Tag: rural arts & culture map

OFN Practicum: Postcard 1

Link to Postcard

Alex Llumiquinga Perez

Andean Instrument Maker

Otter Rock, OR

“It was just a hobby when I started… I never thought I’d do this as a career.”

Alex is a master artist of crafting and playing Andean folk instruments. Growing up in Ecuador, Alex was surrounded by music and remembers his grandfather plucking leaves from trees and using them as instruments. He received his first flute at the age of 11 and his first charango (ten-stringed guitar) at the age of 12. Traditionally made from armadillo shells, Alex fondly recalls that his first charango had a panther carved into it.

Through performance, Alex immediately fell in love with Andean folk music. He formed a 5 piece band called Chayag and landed his first professional music performance at the age of 17. The band soon started spreading his love for Latin American folk music by touring the world. As he grew older, he became interested in learning how to craft Andean instruments himself, like the charango, bamboo flutes and river cane flutes. Over the last decade, Alex has developed his instrument-making techniques and now owns his own workshop. He loves teaching instrument-making skills to children, but when it comes to his own children, Alex says “I’m waiting for them to tell me they want to learn.”

Alex Llumiguinga Perez earned Oregon’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program award in 2012. For more information about traditional arts in Oregon, visit the Oregon Folklife Network at ofn.uoregon.edu.

Oregon Folklife Network:

Making a meaningful difference in Oregon communities by empowering our tradition-keepers to pass on their skills and knowledge.

For more information about the artist and his craft, visit www.andeanmusic.org

OFN Practicum: Week 4 Log

This week Maya and I met on Monday to discuss some of the issues we had come across and compiled a list of questions. Maya has sent a list of these questions out to Emily and Riki, which include questions about what links we should be providing (especially for the older artists we found in the archives), whether or not we should contact artists and if we need to ask for permission to post about them. Other questions pertained more directly to the Art of the Rural’s guidelines. We just need to get a better definition of rural so we aren’t picking artist that don’t represent their mission. Also, we were wondering if we should have a postcard to represent Eugene even though it’s a fair sized city. I need to email Savannah about these questions as well some map capability issues I talked about in the last post, though I’m going to wait till after our meeting with OFN on Monday. Maya and I also plan to do some more research in the archives next week now that we have identified more boxes to look through. This week we focused on creating our first drafts of postcards, as discussed below.

I chose to do my first postcard on a current TAAP artist: Alex Llumiquinga Perez. He is one of the few international artists I’ve found so far living in rural Oregon. I created a first draft of my postcard based on information about him on the web, his TAAP application and a newspaper article. You can see my first draft here. In crafting the draft, a lot of questions came up as to how OFN would want the postcard structured. For instance, do we need to describe the TAAP program? Are we focusing on the artist or his/her craft? I essentially tried to emulate the content I found in the TAAP application and I mentioned that Alex is TAAP awarded including a link. Maya and I also thought it would be nice to include a quote from the artist for each post and that the location should be forefront. A lot of the postcards I looked at on the map did not say what town they came from, which I thought was strange for the purpose of the map. Thus, I think we put the location of the artist in the title, so people can see what area this artist represents. Maya and I will be comparing our postcards and trying to find a good format for us both to follow hopefully before tomorrow’s meeting.

OFN Practicum: Week 3 Log

This week put somewhat of a stall on the project. I was going to go look through box 61 of the TAAP files on Friday, but then Maya informed me that she had already looked through the box and it didn’t contain any pertinent artist information. Emily told Maya that she will contact Nathan to see if there are any other boxes we can look through. I did see some boxes labeled Rural Libraries and other TAAP boxes in the inventory. Perhaps we should look through those? In the meantime, Maya and I will be meeting next Monday to discuss what questions we have and how we should move forward from here. We will all be meeting at OFN Mon. Feb 4th to talk with Emily about those questions and present our first drafts of postcards. Next week I will be working on creating a draft of my first postcard based on the artists Maya and I have identified.

Since, I couldn’t do anymore research into possible artists, I decided to take an in-depth look into the Rural Arts & Culture Map in order to get a better idea of what information I should be gathering for our postcards. However, since the content on the map is so varied, I’m still not sure what our postcards should look like. I know we want to have photos, but what about videos? There may be some videos available for the more recent artists. Also, are we describing the art the artist makes or the background of the artist? We could just replicate the format of the TAAP application forms and talk about the art traditions they practice, where they learned them from and the importance of these traditions. Although not all of the TAAP applications has all this information. The current TAAP artists listed on the OFN website also have varying information. I would like to look at their actual TAAP application to see if there is more info not represented on the website. Also, while looking over the Rural Arts & Culture Map, I noticed some functional problems that will need to be addressed. A lot of the postings have a short blurb about an artist and then link to a site for more information. I’m not sure where we will link to for more information about the older artists we found in the archives. Lastly, there are two ways to see information on the map: stories and folks. It seems the folks tab is used for creating profiles for people posting to the map. You can click on their profile and then see all the stories they have posted. Perhaps we should create a profile for OFN and then link our stories from there? The only problem with this, is that not all of the stories I found through this method showed up on the overall map. I’m not sure why, but I want to make sure our stories are visible.