A text portrait of our class at 601 Tully

(photograph of a group brainstorm on Wednesday, September 14, 2011)

As the Fall 2011 semester wraps up at 601 Tully, I asked my classmates to share words and short phrases they associated with our work at 601 this past semester. Here's the network we created together:

spirit, freedom, knowledge, power, interconnectedness, optimistic, improvisatory, enlightening, enriching, collaborative, challenging, engaging, liberating, grounding, butterflies, interdependence, art/science/religion/love, provocative, contemplative, active, contact, scone, collaboration, fun, discovery, color, bloom, wing, mindfulness, growth, alchemical, chaos, development, love, transformation, butterfly, creation, ecology, evolution, art, chart paper, collaboration, sitting in a circle and talking/thinking together, the community, authorship, materials, complexity, open-endedness, reverberations, the intangible, earnest, confused, formulaic, tentative, community, restoration, interaction, confidence, appeal, growth (the good kind!)

Holiday Party today & WORD THURSDAY tomorrow!

Today we had a lively holiday lunch-hour with our Blue Wednesday Holiday Open House. Many of our awesome neighbors stopped in to hang out, along with many other new and old friends alike.

Nojaim's Grocery generously provided scrumptious sandwiches and Maureen Nolan from the Post Standard stopped in to check it out and snap some photos!

We're keeping the high energy going with a poetry reading tomorrow night, starting at 7pm. Our inaugural WORD THURSDAY will feature poet Michael Burkard, and there will be an open reading to follow. So show up with an original piece and gather up the courage to read it aloud!

WORD THURSDAY is sponsored by Govsphere, Inc., which is a management, strategy, and technology services firm that delivers innovative solutions to meet the complex needs and challenges facing today’s government agencies.

check them out online at: http://www.govsphere.com/

December 14th Blue Wednesday at 601 Tully

Wed, December 14th
11:30am - 1:30pm

In conjunction with our bi-monthly Blue Wednesday meetings between neighborhood residents and 601 Tully staff, we will host a 601 Tully Open House on Wednesday, December 14th from 11:30am - 1:30pm. Guests can:

• tour our gallery and the current exhibit, "The Butterfly Effect"

• enjoy a sandwich from Nojaim Bros Super Market and more, and

• share a favorite recipe for our neighborhood recipe archive.

We have a new batch of Painted Lady and Monarch butterflies in our indoor butterfly habitat. As winter progresses, we will transition to a winter
garden complete with blue and black "iron" butterflies.

We hope that you join us at 601 Tully again or for the first time! Thank you for passing on this information.

Best,
The 601 Tully team

P.S. Friends WELCOME!!

Such Potential: reflections on a semester’s project.

Last week, I met a roomful of Say Yes elementary school site coordinators at their monthly meeting. These are the folks bent to the task of improving success in school for all Syracuse kids. Add one more humbling encounter to a growing list of humbling encounters I’ve had as a student in Marion Wilson’s Art and Social Profit class and a resident of 601 Tully.

I am not new to community activism, to working for and with people trying to make a difference in disadvantaged communities. Yet, witnessing other folks’ generous efforts to improve this world is always moving. And 601 Tully is located right in the heart of the movement to make the Near West Side a better place. Community members, artists and activists regularly meet in the center’s light-filled spaces to plot new initiatives. A large handful of neighborhood kids have made the center their “hang-out.” The Butterfly Effect exhibit, 601’s inaugural exhibit, (which my class curated) will hang until February. The coffee at Café Kubal is great. There is such potential in this place!

If you wander down the street and around the corner, you’ll encounter the West Side Learning Center, site of English as a second language classes for over 300 new immigrants from more than 30 countries. Walk in on any weekday and the joint is jumping! Witnessing so much positive energy harnessed to the task of learning a new language, becoming part of a new culture, was humbling encounter #3…or #4. I met the director, Ed Butler, when I asked him to submit photographs (for a class project) of the people, places and things that inspire him. He and Julia Robertson, another Tully neighbor, submitted their photos of loved ones and treasured community landmarks. They are embedded in this video sketch of the neighborhood that Sara Pfohl, Charlette Caldwell and I put together. This was a sketch we made during the planning phase of The Butterfly Effect. Come see the exhibit and absorb the positive energy of things happening in the Near West Side.

WORD THURSDAY at 601 Tully! December 15!

This December 15th at 7pm is our first ever Word Thursday! Word Thursday is our monthly poetry, literary, and spoken word event on the third Thursday of every month, with a featured reader followed by an open mic reading.

Our inaugural reading will feature Guggenheim fellow, NEA grant recipient and S.U. Professor Michael Burkard! The author of several volumes of poetry, including Envelope of Night and Lucky Coat Anywhere, Burkard has a unique literary voice and an ear for language that must be experienced. Come hear him share his genius!

Open reading follows. This is your chance to share your own poetic voice with the community. Come early to sign up as a reader, and bring your original writing.

601 Tully Announcement on Art & Education!

http://www.artandeducation.net/announcement/the-butterfly-effect/

Constructing the Butterfly Effect

photos by John Cardone

Bellevue Elementary Visits the Butterfly Effect at 601

Photos by John Cardone

Mary Cunningham and Company visits the Butterfly Effect at 601

photos by John Cardone

Photos from the Butterfly Effect Show

Poetry Reading with Opening this Thursday

A poetry reading will begin at 6:30 pm, during the Opening Reception for The Butterfly Effect.

Featuring:

Christopher Kennedy [poet, Associate Professor at Syracuse University]

Manuel Dejesus [601 Tully CNYWorks Fellow, Fowler High School Student]

Annie Liontas [SU Fiction MFA, former 601 Tully Student]

R.S. Mengert [ SU Poetry MFA, 601 Tully Employee]

Christopher Kennedy, along with individuals closely involved with the creation of 601 Tully will share pieces of their creative works. The event is free and open to the public.

Thursday, November 3 / Opening begins at 5, Reading begins at 6:30

at 601 Tully Street, on the corner of Tully and Oswego, on Syracuse's Near West Side

Syracuse, NY 13204

Butterfly Effect Opening Reception

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

601 Tully’s Inaugural Exhibit

October 29- December 9, 2011

Opening Reception: Thurs Nov 3, 5-7pm, to be followed by a reading at 7pm, featuring

Manuel Dejesus and Christopher Kennedy

Exhibition Hours: Mon-Thurs 11-5 or by appointment

601 Tully Street

Syracuse, NY 13204

www.601tully.blogspot.com

601tully@gmail.com / 315.427.7910

The Butterfly Effect is the first multimedia exhibition at 601 Tully. The actual and conceptual life of a butterfly is a departure point for a collaborative exhibition that places humans and butterflies together in a micro-habitat inside an art space.

The Butterfly Effect presents a variety of interpretations of the butterfly structure and the butterfly as a symbol as addressed by contemporary visual artists and will include work by local artists, Syracuse University students and professors, and Syracuse youth. The centerpiece of The Butterfly Effect is a living butterfly habitat constructed by Syracuse University students using materials reclaimed from local sites. The interior butterfly garden provides the opportunity for exhibition visitors to observe living butterflies while surrounded by artworks that explore or feature the butterfly metaphorically.

Public programming aimed at near West Side teens will introduce art-making processes less present in schools to participants (metalworking and casting) and create connections between area youth and local arts organizations. The exhibition and additional public programming will educate visitors about the life cycle of butterflies while engaging them as a whole community.

This Butterfly Effect aims to introduce the 601 Tully site not as an object in the field but as part of the field and embodies the philosophies of 601 Tully as a sensitive, dependent system operating between University and neighborhood ecologies. 601 Tully is a concrete site, a curriculum, an idea, and an artifact of collective experience that, like the butterfly effect, can appear at times random or out of place but is actually part of a complex, interlocking system.

The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public.

SU press release: http://www.syr.edu/news/articles/2011/paying-it-forward-10-111.html

Marion Wilson's Spring 2012 Course

EDU 300/400/600: New Directions in Social Sculpture
(Taught by Marion Wilson, Kianga Ford, and Raul Miyar)
Wednesday 9:30-12:30 at 601 Tully (on Syracuse's Near West Side: 601 Tully St., Syracuse, NY 13204)
www.601tully.blogspot.com

Collaborative Research Studio is a practical, collaborative workshop that emphasizes research and production. It is shaped by faculty research and is designed to provide a context for students to engage with the themes and problems with which their teaching faculty are currently engaged. Unusual in a Fine Arts teaching context, it introduces collective problem-solving and multi-disciplinary team-building that exposes students to the processes of research and development, fabrication, as well as working with institutional needs and agendas that are often a part of professional practice.

This course is a collaboration between three faculty at different institutions: Marion Wilson (Syracuse University); Raul Miyar (Altos de Chavon); and Kianga Ford (Parsons). Each faculty brings a unique perspective to thinking about the rapidly-expanding field that goes under varying monikers, including: social practice, public practice, new genre public art, community-engaged art, and social sculpture, to name a few. Representing different expertise as artists, Miyar, Wilson, and Ford bring practices from painting to architecture to sound and installation to interrogate this emergent field. In this course, they question the limits and methods of this domain of contemporary art by inviting students into their artistic working processes in sites where they live—Syracuse, NYC, and La Romana, Dominican Republic. Students will research and develop new works in each of those locales in teams led by the faculty.

The course will begin with an optional site visit to La Romana for students at all institutions in January (January 16-20, course dates—travel days not included—for additional information on the site visit, please write to mewils01@syr.edu). And the research process will be shared in an exhibition and series of community conversations at Aronson Gallery, at Parsons in NYC in March and April.

Today's Blue Wednesday Postponed

ATTENTION: Today's Blue Wednesday Coffee Conversation has been POSTPONED to November 16, 1 pm @ 601 Tully.

Agnes Martin Inspired 601 Tully Facade

Re-imagining the facade of 601 Tully based on Agnes Martin paintings.

Done by 601 Tully Teammate Andrew Weigand (SU Architecture '12)

And it won't be long before the next generation of eggs are being laid

At the nectar bar, romance is in the air

Inside the chrysalis the caterpillar is transformed into a new creature

Caterpillars take advantage of a vast variety of colors, forms and textures to avoid their predators

A caterpillar egg can be unexpectedly beautiful

Butterfly Effect postcards designs