Great news

The bill passed!

Advocacy for local arts

As you may already know, last week the Washington Senate Bill that would've kept 4Culture alive and thriving failed to pass by one vote. There is another Senate Bill in consideration to keep the fight to save 4Culture alive.

Would you consider taking a moment to write your Senators to help save this important vehicle for arts advancement?

In IDEA Odyssey News, we are days - perhaps hours - from getting the keys to our first space. We're one step closer to bringing this collective into its realized state and building a new arts presence in the International District. What possibilities await us?

In excited wonderment,
SuJ'n

What's Your Sense of Place?

We're thrilled that accomplished artist Juan Alonso has volunteered to curate our first exhibition, "A Sense of Place."
Place can mean so many things to different people. It can be geographic, the landscape we see in front of us, or the ones that appear in our dreams. It can be about community, inclusion, exclusion or all the fragile points in between.
Juan was born in Havana, Cuba and his father sent him to the United States when he was only 9 years old. It was the last time he saw his father. It was also the last time he was in Cuba. Still, memories of his family and the streets of Havana pervade his art.
What does place mean to you? We invite you to share a comment, or submit your work by June 3rd. Here's a link to download the Call for Entries and submission form. We'd love to see your place in our place.
Carina

IDEA Odyssey announces its first Call for Entry

IDEA Odyssey Gallery is proud to celebrate its grand opening by inviting visual artists to challenge themselves for its inaugural exhibition, A Sense of Place. This juried group exhibition will comprise a collection of work in painting, drawing, photography, video and mix-media that represents contemporary art exploring the varied aspects and roles of the artist within their culture and in society at large.

Be a part of the inaugural exhibition. Information on submission can be found here. 

Deadline: Requested materials must be received by 5 p.m. on Friday, June 3rd.

Art & Fear

This book is called an artist's survival guide, but it is more like a reality check. How many of you stop short of finishing work because it's not "good enough"? I do. All the time. I cannot seem to quiet that voice inside my head that tells me I'm a fraudulent wanna-be for attempting (or gasp, actually creating) a piece of work that is supposed to replicate my inner world.

A finished piece is, in effect, a test of correspondence between imagination and execution. And perhaps surprisingly, the more common obstacle to achieving that correspondence is not undisciplined execution, but undisciplined imagination. It's altogether too seductive to approach your proposed work believing your materials to be more alleable than they really are, your ideas more compelling, your execution more refined. As Stanley Kunitz once commented, "The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language." - Art and Fear, D. Bayles & T. Orland.

Art cannot be achieve the impossible; it cannot replace the depths of our minds. It can only represent, in its own forms, what - in its perfection - is the human imagination. Here's to the tension between the mind and the matter, and the courage to live in it.