• Call – Last Theme of the Year
• Response – Thee Bunny Show, 2025
• By – Mimi Peterson , WIR #17

Change is Coming – Details To Be Announced

To the January-June, 2025 Racine Writer-in-Residence Grantee #18 – Congratulations! Best Wishes to our new WIR program coordinator! Formal announcements will be made shortly. In the meantime, Thank You, Nick Ramsey/Art Root coordinator, 2017-2024, for your outstanding leadership and diligence in organizing the program. Nick’s hands on style promotes teaching and learning, encourages entertainment and soul searching. Good Luck to the changing of the guards!

Today is my final WIR OBSERVATION. I am optimistically radical about the chances of balancing environment and social needs and the Arts and Humanities ability to play a positive role in making things happen. We must turn problems into opportunities. The current situation of the local art scene shows a lack of social maturity on the part of our community audience, who seem not to grasp art work, concepts, and research that creatives have freely handed the public. Artists and writers work independent and on our own, carry out experiments, set up workshops, magazines, organize exhibitions and set trends, forever waiting for audiences, who often seem suspicious and ill-informed, consequently, are late in responding to the investment call.

Today, we are witnessing a sort of domestic reformism whose overall result cannot be glimpsed yet. The Arts & Humanities transition is giving way to a period of more diffused anonymous product bent on developing innovation, not reinterpreting the traditional. This seemingly uncommitted means of working ought to be taken as a sign of a new form of engagement which derives from a critique close to home.

During the Pandemic crisis, tactics changed because strategies changed. Current revitalized energy of avant-garde ideas will impact a growing diverse and generational audience. By attending open mics, teach-ins, and installations, we become participant, performer, as well as observer.

I do not treat objects of value – art and books – as insignificant or secondary. On the contrary, the world of objects should be seen as the tip of a huge upturned pyramid. Objects of value have survived historic changes within their ecosystems while holding onto their enigmatic nature and persuasive force. Perhaps, they become more valuable.

As writer-in-residence, my work has been a cross-section of poetry and prose, my initiatives have been collaborative, my instinct tells me Thee Bunny Show, An Immersive Experience Community Project is on target. It means to boost a powerful bond between people, place and objects, to establish an intense interface of friendly relations among participants and discover the value of visuals and words as content, the architectural space as context.

CHANGE IS HERE –

WHAT: Thee Bunny Show, An Immersive Experience Community Project WHERE: To Be Announced WHEN: Saturday, April 26, 2025, International Sculpture Day WHY: Provide a place for contact, collaboration among visual artists, writers, audience. Interactive art making, role playing and storytelling, counter the challenges generated by today’s vicissitudes of life. HOW: You are invited to participate – your talent, your concepts – and celebrate. More information will be available in February on ArtRoot Facebook.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! THANK YOU, Mimi Peterson