Tonight we are gathered together to celebrate one hundred years of the Waldorf movement. I am so excited about the topic that I’m sharing, and I hope that by the end of this short presentation you’re able to receive some of this excitement. I’m going to speak about the history of the Waldorf school, but not from the perspective we might be used to hearing about it—which is a perspective that’s really focused on developmental psychology, child development, and pedagogy—but from a perspective of economic and social justice, including societal reform.
Read moreCan everything be art?
Growing up at the end of the 20th century I remember taking art classes and hearing that everything could be art. As a teenager I was inspired by this notion, as were many people my age, that all of life could be infused with a feeling of meaning and inspiration. “Everything can be Art,” like any slogan, is only as wise as the context in which it appears. And most of the contexts in which I have encountered this slogan have revealed its mind-numbing power, which amounts to the feeling: “If everything is art, then there is no discerning it.”
Read moreThe Cultivation of Site-Specific Artwork
An artist, perhaps a faculty member at Free Columbia or someone participating in an ART / Capital Residency, may offer to work with an institution in order to create a work of art that fits their organizational mission and their working space.
There is a discussion between the artist and members of the institution about what is needed. The artist is left free to create something new and the institution is free to make a contribution to Free Columbia. In November, 2018, Zoltán Döbröntei, a painter from Budapest, Hungary, created site-specific work for the Community Hospice in Catskill, NY; the Rudolf Steiner Library in Hudson, NY; and the new High Falls Theater in Philmont, NY, as part of the ART / Capital Residency.
ART / Capital Residency (2018)
A Free Columbia / Lightforms Collaboration
“Money and capital cannot be an economic value, capital is human dignity and creativity. And so, in keeping with this, we need to develop a concept of money that allows creativity, or art, so to speak, to be capital. Art is capital.”
- Joseph Beuys
The ART / Capital residencies served as free cultural events. Artists were supported to create, and part of the residency included making the art available to the community at large. As with all activities at Free Columbia, donations are continually invited and accepted and will go toward supporting future projects. The intention is that creativity is placed in community context as a goal, as expressed in the new concept of capital referred to in the Beuys quote above.
ART / Capital Residency artists:
Jason Healy
Zoltán Döbröntei
Martina Angela Müller
Contact us if you’re interested in learning more about site-specific artwork or artist residencies.
The Chiemgauer
In the summer of 2015, I had the opportunity to visit the Chiemgau region in Southeast Germany that is home to the “Chiemgauer” currency project I had come across in The Guardian in 2011. Traveling to Salzburg and then westward toward Rosenheim, I enjoyed the landscapes and little village scenes opening outside the train window. Arriving in the village of Traunstein, I walked into a local bank to see about "purchasing" some Chiemgauer (exchanging it for Euros). The teller was well informed and happy to lead me through the details, offering me a small booklet that listed all the businesses that accepted the currency, and the not-for-profits that benefited from its use.
Read moreWhat's possible? Two crucial aspirations for social theory
The 2018 Bread and Puppet Tour is coming through Hudson, NY, with The Basic Bye-bye Show. Peter Schumann has based it “on the fact that our culture is saying its basic bye-bye to Mother Earth by continuing the devastating effects of the global economy on our planet—which is why our show proclaims the Possibilitarian’s basic bye-bye to capitalism in order to welcome the 1000 alternatives to this rotten system.” How true and absurd at the same time, this cocktail of profundity and whimsicality we have come to expect from Bread and Puppet!
Read more