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The Denver Art Museum is hosting Streets of Afghanistan this Thursday, April 28, in an effort to connect communities and cultures in a country that has endured nearly four decades of conflict. The exhibit is a life-size exhibition that recreates the streets of Kabul and the rural roads of Afghanistan, including stunning portraits of the people who live there.
Proceeds from the exhibition, created by Mountain2Mountain (M2M), a Colorado-based nonprofit, will support programs including girls’ education, efforts to help imprisoned women and children and support for the Afghan youth movement. We are honored to welcome Shannon Galpin, the founder of M2M, as a special guest to the Mountainfilm Festival this year.
When: April 28, 2011
Where: Denver Art Museum — 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway
Congratulations to artist Antrim Caskey who was recently announced as a winner of the 43rd Annual Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for her work ‘Dragline,’ a photographic expose of mountaintop removal coal mining.
“The winners this year reflect the interests of Robert Kennedy, particularly in justice and the plight of the downtrodden,” said RFK Journalism Committee Chair Margaret Engel. “From the creative use of cartooning to illustrate solutions to poverty, to the persistence of a reporter continuing to cover America’s prisoners in Cuba, the journalists brought originality and passion to their work. From obvious places of misery, including Haiti and Afghanistan, to the still-sensitive issue of campus rapes and their unseen collateral damage, the winning journalists put their talents to use on behalf of people endangered by violence and destruction.”
Art is often subversion.
Over the weekend Chinese authorities detained Ai WeiWei, a contemporary artist and critic of the Chinese government.
From the New York Times:
Rights advocates say the detentions are an ominous sign that the Communist Party’s six-week crackdown on rights lawyers, bloggers and dissidents is spreading to the upper reaches of Chinese society. Mr. Ai, 53, the son of one of the country’s most beloved poets, is an internationally renowned artist, a documentary filmmaker and an architect who helped design the Olympic stadium in Beijing known as the Bird’s Nest.
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By singling out Mr. Ai, the authorities are expanding a campaign against dissent that has roiled China’s embattled community of liberal and reform-minded intellectuals. In recent weeks dozens of people have been detained, including some of the country’s best-known writers and rights advocates. At least 11 of them have simply vanished into police custody. Two weeks ago, Liu Xianbin, a veteran dissident in Sichuan Province, was sentenced to 10 years on subversion charges.
Each Memorial Day weekend, artists and activists, filmmakers and photographers come to Telluride for Mountainfilm. At our core, we are about exploring, preserving and sustaining environments, cultures and conversations, so this unique gathering is part film festival and part ideas festival with leading edge thinkers – and doers – getting together to change the world. Leading up to this year’s festival we wanted to focus on conversations worth sustaining and we’ve asked some of Mountainfilm’s special guests to help us out. Throughout the coming weeks we’ll be posting our conversations with them. We hope that they engage and inspire you.
If you want to participate in this discussion, just submit your questions via our Facebook page or our Twitter account.
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Lynsey Dyer is not just one the best female skiers in the industry, she’s also an artist, a model, and the co-founder of a non-profit organization. Residing in Jackson Hole, WY, Dyer’s film career includes a long list of well-known film companies including Teton Gravity Research and Warren Miller. Her powder skills have also put her on the pages of Men’s Journal, Women’s Health, Outside, Powder, Freeskier and beyond.
But skiing isn’t her only passion. With a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design and Photography, she has kept art and design an important part of her life and has been able to integrate it into the sport she loves. She has designed everything from t-shirts and skis, to posters and websites.
Dyer’s passion for skiing also translates into action. When she realized she wanted to do more as a visible role model in the ski industry, she and her two friends Vanessa Pierce and Claire Smallwood, founded SheJumps, an organization to help inspire women to reach their greatest potential through the outdoor activities they love. Whether she is skiing, shooting photos or motivating others to get outdoors, Dyer is an example of how to live a balanced life that gives back.
At a very young age you’ve packed a lot of achievements into your resume – world class skier, artist, designer, model, TV presenter and founder of a non-profit dedicated to increasing women’s participation in outdoor activities. How do you manage so many diverse activities?
Luckily I have an amazing people to work with at SheJumps and everything else seems to fall into place. We are still 100% volunteer based and my partners also hold down several careers while making SJ a priority.
From earning a pilot’s license while teaching skiing, to participating on the World Extreme Skiing tour while covering rent as a chef at a helicopter skiing operation, Claire Smallwood and Vanessa Pierce, my co-founders are some of my heroes.
Which part(s) of all that you do you find most exciting/inspiring and most satisfying?
I really appreciate the variety in which I get to express my connection with the outdoors. As an athlete it’s a physical expression in relation to the mountains and as an artist I try to reconnect with that feeling to express the same emotion. I love coming home ridiculously exhausted from a 15 hour day in the mountains and getting to retell the experience through art while my body recovers. Through the TV hosting I get to inquire about what lights people up, and through the non-profit I get to help others find it in ways they may have never had the opportunity to before.
Each Memorial Day weekend, artists and activists, filmmakers and photographers come to Telluride for Mountainfilm. At our core, we are about exploring, preserving and sustaining environments, cultures and conversations, so this unique gathering is part film festival and part ideas festival with leading edge thinkers – and doers – getting together to change the world. Leading up to this year’s festival we wanted to focus on conversations worth sustaining and we’ve asked some of Mountainfilm’s special guests to help us out. Throughout the coming weeks we’ll be posting our conversations with them. We hope that they engage and inspire you.
If you want to participate in this discussion, just submit your questions via our Facebook page or our Twitter account.
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A former corporate lawyer, Chris Jordan is dedicated to raising consciousness, through his art, of the far-reaching and destructive consequences of our everyday habits. His Running the Numbers – a series of carefully rendered photographic images – takes hard statistics and turns them into art that both dazzles and provokes.
His project, Intolerable Beauty, is a looking glass into the prevailing culture of consumption. Most recently, his work, Midway – Message from the Gyre, focuses on the life-cycle of the albatross in the North Pacific Ocean that confuses the vast pollution of trash in the water with food.
As a result, the adult birds feed their nesting babies bellies-full of fatal plastic. Jordan’s images of the exposed stomach content of the dead birds are starkly grotesque and, in the darkest possible way, beautifully compelling.
The tiny atoll of Midway, Jordan says, is an apt metaphor for humanity’s present midpoint between old paradigms in collapse and a new order that’s necessary to rescue us from ecological disaster.
Each Memorial Day weekend, artists and activists, filmmakers and photographers come to Telluride for Mountainfilm. At our core, we are about exploring, preserving and sustaining environments, cultures and conversations, so this unique gathering is part film festival and part ideas festival with leading edge thinkers – and doers – getting together to change the world. Leading up to this year’s festival we wanted to focus on conversations worth sustaining and we’ve asked some of Mountainfilm’s special guests to help us out. Throughout the coming weeks we’ll be posting our conversations with them. We hope that they engage and inspire you.
If you want to participate in this discussion, just submit your questions via our Facebook page or our Twitter account.
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Alex Beard believes that art is a medium that should be accessible to everyone. It certainly was for him, growing up in a family where his uncle was the famed wildlife photographer and legendary character Peter Beard. While that heritage has certainly influenced Beard’s paintings, he has also found a very distinct voice of his own, interpreting the natural world in a unique and abstract way.
Many of his pieces feature intricate and colorful representations of animals, and this year, his elaborate piece “Endangered Species List” was used to create the official Mountainfilm poster, which will be revealed in May.
We caught up with Beard to learn more about his views on the connection between art and creating awareness for the pressing issues we face today. Straight and to the point, Beard believes that every individual does in fact have an impact and that we should all be more conscious of our everyday actions, no matter how big or small.
Philanthropy and social and cultural awareness runs in your family. What cause are you personally most passionate about and what collective action needs to be taken to address it?
I am most passionate about preserving the flora and fauna of our natural surroundings. Collectively, our goal should be simple: Recognize that the world is changing, and that it is our fault. Stop pointing fingers, and start doing the little things. Turn off the the lights when you leave the room. Recycle. Buy an efficient automobile. Plant trees. We all know what to do, the trick is instilling the desire to do so.
In the Race by Alex Beard
How do you see media – be it film, photography, art, etc. – serving as a catalyst for positive change?
Media is a tool best used to raise awareness in as dramatic a way as possible. Show the beauty of nature and how we are a part of it, but make it clear that every time we do something to damage our surroundings, we are hurting ourselves. Try to make the global crisis personal to each individual, so that we understand that if we slice into Nature deeply enough, we will bleed out ourselves.
The Conversation 