Learning and Curiosity

CJ's statement and her piece (come see it in person on the corner of Dean and Westminster St!) illustrates better than I ever could in word and image why places like New Urban Arts need to exist.

Please consider a gift to our 2010 Annual Campaign before June 30!

from the archive...

Dear Providence,

Remember that summer, way back in 2008, when we wrote you all those letters? Dear Providence, we said, I adore you. I'd just like to thank you for being my home. We told you jokes like, how many artists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? What do you mean you don't remember the answer? Were you even reading our letters?! OK, fine. The answer is three.

We confided in you when we told you that in Providence I found love, and I lost it. We're sorry about that time we called you predictable, but no hard feelings, what we treasure most is that you've shown us Life (even if you never did replace the traffic lights downtown with a roundabout). The point is that we saved all of our letters. Yes, all of them (that's how important you are to us Providence).

But you weren't our first muse. Sorry, we just thought you should know. We've been doing mail art at NUA since 2002. Back then we would send our art and letters back and forth to each other...and we saved all of that too. If you can remember who sent us these floating baby heads, could you let us know?

Oh and by the way, we posted all our letters to you here: http://dearprovidence.org/ Maybe you'd like to look at them again? Just get yourself a box of tissues.

With love,

New Urban Arts

from the archive...

There are TONS of photos in the archive too – photos of NUA events, random days in the studio, and lots of fabulous artwork. While I was going through them this collage scrap surfaced...kinda sums it all up, doesn't it?

from the archive...

Letterpress napkins with quotes from students, handprinted (yes, one by one) by Tamara for NUA's first annual campaign event in 2002.

Watch Out for Spiders!

Hi, I'm Jane. I'm an alumni mentor here at NUA. This summer I'm rolling up my sleeves on a number of projects in the studio, the first of which is cleaning out NUA's attic – otherwise known as that space on top of the supply closet that you can only get to with a really tall ladder...or as the place where Jesse hides the snacks (sorry Jesse, hope that wasn't a secret).

Attics are tricky places. We throw our stuff up there and tell ourselves we'll sort through it later, but it's easy to forget about. Before you know it, your attic is FULL! In NUA's case, this means less room for snacks. And I think we'd all agree that making more room for snacks is a good thing.

So what's in NUA's attic? Loads of stuff from our 10+ year history – artwork, writing, photographs, back issues of FLiP, and more. This month I'll be bringing everything down and taking a look. I bet we'll find some treasures, and when we do, I'll post them here. I may also ask for your help in piecing together stories from NUA's past. Yesterday, Amanda solved a mystery about this photo journal. In it was a photograph of her cats Brittany and Gizmo that she took her very first year at NUA! She helped us figure out what year the book was made (and we also learned a little something about her cats in the process).

This is going to be fun.