Harrison David Rivers will be the presenter of an artist’s talk for our series StARTers: Assaggi d’Arte Tuesday November 29 at 6pm Siena, in person at the Siena Art Institute and live-streaming on the Siena Art Institute’s Facebook page and YouTube channel.
Harrison David Rivers is an award-winning playwright, librettist and television writer based in St. Paul, Minnesota and currently in residence at the Siena Art Institute through Dec 10th.

Harrison David Rivers is an award-winning playwright, librettist and television writer based in St. Paul, Minnesota. His plays include THE BANDAGED PLACE (Playwrights’ Center, Roundabout),  WE ARE CONTINUOUS (Williamstown Theatre Festival, Geva Theatre Center), THIS BITTER EARTH  (Playwrights’ Center, New Conservatory Theatre Center, Penumbra, About Face, Theater Alliance, Richmond Triangle Players, The Road, InterAct, TheatreWorks Hartford), WHERE STORMS ARE BORN (Williamstown), WHEN LAST WE FLEW (NYFringe, Diversionary, TheatreLAB, Real Live Arts, Out Front), and the musicals FIVE POINTS with Douglas Lyons and Ethan Pakchar (Theater Latté Da), WE SHALL SOMEDAY with Ted Shen (Signature Theatre, Theater Latté Da) and I PUT A SPELL ON YOU with Nubya Garcia. Harrison has received commissions from Roundabout, Yale Rep, Transport Group, Penumbra, TheatreWorks Hartford and the Public Theater, among others. His television credits include ONE OF US IS LYING (Peacock) THE NEVERS (HBO) and THE PLOT (Hulu). Harrison sits on the Board of Directors of The Movement Theatre Company and the Playwrights’ Center. He is a graduate of Kenyon College and the Columbia School of the Arts.   
Find more info on Harrison’s website: http://www.harrisondavidrivers.com/

This week our Academic Director Lisa Nonken and Communications Coordinator Clio Manfredi were in Austria for a meeting with project partners of the Erasmus+ European Project CREATIVITY (Developing Communication, Creativity, Critical thinking and Collaboration skills amongst job seekers in the creative and cultural sectors)

Our project partners include:

Partners:

– DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY, UK (project leader)
– ATIT BVBA, Belgium
– LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY, UK
– SPES GMBH, Austria
– ISTITUTO LUIGI STURZO, Italy
– RESEARCH PATHS ETAIREIA EREYNAS, Greece
– Siena Art Institute Onlus, Italy
– VšI “Lyderystės ir verslo akademija”, Lithuania

The project aims to educate, strengthen, and encourage 12-18 years old schoolchildren to practically demonstrate four competencies (4Cs): 

Creativity 

Critical thinking

Cooperation

Communication

The Siena Art Institute’s faculty led workshops for educators and students in Siena earlier this year as well as participating in September workshops at DeMontfort University (Leicester, UK). We are working together with our partners to study the skills training of students and the predicted future needs of the sector to identify gaps in terms of fostering creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. With this knowledge we are co-creating digitally interactive education sessions and publicly accessible supporting teaching materials that will utilise performing and visual arts methods to develop key competencies.

In our Austrian meeting this week with all project partners, we shared updates on the materials we have been creating for our shared platform which will allow us to publicly distribute the research and materials we are developing. We were excited to discuss the design of our e-learning platform (which is on its way!), where teachers and independent students will find a lot of useful and inspiring content to spark creative responses developing skills in the 4C’s. 

By the way, we will soon start planning dissemination events in partners’ countries (in 2023), so stay tuned for more updates on our project activities!

For more info: https://creativityproject.our.dmu.ac.uk/

https://www.sienaart.org/Art-Community-Projects/CREATIVITY-Erasmus-%2C-European-Commission/

#SienaArtInstitute, #LoughboroughUniversity, #ATiT, #DeMontfortUniversityLeicester, #SPES, #Zukunftsakade #lyderystėsirversloakademija, #CREATIVITY #EUproject

Join us for an online artist’s talk Tuesday Nov 15 with Borinquen Gallo!
Streaming on the Siena Art Institute’s YouTube channel and Facebook page at 6pm Siena/ Noon NYC

Borinquen Gallo is an Italian-Puerto Rican Bronx-based multi-disciplinary artist whose work delves into themes of of transformation, community development, socio-cultural systems and structures through sculpture and installations made using a range of repurposed materials. Her work is developed both individually and collaboratively, through participatory initiatives often involving schools, museums, and community and cultural organizations.Everyday detritus, construction, and packaging materials including trash bags, debris netting, and caution tape, are painstakingly manually knitted, threaded and reconfigured into lush textural weavings.   Across a broad range of considerations — material, formal, psychologically intimate and social — the work aims to modulate between the familiar and the surprising so as to fundamentally disrupt viewers’ assumptions regarding what is valuable and discardable. 

Gallo received her BFA in Painting and Sculpture from the Cooper Union for The Advancement of Science and Art, her MFA in Painting from Hunter College. She has received numerous awards including the Sol Shaviro Award (2015), The Marion Netter Fellowship (2010), the Doris Liebowitz Art Educator Award (2009). Residencies include The Children Museum of Manhattan (2019), The Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Program (2015), the Vermont Studio Center (2013) and The Cooper Union Artist Residency (2011). She has exhibited at Burning in Water Gallery, BRIC Arts Media, Smack Mellon, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Wave Hill Sunroom Project Space, the Queens Museum, Clio Art Fair, Scope, Volta NY, The Children Museum of Manhattan, the Hudson River Museum  and the The National Academy Museum and School where she also served as Studio Practice Program Head. In addition, she has worked on curatorial projects with BAM Fischer, and Pratt Institute. Gallo is currently represented by Malin Gallery and is Adjunct Associate Professor of Art and Design Education at Pratt Institute in New York.

More info: https://www.malingallery.com/artists/borinquen-gallo

https://www.pratt.edu/people/borinquen-gallo/

Join us Thursday Nov 10 6:30-7:30pm for an OPEN STUDIO with current resident artist Sheri Simons! This is a great opportunity to speak with the artist about the projects she has been creating during her month in Siena, and get a “behind the scenes” look at her creative process!

Born and educated in Michigan (USA) with a BFA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Simons has resided in California since the mid-1980s. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Michigan Council for the Arts. Residencies have taken her around the globe, including the Japan-US Friendship Commission and Youkobo Art Space residencies in Tokyo; a residency at ZK/U: Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin; and a residency at Artpark in New York. In 2019, Simons worked in the Glass Shop as a G.A.P.P. (Guest Artist Pavilion Project) artist in residence at the Toledo Museum of Art.

Her sculptures have been included in exhibitions at such institutions as the Fukushima Biennale, Japan; the Cranbrook Museum, Michigan; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, the Kansas City Art Institute; and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

For more information, visit her website: www.sherisimons.com

#contemporaryart#artistinresidence#artistresidency#siena

Our Fall 2022 students are working hard on all their projects in our many courses this semester, including painting, ceramics, metalsmith-silversmithing, mixed media work, and more! Keep up the good work everyone!
We are really looking forward to our end of semester exhibition which is coming up on Dec 3

On Nov 18th American playwright Harrison Rivers arrives for his residency at the Siena Art Institute!

Harrison David Rivers is the winner of the 2018 Relentless Award for THE BANDAGED PLACE. His other plays include WHEN LAST WE FLEW (GLAAD Media Award, NY Fringe Excellence in Playwriting Award), SWEET(AUDELCO nom), WHERE STORMS ARE BORN (Berkshire Theatre Award nom, Edgerton Foundation New Play Award), FIVE POINTS (MN Theatre Award for Exceptional New Work, Lavender Magazine citation for Outstanding New Playwriting, BroadwayWorld Minneapolis Award for Best New Work, Inclusion in MinnPost’s year-end “Best” List), THIS BITTER EARTH (MN Theatre Award for Exceptional New Work, Lavender Magazine citation for Outstanding New Playwriting, Joseph Jefferson Award nom), LOOK UPON OUR LOWLINESS, AND SHE WOULD STAND LIKE THIS, TO LET GO AND FALL and BROADBEND, ARKANSAS. 

Harrison was named a Runner-up for the 2018 Artist of the Year by the Star Tribune and a 2017 Artist of the Year by City Pages. He has received McKnight and Many Voices Jerome Fellowships, a Van Lier Fellowship, an Emerging Artist of Color Fellowship and residencies with the Bogliasco Foundation, the Hermitage, Duke University and the Williamstown Theater Festival. He was the winner of New York Stage & Film’s Founder’s Award in 2015. 

Harrison is an alum of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers’ Group, Interstate 73, NAMT and the Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab. He is a NYTW Usual Suspect and a member of the Playwright Center’s Board of Directors. BA: Kenyon College. MFA: Columbia University School of the Arts. 

For more info: harrisondavidrivers.com

Collaboration and conflict resolution do not only affect human beings, but are also common in the plant world: this will be the focus of the intervention of Anna Morera, trainer and expert in regenerative agriculture. This ONLINE event for our StARTers – Assaggi d’Arte series “Learning to dialogue like plants” will take place exclusively online (not in person) and will be in Italian TODAY at 6.00 pm, live-streaming on the Siena Art Institute’s Facebook and Youtube channels.

https://m.facebook.com/events/546346020636919

 Viewers will be able to ask questions and interact with the speaker through the comments section of the video.

L’evento rientra nella programmazione realizzata dal Siena Art Institute per il progetto FRAGILE in Art per Toscanaincontemporanea 2022 con il contributo della Regione Toscana e GiovaniSì. 

A few snapshots from our Stencil Art Workshops with guest artist Tania Saleh this week.

@regionetoscana @giovanisi.it @taniasaleh @tantunevisuals

#Toscanaincontemporanea2022#contemporaryart#nonviolence#socialpractice#conflictresolution#stencilart