SANcafé: Lauren Elder, Oscar Melara and Kate Connell

SANcafé includes a communal pop up café, a Map/Book and a digital Library.

We’re working on the artwork the for San Agustín Farm Map/Guide to Flavors and in Spanish: Mapa de Cultivos y Manual de Sabores de San Agustín for the 11th Havana Bienal, which opens May 11, 2012 in Cuba. Our part of the SANcafé project is a map that folds into a book and a small digital library on urban agriculture. It’s another “edge of a big city project!” And more neighborhood mapping and bookmaking! (And library related too)

SANcafé is one project developed for  MAC/SAN (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de San Agustín) a project of LASA (Laboratorio Artístico de San Agustín), an organization in San Agustín, a neighborhood at the outside southwest edge of Havana. San Agustín is a working class neighborhood of 37,000 people. In the past the neighborhood was the home of many of members of Fulgencio Batista’s regime and before that the site of extensive mango groves.

Read about our Portola District Fundraiser April 22, 2012!

Check out LASA’s blog!

SANcafe Press Release

Here’s a peek at the artwork for the San Agustín Farm Map/Guide to Flavors–lots of combining of images and text to come!

A post on Crossing the Street appears this month and next on the new ArtPlace website. Site for the new funding consortium ArtPlace America, projects that improve urban neighborhoods are featured.

Link to:

Artplace

Neighborhood projects funded by the Creative Work Fund on ArtPlace

The 3-part Alemany Island Project will be installed under the 280 Freeway across from the San Francisco Farmers Market on Alemany Boulevard.  To be unveiled in 2012, the project includes: a beautiful 50′ mural of a San Francisco Garter Snake and Mission Blue butterflies painted on a freeway support, a native garden designed by a City College of San Francisco Horticulture Dept. student and a 48 panel mural painted by Portola residents of images from the Book and Wheel Works Porto-Loteria game. Lia Smith, Chairperson of the Portola Neighborhood Steering Committee, began work on the project in 2008, and through her efforts the project was awarded funding from the San Francisco Community Challenge Grant Program.

Saturday, March 19, 2011 Artists’ Talk at the Portola Library

We’ll tell some of the neighborhood stories that led to Crossing the Street. If you haven’t seen the Crossing the Street handmade books about the Portola District, now’s your chance. Come get your free maps! You’ll have a chance to tell your stories, too.

Raffle! Prizes!

Portola Branch Library
380 Bacon St. at Goettingen
San Francisco, CA 94134
1:30-3:00

Email us for more information: info@bookandwheel.org

20 Great SF Neighborhood History Projects!

The SF History Expo in the Old Mint showcased 20 San Francisco Neighborhood Projects. We got to meet San Franciscans working on the Bernal, Portrero and Visitacion Valley history projects. Foundsf was there, collecting oral histories and scanning visitors’ personal photographs for their website www.foundsf.org. More than 3,500 visitors passed through the Expo over 2 days. The Old Mint was lovely, lots of people came to see the inside. Thanks to the San Francisco Historical Society which produced the event.

Join us at the San Francisco History Expo

This Saturday and Sunday, February 12 & 13, 2011 at the Old Mint at 5th and Mission Street. The Hours Are from 11-4 both days and the Expo is FREE!

Link to the Expo

Crossing the Street Extended!

The Crossing the Street exhibition at the Portola Branch Library has been extended through May 31, 2011. You’re invited to come to the library on Saturday, March 19 at 1:30 pm for an artists’ talk with us on working together with Portola residents and with the Library to make the Crossing the Street book collection.

See you there!

ArtsChange
www.artschange.org
Grass roots organization offering the arts as a healthy way of life.

Creative Work Fund
www.creatveworkfund.org
Socially engaged arts projects for the San Francisco Bay Area.

Intersection for the Arts
www.theintersection.org
“For nearly 50 years, Intersection for the Arts has activated space and time for people to come together to imagine new cultural experiments that aim to transform our world.” From the website.

Scenic Route
www.scenicroute.info
Building handheld tours throughout San Francisco, making discoveries, revealing secrets!

Southern Exposure
http://soex.org/index.html
“Dynamic, cutting edge art, education, and community programs since 1974.”

Book and Wheel Works : artist’s statement . cv | Oscar Melara . Kate Connell

Statement

As a pair of collaborating artists who are also a bus driver and a librarian, we  see our artwork as a public service with the same intention as our day jobs—to work together with our community.

The experience of our daily lives is the focus of our collaborative work, which began in 1995. Our first joint undertaking, The Nacimiento Project, centers on our artistic and cultural community, our second, Our Work Life, was organized around the people we work with. Made in the Portola, our third collaboration, is centered on the people we live with. Our projects either evolve over several years of engagement or are ongoing annual events. Together we have produced community story telling projects that take the form of installations, murals, exhibitions and events. Our work makes use of a variety of media, from digital to ceramic. Our roots go back to the late 1960s and 1970s in the arts community of San Francisco’s Mission District where we first began to do community-based artwork.

In addition to collaborating with each other, we have collaborated with writers, musicians, a transit system, an archive, libraries, cultural festivals and trade unions. Our individual work has been shown internationally, is in university collections and has been funded by councils, foundations, and businesses.

ABOUT: KATE CONNELL | OSCAR MELARA | BOOK AND WHEEL WORKS

Nominated for People’s Choice Award!

Portola at Play has been nominated for a People’s Choice Design Award at the Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian Institution!

Check it out and add a comment…we’d be honored to get your vote!
There are pages of great projects, from grass roots ones like ours to corporate designs like iPhone and Google Wave.

Create a login and you can vote!

http://peoplesdesignaward.cooperhewitt.org/2009/nominee/2139