Cyberart



On May 1st, 1999, the first-ever Boston Cyberarts Festival hits Beantown with a vengeance: participating institutions include American Repertory Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts, Dance Umbrella, DeCordova Museum, Harvard University, MIT's List Center, and the Museum of Fine Arts. Greater Boston Arts takes this opportunity to ask: what is Cyberart? We visit four artists with different perspectives on the relationship between art and technology. Denise Marika is a sculptor, video artist and performance artist. She has created a piece for the festival that involves making a digital scan of her naked body, "printing" that image with a cutting-edge 3-D printer, and then using the resulting figurines as part of a video piece. Carmin Karasic is a digital artist whose work appears both on the Web and in digital installations in galleries. She has created autobiographical interactive work about her upbringing and experiences as an African-American woman. Jennifer Hall works in various digital media. Her piece involves a dozen machines that detect viewers' proximity and communicate that information to acupuncture needles that pierce the flesh of tomatoes. Karl Sims' piece, Galapagos, is a computer simulation of evolution where viewers' input determines how digital 'creatures' evolve. For more information on cyberart visit this month's Highlight

Boston Cyberarts Festival
May 1 - 15, 1999
for more information visit www.bostoncyberarts.org

Collecting Art



With veteran art dealer Portia Harcus as our guide, Greater Boston Arts gets the inside story on how to acquire an eye for art and build a collection. Our camera follows Portia as she visits the homes of three local collectors. John Axelrod, a collector with an eclectic eye, explains that his love of art and collecting comes from experience, not schooling. He collects, among other things, American painting, African American and Latin American art. Rick and Lucille Spagnuolo, a couple who are longtime collectors, specialize in contemporary art. Peri Onipede, a relatively new collector, collects African art as well as work by local artists in a variety of media. According to Portia, a trained art collecting eye can catch the quality pieces amongst the less significant. "If you put me on a panel with ten other art experts, even if we don't have the same subjectivity, and give us a hundred pieces, we will come to a consensus on the top one or two." Greater Boston Arts visits collectors to see first-hand how the judgments and tastes of collectors evolve.

Collectors Collect Contemporary, 1990-99
The Institute of Contemporary Art
955 Boylston Street
Boston
March 30 - May 28, 1999
for more information call 617 266-5152

A Bold Approach: Boston Arts Academy



This fall, something unprecedented happened: the Boston Arts Academy -- the city's first public high school for the visual and performing arts -- opened its doors. Many years in the planning, this effort is the result of a partnership between six local institutions of higher learning and the Boston Public Schools. In an era when arts education has been marginalized in, if not eliminated from, most school curricula, the Boston Arts Academy represents a long-awaited sea change, a resurgence of public support for the arts as a commonly held value. Greater Boston Arts views this moment as an extraordinary opportunity to capture the evolving aspirations of a new institution and the young people it serves. In this first of two installments scheduled to air on Greater Boston Arts this spring, viewers are introduced to Headmaster Linda Nathan, her staff, and the student body. We meet one of these students, Diego, a Latino boy with discernible acting talent and significant learning disabilities. Can the Boston Arts Academy give teenagers like Diego, who have been unsuccessful in other public schools, an education in art as well as in traditional academics? By filming at the school throughout the first year, Greater Boston Arts seeks the answer to this question as it unfolds.

Tune in next month, Wednesday, May 12 at 9pm on GBH/2, for the continuing story of the Boston Arts Academy's inaugural class.