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Place-Based Love: Here and Abroad Thursday, December 17, 2009
The problem with loving a city, we’re told, is that a city can’t love you back. It’s the groupie dilemma, a case of unrequited love writ unimaginably large. Evidence shows: a city won’t return your phone calls, and a city won’t buy you dinner.
As the holidays approach—closing a month-long season of travel—we have beloved cities on our minds. In 2009, CreateHere met more of Chattanooga than ever before, and we’ve shared our space, our hearts, and our heads with cities across the world. From DC to Detroit, Berlin to Birmingham, we’ve found many reasons to city swoon. This love for place, it’s given us a reason to get up every morning.
As a result, we’re boldly refusing conventional wisdom. We believe: cities can love you back. They are sources of inspiration, centers for change, icons of human potential. They give us daily renewal, and they push us into new modes of living. Our city and others: we’re better for knowing them.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the people and cities that populated 2009, making it a wonderful year, here and abroad. Season’s greetings! Go love a city!
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Guest Blog: Melissa Hefferlin’s Vision for Chattanooga Arts Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Melissa Hefferlin is one of CreateHere’s board members and an internationally-recognized painter. She brings us this dispatch, with an urgent call to action.
As a mid-career artist in Chattanooga I want to create ways for my colleagues and myself to extend our professional reach beyond our “regional” boundaries. I want to see us stretch into national territory.
Within Chattanooga we have fine collectors, supporters of the arts, and excellent access to high quality, regional publicity, but I believe Chattanooga professional artists can improve in the area of attracting outside attention to our local art scene. I want to figure out how to bring collectors and art lovers here, and to encourage meaningful and practical professional relationships nationally. One idea I have is to create a national painting competition, with both figurative and abstract categories. Imagine the Nobel Prize of painting being held in Chattanooga. I can see it clearly…
Advertising is also on my mind. But it costs a lot of money.
A few years back I emptied Barnes and Nobles of its entire rack of art periodicals, and then telephoned each magazine about pricing for ads. The price for one page, in one issue, ranged from $3,000-$9,000. One intelligent sales rep advised me that size doesn’t matter so much (smile), but what matters most is repetition. He believed that in order for an artist to register in the mind of a potential customer one must be noticed by that customer three times before he or she will take action. Therefore, he encouraged me to buy not one page for $9,000, but a run of three, 1/3-page adds running for three months. I remain grateful for his advice, though we declined the opportunity. I do think repetition is important, though. And I think it’s repetition that will get Chattanooga recognized as a center for the arts.
I’m asking anyone interested in working with me on getting our art scene recognized nationally to contact me via .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Let’s start a conversation: how do mid-career artists widen the perimeters of our work zone? How do we spread the reputation of our rich community? Let’s find out together.
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City Share: “Visioning in Real Time” with Russell Stall from Greenville Forward
Wednesday, December 16 is the second installment of City Share, a speaker-based lunch series focused on finding creative solutions to community issues, presented by Chattanooga Stand.
This week, we’ll be featuring Russell Stall, founder and Executive Director of Greenville Forward, an organization that seeks to enhance the quality of life for greater Greenville, SC.
Greenville is a mid-sized city with a metro population of around 600,000, just slightly larger than Chattanooga’s 518,000+. Like Chattanooga, Greenville has undergone a huge transformation in the last few decades, evolving from the “Textile Capital of the World” to a diverse and desirable place through collaborative relationships, creative partnerships and community engagement.
Just ten years ago, Greenville Forward launched its own 25 year visioning campaign for the city of Greenville. And, as the director, Stall is the man who “wakes up every morning thinking about where Greenville is going.”
Please join us Wednesday, December 16 from 12-1 pm at CreateHere, 55 E Main Street.
Lunch will be provided, so you don’t need to bring anything to the table except your ears and your ideas. If you plan to attend, please RSVP by emailing .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
City Share is free and open to the public. Join us every first and third Wednesday of the month from 12-1 pm for light lunch, broad insight, and thoughtful discussion.
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On the Map: A Google Mention for Chattanooga 3D
The Chattanooga 3D mapping project, a project spear-headed by Karen Liwanpo and Stephen Culp of SmartFurniture, has received a bit of press since it’s start at 48Hour Launch. Read more about the project on Google’s Sketch-Up blog, or plug in at Chattanooga 3D’s website!
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Guest Blog: The Chronicles of CreateHere Monday, December 14, 2009
Alison Lebovitz is one of CreateHere’s board members, president of One Clip at a Time, and host of WTCI’s “The A List with Alison Lebovitz.” She brings us this dispatch on “We Stand: A Civic Engagement Laboratory,” and specifically, our book drive for local schools.
If you have never had the occasion or inclination to walk into the CreateHere space on Main Street, then you have definitely been missing out on one of Chattanooga’s greatest treasures. Next to Rock City, of course. Walking into CreateHere is sort of like walking through a wardrobe into a modern day Narnia. It is a place filled with so much inspiration, promise and, of course, creativity, that just stepping inside feels almost magical.
But contrary to a fantasy world, this is a real place with genuine ideas, authentic people and true innovation. At a recent meeting there I found myself entrenched in their newest rotating exhibit, “We Stand: A Civic Engagement Laboratory.” It is an amazing interactive experience that combines visionary work with relevant statistical data. And best of all, it reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Confucius who said, “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.”
Part of the “doing” in this case is a small section that contains a scantily clad bookshelf as part of a community book drive to help collect new or gently used books for students at Battle Academy and Calvin Donaldson Elementary. If you are like me and my husband, there is nothing more exciting than an excuse to rid your house and home of unwanted stuff during this holiday season, and even better if we can tie it into a service project for the kids. And so, this weekend we are cleaning out our own bookshelves and plan to bring a load of books to CreateHere next week to donate to the cause. It will be a great excuse to bring our kids to this urban wonderland, and for them to see this exhibit first-hand.
And while we are there, I think I will give each of them a token for the Art-o-matic – a refurbished cigarette machine that dispenses tiny boxes of artwork instead of smokes. Because the only thing better than visiting Narnia, is taking a piece with you when you leave.
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