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Charles Tracy of National Park Services

  • Tracie Dunn, Rivers and Revolutions
  • Oct 31, 2016
  • 3 min read

Today, Charles Tracy met with us at The Umbrella Community Arts Center. Tracy works for the National Park Service as the Arts Partnership Specialist. He has over 30 years of experience in bringing the arts and parks together, and was therefore able to share how he has personally nurtured and observed the power of combining art – performing and visual – with our National Park System. He has worked with emerging artists and better known artists such as Barbara Bosworth, Ai Weiwei and Maya Lin. He offered us some examples of artists confronting our nations history, and our nations future. As a group, we questioned how our perceptions of history may be shaping our perceptions of the future. Charles Tracy also inspired us to talk about how one person, such as Harriet Tubman, can make a huge difference in our collective history (in essence, be a revolutionary), how an artist can significantly increase visitors to a park, and how having long term vision doesn't mean you can't start now! He was an effective motivator. Here are links to some relevant articles, artists, and projects:

  • Artful Ways: enhancing trails and greenways with art and artists: Article

  • How the National Park Service Ebraces the Arts to Engage Visitors: Article

  • The Power of Art on Alcatraz and Ellis Island: Article

"To Be at the Further Edge"

Barbara Bosworth spent the summer and fall last year hiking and photographing the New England National Scenic Trail, lugging her boxy 8 x 10 view camera and tripod into woods and along streams surrounding the Connecticut River.

“It was a dream job,” she says. “Not a job at all. A dream.”

Barbara Bosworth spent the summer and fall last year hiking and photographing the New England National Scenic Trail, lugging her boxy 8 x 10 view camera and tripod into woods and along streams surrounding the Connecticut River.

“It was a dream job,” she says. “Not a job at all. A dream.”

"With Wind", a Chinese Dragon Kite fills New Industries Building at Alcatraz

"Both delicate and fearsome, the traditional Chinese dragon kite embodies a mythical symbol of power. Ai Weiwei unfurled a spectacular contemporary version of this age-old art form inside the New Industries Building. He said that for him, the dragon represents not imperial authority, but personal freedom: “everybody has this power.” The individual kites that made up the dragon’s body carried quotations from activists who have been imprisoned or exiled, including Nelson Mandela, Edward Snowden, and Ai himself.Ai’s studio collaborated with Chinese artisans to produce the handmade kites, reviving a craft that has a diminishing presence in China. By confining the kites inside a building once used for prison labor, the artist suggested powerful contradictions between freedom and restriction, creativity and repression, cultural pride and national shame. He also offered a poetic response to the layered nature of Alcatraz as a former penitentiary that is now an important bird habitat and a site of thriving gardens."

Dedication Ceremony for "Confluence Listening Circle" at Chief Timothy Park: https://vimeo.com/129992055

The Listening Circle is based on a Nez Perce blessing ceremony performed at Chief Timothy Park in 2005. According to Nez Perce custom, the men faced north, the women faced south, the elders faced east and no one was allowed to pass behind them. Of all the Confluence sites, stretching 438 miles to the mouth of the Columbia River, Chief Timothy Park looks the most like what Lewis and Clark observed on their journey. The newly constructed circle is a gathering place and a place to listen.


 
 
 

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