Community Built Association Conference
“Meeting in the Middle”
April 7-10, 2022
Omaha, Nebraska
Speakers from 2022
Mark Lakeman
Mark is a national leader in the design and development of participatory, artful, and ecological public places. In the last decade he has directed, facilitated, or inspired designs for more than five hundred new community-generated public places in Portland, Oregon alone. Through his leadership in Communitecture, Inc., and it’s various affiliates such as the The City Repair Project (501(c)3), The Village Building Convergence, and the Planet Repair Institute, he has also been instrumental in the development of dozens of participatory organizations and urban permaculture design projects across the United States and Canada. Mark works with governmental leaders, community organizations, and educational institutions in many diverse communities.
www.planetrepair.wordpress.com
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Arlene Goldbard
Possibility, Power, and Purpose: Sensing the Demand | I’m inspired by Abraham Joshua Heschel’s words: “This is the most important experience in the life of every human being: something is asked of me…. Meaning is found in responding to the demand, meaning is found in sensing the demand.” Beyond all that our own work requires, what roles and responsibilities call to community-based artists in times like these? How do we balance radical acceptance and radical hope? How do we invest our creativity and courage in our collective future?
| WORKSHOP | REFRESHING YOUR VISION: LOOKING AT YOUR WORK THROUGH NEW EYES | Like everyone else, artists and creative organizers sometimes feel stale. The pleasures of creation may be overshadowed by the drudgery of making ends meet, by the challenge of getting work seen and supported. A strong sense of passion and purpose often sustain the desire and energy that fuel an artist’s work. As times change, as you grow in experience and understanding, the vision, values, and mission that drive your work may need refreshment. This exercise offers fresh new ways to look at your work, energizing your creativity and sense of mission, sparking new ideas you can put into practice.
Arlene Goldbard (www.arlenegoldbard.com) is a New Mexico-based writer, speaker, consultant, cultural activist, and visual artist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her books include The Wave, The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future; New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, Community, Culture and Globalization, Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture, and Clarity. Her new book, In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated? will be published by New Village Press/NYU Press early in 2023. Her essays have been widely published. She has addressed academic and community audiences in the U.S. and Europe and provided advice to community-based organizations, independent media groups, institutions of higher education, and public and private funders and policymakers. Along with François Matarasso, she co-hosts “A Culture of Possibility,” a podcast produced by miaaw.net. From 2012 to 2019, she served as Chief Policy Wonk of the USDAC (usdac.us). From 2008-2019, she served as President of the Board of Directors of The Shalom Center.
www.facebook.com/arlenegoldbard/
Twitter and Instagram: @arlenegoldbard
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Bernard Williams
My Artistic Journey: The Street and the Studio | My experience of becoming a public artist and its connection to my independent studio practice.
Bernard Williams is an established artist based in Chicago, IL and working in painting, sculpture, installation, and public art. He holds a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MFA from Northwestern University. The artist began painting outdoor murals in the early 1990’s with the Chicago Public Art Group. While continuing with CPAG, Williams has added outdoor sculpture to his practice. In recent years he has created several outdoor steel sculptures in Chicago, and completed the Black Tractor Project at the Arts Club of 
Chicago 2019. In November 2020-May 2021 he debuted a large sculptural work in the “Long Dream” group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. In 2021 the artist won two significant outdoor Commissions: The Naomi Anderson installation for Michigan City, Indiana, and a large steel sculpture will be installed at Nate Manilow Sculpture Park at Governors State University in University Park, IL.
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NDN Collective & The Black Sheep Art Collective
Community Arts becomes Creative Resistance | A story of a community with a strong and rich history in arts finds itself with schools without art programs, art teachers, and encouragement to think creatively. The Black Sheep Art Collective (BSAC) was formed to mentor young artists using traditional language, stories, and explore the question, “where do creative ideas come from?” These BSAC members all shared a common hardship growing up without arts resources, materials and began to share a dialogue in conversion with communities about what hope looks like visually and the rebirth of mural storytelling. In recent years we find ourselves using art to preserve and protect our traditional ways of life and fight for water, land and resource extraction.
Cy Wagoner
Cy Wagoner comes to us with 20 years of collaborative experience and is a Creative Resistance Coordinator with the NDN Collective. His background in arts in activism has always been rooted in a community’s expression of visual arts and storytelling. He started out managing an art collective that focused on youth mentorship before working full-time as a trainer coordinator for large organizations across the country as well as sitting on the board for Indigenous People Power Project. Cy feels honored to combine the expression of wellness through artistic resistance which always includes the voice of a community’s youth. Cy’s early background as a teacher informs his continued dedication to engaging youth in building their voice and skills to continue to fight for a better future. He believes that the future is in the hands of our youth. It is our responsibility to support the youth in creatively expressing their vision of a just and healthy world. Art has always been land and people together. When you no longer live with land, you will be changed. Art does change people.
Instagram: @cytsidi
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Milenko Matanovič
Collaborative Democracy in Action | A participatory exercise to find answers to where our country finds itself, what ought to happen next, and what can the CBA community do about it.
An artist and community activator, Milenko Matanovič was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then the republic of Yugoslavia). He is known for his unique, art-centric facilitation process in uniting multiple voices around a common goal. He was a member of the Slovene neo-avant-garde movement OHO (later to become the OHO Group) that challenged the status quo of what art was and how we experience it.
In 1986, he founded the non-profit Pomegranate Center outside of Seattle, Washington to help communities resolve real-world problems. During his three decades’ long tenure as Founding Director, he worked on hundreds of projects facilitating livable city design throughout the U.S. and around the globe, often involving the transformation of abandoned public spaces into vibrant community gathering sites.
Milenko now focuses on sharing his experiences and knowledge through consulting, training, and articles and speaking engagements. He keeps himself grounded by continuing to create visual art that celebrates the power of collaboration.
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Sherri Warner Hunter
Sherri Warner Hunter is the creative force behind SWH Art Studio Inc., Bell Buckle, TN. She is a sculptor, mosaic artist, author, and teacher.
Hunter’s studio production concentrates on large-scale public commissions and community-based projects. Her work is included in numerous private collections and can be viewed publicly at Dignity Health Dominican Hospital, Sant Cruz, CA; The Executive Residence of Tennessee, Nashville; and as part of the First International Mosaic Intervention Project in Puente Alto, Chile.
Her interactive sculpture installation, ‘Rocky Shores Playspace’ in the Emerald Garden at Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, Palo Alto, CA was selected by CODAworx as one of the 100 best commissioned art installations for 2019.
Hunter is a former president and board member of the Community Built Association, a national organization of professional creatives who work with communities to design and develop volunteer-driven projects. Her participation with community-based projects include The Gathering, William Edmondson Park, Nashville, TN; the mosaics at Turtle Grove, Albany, GA; Andrew Brown Park East, Coppell, TX; as well as numerous projects working with children in schools.
Hunter has written two books: Creating Concrete Ornaments for the Garden and Making Concrete Garden Ornaments (published by Lark books) developed from expertise honed through decades of teaching workshops throughout the US, internationally, and at her studio in Bell Buckle.
sherriartstudio@aol.com
https://swhartstudioinc.wordpress.com/
www.instagram.com/sherriartstudio/
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Brett Ramey
Indigenous world building | In these times of transition, Indigenous leadership is guiding us into the next world. From a community cafe feeding elders in the epicenter of uprisings in Minneapolis to rematriated lands in the Missouri River bluffs, this session presents stories and practices of Indigenous world building, and highlights ways of being in good relationship with each other and the natural world through collaborative work.
Brett Ramey (Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska) is a land-based educator and program designer based in Northeast Kansas and Minneapolis. He leads collaborative visioning and design processes that have resulted in medicine gardens, murals, and funding mechanisms for Indigenous conservation and food sovereignty initiatives. He is the Climate Resilience Planner for the Iowa Tribe.
@brettlesting
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Erika Nelson
No One Expects Anything out of Kansas: a permission slip for rural artin’. Looking at the freedoms and challenges of social practice art making in a rural environment through first-hand experiences, failures, and stubborn optimism.
Erika Nelson is an independent artist and educator, examining contemporary art in the public realm. She took to the road full-time, exploring the nooks and crannies of the United States, seeking out the odd and unusual, gathering stories of people building roadside vernacular architecture known as World’s Largest Things. She developed her own traveling roadside attraction featuring The World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things, settling in Kansas as a geographically central home base. Her artwork manifests itself in a series of public art projects that incorporate Art into the Everyman’s everyday experience.
https://erikanelson.cargo.site/
FB & IG: @worldslargestthings
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Inkpa Mani
The memory of hands in Community Art | Inkpa Mani connects ancestral symbols and petroglyphs into contemporary community engaged art that has existed as a continuum for thousands of years in the Northern Plains. The work looks at community based art through past and future generations.
Inkpa Mani is an Indigenous artist who grew up in the lands now known as Mexico and the United States and he currently lives in Wheaton, Minnesota. He earned his BFA at the University of South Dakota in 2019. Inkpa is a multi-disciplinary artist and academic. Inkpa works with paints, stone, paper, and digital media to explore his culture. His process involves community, oral histories, and institutional research to highlight the concerns and values of his people. He shares his knowledge of Native American history, art and culture and how Indigenous people have adapted to changes in social and cultural landscapes. He has worked on large scale sculptures, murals, and community-based arts in the Midwest as well as working with Dakota language education for the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. Inkpa currently works at Tiospa Zina Tribal School and is earning his Business Administration degree and his Dakota Teaching Certificate form Sisseton Wahpeton College. He is working on an extensive portrait series, a large-scale stone sculpture in Sisseton, SD and a waterfront public art commission for the city of Minneapolis.
@inkpa_mani_art
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Christina Valdivia-Alcalá
Re-Membering Who We Are: Calling Ourselves Back Through Community, Art & Nature | In curandersimo, part of the healing journey looks at one’s relationship to their community. An imbalance in this relationship is believed to be part of the soul’s illness. In ceremony, one’s truest essence is called back into the body – one re-members.
We will explore the healing and life-giving energy of art, intersecting with nature as a catalyst to re-building and re-imagining what it means to be alive during these sacred and turbulent times.
Christina was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas and on a small family farm. She is a Chicana with Mexican indigenous heritage. Christina has a BA in History and a Minor in Political Science. A longtime volunteer in her Mexican-American community, she has been engaged in art and culture for decades. In 2011, she founded the Tonantzin Society, a volunteer Chicana, Indigenous, Latinx art and cultural organization. The Society places deep emphasis on social and environmental justice. Christina is semi-retired and currently serves on the Topeka City Council. She is married with one daughter, two grandchildren and two faithful loving dogs, Tessa & Bailey.
FB https://www.facebook.com/TonantzinSociety/
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tonantzinsociety/
Twitter https://twitter.com/tonantzinkansas
Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/tonantzinkansas/
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Dave Loewenstein
Hidden in Plain Sight | Dave will share stories about the origins of his work as a muralist and activist printmaker, and how those experiences led him to farming, community organizing and a search for his family’s roots.
Dave Loewenstein is a muralist, printmaker and community organizer based in Lawrence, Kansas. His community-based murals can be found across the United States, and in Northern Ireland, South Korea and Brazil. Loewenstein’s prints, which focus on social justice issues, are exhibited internationally and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles. He is the co-author of Kansas Murals: A Traveler’s Guide, a 2007 Kansas Notable Book Award Winner, and is the subject of “Called to Walls,” a feature length documentary that premiered in 2016.
@daveloewenstein
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Ellen Struve
Ellen Struve is a playwright, community artist and educator. She is a Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow, a WhyArts resident artist and serves on the board of Comunidad Maya Pixan Ixim. She has degrees from University of Iowa and School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Betni Kalk
Community Mural Advocacy | Betni Kalk talks about her work to encourage communities and artists to make community murals together. She founded the website communitymurals.info and is making video interviews of advice from muralists and community members.
Betni Kalk is an artist, designer, muralist and advocate for community murals. She was born in Canada, grew up in Papua New Guinea and attended high school, college and graduate school in the U.S. She studied graphic design, painting, and drawing. In search of the sublime in nature, she explores the natural landscapes of other countries, and visits different regions of the U.S. to and from artist residencies. She has exhibited in numerous locations including Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Omaha. She has received grants and residencies in the U.S. including at Sitka Center and San Juan National Forest. She currently lives in Omaha, NE with her partner and children where she teaches design at Creighton University.
Instagram: @betni
Website: B-e-t-n-i.com
Facebook: facebook.com/betnikalk
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Sydney Jane Brooke Campbell Maybrier Pursel
Hard Lessons Worth Learning | Stories of lessons learned while working in community-based and publicly engaged arts. Topics include community murals and public-facing projects, working with Indigenous communities, representation, and participant incentives.
Sydney Pursel is an interdisciplinary artist and museum curator specializing in interactive, socially engaged, and public-facing projects that take form as sculptures, paintings, performances, interventions, and exhibitions. Some of Sydney’s projects are used to educate others about food politics, language loss, appropriation, and history in addition to projects amongst her own community focusing on language acquisition, culture, and art. Her work has been shown at public parks, universities, galleries, alternative spaces, and museums. Sydney is the Curator for Public Practice at the Spencer Museum of Art and a member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska.
instagram.com/sydneycampbellmaybrierpursel
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Jeff Mather
Expansive Partnerships: Transforming Community | Community-based artists’ necessary emphasis on designing equitable collaborative processes – while funders and other stakeholders often focus on a shiny product – can make for a tricky balancing act. This session will be an exploration of strategies for going wide, rather than narrow, with multi-arts partnerships and will also cover ways of working with schools and other organizations as an independent contractor.
Jeff Mather is a community-based public artist & environmental sculptor and interdisciplinary artist based in Atlanta. He has been a member of CBA since 2004. A member of Alternate ROOTS, the southern regional community-based art for social justice organization, since 1992, he has had several of his community-based public art projects, including theater projects, partially funded by ROOTS’ Community/Artist Partnership Program. Mather has been an artist-in-residence at the High Museum in Atlanta, and was the first visual artist-in-residence for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, developing an object theater + dance collaboration for a series of 20 ASO concerts. He has been the STEAM Artist-in-Residence at Drew Charter School in Atlanta for ten years and has also been the lead teaching artist for the Arts Access Program in Cache Valley in northern Utah over this same stretch.
communitybuilt.org/jeff-mather
https://alternateroots.org/jeff-mather/
https://www.facebook.com/mathersiteart
https://www.teachingartistsguild.org/profile-view/?u=2382
https://www.instagram.com/mather_site_art/
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Community-Built Organizing-izations : Working Together Together!!!
This panel presentation and conversation will explore the benefits and opportunities for community built art through non-profit organizational structures. Concrete Couch and The Steel Yard both manage projects throughout their communities, but also own and maintain public spaces, sculpture parks for and by the people! They will discuss the art and projects they have done, the role of economic justice, the benefit of being organized, some of the challenges with legal and professional systems, and the opportunity to effect change in areas outside of the Arts, while making truly monumental impacts on the visual and cultural lives of the community.
Concrete Couch is a creative, community building non-profit organization. We do a lot of job training, people connecting, recycling, and offer programs which create opportunity for underserved communities. We make all of our programs free, and do a lot of outreach to build involvement. We try and do a lot of listening to chart our course and plan our programs. We are pretty tangible in our goals…we often make something that the community wants, but along the way we train people, and also build a situation where participants can share their skills and meet their neighbors. We make it fun and share food too!
The Steel Yard is a non-profit industrial art center and shared studio located in Providence, RI. We’re an arts maker space and non-traditional craft school offering courses & educational programs in blacksmithing, welding, jewelry, foundry, and ceramics. Our public projects department fabricates cultural, functional, and community-design-driven public-art for installation throughout Southeastern New England. These decorative bike racks, sculptures, trailers, trash cans, benches, and fences are found at parks, schools, businesses and public spaces from Western Massachusetts to Block Island.
Counterform is a catalyst for strategic design and printmaking in the community through project-based work, publishing, workshops, and lectures. Our initiatives provide a platform for growth and empowerment that benefit our community by increasing economic opportunity for residents participating in artistic and educational programs. As a multicultural and multilingual team, we act as a liaison between individuals, businesses, local non-profits, government, and academia.
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Elizabeth Raybee
Art From the Ashes – Community Healing through Art | The Redwood Complex Fire destroyed hundreds of homes and killed nine members of our community in Mendocino County, California. As one of the thousands of evacuees who was able to return safely to my home, I spent the following year working on funding, giving free mosaic workshops to survivors, designing and building a mural with many community volunteers and organizing exhibits of any fire related artwork in four venues throughout our county.
I spent my first 10 years living on a junkyard outside of Detroit, where I collected bits of broken tail-lights and ball bearings and made my first mosaic in a box top. During high school I painted my first two public murals, then got a degree in Painting and Printmaking from the Kansas City Art Institute. Two days later I left for California, where I’ve been making mosaics, with an occasional painting or collage in the mix. ever since. I’m very involved with my community through public art, organizing fundraisers and singing for peace and freedom with the Raging Grannies of Mendocino County. 
Jose Faus
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Mentorship in Community Built Work Panel
- Tom Ari Donch
- Bernard William
- Mark Lakeman
All cultural and human development directly or indirectly comes from mentorship of some kind. Direct mentorship and training is the expedient route to mastery in the field of Community Built work. By far, the most successful organizations in the field have developed conscious methods of bringing up artists and designers in the field. Equity is a central value that needs to be included in mentorship programs. This panel presentation and discussion is about short term and longer term models to developing equitable and diverse mentorship programs. The Vallejo Sol Trans project, the Chicago Public Art Group, City Repair and Communitecture will be explored. Successes and lessons learned.
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Steve Tamayo
Steve Tamayo is a traditional Sicangu Lakota artist whose family originates from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. After graduating from High School in 1984, Tamayo enlisted in the US Army, serving in the 101st Airborne Division. After returning to Omaha in 1987, he studied the traditional arts of the Umonhon people under Howard Wolf. As a mentor, Wolf instilled in Tamayo a deep appreciation and knowledge of Umonhon art and culture. He learned the importance of traditional materials, construction and the history surrounding native artifacts and regalia. In 2000, Tamayo moved to the Rosebud Reservation, where he augmented his understanding of Northern Plains art; he earned his BFA from Sínté Gleska University in 2011 where he developed and taught the traditional arts program.
Tamayo currently leads study groups on his Reservation and travels to schools and museums throughout the country to study and teach historic methods of artifact construction and preservation. He is a regular consultant to the curatorial and conservation staff at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian; his most recent work there is the current exhibition, “As We Grow,” focused on traditional native games and toys. He is an artist-in-residence and cultural consultant with OPS and has taught Native American Art History at Metropolitan Community College and University of Nebraska-Omaha. In 2016, Steve served the children of Standing Rock as an elder, art teacher, and cultural keeper at the Mini Wichoni Nakincinzin Owayawa, Defenders of the Water School at the Oceti Sakowin camp in North Dakota.
Tamayo’s honors include the 2014 NAC Governor’s Heritage Art Award for excellence in cultural artistic expression. In 2015, he and Paul High Horse won the Omaha Entertainment and Arts Award for best two-person exhibition, and were again nominated in 2016. Tamayo has exhibited at The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, in Washington, DC, Kaneko in Omaha, The Great Plains Museum in Lincoln, NE, the John G. Neihardt Center, and RNG Gallery in Council Bluffs, IA. Some of his most recent work includes buffalo robes for Willie Nelson and Neil Young and a painted tipi offered to President Obama from Bold Nebraska. Steve was granted a Creative Capital award in 2022 which will support his project of replicating the 12 historic types of buffalo hides of the Lakota People.
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Therman Statom
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Sophia Othman | moonfishartworks.com
Gene Buban | @geneous_1
Melissa Berrios Penny | @malisbee
Leo Rodas | @ljrart9
Gifford Park Neighborhood Walking Tour…”Boots on the Ground”
Neighborhood volunteers will guide a walking tour of the Gifford Park neighborhood, a very diverse older part of Omaha near downtown. Our walk will take us through community gardens (composting, espalier fruit trees, chickens), Adventure Playground with our two-story treehouse, Big Muddy Urban Farm, neighborhood business district, several murals, Community Bicycle Project, Myrtle & Cypress Coffeehouse, Gifford Park, and Yates Illuminates (our soon-to-be-open historic neighborhood educational community center). We will see several projects and meet some of the people involved with our vital partnership organizations.
Chris Foster
My background/bio is I have been involved with the Gifford Park Neighborhood Association (GPNA) for thirty-three years volunteering with many youth and adult activities and events. I served as past GPNA president and board member. Currently I serve as director of our Gifford Park Community Garden, Youth Garden, and Youth Tennis programs, and I’m on the executive team to organize Yates Illuminates (our neighborhood educational community center). I worked with Kiewit as an IT Manager for twenty-six years and left in 2010. I enjoy sports, community, saving old buildings, outside activities, arts & trades, and I’m a “wannabe meteorologist” J.
Social media links for Gifford Park Neighborhood Association:
Website: www.giffordparkomaha.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GiffordPark
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Therman Statom
Art as a Diplomatic Tool | Therman’s presentation will be about international art workshops done in conjunction with art and embassies, public art installations, and socially focused art activities.
Therman Statom is an American Studio Glass artist whose primary medium is sheet glass. He cuts, paints, and assembles the glass – adding found glass objects along the way – to create three-dimensional sculptures. Many of these works are large in scale. Statom is known for his site-specific installations in which his glass structures dwarf the visitor. Sound and projected digital imagery are also features of the environmental works. Therman Statom’s glass studio, Art Objects, Inc., is located in Omaha, Nebraska.
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