- Prescription for a Healthy Art Scene
Not for the first time, I’m going to let Art Fag City do the heavy lifting on this post while I try to get some real work done. They’ve been a bit busy this week too, but made up for reduced content with a lovely smorgasbord of links today, including a dip into the SFMOMA […]
- Excerpt: An age of austerity for the arts
A side-effect of my recent love affair with Adrian Searle’s Private Views has been an expanded interest in the other cultural podcasts offered by The Guardian’s website. While the critical heft doesn’t quite compete with CBC’s Ideas (a long-standing favourite of mine), the series of recordings from the 2009 Cambridge Festival of Ideas have been […]
- The Big Picture Revisited Part Three: Engaging City Hall
My third and final post in this week’s series reporting on ‘The Big Picture Revisited’ addresses the discussion around Engaging City Hall. As this whole event was hosted by the City of Hamilton’s Arts Advisory Commission with the intention of forming an action plan within the means of municipal government, this was a topic that […]
- The Big Picture Revisited Part Two: Sustainability of Arts Organizations
Continuing from yesterday’s report on The Big Picture Revisited with a focus on Support for Individual Artists, today’s post will cover the forum’s discussion surrounding Sustainability of Arts Organizations.
In his introductory remarks on the topic, Ivan Jurakic cited an exceptional quality in the James North landscape that has intrigued me for some time now […]
- The Big Picture Revisted Part One: Support for Individual Artists
There’s something cruel in talking about artistic survival in Hamilton, particularly when the event kicks off at 9:30 in the morning and artists are made to mill about the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre dolefully slurping coffee and wondering why they’re awake, upright and wearing pants this early in the morning after an art crawl. […]
- Off the oft-beaten path
Most of my critical writing energies these past few days have been gobbled up in the task of producing another Hamilton report for Akimblog. As this is the fifth cross-city blog post that I’ve written for Akimbo, I’m beginning to recognize an alarming trend in my coverage - namely, my reliance upon a mere handful […]
- James North Art Crawl: September
No matter one’s ties to any sort of educational context, September continues to hold something in the way of new beginnings, especially after the cyclical languor of August. In that spirit, this month’s Art Crawl offered a portend of change to come with a one-night open house of the former Hotel Hamilton, currently being renovated […]
- Glowering down on James North
Given that I woke up this morning musing on what I might find to blog about today (lest I suffer further admonishments from the big brother in Whitby), I should have been pleased to see a big shiny Spectator article laid open on the dining room table. Perhaps the problem was getting hit at my […]
- Vacancy in the Hotel Hamilton
I’m fortunate to have a mother who still reads The Hamilton Spectator, as she does as good a job as an RSS feed whenever anything remotely art-related turns up in its pages, and today’s front-page pronouncement on the forthcoming conversion of the former Hotel Hamilton certainly qualifies. As per usual with bringing these articles to […]
- An open letter on Hamilton’s post-steel future
Partway through this lovely Victoria Day weekend, I received an email from an associate producer of The Agenda with Steve Paikin on TVO. Besides feeling relief at knowing I wasn’t the only person using the May Two-Four to catch up on work, I was pleased to learn that The Agenda will be hosting a panel […]
