The Berman Museum of Art joined forces with the Collegeville community and nationally acclaimed group Spiral Q Puppet Theater to produce a successful Partnership Parade on Sunday, November 7. The parade showcased the evolving partnership between the campus and the Collegeville community, facilitated in this project by the Berman Museum and expressed through community-based art.

Members of the Collegeville community, Berman Museum's educational partners and Ursinus students, faculty, and staff met at Collegeville Park to decorate "Partnership T-shirts" and banners before the parade got underway. Student groups from Ursinus had created banners and "helping hands trees" that communicated the themes of collaboration and partnership.

"Community partnership grows from the ground up.  It is an organic, collaborative project made all the richer by the making and displaying of community-based art," said parade organizer Susan Shifrin, Associate Director for Education at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art.

Ursinus groups who contributed included UCARE, Art Exhibitionists, Gay Straight Alliance, UC Environmental Action and the Art Department.

Perkiomen Middle School East, Lakeside Girls Academy and the Junior Girl Scout Troop 741 from the Freeland Hills Service Unit also participated in the festivities. Spiral Q, the community arts organization with whom the Berman partnered for this project, demonstrated how to create props on a large scale. Some of the props carried in the parade will be on display in the Myrin Library on the Ursinus campus.

The group marched along the streets of Collegeville and then gathered for a finale on the lawn in front of the Berman Museum, where they were greeted by Ursinus Jazz Band musicians and one of Spiral Q's super-sized puppets, holding out its arms to embrace the crowd. The parade reached its fitting end with participants mingling and enjoying food and festivities together, demonstrating the power of art and arts-based partnership.

Deforestation, while not a new phenomenon, is a key global  environmental issue, especially given the beneficial role of forests  as carbon sinks and as sustainers of biodiversity. In recent years, China has increased its extraction of natural resources from Africa, be it timber, coal, oil, minerals, rare plant and animal species and other resources. Reports of China's timber demand in Asia, in central Africa and in other regions are increasingly more common. China's timber demand in Africa now surpasses demand from other regions, placing intense pressure on African forests. In Mozambique, an area that has received less attention from scientists and media concerning deforestation, China's timber demand has had a devastating impact on the country's slow-growing and semi-arid tropical miombo forests. How are the latest strategies for stemming deforestation faring in Mozambique, where miombo forests are rapidly succumbing to China's burgeoning timber demand? Mozambique's unique land and forest laws should, theoretically, contribute to a more socially-just management of the country's forests. But Mozambique's home-grown and internationally-allied environmental movement is facing many challenges in supporting the communities that live in these forests while also positively supporting the local forest ecology. Based on her experiences researching and living in a miombo forest during a major turf struggle between different timber buyers, Ingrid Nelson presents an on-the-ground account of how international, national, regional and local interests and strategies meet and what these encounters produce.

Ingrid Nelson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon and recipient of a U.S. Student Fulbright Fellowship and a Society of Women Geographers Evelyn L. Pruitt National Fellowship for Dissertation Research.

Ursinus Professor and Philadelphia Noir Writers Ask,: 'What is Noir?'

December 8, 2010

7:30 PM

Berman Museum of Art

Free to public.

No reservations necessary

Ursinus Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Carlin Romano guides us through Philadelphia's dark side, as editor of Philadelphia Noir (Akashic Books), a just-published collection of original short stories set in Philadelphia neighborhoods.