Arts & Culture

Listening to many people around me expressing pessimism, or fear, about the current economic conditions in our country, I think of things my father said to me as I was growing up about dealing with difficulty. He used to say problems brought opportunities, that in the midst of things going wrong there was usually something that was going well. That is a generational attitude, shared by many people the age of my father. Perhaps it is now an attitude that can be cultivated in our times.

People often ask me  how Images and Voices of Hope makes an impact. They want to know  what changes come about as a result of our work. Over the 10 years that I have been involved, I have seen  people moved in countless  ways. It often has to do with the connections made through the conversations that take place. It may even be a new thought that comes as a result of being in such an inspired atmosphere.  I personally experienced this at a recent Images and Voices of Hope conversation on the Arts that was held in Miami.

Forgotten Ellis Island, the first film to be produced about the immigrant hospital on Ellis Island, will be shown on PBS 2/2 at 10PM ET. Check local listings for other times and dates.

The film was honored with an award of appreciation at the 2008 IVOH fall conference.

If ever there was an image and voice of hope, it was President Barack Obama on January 20th in his riveting inaugural address. Having won the hearts and minds of the American people in a clear victory, he could speak with confidence about things that may have seemed innocent or naïve before - urgings us forward with "hope and virtue."

The effect was instantaneous. The country -in fact the world - felt buoyant, uplifted, even light hearted. No one had missed the seriousness of the cautions about the future, but we all felt there was integrity and possibility again.

I first met Lin Arison over 25 years ago who told me of her very new organization National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts . She and her now late husband and founder of Carnival Cruise lines Ted Arison had just founded it to give support to young and supremely talented artists across America. We decided to collaborate on a television special for WLRN Public Television in Miami where we would videotape these young people who had come to South Florida from all over the country to show off their creativity.

Dan Barry's poignant story of a leprosy colony in Hawaii sat above the fold on the National page of the New York Times yesterday. It's title, "A Story of Exile and Union Few Are Left to Tell", grabbed me. The first line of the essay is this: "The peace of morning comes to the small village of famous isolation called Kalaupapa". With the newspaper in my hands, the dark of early morning outside my window, and the quiet and stillness of a yet busy world far away from me, I was struck with the power of Barry's storytelling.

I recently had the opportunity to watch a dance teacher intently trying to help heal women in prison. Leslie Neal is a former choreographer and associate professor of dance at Florida International University in Miami who works with women at Homestead Correctional Institution and other prisons in South Florida. It was both unnerving and moving to see how founder of ArtSpring's Inside Out Program Leslie Neal guides these women on a journey toward self exploration and wholeness.

AMERICA DREAMS

Dreams, they bring us to a place in our inner soul where we leave the outer world for a place of imaginary splendor, a place where we see visions, a place where we transpose ourselves to where we want to be.