A teacher/playwright/performer shares her story of bringing arts education to communities in need.

April 27, 2012

When I listen to politicians like Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich talk about immigrants, I end up making sick jokes as a survival tool. According to their proposed policies, most of the people I work with would be offered a "trampoline to self-deportation." I am the founder and director of a non-profit arts organization dedicated to uncovering and portraying stories of the uncelebrated. I work with new immigrants and refugees, mostly teenagers and college students and young people. The future of America and the future of the world.

As part of this organization, called EarSay, in 2001 I founded an educational project in partnership with the International High School at LaGuardia Community College to provide healing through artistic expression to teenagers who have recently migrated to the United States. We offer young people who are new to the language, culture and cultural references in this country additional tools to express the truth of their lives. That we should be providing arts education from “outside” the school does not make us unique: as arts funding and teaching positions in the arts were cut in the 1980s and 1990s, many small and large non-profits began to take up the slack and provide arts training in public schools where there otherwise would be none. Out of that need, a new breed of artists began to emerge throughout the country – “teaching artists,” who are artists who teach and artists who make art. We are not members of the full-time teaching faculty, but have the ability to complement curriculum in programs that are truly collaborative within a school.

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In 1999 multimedia artists Lehrer and Sloan co-founded EarSay, combining their skills in multimedia arts project. EarSay is an artist-driven non-profit arts organization dedicated to uncovering and portraying stories of the uncelebrated. Their projects bridge the divide between documentary and expressive forms in books, exhibitions, on stage, in sound & electronic media. They are committed to fostering understanding across cultures, generations, gender and class, through artistic productions and education. They bring their work to theatres, museums, schools, prisons, festivals and universities.

Warren Lehrer is a writer and artist/designer known internationally as a pioneer in the fields of visual literature and design authorship. His work explores the vagaries and luminescence of character, the relationships between social structures and the individual. His books, acclaimed for capturing the shape of thought and reuniting the traditions of storytelling with the printed page, include: Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a New America (W.W. Norton) with Judith Sloan,The Portrait Series: a quartet of men (four book series, Bay Press); GRRRHHHHH: a study of social patterns (Center for Editions) with Sandra Brownlee and Dennis Bernstein; FRENCH FRIES with Dennis Bernstein (Visual Studies Workshop); i mean you know (Visual Studies Workshop), and versations (EarSay). Lehrer is a frequent lecturer and presenter at universities, art and literary centers, and book stores throughout the United States and internationally. Lehrer is a professor at the School of Art+Design at Purchase College, SUNY, and a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. He is currently finishing a novel, A Life In Books: the rise and fall of Bleu Mobley, an illuminated novel that contains 101 books within it, all ‘written and designed’ by Lehrer’s protagonist, who finds himself in prison looking back on his life and career.

Judith Sloan is an actress, writer, radio producer, human rights activist, oral historian, poet, and audio artist whose work combines humor, pathos and a love of the absurd. For over twenty years, Sloan has been producing and presenting interdisciplinary works and sharing voices often ignored by the mass media. For over twenty years, Sloan has been producing and presenting interdisciplinary works and sharing voices often ignored by the mass media. Her solo performances include: Denial of the Fittest (nominated for best comedy performance at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival), Responding to Chaos, Peace is Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Kill, A Tattle Tale: eyewitness in Mississippi, The Whole K’Cufin World and a few more things and Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America. She is a member of the faculty at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and is the director of EarSay’s Arts and Education programs, including Transforming Trauma Into Art, a program for immigrant and refugee teenagers from conflict-zones and war-zones. EarSay is partnering with Viper Records on Sloan’s new work in development directed by Michael Dinwiddie: Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide. For more information about their projects over the past ten years go to: http://www.earsay.org

Their most ambitious multimedia project to date is Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America, a book, traveling exhibition, audio CD, performance and lecture series.

Crossing BLVD audio CD:
Original new music compositions by Scott Johnson and text-based audio compositions by Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer cross the boundaries between music and speech, journalism and expressionism, tradition and the avant-garde. Produced by Judith Sloan, the CD also includes music by Crossing the BLVD participants including the gypsy-punk-cabaret band Gogol Bordello, Nigerian gospel singer Kingsley Ogunde, and Romanian-American musicians Christine and Dinu Ghezzo. This CD is a rich and original musical soundscape that reflects the immigrant experience at the crossroads of a paradoxical and ever-changing America. Aired on Public Radio stations nationwide.

“Crossing the BLVD by Warren Lehrer, Judith Sloan and Scott Johnson is a rich, varied  listening experience, a demonstration of the way you can explore the  world without leaving home. BLVD emphasizes the rhythmic musicality of  everyday speech… you hear laughter, sorrow and many moving tales of  hardship, flight, splintered families and the difficulties of  assimilation… Dynamic pieces from spoken-word recordings – the vocal  samples leap out of the speakers… The editing and juxtaposition of  voices can be subtle, allowing straight testimony to come through, or  extravagantly artful, complex, and exhilarating… The [companion] book  is a turbo-driven eye-witness guide with riveting first-person  testimonies.” The Guardian (London) John L Walters

Featured as a “Global Hit” “An incredible and moving story… Sloan and Lehrer spent  three years talking to immigrants and refugees in Queens, traveling the  world, in a sense, while never leaving their backyard… a place where  new immigrants from every corner of the globe come to start their lives  in America. The result is a unique multi-media project. Oral History with a twist!” The World, PRI/BBC Marco Werman

BUY THE CD NOW

For more info about the CD:
http://www.earsay.org/projects/cds/

Crossing the BLVD- Book:
As immigration policy is hotly debated around the country in terms of national and cultural security, Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America presents the very human stories of why immigrants and refugees have migrated to the US and what their experiences have been since they came here pre- and post-9/11. The 400 page, four color book portrays the lives of new immigrants and refugees who live in the most ethnically diverse locality in the United States—the borough of Queens, in the city of New York. For three years, writer and artist Warren Lehrer and actress and oral historian Judith Sloan traveled the world by trekking the streets and neighborhoods of their home borough in search of migration stories, culture and soul. This book documents some of the many people and stories they encountered along the way. First person narratives, culled from interviews and storytelling workshops, are illuminated by Lehrer’s photographic portraits of the subjects alongside reproductions of the objects they have carried with them from home to home. The Talmudic structure of the book juxtaposes multiple perspectives: neighbors who came from opposite ends of the earth, intergenerational points of view within families, teammates, classmates, friends, enemies, and co-workers. Narratives are annotated by Lehrer/Sloan’s observations, as well as historical perspectives on the countries of origin, changes in U.S. foreign/immigration policies, and other contextual matter. In five movements, the book features the voices of 79 individuals as they reflect on the good, the ugly, and the unexpected in their stories of crossing oceans, borders, wars, economic hardship, and cultural divides. Collectively, the stories, images and sounds of Crossing the BLVD serve as a magnifying glass for the future of America. Crossing the BLVD is used as a text in college courses from oral history and sociology, to documentary, immigration, cultural, ethnic, American, and women’s studies, to immigration and civil rights law, to American history, globalization, freshman writing, and as a common reader. The book is also used in high schools and in ESL classes, and even as part of training kits for interns at urban hospitals.

“Immigrant life in Queens, as told in the intimate, rich, comic, ironic and sad stories so often seen but not heard in America’s big cities…” The Washington Post Lynne Duke

“...riveting stories about a new wave of immigrants to America… ” The New York Times Corey Kilgannon

“I have never seen a book like this. [Crossing the BLVD is] a remarkably beautiful, lovingly put together example of bottom-up journalism.”Amy Goodman, Anchor and Executive Producer Democracy Now!

Winner 2004 Brendan Gill Prize
“A celebratory chronicle of the immigrant experience in New York, Crossing the BLVD is a Whitmanesque book that reveals a staggering array of humanity… [It] chronicles life in Gotham in both its despair and boundless promise. The first-person narratives are drawn from audio interviews, while the book’s ever-changing graphics and typefaces mirror the rich pastiche of religion, language and tradition that coexists in the borough… chosen for its ability to convey the inspired resiliency of the myriad communities that contribute to the city’s dynamism.” Municipal Art Society of New York

Winner 2003 Innovative Use of Archives Award “We honor Crossing the BLVD for exploding the paradigms of oral history and reinterpreting them for our multimedia century…” Archivist Round Table of Metropolitan NY

For more info about the book and to view page spreads:
http://www.earsay.org/projects/books/crossing-the-blvd-strangers-neighbors-aliens-in-a-new-america/


About the performance:
Judith Sloan channels the voices of some of the 79 stories from Crossing the BLVD. Performed as a solo show and a multi-ethnic cast, Crossing the BLVD performances have taken place in universities and festivals throughout the United States and in South Africa.

“Crossing the BLVD is a whirlwind tour and love poem of what has often been called the most racially and ethnically diverse county in America. In the tradition of the playwright Anna Deavere Smith, Ms. Sloan performs “Crossing the BLVD” adopting the personae (and respectfully mimicking the accents) of the varied immigrants whose stories are in the book… The New York Times, City Room Blog, Sewell Chan http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/an-oral-history-of-queens-immigrants-hits-the-road/

For more information about the performance:
http://www.earsay.org/projects/performance/

Traveling exhibition:
The traveling exhibition has toured to over 14 museums and university galleries throughout the United States since 2004 and is still traveling the country.
For more information
http://www.earsay.org/projects/exhibitions/