Here’s a few basic things that may make your trip to Italy a little easier.
BEFORE YOU LEAVE, first double-check your passport is valid (hey, it’s happened). And, stash a copy of your passport and credit cards in another spot of your luggage or trade with your partner. I always carry important documents in a travel pouch around my neck under my blouse/shirt. Better safe, I say.
LABEL YOUR BAG with the Hotel Giotto address: Via Fontebella 41; 06081 Assisi; Perugia, Italy and phone number 39-075-812744. Put your name and address inside the bag- you can label the bag the reverse on the way back. That way, your bag can follow you if it gets separated!
ARRIVING at the international gate in Rome, you will exit through a glass door (just like in domestic airports) into the lobby. This is where a driver will wait for you with an Art Workshop International sign.
TO CHANGE MONEY, there are ATM machines everywhere, including the airport. Some credit cards are better than others - try to find one that has a commercial, not forex, rate of exchange and is set daily. There probably will be an surcharge, too. Brokerage firms tend to be better than banks.
IF YOU LOVE COFFEE, try one of the stand-up bars. You order and pay first at the cashier, then show your ticket to the barrista who will fill your order.
TO CALL HOME, buy a phone card. Don’t use it with a cellphone - it will still be expensive. Your family and friends back home can do the same, for example, with a www.nobel.com access code.
A few words can get you far - per favore (please), grazie (thank you), mi scusi (excuse me), buon giorno (good day), parla inglese? (do you speak English).
Most of all, relax and enjoy the differences!
Ciao, Chris Spencer

Small travel tip–call your credit card customer service number to alert them to the fact that you’ll be using it out of the country. Last year I could charge, but couldn’t withdraw money on mine because it was considered “suspicious activity.”

Barbara Shoup

Conversations: Among Friends, Paris Jazz
featuring Emmy Award-winning producer Charles Hobson and Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, MoMA

including a performance by special musical guest Terry Waldo
Harlem in Montmartre: Paris Jazz

Conversations: Among Friends, Paris Jazz featuring Emmy award-winning producer Charles Hobson and Joshua Siegel will explore the historical themes that emerged in jazz music developed in Europe during the 20’s and 30’s, and feature clips from Hobson’s upcoming PBS documentary Harlem in Montmartre; a Paris Jazz Story, scheduled to air late this summer nationwide on Great Performances. Following the Conversation, there will be a reception and performance by a special musical guest, Terry Waldo, in the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Lobby.

Charles Hobson is the executive producer of Vanguard Documentaries, which will premiere Harlem in Montmartre this August for PBS’s Great Performances series. His distinguished career spans four decades and includes Porgy and Bess: An American Voice (PBS); Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant; Jump Street: The History of Black Music (a thirteen-part PBS series); Negroes with Guns; The Africans (a nine-part series coproduced with the BBC); Global Links (a six-part series on international development, coproduced with the World Bank for PBS); Spaces (a six-part science series, funded by the Department of Education); and Like It Is (ABC-TV). His awards include an Emmy, a Fulbright (Germany), The Japan Prize (Special Citation), and CINE Golden Eagle. Hobson has been ranked among the top fifty producers in the film and television industry by Millimeter magazine. He has taught at SUNY, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and Vassar, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. This summer he will be the 2009 Artist in Residence at Art Workshop International, in Assisi, Italy. Hobson and his family currently reside in Brooklyn.

Joshua Siegel, an associate curator in MoMA’s Department of Film, has organized or co-organized more than ninety exhibitions at the Museum, including The New India (2009), Jazz Score (2008), Projects 84: Josiah McElheny (2007), Tomorrowland: CalArts in Moving Pictures (2006), Killer Films (2005), and The Lodz Film School of Poland: 50 Years (1999). He has organized monographic exhibitions of Julien Duvivier, Michael Haneke, Gregory La Cava, Christopher Guest, James Wong Howe, Jem Cohen, Jean Painlevé, Errol Morris, and Paul Robeson, among others. He has also co-organized the annual exhibition To Save and Project: The MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation since 2002, and together with Kirk Varnedoe and Paola Antonelli, co-organized Open Ends, as part of MoMA2000, and co-edited the accompanying catalogue, Modern Contemporary: Art at MoMA Since 1980. Mr. Siegel has lectured at Yale University, Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Warsaw; has served on grant panels for the Alpert Award in the Arts/CalArts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and The Penny McCall Foundation; and has been a jury member of the Vancouver International Film Festival, the Santiago International Film Festival, and other festivals.

Terry Waldo is considered one of America’s premier performers and presenters of ragtime and early jazz. He has played countless New York jazz clubs and concert venues worldwide, including the Grand Parade du Jazz in Venice and Jazz At Lincoln Center, and he recently appeared with the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, where he performed the world premiere of The Eubie Blake Concerto. Waldo’s TV and film credits include The Tonight Show, the PBS documentary Storyville: The Naked Dance, and Ken Burns’s Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. He has produced and arranged over forty albums, including a ragtime orchestra album for BMG, and he is currently working on albums for Chiaroscuro, GHB, and Delmark Records. His This Is Ragtime, presently being republished by Jazz at Lincoln Center, is the definitive book on the subject. Waldo has been the music director for a number of theatrical shows in New York City, including Mr. Jelly Lord (directed by Vernel Bagneris,) and Ambassador Satch (directed by André De Shields), and he has originated four one-man shows: Eubie and Me; The Naked Dance: The Music of Storyville; Shake That Thing!; and Waldo’s 1927 Revue.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009
7:00 p.m. program | 8:00 p.m. performance and reception
Theater 3 (The Celeste Bartos Theater)

The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
The Museum of Modern Art
4 West 54 Street

Latest Classes for Art Workshop International Summer 2009

Tell a friend about us

Two New Mosaic Classes taught by Nina di Giovanni, director of Arte Biulu Centro Cultural, Oaxaca, Mexico.
July 22 - August 4, 2009: The Byzantine Muse - Mosaic Enchantmnet
August 5 - August 18, 2009: Contemporary Mosaic - Beyond Byzantine - The Muse Morphs

New Poetry Class with Francesco Levato, Chicago Poetry Center Director.
July 22 -August 4, 2009: Join multi-talented poet and editor in “Caffe Poesia,” an intensive poetry workshop in a coffeehouse setting.

Early-bird discount price extended to May 15, 2009!
Our own financial stimulus package. Art Workshop International has not raised its tuition since 2006. Register before May 15, 2009, to benefit.

Art Workshop International proudly announces a new show by Edith Isaac-Rose at the Phyllis Kind Gallery.
Here is a link to the opening on Saturday, March 28, 2009, and also to the gallery.

Art Workshop International - the 29th year!
Join us this summer in Assisi, Italy
July 22- August 18, 2009: 2, 3, and 4-week sessions
Live and Work in a 12th-Century Hill Town
Critiques, lectures, field trips, and visiting artists
Beautifully situated 3-star hotel, air-conditioned room and bath, two meals, studio

Visual Arts: painting, drawing, artmaking, pastel portraits, watercolor plein air, creativity workshop
Faculty: Edith Isaac-Rose, Bea Kreloff, Pam Christiansen, Ellen Eagle, Nina di Giovanni, Kamilla Talbot

Creative Writing: fiction and non-fiction, crime and mystery novel, arts journalism, memoir, poetry, playwriting and solo performance
Faculty: Rosellen Brown, Leslie Garis, Robert J. Hughes, Bill Goldstein, Francesco Levato, S.J. Rozan, Aoibheann Sweeney, Barbara Shoup, Dinitia Smith, Jayne Wenger

Special Programs: culinary arts, immersive Italian language
Faculty: Arianna Calzolari and Valerio Mogliana, Caterina Bertolotto

Independent Program for professional and advanced artists and writers

For more information: Art Workshop International

463 West Street, 1028H, New York, NY 10014
Toll Free: 866-341-2922 Fax: 212-691-1159
E-Mail: bk@artworkshopintl.com

EDITH ISAAC-ROSE, BEA KRELOFF, CHRIS SPENCER, DIRECTORS

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Check your local PBS listings for the interview of acclaimed author, Maxine Hong Kingston, who is teaching “All I Know About Writing” at the Art Workshop International workshop in Assisi, Italy, August 8 -21.

Quote from Maxine Hong Kingston about her interview with Bill Moyers:
“In addition to The Fifth Book of Peace, we focused on my editing of VETERANS OF WAR, VETERANS OF PEACE. There is a website for that book: http://vowvop.org/ ”

Kingston’s latest work, “The Fifth Book of Peace,” has taken an extraordinary journey. Traced all the way back to the late 1980s, it all began with a rumor she heard regarding three lost books of peace in China. She hoped to track them down to “balance the damage” done by Sun-Tzu’s famous book “The Art of War.”

After years of research in China, she wrote her fictional book of peace, only to see it destroyed in the 1991 Oakland Hills fire. After that, she wrote an entirely new book—this time nonfiction and personal—reflecting on her ideas on ending conflict and her coming to terms with the Vietnam War.

Writing an almost 800-page peace work of her own revealed changes about her future as a writer.

“At that point, I wanted to be socially irresponsible,” she said with a smile. “I wanted to write as I did as a child, about my feelings, my inside.” To do that, Kingston turned to poetry.

The result was the recently released “To Be the Poet,” in which Kingston chronicles her attempts to adopt “the life of the poet,” and in later sections shares her poems.

Kingston, who is also a creative writing professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wants to continue shaking up how college students are taught creative writing. Kingston doesn’t back away from her 1970s statement that college interfered with her creativity. “Creative writing is a seed, it must not be criticized right away,” Kingston said. “College writing has to be about building a supportive community of writers.” In her own Berkeley classroom, she takes time out for activities like meditation, which helps her students move from a “rational to an imaginative state.”
[Excerpt from Wikipedia]

Art Workshop International is proud to announce the opening of Edith Isaac-Rose’s show sponsored by the town of Assisi. Isaac-Rose’s exhibit encompasses 25 years of painting in Assisi. Join us for the gala celebration at the Galleria Le Logge in the central Piazza del Comune.

Stephen Oliver, well-known West Coast collector and chairman of the board of San Francisco MOMA, bought a major painting of from Isaac-Rose’s exhibit in Petaluma, CA in November 2006.