AMP Connect Flyer
AMP Presents CONNECT
An Arts Networking Event at Meridian Gallery in San Francisco
February 27, 2010
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Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective (AMP) presents Connect, an arts networking event at Meridian Gallery at 535 Powell St. in San Francisco on Saturday, February 27, 2010, from 8 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.

For a $10 cover, event guests will enjoy mingling with artists and grassroots art organizations from various disciplines - music, dance, poetry, visual art, theater, and more, all with the intention of providing a networking opportunity for the Bay Area's diverse arts community. Wine and hors d'oeuvres are included in the cover donation.

The evening will feature a sound installation by Silvia Nakkach of Vox Mundi, a movement workshop from Creative Source, the visual art of Rogil Birco, experimental short films from Loren Means, an electronic music set from Elliot, and BUBBLES from Sterling Johnson, the Bubblesmith!

AMP, a Los Angeles-based, international arts organization, is a thriving online hub for artists, with nearly 4,000 members in 85 countries. AMP's website empowers members to meet, share their work, post classifieds, and search AMP's worldwide directories for other artists, as well as artists' resources. AMP also sponsors networking events, focusing on not only sharing art, but creating community, which is essential to generative, relevant, and interesting art making.

This event is curated by AMPers Chiara Viscomi and Elisabeth Friedeman, with direction from Los Angeles by AMP Executive Director Terri Anderson. See Chiara's and Elisabeth's photos and biographical statements below. The flyer above is by Jessica DeVries, and the art is by Matthew Freeth.

SIlvia Nakkach
The Vox Mundi Project ( Voice of the Worlds) is an international organization devoted to teaching and preserving sacred, shamanic, and indigenous vocal arts, combining education, performance, and service and spiritual practice The project promotes research of culturally-free vocal arts , and is committed to revitalize the experience of singing as a transformative art through schools, health centers, communities, and individuals everywhere. The mission is to offer the experience of a diverse range of vocal music as part of one united vision: the human search for freedom of expression and joy. Vox Mundi has school centers in California, Brazil, Argentina and India.

Named by Utne Reader magazine as one of 40 cutting-edge artists that will shake the art world in the new millennium, Silvia Nakkach is an award-winning composer, former psychologist, voice culturist, recording artist and performer, pioneer in the field music shamanism and of consciousness. Founder/Director Vox Mundi School of the Voice. Creator and academic advisor of the Sound, Voice, Music Healing Certificate at California Institute of Integral Studies (San Francisco). Her work has been integrated in a comprehensive curriculum of scientific vocal and creative sound applications known as The Yoga of the Voice with certification and training in the United States, Brazil, India, and Europe. Contributing author of several books, Silvia's interest in indigenous music cosmology and alter states of consciousness brought her to renowned shamans and many spiritual masters. For more than 26 years she studied Hindustani music and raga singing with the late maestro Ali Akbar Khan.
23HAM
23HAM is a soulful art studio and community in West Berkeley that emphasizes an interactive process. Interactions are encouraged and our events, groups and meetings are member-created and member-led. We nurture dialogue with our open studio environment and through facilitation of community activities. We offer access to a conglomerate of shared studio environments: couches for reading, tables for writing and drawing, easels, a darkroom and even a full kitchen for dinner parties. Private studios are also available. 23HAM is focused on providing a comfortable and collaborative environment for creatives of all sorts to explore the processes of exploration, their oedipal urges, and whatever else we do not yet understand, or cannot yet accept as a species and a phenomena. We are not a corporate investment project. We are not a cookie cutter franchise. We are the old-fashioned people-can-make-a-difference types. We are doing this from the bottom-up. Bottom of our hearts, hope to die, stick a finger in my eye.
Red Poppy Art House
"The Red Poppy Art House was founded for the purpose of establishing a hub for artistic life in the Mission District of San Francisco. Implicit in this description is the distinction of a 'hub of artistic life' as being different from an arts presenting organization. The Art House was founded out of San Francisco's need for centers of cultural-artistic life that embody three core elements that we've identified as constituting the fertile ground necessary for the germination of a vibrant community of artistic peers. Without a creatively intensive community of peers, our city will have little power to attract new artists, while at the same time our capacity to retain local artists, ones excelling in their discipline, will diminish as they leave in search of a more vigorous artistic life in other cities or countries. In a small but concentrated way, the Art House has endeavored to forge such a community, diverse in both discipline and cultural root, aimed at integrating artistic excellence into local non-arts community life." (from their website)
Project Bandaloop
Project Bandaloop honors nature, community, and the human spirit through dance. The company, under the artistic direction of Amelia Rudolph, creates a blend of dance, sport, ritual, and environmental awareness. Inspired by the possibilities of climbing and rappelling, the choreography draws on aerial, vertical and horizontal movement to craft dances, many site-specific. The work explores the relationship between movement and gravity and stimulates viewers' awareness of their natural and built environments. Project Bandaloop hopes to enrich the quality of life with their performances, out-reach and ability to bring dance to new audiences. Since 1991, the company has enjoyed performing for close to half a million people.
Andrea Marchione
Creative Source is directed by Adriana Marchione who brings movement-based expressive arts therapy, creative coaching and arts process workshops and groups to the San Francisco Bay Area. Creative Source employs a variety of methods to support emotional and physical health; creative growth; and a deeper relationship to life. With an artistic and compassionate perspective, this work is rooted in the belief that the language of the soul speaks through the body, the imaginal world, artistic expression and our life stories. Adriana Marchione has a background in visual arts, arts curating and currently engages actively in Argentine tango and writing poetry.
Poetry Flash
Poetry Flash, Literary Review & Calendar for the West aims to make poetry, literature, and literary experiences accessible to a large and diverse audience, building community through literature. We publish a quarterly review featuring interviews, essays, poems, calls for submissions, and a literary calendar (fiction and nonfiction, too). We also host a website, www.poetryflash.org, with an even more comprehensive literary calendar updated each week, with online reviews, more poems, and archives from our print magazine. Poetry Flash Reading Series presents about forty readings a year at Moe's Books in Berkeley and Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland. Poetry Flash also sponsors the Northern California Book Awards to be held on April 18, 2010, at San Francisco Main Library, and the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival in fall 2010 at Civic Center Park, Berkeley. See www.poetryflash.org or call (510) 525-5476 for more information.
CIIS
WEAVING ARTS AND PSYCHOTHERAPY: Each art form - painting, drawing, sculpture, music, dance, movement, poetry, prose, story-telling, and ritual - is a gateway to the deepest aspects of the self, reawakening a language of image and metaphor and expressing what cannot be easily put into words. The Expressive Arts Therapy program at CIIS seeks to reawaken a true appreciation of the healing power of the creative and expressive arts. Its mission is to apply this ancient knowledge to our modern context and bring the power of the arts into our personal and professional lives.
"Playwrights Foundation is dedicated to discovering and supporting local and national American playwrights across a broad spectrum of artistic and career positions, in the inception and development of new plays that speak to and from an increasingly diverse society. Founded on a deeply held belief that the relevance and vitality of American theater depends upon a continual infusion of new work, Playwrights Foundation sustains a commitment to the playwright, who we regard as the creative wellspring of theater." (from their website)
"California Poets in the Schools is committed to helping students throughout California recognize and celebrate their own creativity, intuition and intellectual curiosity through the creative writing process, and providing students with a multicultural community of trained, published poets who bring their experience and love for their craft into the classroom." (from their website)
Bread & Roses is dedicated to uplifting the human spirit by providing free, live, quality entertainment to people who live in institutions or are otherwise isolated from society. Our performances enrich the soul and promote wellness through the healing power of the performing arts; create a sense of community for our professional performers, in a non-commercial setting in which they can donate their talents to inspire and be inspired; provide an opportunity for non-performing volunteers to contribute a variety of skills and resources that support our humanitarian services and increase the impact of donor contributions. In carrying out this mission, Bread & Roses seeks to create a social awareness of people who are isolated from society, and to encourage the development of similar organizations in other communities.
Chiara Viscomi
Chiara Viscomi is a performer, musician, writer, and DJ. A graduate of the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Chiara is currently working on a solo music project called ChiaraOscuro. As the force behind shoegaze and ethereal music night TremoloSF, she DJs and curates experimental films. In addition, she has a solo performance art project. Chiara is the recipient of several awards for her work in theater and vocal performance, including the Works in Progress Award from NYU. For the past several years, Chiara has explored where the expressive arts and healing interface, volunteering as a teaching artist with children, adolescents, and the homeless. She is completing her master's degree in counseling psychology with a concentration in creative expression from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.
Elisabeth Friedeman
Elisabeth enjoys drawing comics and appreciating the art of others. She is hoping to draw a wide range of talents and interests for this event, which is solely a convoluted effort to get one degree closer to Kevin Bacon.
Meridian Gallery
A commitment to nonviolent social change and to the inherent value of diversity has animated the SAPA (nonprofit parent of Meridian Gallery) since it began in 1986. Initially dedicated to breaking down racial, cultural, economic and geographic barriers through the arts, Meridian Gallery rapidly began to move into its purpose - to embody change - and as it moved, to assume a tangible responsibility to explore issues and to make spaces where youth and adults could access experientially a widening of the possible.

The Society for Art Publications of the Americas and its Meridian Gallery increases social, philosophical and spiritual change among previously isolated individuals and communities. Society for Art Publications of the Americas is the title selected in 1985 for the 501(c)(3) non-profit whose programs bear the name "Meridian" to signify hemispheric, geographical and cross cultural concerns: Meridian Gallery (1989), Meridian Interns Program (1996) and Meridian Music: Composers in Performance (1998).

If you're in the San Francisco Bay area (lucky you!), or not too far away, I hope to see you there! It will be a privilege to share the elegant space of Meridian Gallery with representatives of these extraordinary organizations, as well as the performers (I can't wait to see Sterling's bubbles!). Come on down, learn about some new people and places, eat some food and drink some wine (or sparkling water), and connect - with AMP.

until soon,

 BW Terri
Terri Anderson, Executive Director
AMP: Artists Meeting Place and Resource Collective

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