heARTwork
We have so many heART projects underway, which are sure to reframe the health care debate. Each organization and artist seeks to help Oregonians reorganize the plasticity of the brain, developing new maps for navigating pathways of community organization through the medium of the heARTistic endeavor. Essentially, heARTists of multiple-media use modes of expression to intricately tie our populace back to the heART of the matter: achieving health and building community.
To provide a little bit of structure, we have themed events and several willy-nilly guerrilla heARTwork peppered throughout the Portland area for the month of April, 2010. 
Click a title* that catches your fancy and see for yourself the fanfare of healthy community in action.
Get Lit: Wordynerd Style
HeART Auction
HeART Display
HeART and Health Panel Discussion
Big Ol’ Parade
Clown Brigade
Film Series
Movement Week
Muddy Boot
Musical Interludes
Willy-nilly fanfare
* Please note that more details and links will appear soon, this is truly a work in progress. If you would like to be more than just an audience member and want to take center stage, follow this blue rabbit: Join the Fun page.
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Get Lit: Wordynerd Style
Like digesting words? Boy, do we have words for ya, enough to fill a hearty palate and satiate any curious intellectual appetite. Since my old pal Guttenberg moved his type and sparked his printed press into gear, words have pushed, rebelled, and propelled thoughts into action. Whether it’s on a bus, in your hands, in a store, or in your ears, words have the power to move us towards a better, healthier future and teach us all how to get in touch with where the wild things are. Word to your mother, your brother and every other!
Wordynerd events:
Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center (IFCC)’s Create your own Cookbook!
Longfellow’s Bookstore Author Appreciation Nite
Write Around Portland
Wordstock with Kaiser Permanente Press
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HeART Auction
The premise behind the ART Auction is to literally provide an outlet where Oregon’s movers and shakers can get an inside look at how expression and health are connected. Artists will be on site flipping paints and ink to canvases as live models lounge along the sidelines, acting as muse for the evening affair. Light appetizers and ambient music will set the backdrop for the scene as prominent speakers ranging from the political to the spoken word will add insight into the next healthy stages for our health care system. Themes for the art auction include the magic and insight into how we can shift our perception of how ART and health are connected. The event takes place at the Disjecta Studio, which is located in north Portland, the heART of where community organizations seek to support local economy.
Participating Organizations:
Disjecta
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HeART Display
The art of medicine has a lot to do with a skillful, subtle ability to read patterns within patients. Whether it is the physical dance of biochemical blood markers, or the ebbing and flowing tides of emotional behavior, medical practitioners must learn how to pair treatment plans with a patient’s presenting circumstances. Following in the art-meets-medicine footsteps of DaVinci and Descartes, Portland’s own medical schools have teamed up to display their colleagues’ art work across the city. The main exhibit will be at the nation’s largest natural medicine clinic, located just west of the Ross Island Bridge. Furthermore, other exhibits will be sprinkled throughout participating clinic spaces in our fair city. You need an ART prescription? Take a dose of art created by medically minded professionals stretching their right brains, connecting across disciplines.
Participating Organizations:
National College of Natural Medicine (NCNM)
Oregon Health & Sciences University (OHSU)
Oregon Collaborative for Integrative Medicine (OCIM)
Western States Chiropractic College (WSCC)
Portland Healing Project at the Fontanelle Gallery
Ann Strorer and her artistic creations
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HeART and Health Panel Discussion
Getting artists, medical professionals, and community organizations onto the same page will help Oregon re-write the next steps for health care reform. The HeART of Healing will host an evening event, where panel members will lead the over-arching discussion to reshape how Oregonians can approach health reform using an innovative approach. Audience members are encouraged to vie in and express their proposals for how each pARTy can promote health in our community. Here are the representative panel speakers:
- Dr. John Kitzhaber or Archimedes Executive Director Liz Baxter will present on behalf of the Archimedes Movement and its efforts with local health reform, outlining the stages of policy advancement in our legislative system.
- Artists will have the opportunity to describe the process of channeling imagination into materials that contain purpose and passion. Moreover, each shall detail how art can act as a means to express
personal and contemporary conditions, and what it’s like to be an artist in today’s health care system. - Health care administrators will discuss how to generate working templates to meet the real needs of people, as well as how to appropriately direct artful ideas within the existing medical system.
- Art therapists and creative organizations will demonstrate how to use artistic expression to create health and emotional healing through various methods of art media.
- And lastly, innovative researchers will describe how artists and medical practitioners can generate ‘evidence-based’ medicine so that healing arts communities can translate clinical and creative healing into words, facts, and figures that funders and governmental policy members can understand.
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Big Ol’ Parade
What better way to celebrate a synthesis under a common goal than a good ol’ fashion parade. Yep. Think jugglers, bicyclists, fire dancers, costumes galore, marching to the beat of a different drummer… all the while decorated citizens lining the streets engaged and aware of the true HeART of Healing mission. It’s an evening of transformational effort that hits the target spot-on (celebration is healthy, right?) and targets the streets of our community. We may not toss candy, but we’ll certainly toss around a lot of ideas, seeing where the rubber meets the road and where to create connections between diverse groups of Oregonians.
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Clown Brigade
This pro-bonzo event is an exceptional piece for the HeART of Healing, in that it will tie Patch Adams and his out-of-the-box approach of health care to the underlying mission of the HeART of Healing: laughter really is great medicine. Furthermore, one of our goals with the downtown clown performance is to catch people off guard and have them think differently about their surroundings. Oregonian clowns coupled with other fool heARTy Portlanders will easily achieve this goal using a successful swarm of clowns. Expect strolling entertainment, strange acts, and normal clowning around amidst the busy bustle of buses and business suits alike. Monkeying around is highly encouraged and will be applauded.
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Film Series
Film forms its foundation using sticky stories, characterizing people or ideas which seek renovation, a deliberate shift in consciousness. Any good film takes an intangible, gives it material form, manipulates it, and then releases it, thereby casting a sensuous spell. This is fundamental to film. Moreover, that’s also the root of shamanism, so, not surprisingly, film is one of the most powerful traditional healing method. You can impact a huge number of people with a one to two hours of narration. Still not convinced? Well if you sit and watch the documentaries that are pART of the HeART of Healing series, you’re sure to go into a dark setting, get awash under a spell, and leave transformed. And if you have questions, we’ll have the film directors and/or producers on hand to give you first-hand perspective on why they outlined this specific idea of the health care setting. Our film series is tentatively set for April 19-21st.
Participating Organizations:
Billionaires for WealthCare
The Euphoria Project
Health Money and Fear: A film about our health care system
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Movement Week
Ugh. Exercise is a chore, just a redundant bore; you say lifting my lefts and flapping my arms can be good for my heART, my muscles, and every other body pART? Wait, what’s that you say? You say that what the HeART of Healing has in store will not be a snore? Will make me think differently about the shaping and tapering of my load-bearin’ brawn? We’ll count me in! Japanese drumming, Taiji, Qigong, a little bit of yogic stretching or yodeling of your toes, asana, a limbering of ligaments, ecstatic dance galore, or the wood-chopin’ he-YA! of karate!
Participating Organizations:
Family Martial Arts Academy
Street Yoga
Village Ballroom’s Village Dance Convergence November 6th, 2009
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Muddy Boot
Get yer feet wet with this sneak-preview of the HeARt of Healing at the Muddy Boot Festival this September 13 and 14th, 2009. Yes, we will be there bunny costumed and walking tall upon stilts, what a way to raise perspective on our heARTful mission and to set the stage for how living sustainably includes valuable pieces like down-to-earth health care structures as presented by the Archimedes Movement. Come check out local foods and wines, workshops and exhibits on sustainable living!
Brought to you by:
Archimedes Member and MoveOn.Org extraordinaire: Harold Treinen
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Musical Interludes
Music takes the immaterial and pushes it through your earholes, shifting mind and consciousness to different planes of thought. Music stimulates creativity, and heck for a while there, babies listened to Bach like it was going outta style. Each musical group listed below sees the holes in our current system, and fills them with harmonious chords for change. Join them and get a good ol’ fashion dose of symphonic fix. ‘Cause music is pretty powerful stuff, it’s the heART’s master pacemaker, setting the tone, beat, and innovative dance steps for the future of health care.
Participating Organizations:
Mike Meyer’s host of KMHD’s Mississippi West
O’Connor’s
Old Yellers
Vagabond Opera
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Willy-nilly fanfare
Man! There’s so much to do under the umbrella of the HeART of Healing, and it’s hard to simply categorize everything or put it in a box. So… to keep things a chaotic and as willy-nilly as possible, we created a category for just the simply weird and hard to define. Those pieces of the puzzle that walk a finer line, trying to refine the way that we can reshape our perspectives when it comes to creating better health for ourselves and for our local communities. Take a gander at these outlander activities!
Neat-O enterprises:
Play Back Theater‘s not to be missed event series
Mad As Hell Doctors Road Tour
The TREE Institute
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