March/April 2015
Feature
Community Arts Gathering
International Sonoran Desert Alliance
Ajo, Arizona
PictureCAG logo by Tohono O'odham artist Tony Johnson
Five sunny spring days in the Sonoran Desert filled with art, music, theater, dance, delicious regional food, participatory workshops, open art studios, and some yoga classes and group bike rides thrown in, too. Oh, and did I mention lots of fun?  We’re talking about an arts conference in some big city like Los Angeles or Phoenix or even Tucson, right? No!!  We’re talking about the Community Arts Gathering, March 14-18, 2015, in Ajo, Arizona.

The Community Arts Gathering is just one of many projects organized by the International Sonoran Desert Alliance (ISDA) based in Ajo. According to Tracy Taft, ISDA Executive Director, ISDA “was formed in 1993 by individuals from Mexico, the Tohono O’odham Nation, and from Ajo who were concerned with preservation of the Sonoran Desert and its cultures.” Since that time, ISDA has sponsored numerous conferences and gatherings with the goal of preserving the unique ecology and cultures of the Sonoran bioregion. 

Morgana Wallace, Community Arts Director for the ISDA provides an overview of the Gathering. “The Community Arts Gathering will be held in the downtown historic district of Ajo – the Plaza and Curley School campus, including the new International Sonoran Conference Center. The Gathering opens on Saturday March 14, 2015, with registrants invited to attend the Authentically Ajo Food Festival in the Plaza. …The Gathering schedule is packed with talent and experience from Saturday afternoon through to Wednesday afternoon March 18, 2015. This is the first of many bi-annual Community Arts Gatherings in Ajo.”
Tracy Taft explains that “ISDA organizes festivals, events, and programs, one purpose of which is to bring people together across cultures and generations.” Other culture-related events held in Ajo each year are the International Day of Peace (September) co-hosted by ISDA, the Tohono O’odham Nation, and Mexico. In February, ISDA co-hosts the Peace and Friendship Day in Sonoyta, Sonora, just south of the international border.

“This Gathering is very much about PLACE,” Morgana Wallace adds. “Ajo is uniquely situated near two distinct and very controversial and culturally rich borders – the border between the United States and Mexico and with the Tohono O’odham Nation. So besides the community building that we intend to take place between artists, we see very dynamic and important things happening with our local community and in the interaction between community artists and those who identify as non-artists.”
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Mural painting, International Day of Peace. Photo: Jewel Clearwater
Gathering Presenters

Morgana Wallace explains, “We spent a few weeks meeting with artists in our region to discuss what an event like this could look like. In each of those meetings, artists expressed their desire to be with each other, to connect with other artists doing similar work. So we hope that this Gathering will support community building among our Southwest artists and practitioners. And by bringing in artists from outside of the region we hope to expand this community of artists and explore our practice in the greater community arts field. We have presenters coming from as far as South Carolina, Washington state, Louisiana, and Mexico.  And the opportunities to work collaboratively across borders, and across nations even, are exciting and available. This Gathering will help to ignite some of those new connections and reaffirm familiar ones. “
Among the presenters at this year’s Gathering:
  • Alma Angelina Yanes Leyva of Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, will lead a workshop on how to use recycled materials to make useful items for home and garden.
  • Carina del Rosario of Seattle, WA, will present her interactive art installation titled Passport Office and Series which involves a temporary “passport office” displaying artistic passports and encouraging conversation about race, identity and discrimination.
  • Kimi Maeda, theater artist from Columbia, SC, will present Bend, a performance and workshop that combines sand drawings and archival film footage to tell the true story of two men who were interned in a Japanese American relocation camp during World War II.
  • Logan Phillips, of Tucson, and Verbo.bala Spoken Video present Sonoran Strange, a theatrical experience and a poem cycle about the Arizona Sonoran borderlands, as told through the stories of historic, ironic, and sometimes ludicrous characters and events.
  • Oliverio Balcells, photographer, painter and musician from Guadalajara and Tempe, presents Aztec Calendar, the true meaning of the Aztec Calendar (Piedra del Sol), and then invites participants to create their own art piece and a collaborative piece based on the Calendar.
  • Joan Baron, Scottsdale environmental artist, invites participants in her project Place to “uncover and recognize the unique history within the physical terrain of Ajo, and explore our connectivity to the land, the people and the choices we have before us to protect and preserve” and translate insights into “unique creative interventions using art as the tool to record our discoveries.”
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AAYanes Leyva, recycled materials workshop
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OBalcells_Aztec Calendar_
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CdelRosario_Passport Office_
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_Sonoran Strange_ photo: Emiliano Leonardi
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  • Tay & Val present Dreams Unlimited @SONORAN an interactive multimedia presentation sharing inspiration, hopes and dreams via films, photos, live music, spoken word performances and traditional oral storytelling.
  • Los Cenzontles Performing Ensemble from California presents traditional and original songs of conscience and resilience, screenings of their media productions, and group discussions on an inclusionary American identity. The ensemble has spent two decades working with Mexican American and Mexican immigrant communities using the arts to help maintaining their culture and ancestry.
  • José Torres-Tama works with migrants coming from Mexico to the United States. He will lead performance workshops in Sonoyta, Mexico to cultivate the stories of migrants and will then bring those stories to Ajo to share at the Gathering.
  • Marc David Pinate of Borderlands Theater, Tucson, launches his Ajo Memory Project Phase 2: Redemptive Remembering which is the second phase of an arts-based project that took place in Ajo in 2010. The project generated oral histories from former residents of Ajo’s formerly segregated communities. Marc will be collecting new stories and including stories from the archive in the final performance.
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Tay & Val. Dream Mural @Bellingham_
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Los Cenzontles
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Jose Torres-Tama
PictureAjo Ballet Folklorico. Photo: Jewel Clearwater
Additional presenters include:

  • Carlos Daniel Soto Espindola and his Centro Ecológico Comunitario de Bahía Adair (CECBA)
  • Cultural Arts Coalition and its Thoughtful Warrior Program
  • Marla von Ettenberg  and her participatory Exquisite Desert
  • Mel Ortega and the film Apache Mountain Spirit
  • Michael B. Schwartz on Community Arts Movements
  • Michael Chiago’s  Beginning of Time' Mural Renovation
  • Norma Gomez and Ballet Folklorico de Ajo
  • Sergio Ricardo Monjaraz Gonzalez  and his workshop Metal and Sand
  • Southwest Folklife Alliance presenting The Ethnographers Toolkit for Artists
  • Toni Cubillas and the  Cultural Crafts Group presenting Building Community Through Cultural Crafts
  • Wesley Fawcett Creigh on  Resolution Through Arts Engagement in the Era of SB1070
  • Yvonne Montoya and the Safos Dance Theatre’s Color the Mural
  • Karen Sucharski with Every Picture Tells a Story

PictureKSucharski_Antique Photo Garden 7_
The conference opens Saturday with a keynote speech by Maribel Alvarez of the Southwest Folklife Alliance.  There also will be an artists’ marketplace on Sunday, and on Monday, the Arizona Commission on the Arts presents a workshop for artists on writing competitive grants, as well as street art and open studios.

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Intn'l Day of Peace 1. Photo: Jewel Clearwater
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Intn'l Day of Peace 2. Photo Jewel Clearwater
Artists and Social Change

The role of the arts and artists in bringing about social change is an underlying theme of the Community Arts Gathering.

Morgana Wallace explains how the arts can transform communities. “I believe the transformation begins on an individual level, is very personal, and is based on entering into new relationships.  Ultimately what comes out of that new relationship is spurred by an artistic process, and is what transforms the larger community. There is no community without relationship. And there is no impacting a social issue, no room for social change, unless we enter in relationship with each other, and the way to do that is through the arts. The arts break down barriers, reach across borders, and create conversation that initiates social change. “

Artist and poet Karen Sucharski, one of the Gathering presenters and also Curley School Clay Studio Manager, elaborates on this idea of transformation, “The more detailed I am in my poetry, the more people relate to it, to me and to themselves. My poems are very personal and often connect an audience with an emotion they had not necessarily acknowledged, i.e., grief, love, frustration, even anger. People have said my poems have changed their lives. They have said they realize they are not alone in their feelings. I believe when straight-up conversation doesn’t work that we can connect through art.”
 A Sense of Place: Art and the Environment

The idea of “place” is fundamental to this Gathering and to the work of the International Sonoran Desert Alliance.  Executive Director Tracy Taft explains, “Every two years ISDA hosts a Tri-National Symposium Celebrating the Sonoran Desert, cosponsored by all of the local and regional land management agencies: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Pinacate Biosphere Reserve, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Barry M Goldwater Range, U.S. Border Patrol, etc. and the Tohono O’odham Nation sharing information and discussion on a wide range of natural resource issues, cultural resource issues, environmental protection issues, and Native American perspectives.

“Over the years ISDA has also organized volunteer projects to “disappear” illegal roads, to build pupfish ponds, to do restoration on both sides of the border. Currently, we focus on the Symposium. We engage artists in all of this – the Symposium includes, for example, an art exhibit – for the last few symposia, the focus has been on the border – the last exhibit was called Re-drawing Borders and there was a simultaneous showing of The Border Project in Sonoyta, Mexico – with people at the two opening receptions able to communicate through a computer link up.”
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Sonoran Desert Symposium 1. Photo Jewel Clearwater
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Sonoran Desert Symposium 2. Photo Jewel Clearwater
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For more information about ISDA and the Community Arts Gathering 2015:

International Sonoran Desert Alliance http://isdanet.org/


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             Where in the world is Ajo, Arizona?


            There!  (click on map to enlarge)
       <  (red dot and map courtesy of Tio Google)






~~C.J. Shane