Newsletter

Shore to Shore.

New Pacific Studio Vallejo, September 9-11, 2013

Hi everyone! In Pacific North geese are flying south in formation and gardens piling up with leaves. Brilliant sunsets this past week, pouring gold over the distant hills of Marin County, on the other side of the bay. I’m looking forward as eagerly as my five-year-old granddaughter to my first northern winter in a decade, and to participating year-round in the wonderfully diverse cultural life of the San Francisco Bay Area. Rain usually starts next month.

Right now, we’re sweltering in a heat wave and a wildfire is raging on Mount Diablo, to the southeast. Out in the bay, Oracle and Emirates Team NZ are fighting for the America’s Cup. I learned this week from Ray Wichmann, writing in Bay Crossings, that the race began in 1851, when yachtsmen from the New York Yacht Club sailed their yacht America to the UK to compete in the Round the Isle of Wight Race. It won the race and a cup was named in honor of the first boat to win it.

I began my life at NPS Mt Bruce in 2001 by sitting in the unlined loft, wanting to find its stories. This week I’m going through a similar adventure here, opening up the small loft above my study. A permanent loft stair has been built in, next to my desk. Plywood flooring should go in soon. I think I’m addicted to lofts, as spaces for secret making, in their own magic bubble of time and space.

Farewell to Mt Bruce and Mauriceville on my Mind

After stepping down from my 12 years at NPS at the end of April and receiving a poignant send-off, I flew to San Francisco in mid-May, leaving NPS Mt Bruce in the capable hands of NPS board members and the house team of Maelyn Charlton, Heidi Ankers and Jodie Dalgleish. My current book project, Rainbows over Mauriceville. Early Days in a Scandinavian-Kiwi Community, travelled with me, and has now gone to my editor for layout. It contains more than 250 historic images. This has been compiled for Friends of Mauriceville, and we still need to raise funds of around $2,500 for the next stage – publication. Donations and debentures are both welcome. Email FOM Secretary Jean Thompson-Church.

NPS Vallejo - New Board

Welcome to incoming board members Christina Hellmich, Mel Orpilla, Miro Salazar, Myrna Hayes, Alvaro Garcia and Ines Hernandez-Avila. And our thanks to continuing board members Amy Berk, Edith Hillinger, Jim Kern and Joyce Jenkins and to outgoing member Anne Lamborn. Brief bios appear on our updated website.

Advisory Board

The role of advisory board members is to promote north-south Pacific exchanges between museums, universities and our two residencies. We thank Dame Anne Salmond for agreeing to be honorary patron, and welcome Petra Kuppers and Awhina Tamarapa.

Residency Program

Thanks to donations, local thrift stores and Ohmega Salvage recycling store in Berkeley, we were soon simply furnished once again and ready for another exciting year. The residency program resumed here in June, building new personal Pacific bridges. (And the beautiful new white East Span of the San Francisco –Oakland Bay Bridge opened last week.)

Five artists enlivened the local scene (and Facebook) between June and the end of August: Sam Hill, a jazz guitar musician and photographer from New Plymouth, New Zealand, spent two weeks here writing and sorting before moving on to New Orleans and Burning Man events. Next in was Australian prizewinning poet Nadine Browne from Perth, who enjoyed walking around San Francisco’s North Beach, performing at a poetry slam at the Starry Plough in Berkeley, and meeting Vallejo artists at coffee master Fabrice Moschetti’s generous free coffee sessions on Saturday mornings.

Alyssa Fridgen swapped her curatorship at the Alexandria Museum of Art in Louisiana for two weeks of research at NPS, and also shared her experience directing Art in Action community initiatives in New York in recent years. NPS alumna Terra Fuller, recently returned from four years overseas, two in Morocco and two in Namibia, focused on her own studio practice before taking up a new part-time position working with the Museum Experience team at San Jose Museum of Art. (Terra did an internship for her MA in arts administration at NPS Vallejo in 2006, followed by three months as acting director at NPS Mt Bruce.) Terra’s dream is to continue to work in the artist residency field, as well as to pursue her own art practice.
Last summer artist was Elisabeth Corrales, a recent BFA graduate from New York. Elisabeth spent a day engaging with young and old in Story Spot at the Solano County Fair, took a life drawing class in SF, attended the opening of the Virginia Street revitalization project, and mounted a combined exhibition (with Miro Salazar) of paintings, drawings and animation for her Open Day on August 17. Vallejo’s mixture of creative energy and problems of urban blight kept reminding her of similar areas of Bushwick, her current home in New York.

The residency program resumes next month and we hope to welcome American writer Carol Park, who is working on a topic dealing with Japanese youth culture.

Donations

Grateful thanks to board members Edith Hillinger and Miro Salazar, along with an anonymous donor, for recent gifts of books, furniture and household supplies. These are very much appreciated.

Outreach

This continues to be an important part of the vision of NPS, giving visiting artists an immediate entry into community concerns.

1 Sister Cities

In addition to encouraging closer Australian, New Zealand and Bay Area cultural links, NPS Vallejo also hopes to promote artist/writer exchanges between three of Vallejo’s sister cities: Akashi in Japan, Baguio in the Philippines, and Trondheim in Norway. In 2004 Shigeko Nakanishi and KF began developing the Akashi network with Shigeko’s visit to Vallejo, followed by KF’s visit to Japan in 2005, and pilgrimage to the grave of Ema Saiko in Ogaki. The Ema Saiko Room at NPS Mt Bruce also honours this 18th century woman poet and painter, and KF’s record of her journey is published in ‘Pilgrimage to Japan’ in Moon over the Pacific.

NPS Vallejo launched the Baguio connection in July this year with a display of work at the 2013 Solano County Fair by Baguio-based artists including Benedicto Cabrera, known as Bencab, a National Artist and founder of the Bencab Museum. KF was graciously declared an ‘honorary Filipina’ and NPS also ran Story Spot each day,collecting stories of locals and visitors.

NPS Mt Bruce is already connected to Trondheim through the 2009 residency of Kari-Elise Mobeck and Johannes Sigurjonsson. Now we want to build a triangle to Vallejo.

2 Vallejo Street by Street Project

This project was launched by NPS-V in August with the aim of improving the city one street at a time by
* cleaning / adding missing sidewalks
* planting pollinator pathway beds and
* Picturing Vallejo- installing photos and other images telling stories of Vallejo 1850-2050.


NPS is collaborating with Vallejo Together, the Vallejo Daffodil Project, Loma Vista Farm and other groups. The first day of action was on Saturday 31 August, when more than 25 volunteers turned up to clean Valle Vista and follow farmer Rita LeRoy’s direction in planting a pollinator flower bed.

Arohanui/ Love to you all
Kay Flavell
newpacificstudio@att.net