1967, Melvino Garretti joined the nearby Studio Watts Workshop. Although, originally a painter, the workshop introduced him to ceramics through two years of rigorous work at Great Barrington Pottery, the pottery shop of Richard Bennett in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. There he received lessons in Japanese techniques and philosophy of production, and fired pottery within an authentic wood-burning kiln. After this focus in ceramics, Garretti moved to San Francisc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ceremony Of Us
''Ceremony Of Us'' was an interracial dance encounter between the Studio Watts Workshop, an African American arts organization, and the San Francisco Dancer's Workshop, Anna Halprin's dance company. The performance took place at the Mark Taper Forum, a venue of the Los Angeles Music Center, on February 27, 1969. The work was commissioned as a part of the Second Los Angeles Festival of the Performing Arts, a festival organized by Studio Watts director James M. Woods in coordination with the Music Center. Additional events for the festival involved jazz performances at Shelley's Manhole jazz club by Studio Watts master teachers John Carter and Bobby Bradford, as well as a poetry reading by Watts Studio fellow and ''Ceremony of Us'' dancer Wanda Coleman. The performances developed from a series of workshops Halprin facilitated with the two companies. To begin with in late 1968 Halprin worked with the two companies separately, developing a movement vocabulary specific for an all-white ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African-American Arts Organizations
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of enslaved Africans who are from the United States. While some Black immigrants or their children may also come to identify as African-American, the majority of first generation immigrants do not, preferring to identify with their nation of origin. African Americans constitute the second largest racial group in the U.S. after White Americans, as well as the third largest ethnic group after Hispanic and Latino Americans. Most African Americans are descendants of enslaved people within the boundaries of the present United States. On average, African Americans are of West/Central African with some European descent; some also have Native American and other ancestry. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, African immigrants generally do not self-id ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arts Organizations Based In California
The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both highly dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into innovative, stylized and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training and/or theorizing within a particular tradition, across generations and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural and individual identities, while transmitting values, impressions, judgments, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life and experiences across time and space. Prominent examples of the arts include: * visual arts (including architecture, ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, and sculpting), * literary arts (incl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.jpg "Click for more on -> Doris Duke Foundation")
