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The Chattanooga Market presents Plaza Parties: Inauguaral Event Tomorrow Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Join your neighbors for the launch of Chattanooga’s new Market & Music Series, held at Miller Plaza every week from 4 pm until 7pm every Thursday, starting tomorrow. These Plaza Parties will run through the end of October, then resume in May for a full 26-week season in 2010. Just like Sunday’s Chattanooga Market, this family-friendly event will feature live music, local produce and regional arts & crafts.
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Mainx24 Planning Meeting: September 22 @ green|spaces
Last year on December 6, Main Street was taken over by pancakes, Santas, tacos, bluegrass music, dedications, and dancing, and it lasted 24 hours. Feel like you missed out on last year’s Mainx24? Want to do more to make this epic event bigger, better, and even more community-owned?
Join the organizers of Mainx24 for their first planning meeting on September 22 at 5:30 pm, hosted at green|spaces. Interested in helping coordinate, participate, volunteer? Maybe you just want the inside scoop on events and programming? This meeting’s for you. Plan to attend with your neighbors, business owners and friends in preparation to make our annual neighborhood event the best in the city.
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Chattanooga Welcomes Three More ArtsMove Artists
About a week ago, a panel of locally acclaimed artists gathered at CreateHere to assess the latest pool of applicants for the ArtsMove artist relocation program. ArtsMove aims to attract outstanding artists and artisans from around the country to the Chattanooga area by awarding up $2500 in grants to reimburse moving expenses. After comprehensive consideration, the jury unanimously elected to offer awards to mixed-media artist Beverly Hayden, ceramics master Linda Falcone and multi-genre musician Evan Lipson. The funding will help support the artists as they pack-up their lives and move to the Scenic City.
Beverly, a former lawyer from Paducah, Kentucky, is now a well-decorated artist who has shown her work in over 70 art shows throughout the nation since 2003. Beginning her artistic career as a photographer, she transitioned into mixed media work a couple of years ago.
Linda, hailing from Wilmington, North Carolina, has resided in many locations across the nation, which has exposed her to varying culture and foreign influence. This eclectic viewpoint, along with her “love of colors and their expressive abilities,” help her create beautiful pieces such as one-of-a-kind horsehair pottery and richly glazed ceramic dinnerware.
Evan has been splitting his residence between Philadelphia and New York City. He is a currently a composer/bassist who is “focused on transgressing the politics of genre, in favor of cultivating the rarefied esoteric world(s) of underground music.”
The grantees will be settling into their new homes in Downtown Chattanooga within the next few months. The three recipients have each expressed excitement about sharing their art with the city. Each artist will offer new, high-quality work to the city’s growing art scene while also working to engage the community through educational opportunities driven by their unique perspective.
By Trey Meyer, Senior Arts Fellow
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Majora Carter’s Visit Should Herald Start of Citywide Conversation
I’ve just come back from a day full of big, inspiring ideas; a day whose richness I can attribute directly to Majora Carter, environmental justice advocate and all-around rock star.
That last comment reminds me that I shouldn’t disguise this as a blog post written from CreateHere’s often cryptic (I have only myself to blame for this) authorless Marketing Speak. It is my own impassioned view.
Naïve at times, yes, but I’ve heard more than once that naïveté is a crucial component in change-making. And it is a quality that Carter at some point reveled in, as well, as she described in her lecture tonight. “I never knew who I wasn’t supposed to talk to,” she said regarding the community of experts she helped form at the launch of her sustainability initiatives in the South Bronx, the neighborhood she grew up in and lives in still. Obstacles to knowledge transfer between people invested in their communities should be readily breakable. It’s a lesson for all of Chattanooga, too.
Carter’s time in Chattanooga started this morning with a tour through downtown, the Southside, Highland Park and Alton Park. Touching on past, present, and especially future, guides from River City Company, Neighborhood Impact, the St. Andrews Center, and the Enterprise Center lead Carter through the city’s victories, and shortcomings.
Reverend Mike Feeley of the St. Andrews Center discussed the methodology for implementing a neighborhood garden in a Highland Park, which will soon expand. “We drove around the neighborhood and found houses where people were growing food, where they were cooking for their neighbors. We found out what they were eating, how they were cooking, and what languages they spoke.” With this knowledge in hand, the Center was able to launch a community garden that reflected the interests of the surrounding area, and as a result, the project has flourished.
It was talk of similar successful projects across the city that lead our group to talk of Alton Park. Maria Noel of the Enterprise Center discussed the very dire environmental depreciation of the area, which for decades was red-lined by banks and investors, and as a result, has come to bear the brunt of ecological damage following major industrial decline.
The area holds eight Superfund sites, several capped landfills, and a dubiously named “Residue Hill,” a site so contaminated that the EPA has made it clear its contents—completely manmade—will never be explored. Residents have been evacuated twice in the past thirty years because of chemical contamination. Noel told us about a school, now demolished, where teachers were struck with fits of nausea and vomiting, directly attributed to waste from a nearby chemical factory. While it isn’t completely clear what made the teachers sick, theories abound, including one that states the plant produced materials included in Agent Orange.
The residents in this neighborhood are separated by huge stretches of land, occupied by factories, both abandoned and functioning. Construction of any kind requires an EPA grant for cleanup, and even in spots not contaminated with hazardous materials, there are issues of access and transportation that contribute directly to an average income significantly lower than the rest of Chattanooga.
It is staggering.
There is hope, though, and Carter’s visit provided an ideal opportunity to start a citywide conversation that can find sustainable, community-owned solutions to the problems all Chattanoogans experience daily. A luncheon following the morning’s tour focused us on The Bethlehem Center, a beacon in the community, and on the Neighborhood Environmental College, which claims 300 graduates in the area. Literacy and marketable skills were at the forefront of the discussion with Carter, who has pioneered the Green Collar movement.
In her lecture at UTC, Carter touched on what inspired her to work in environmental justice initially. “It started with my family, and with my neighborhood,” she said. “Movements start when conditions are no longer tolerable, when people decide they will fight for the freedom to do something they couldn’t do before.”
In the South Bronx, Carter has trained a green collar workforce to work on projects that help locals reclaim public spaces. A waterfront development project and greenway are underway this year, as well as projects in Detroit, North Carolina, and New Orleans. “You have to unlock the potential of places,” she said.
My deep hope, and I suspect it is also the hope of anyone familiar with the depth and thoughtfulness of Carter’s work, is that this is the start of a much larger conversation for our city. A culture of opportunity, one that doesn’t leave the fate of our neighborhoods up to chance, is a real possibility.
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Environmental Justice Leader Majora Carter at UTC, Tomorrow Night Monday, September 14, 2009
National environmental justice leader Majora Carter comes to Chattanooga tomorrow, September 15. Join the Benwood Foundation, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies and CreateHere in welcoming this progressive young activist.
Born, raised, and continuing to live in the South Bronx, Carter’s work takes her around the world in pursuit of resources and ideas to improve the quality of life in environmentally challenged communities. She founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 and since then, she has been instrumental in creating riverfront parks, building green roofs, working to remove poorly planned highways in favor of positive economic development, and successfully implementing the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training (BEST) program—a pioneering green-collar job training and placement system—seeding a community with a skilled workforce that has both a personal & economic stake in their urban environment.
Carter also worked with Van Jones to co-found Green For All, a national initiative dedicated to creating quality jobs in green industries by collaborating with government, business, labor, and grassroots communities.
Carter’s visit to Chattanooga couldn’t come at a better time. As a community, we stand at a crossroads, and how we move forward with community-based environmental initiatives could change the way our city works.
Carter will speak at UTC’s Roland Hayes Concert Hall at 7 pm. This event is free and open to the public, though space is limited.For more information on the George T. Hunter Lecture Series, visit the Benwood Foundation online.
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