ART-ACT Art | SPW Art | Introduction | Community | Web School | Free Graphics
"Invisible Everyday People Wearing T-shirts and ART-ACT"
Culture and Entertainment
ART-ACT is an international, on-going, two-year-long, on-line, art contest and exhibit with a pro-diversity, anti-racist theme.
The "Art of the T-shirt" and our "Screen Print Workshop for Artists" laid the foundation for our web site content. Before the World-Wide-Web artists were isolated with local exposure limited and outside opportunities even less accessible. We worked in a vacuum of support with little hope to have our visions seen beyond our local community.
Suddenly, we have an international forum. Now, the character of our content will allow us to find a global audience over time. This is why we are willing to expend steady effort to present our agency activity on-line.
The challenge is to build a site that remains relevant and growing, to harness the lessons received by participating in this monumental shift of media. We will build a low tech website that is accessible to the many browsers and computer systems. Our creativity will evolve a site rather than plot it - with the involvement of our audience as possible. We begin on a shoe-string budget so thin it resembles cheap thread. Our method applies artistry - not money - to come up with ever expanding content and interest. Artists' work will inspire our community to promote this site. This is our challenge.
ART-ACT has been active since March 1999.
Our website theme is inclusion. Invisible everyday people wearing t-shirts - T-shirt Art Pointers - populate our website because it and ART-ACT are outgrowths of our mission and programs that extend into cyberspace.
Our programs include the "Art of the T-shirt" exhibits series and our "Screen Print Workshop for Artists" which target overlooked artists of many cultural backgrounds and our efforts to address the digital divide - a Website SIG and a Computer Recycling Workshop. ART-ACT fights hatred - on-line and off. It involves artists globally. We are creating an exciting cultural hub for a community of diversity on the Internet (see art-teez.org/pr/umd_rel.htm).
Our on-line "Community Art Issues" segment features the "Chicago Cultural Plan" and a call for an "Artists' Free Zone" on Chicago's lakefront. This segment, which reflects our commitment to include artists input to our local arts scene, is ripe with opportunities for democratic discussion of local art issues.
Our Promotion, Search Engine and School (Website SIG) pages compliment our local digital divide efforts by offering increasing support for beginners in website development. Our community art shoe-string-budget-survival-instinct and in-your-face-art is the legacy we project on-line. A mountain of art supporting diversity at www.art-teez.org is growing.
Return to Index3,600
Our ART-ACT program builds global communications bridges for Chicago artists and gives pro-diversity expressions a stronger voice with world-wide participation.
Artists from around the globe in growing numbers are submitting their art to ART-ACT. Below each work of art are opportunities for the public to comment on the artwork and tell their personal stories of racism. We have experimented with fliers that are return mailers presenting the art from ART-ACT and inviting people to send us their comments off-line for posting on-line. Our newsletter informs subscribers of the latest submissions and explains our website activities. Simple HTML code and graphic images that download easily help make our site accessible.
We have designed pages to enable volunteers to help us promote ART-ACT. Volunteers contact us by e-mail and work to trade links on-line. Our site plan is long term and our programs are all on-going because increasing traffic is a function of public relations and time.
We are building grass-roots art opportunities on-line. Community art and creativity are our hooks to attract a growing audience. T-shirt art pointers - free graphics, the expanding art of ART-ACT and additions from our Screen Print Workshop for Artists are ever-growing site attractions.
Return to IndexART-ACT I posted 47 entries (3 posts per month). Over the course of ART-ACT I (5/99-9/00), our website logs went from 800 hits from 50 different hosts per week to 10,000 hits from 827 different hosts per week. Total viewers were 34,000. Our traffic increased by 1600%.
Nineteen images came from our "Screen Print Workshop for Artists," nineteen from outside Illinois and nine more were from outside the U.S.A.
In the first three months, ART-ACT II increased to 4 posts per month.
ART-ACT created a socially therapeutic forum through which Chicago artists and artists everywhere were able to advertise their art and websites without cost. Thirty artists took the initiative and tens of thousands viewed the growing results.
Our first test proved that artists from around the world will participate with enthusiasm! This is what we need to know to meet our ART-ACT goal of posting a mountain of visuals supporting diversity. More effort is needed to gain significant contributions of personal stories of racism. One reason artists support us is the attitude of an artist-founded, community-based art agency fighting to exist which comes through on our website. Artists feel they can trust us. And they can!
Return to IndexIt is on-going. The Mountain is growing slowly but surely.
Website $1,000
Agency $7,000
Contributions of Artists and enlightned individuals.
To maintain contact with local artists while dramatically refocusing energy on our website.
To promote, without paid staff, our project on the infinitely wide stage of the global Internet in competition with many well financed sites and to build a steadily growing audience.
To encourage artists with technophobia in our community and beyond to be excited to use the Internet for communication.
To build strong on-going hooks into our website to bring people back again and again.
To design a low tech website as a study of how to do more with simple codes and strong content so that non-technical people can help to maintain our site without expensive software.
To teach free workshops that enable members of our community to participate as volunteers and content contributors.
To develop all this on a volunteer basis with an annual budget of $7,000 and a project budget that pays only for the ISP and domain registration until support is found. Even paying our domain registration is a challenge!
We are on the edge of a world re-orienting shift. We are challenged to create structures and methods that may become standard practice for future non-profits on-line.
Return to IndexWe will improve our management of on-line volunteers to better promote ART-ACT. Next, we will encourage artists to contribute to a growing on-line discussion of issues related to cultural diversity. We will coax from the public more personal stories of racism. A curriculum will be created from ART-ACT images with the help of volunteer teachers on-line to be used by schools in discussion of the issues of diversity.
We will continue to add images to our "Screen Print Workshop for Artists" segment and to build our on-line sales of t-shirt designs.
Our computer workshops will contribute more content to our website that is useful to artists and all those beginning to design websites. Soon we will begin posting youth created pages from our Web Design Workshop just beginning at the Chicago American Indian Center. We will activate the Community Art segment of our site to invigorate the discussion of local public art issues to help Chicago to be more supportive of artists.
Throughout, we will continue to build a mountain of visual art supporting diversity and exposing racism. Our growing content and the involvement of artists world-wide will dramatically increase our traffic and the international awareness of our art activities.
Return to IndexHow to build a simple community oriented maintainable site that does not require expensive software to build and a department to maintain.
A practical example of how to involve artists over the Internet in a useful issue related project.
ART-ACT grew out of our "Screen Print Workshop for Artists" (8 yrs) which grew out of our "Art of the T-shirt" exhibit series (12 yrs). The diversity of the artists showing and in our Workshop guaranteed issues of diversity and racism surface in the art.
Return to Index