Awarded Grant by ACTA
Ziya Art Center is pleased to announce that we have received our first grant from Alliance for California Traditional Arts (ACTA). ACTA’s generous funding and support through its Round 10 of Living Cultures Grants will help us curate and lead the second year of “Calligraphies in Conversation”. “Calligraphies in Conversation” encompasses a group exhibition and a series of public events including calligraphy demonstrations, workshops, and calligraphers’ talks and presentations focusing on endorsing the appreciation of traditional calligraphy in hands-on and tangible manner. The emphasis of this program is initiating a meaningful conversation between different calligraphy traditions especially between the Middle Eastern calligraphy and other calligraphy scripts and traditions. The program is planned for November- December 2015 in the Bay Area, California.
This program builds on the success of our inaugural Calligraphies in Conversation project in partnership with Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California (ICCNC) and Oakland Asian Cultural Center (OACC) in Spring 2014, where over 80 artworks were exhibited at these two locations near downtown Oakland. A range of diverse traditions and styles were exhibited, with an array of Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish traditional calligraphy artworks as well as manifestations of calligraphy in some contemporary and abstract art pieces.
Co-curators Arash Shirinbab, Neal Jamal Koga, and Raeshma Razvi assembled the collection over many months, in a competitive process that yielded 115 submissions mainly from the Bay Area and some from the U.S., United Kingdom, China, Iran, Japan, and Turkey. The exhibition coincided with four public events at ICCNC and resulted in a full color exhibition book. The public programs included:
“Trees of Fall” calligraphy workshop and exhibition with Arash Shirinbab, April 26, 2014
“Artist demonstration and talk”, jointly with Arash Shirinbab and Justin Hoover curator of SOMArts Cultural Center, April 12, 2014
“A Calligraphic Dialogue”, joint workshop with Japanese master calligrapher Uehira Baikei, February 13, 2013
This project is made possible by a grant from the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, in partnership with Walter and Elise Haas Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Surdna Foundation.
