Greetings Open Studios Staff and Board of Directors

Joan Kuenz and Edwin Rutsch are working on creating a series of documentaries on different human values. The first theme we're working on is "Inspiration". See our previous "Inspiration and The Art of Living Black (TAOLB)" project. We want to continue exploring this theme with more interviews and stories. Future theme would be values, such as, empathy, responsibility, diversity, tolerance, equality, love, etc.

We would like to develop a relationship with the different Bay Area Open Studios, since we found that working with artists for our projects works quite well. Artists are motivated to take part in being interviewed and telling their stories since it helps them get exposure for their art. Their art also adds great visuals to their stories.

To get a relationship started with your organization one idea is that we could volunteer (Pro bono) to video tape the artists who are interested in doing "artists talks."

Video Taping Your Open Studios "Artists Talks"

For TAOLB exhibit, they had a Preview Exhibit Gallery where all the artists have one piece of art as a sample. The artists came in one day and each talked for 2 to 5 minutes in front of their art piece. The pubic was invited in to hear the talk. We video taped each artist and placed it on the TAOLB Youtube site. This is relatively easy to do. In about 1:30 hours we video taped 25 artist talks. See the following links of how we did it with TAOLB.

• 2006 TAOLB Artist Talk
• 2007 TAOLB Artist Talk

We would be glad to volunteer to do something like this for your arts organization. We could create a Youtube space for your organization where the "artist talks" videos would be placed. Here are a couple of examples;

• http://youtube.com/group/TAOLB
• http://youtube.com/group/RichmondArtCenter
• http://youtube.com/group/ProArts
• http://youtube.com/group/AATS

Doing a project like this would give us a chance to get to know each other and start the ball rolling.

Beyond That

Beyond that, we are now looking for grants to continue doing a more in-depth theme based interview process like in the "Inspiration and TAOLB" project. If we get the funding, we would like to set up the more in-depth process with some Open Studio organizations as outlined in the video clip,

"TAOLB: Joan Kuenz - About Video Interview Workshop Process"

Video sharing sites like YouTube open up a whole new world of possibilities for getting information and stories out to the world.  We're also interested in brainstorming together, other uses of video with Open Studios and your organization. A possibility would be an Open Studios Video tour, where we go from studio to studio and tape them.  Anyone with an internet connection could then take the Open Studio tour year round. These projects could be financed by grants or as a paid service for artist.

However, it seems the first step could be doing a project like the artist talks. Let us know your ideas.