Venture Academy V #3

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Venture Academy V #3

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VENTURE ACADEMY V SUMMER 2018

Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts

321 East 3rd Street, Bethlehem

Wednesdays 6:15 – 8:00 pm

June 6, June 13, June 20

This session’s theme:

ENCOUNTERING OUTSIDER ART IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD: 

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

Your Guide: Norman Girardot, Professor Emeritus, Lehigh University

To Register:  Call 610-868-2971 ext. 3185

What is Venture Academy?

Now in its fifth installment, this series of guided explorations is designed to promote provocative ideas, images, and sensations for venturesome adults seeking to cope with an increasingly complex, bewildering, exciting, wondrous, and sometimes scary world.  “LIFE IS AN ADVENTURE: A pilgrim’s journey for the young of mind and heart.”

These sessions are open to the public and all proceeds benefit the Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts.

More about this session:

SESSION DATES:
June 6 (In the Beginning was the Mark),
June 13 (An Angel of Art Cometh to Bethlehem),
June 20 (Saving Mr. Imagination’s Environmental Vision)

THEME & DESCRIPTION:
ENCOUNTERING OUTSIDER ART IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

A series of special guided explorations about the mysteries of human art-making (both visual and performative) and why art is not just what certain white men called “artists” (who learned how to draw representationally and perspectively) defined as the only “real” art. There is, in fact, a whole other universal and global tradition of skillfully and imaginatively “making visible” or “making/seeing/experiencing something hidden and special in the world.” This includes tribal art, children’s art, art of the insane, prison art, self-taught art, visionary art, folk art, and so on – or just about everything outside of what elite Western tradition presumptuously called fine or schooled art by excluding everything else. In the contemporary sense, to be an “outsider,” or in this case, an “outsider artist,” loosely means someone who in some fashion is marginal to mainstream culture, someone who does not depend on, or conform to, what is taken as the prevailing cultural norms. There can, of course, be a light and dark side to being an outsider in that real innovative forward-looking creativity, or a dark regressive demonology, can both flow from a culturally unmoored imagination.  Be careful.Venture Academy V will explore some of these issues in a general and semi-traditional historical and academic way (lectures, films, discussion), but will focus primarily on a concrete case of outsider art as exemplified by Bethlehem’s own late great outsider “found object” artist Mr. Imagination (aka Gregory Warmack, 1948-2012; see among numerous other articles and videos, catalog essays, and book chapters, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO52kzGUgxk&t=6s  ).  

The academy will also include some volunteer opportunities for hands-on project-based creative activities in the recycled environmental art park on the Lehigh campus inspired by Mr. Imagination.

See in particular: https://residenttouristbethlehempa.com/2016/01/31/lehigh-millennium-folk-arch-and-art-enclave/  .

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