The Front Porch, particularly in the south, is a space of dialogue and conversation. It is the architectural, liminal space between the inside and outside, connecting private and public.
Front Porch Conversations (FPC) is a program with a mission to encourage and support artistic (visual) excellence in Nashville. The conversations are designed to initiate and sustain high-level artistic dialogue in the community of Nashville and its surrounding cities--using the idea of the front porch as a metaphor for exchange and dialogue.
The Front Porch Conversations are a series of lectures and workshops (sponsors are in the works, but will be announced at a later date) designed to create dialogue between the growing, “inside” Nashville arts community and the “outside” artists living in other regions of the United States. Community involvement and further partnership is strongly encouraged. Topics include but are not limited to Working in a Collective, Why Paint?, How Disaster Effects Artists, and the Marriage of Art and Business. The Conversations are intended to be forums in which students, professional and independent artists, academics and community leaders can take part.
Inaugural events include public lectures with top US artists, coupled with a “private” conversation with said artist on an undisclosed East Nashville porch. The porch conversation will be recorded (since we can't fit a whole community on our front porch), made into a pod cast and housed on Front Porch Conversations’s web site. The idea is that some of the best conversations are born out of friendship and familiarity. Front Porch Conversations utilize new media to allow for a democratic use of formerly privileged information, providing access to more community members.
More to come...
3 comments:
hey--dig the blog.
will be in touch.
bob
THE FRONT PORCH : SEGMENT OF AN AFRICAN LEGACY IN AMERICA
The description of the front porch as the “architectural liminal space between the inside and outside, connecting private and public” is insightful and encapsulates a complex range of concepts. Some of these can be expanded to highlight the appropriateness of the front porch motif as an introduction to the new gallery program at TSU. Due to the epic role that TSU has played in bridging and navigating both the clearly defined and the “in between” spaces from segregation to integration and diversity, it has a history which resonates with this motif. However, ramifications of the above description of the front porch reach beyond its concept as a particularly “southern” form and can extend to origins, which have been acknowledged to owe much to Africa (Driskell, 27- 30), (Anderson, 23,24). As it has been stated “… the legacy of African culture is important to the understanding of America (Piersen, xv).
In other words, a “liminal” aspect of the front porch is it’s position as a historical link between Africa and America that is part of an often hidden legacy of artistic and cultural influences. Naturally, American architectural forms, including the porch, can be complex blends of various environmental and cultural influences. However, since the African history and/or components of those blends are not always highlighted, there is an imperative to cultivate an appreciation of the aesthetics of this legacy, and perhaps even more crucially, to understand associated ways of being and thinking respective to its forms. The key concept here is not simply the need to preserve knowledge of certain visual forms and modes of thinking and behavior, but that these may be needed to help preserve us (us as in humanity).
Accordingly, research suggests that emphasis in specific areas of the U.S. on architecture which functions to connect “inside and outside” and “private and public” is not by chance. Instead, it is likely because much of such architecture consists of African forms introduced to the U..S. through the Caribbean , Sea Island/Eastern Coastal, and Louisiana regions when enslaved Africans utilized their skills to recreate structures which emerged from the more communal based life that they remembered in Africa. There, in the African homelands, the boundaries between private and public were not so distinct and, as pointed out by Anderson, the role of architecture differed at the time, from that of Northern Europe, the root of the early European settlers (21). Numerous examples of African architecture have been studied in terms of affirmative relationships to natural and social environments (Jencks and Baird, 176-213).
What may be essential to understand here is the pervasive African concept of the “self,” as more than an isolated individual (Some, 91). Such a relational basis of existence may provide further context for the front porch evident in the variety of African communities noted for resolving conflicts through more effective consensus means rather than through winners versus losers debate models (Fancher, 107). The sad state of much of the world, including much of Africa, suggests that more effort is needed to maintain those reservoirs of knowledge and wisdom, often encoded into our artistic forms, involving ways to harmoniously sustain communities and civilizations. It is particularly those forms whose roots and respective lessons may be pertinent, even or especially when, associated behavior has deviated from their original models.
Acknowledgment of roots and origins may minimize the chances of missing or distorting wisdom accessible from an art form’s spirit of original intentions and purposes.
Therefore, by highlighting the front porch as one of the expressions of style and culture which connect Africa and America, it can be better appreciated as a fitting symbol for this forum. The title, “Front Porch Conversations” and its description as a space for dialogue (rather than a confrontational debate format) appropriately reflect the architectural form’s historic origins. Utilized as such, it can provide an opportunity to perpetually generate bridges linking the Art Department of TSU to an ever wider and more cooperative community.
sisterl
References:
Anderson, Genell. The Call of the Ancestors, Washington D.C.: AMAR Publications, 1991
Akbar, Naim. Akbar Papers in African Psychology. Tallahassee: Mind Productions and Associates, 2004.
The Community of Self. Tallahassee: Mind Production and Associates, 1985.
David Driskell, Two Centuries of Black American Art. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976
Fancher, Mark P. Village Justice: An African-Centered Approach to Settling Conflicts In Our
Communities. Ann Arbor: JurisAfricana Press, 1999.
Jencks, Charles and Baird, George. Meaning in Architecture. New York: George Braziller,
Inc., 1970.
Piersen, William, Black Legacy: America’s Hidden Heritage. Amherst: The University of
Massachusetts Press, 1993.
Some, Malidoma. The Healing Wisdom of Africa. New York: Tarcher/Putman, 1998.
Visona, M., Poynor, R., Cole H., M. Harris. A History of Art in Africa. New York: Harry N.
Abrams, Inc., 2001.
wonderful, sister l!!
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