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Go directly to: An Apprenticeship in Ghanaian Drumming The Foundation Center Offers Resources on Arts Funding In Memoriam: Lawrence Levine 1933-2006 New Study Shows How California Artists Build Careers in the Creative Economy Proceeds from the license plate sales will benefit the California Arts Council (CAC) To subscribe to the weekly CAC update, please visit their website.
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WHAT'S NEWSubscribe to The New Moon, ACTA's Monthly E-Newsletter. See the latest edition of The New Moon. ACTA Welcomes New Staff Member Sherwood ChenThis month ACTA welcomes Sherwood Chen as Associate Director. Sherwood has worked in festival production, youth arts programming, arts grantmaking and community arts working for organizations including The San Francisco Foundation, the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, and the Music Center Education Division. As a dancer, Chen has worked with artists including Anna Halprin, Oguri, Nanik and I Nyoman Wenten, Sara Shelton Mann and Shinichi Iova-Koga, and was a resident member of Min Tanaka's performance collective Maijuku in rural Japan. He currently serves as a member of the City of Oakland Cultural Funding Advisory Committee and as a board member of Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. Sherwood’s role at ACTA will be multi-faceted; including work in development, planning, and program coordination. He will also be managing a major research project, piloted by ACTA in partnership with the UC Davis Center for Health Disparities and supported by a grant from the California Endowment, which examines the health benefits of participation in traditional arts activities. Sherwood works in ACTA’s San Francisco office and can be reached by phone (415) 561-1562 or by email to sherwood@actaonline.org. An Apprenticeship in Ghanaian Drumming
(left to right) Kwashi Amevuvor and Agbi Ladzekpo Kwashi Amevuvor and Agbi Ladzekpo have known each other for over thirty years and both come from musical families. They are now completing an intensive six months apprenticeship in advanced Ghanaian drumming through ACTA’s Apprenticeship Program. While the apprenticeship has focused on traditional Ewe drumming, Kwashi has also been teaching Agbi to play the brekete, a drum played by the Dagomba people of Northern Ghana. The brekete usually accompanies the talking drum in a group ensemble, where the talking drummers lead and the drummers on brekete give an improvised response. Kwashi started learning to play the drums when he was about seven year old. His father was a musician who performed regularly for their village in the Volta region of Ghana. Whenever his father would perform he would give Kwashi a stick so that he could play along and learn the rhythms. Kwashi continued to learn drumming when he went to school and by the time he entered the University of Ghana to study music he was already at the instructor level. He left Ghana in the 1970s to teach and perform in Europe. Kwashi was the first African musician to perform at Buckingham Palace. He also performed with the symphony in London and recorded music for the BBC African news broadcasts. Since moving to the United States he has continued to teach and perform, introducing new audiences to African music and dance. He used to perform as a dancer as well as a drummer, and he was a pioneer in introducing live music to African dance classes in the Los Angeles area.
Kwashi Amevuvor
Agbi also started learning to drum as a child. When he was about eight years old his father started to make small drums for him so that he could play along with the family. He explained, “Everything in my family was about drumming and dancing. The whole family could get together and play from sunrise to sundown.” His grandfather was a composer and a drummer and he passed the musical traditions to Agbi’s father and his uncles. Some of his uncles settled in the Bay Area and today the Ladzekpo family is well known in California for their musical skills. Agbi performs regularly with Kwashi and he has also taught classes at the university level. He is dedicated to continuing his study of music. Each week he drives nearly one hundred miles to meet with Kwashi after completing his night shift at work. Both Kwashi and Agbi are eager to teach the next generation traditional drumming and they hope to help connect young African Americans with their African cultural heritage. Kwashi explains, “Back in Ghana you don’t have to go to a classroom to learn to drum because you see it performed all around you. Here it’s different – children that are born here just want to listen to rap or hip hop.” Kwashi believes that learning to play the drum is good discipline for children and he would like to form a group of youth who can perform. Kwashi and Agbi will continue to work together in the future as they work to reach the next generation of drummers. The Foundation Center Offers Resources on Arts FundingAs part of Funding for Arts Month at the Foundation Center, the Foundation Center’s Research Department has updated their collection of arts-related resources in a Special Issue of Philanthropy News Digest. The Spotlight on Arts Grantmaking in California report offers an overview of grantmaking in the arts in California and includes a mini-directory of significant arts funders in California as well as profiles of some California foundations that support individual artists. The Special Issue also includes interviews with Joan Spero, President of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Karen Brooks Hopkins, President of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. An article by Christopher Schram, Vice President of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts entitled “Empowering the Arts for America’s Future” highlights several organizations that support emerging young artists. In Memoriam: Lawrence Levine 1933-2006
Photo Credit: Bruce Jackson Lawrence Levine was born on Feb. 27, 1933, and raised in New York City. He received his bachelor's degree in 1955 in history from the City University of New York and his master's and doctorate degrees in history from Columbia University in 1957 and 1962, respectively. Through his writings and teaching, colleagues said, Levine helped transform cultural history in the United States into a vibrant and accessible field of study. During his 32 years as a member of the UC Berkeley faculty, Levine received many honors. A champion of multiculturalism, Levine won a MacArthur "genius" fellowship in 1983 for his intellectual curiosity and scholarship. Following the MacArthur award, he was elected in 1985 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And in 1994, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow. In "Black Culture and Black Consciousness" (1977), Levine's best known work, he made use of the oral expressive tradition of African Americans to examine how they perceived themselves, their position in American society, and their relations with whites. According to UC Berkeley history professors Leon Litwack and Waldo Martin, the book was a pathbreaking study of folk thought and culture that exerted an extraordinary influence on several generations of scholars – not only historians, but anthropologists, folklorists, musicologists, sociologists, and students of American and African American culture. Historian Shane White, a professor in Australia at the University of Sydney, where Levine once taught as a visiting professor, added that Levine was "one of the best historians writing in the second half of the 20th century. His pioneering explorations of the American past made possible the current explosion in the popularity of cultural history." Excerpted from a UC Berkeley Press Release. New Study Shows How California Artists Build Careers in the Creative EconomyCalifornia artists move fluidly among commercial, nonprofit, and community sectors despite formidable barriers, finds a new study from the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Artists' ability to "cross over" is a major stimulant to regional economic activity and the quality of life. The study was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, and Leveraging Investments in Creativity. The study, "Crossover: How Artists Build Careers across Commercial, Nonprofit, and Community Work," reports how artists develop successful cross-sectoral careers in ways little understood by employers, funders, and policymakers. "Crossover" includes in-depth interviews and data from a web-based survey of Los Angeles- and San Francisco Bay-area musicians, writers, performing, and visual artists. More than 100,000 artists work in the two metros. Along with New York, the two California regions support more artists per capita than the nation's other large metropolitan areas. Even though crossover is quite pervasive among artists, artists on average earn more arts income for time spent in commercial work than they do in nonprofit or community work. If money were not an issue, artists would cross over even more than they currently do, according to the report. Many full-time commercial artists would work more hours in the nonprofit and community sectors while others would increase their for-profit efforts.Many more would engage in community artwork. "This demonstrates that the barriers between sectors remain high," said Ann Markusen, Humphrey Institute professor and chief author. "Employers, arts organizations, and artists themselves persist in prejudices and practices that hamper synergy." Artists credit each sector with distinctive career growth opportunities. For-profit work raises their visibility, deepens networks and understanding of professional conventions, and generates higher financial returns. Nonprofit work helps artists explore new media and collaborate across disciplines, as well as offering greater aesthetic and emotional satisfaction. Community work ranks highest for affirming cultural identity, pursuing political and social justice goals, and enriching community life. "Identifying the extent of 'crossover' is key to understanding the dividends that artists-as core cultural workers-generate for the entire economy," concludes Markusen. "Artists are entrepreneurs with very high rates of self-employment and great agility in making career changes. Their activities help explain the resiliency of two California regions in the face of structural upheavals in commercial sectors." The study addresses how employers, schools, service organizations, funders, the media, government, arts advocacy groups, and artists themselves can encourage crossover. "The arts sector needs to build the kind of relationships we see in high-tech or medicine," said Markusen, "where industry, nonprofit research and advocacy groups, government, and training institutions work together to enhance societal and economic impact." The complete study includes profiles of several dozen artists and can be found online at this link. To order hard copies, contact Katherine Murphy at 612-626-1074 or k-murp@umn.edu. AdvocacyCalifornia Arts Advocates is working to achieve $1 per capita state funding for all of the arts in California. They offer ten suggestions for supporting the arts in California:
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