Author: Andrew Caldwell

The connections between the Memphis arts scene and the Berlin Wall may not be obvious, but a new documentary could offer some lessons for local artists.

Nearly six years in the making, two Memphis filmmakers, Eric Swartz and Sarah Bolton, will host the Memphis premiere of Children of the Wall on Wednesday, March 21st. The film, featuring stories from 20 artists, musicians, and performers from Berlin, Germany, is about the artistic and cultural explosion of Berlin after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the recent development and gentrification of the city’s arts district.

“What I was really feeling in Berlin [before we began filming] was this creative energy,” Swartz said. “I had this naive notion that maybe it had something to do with the Wall and the minds of the East and West coming together to make this awesome thing happen.”

The further Swartz and Bolton fell into their research, they discovered that there were more connections between the fall of the Berlin Wall and a blossoming arts movement.

“What we found was that it was more about the vacuum of space that the collapse of the Wall created — the economic vacuum and the real estate vacuum — because people would abandon East Berlin and East Germany for the west in hopes of getting work. The economy [in the East] was desolate,” Swartz said.

“There were all of these empty warehouses and buildings, and artists tend to migrate into those spaces,” Swartz continued. “These places really became cultural meccas.”

But today, as bankers and developers are beginning to notice the thriving arts district in Berlin, artists are finding it increasingly difficult to hold onto the spaces they have saved and cultivated over the last 20 years.

“For me, it’s like a flagship for the topic of gentrification of art spaces in particular,” Swartz said. “Banks are trying to foreclose [on Berlin art houses] and kick the artists out.”

Gentrification and development are not unique to Berlin. Swartz said Memphis, though home to a growing arts scene, may need to find the balance between pushing for economic growth and providing a space for local artists to work and thrive.

“We’re in the middle of some development in Memphis, like Crosstown Arts, which is great,” Swartz said, “But I think artists have to learn how to develop themselves as a business if they want to stay in a space and continue to do what they’re doing.”

Swartz points to the South Main Arts District as an example. In the 1990s, property was cheap. Enterprising artists began buying space for studios, and South Main became safer and more sophisticated, eventually resulting a gentrified arts district that prices out some artists.

The city of Memphis and nonprofit ArtSpace are trying to solve that problem by creating affordable live/work space for artists inside an old South Main warehouse on St. Paul.

Children of the Wall premieres at Studio on the Square on March 21st at 7 p.m.

With the Chardon High School shooting in Ohio sparking national concern for student safety, local parents, teachers, and public officials gathered to plan a safer future for Memphis City Schools kids.

The second annual “Assuring Safe Futures for Our Children Conference” was planned well before last week’s shooting, but the conference couldn’t have occured at more appropriate time.

Nearly 200 people attended the two-day conference, which was intended to help teachers, parents, and members of the community address threats to local children’s safety. It took place last week at the Memphis City Schools Frances E. Coe administration building.

“We wanted parents, teachers, and law enforcement officials to come to the conference and leave with tools that they can take back to their own environment so they can know characteristics of gang members and how to spot a bully or someone who is being bullied,” said Ronald Pope, director of student engagement for Memphis City Schools. Pope helped organize last week’s conference.

In a letter addressed to those who attended the conference, Mayor A C Wharton wrote: “Local governments have perhaps no greater obligation than to ensure the public’s safety, and for no one is this obligation more urgent than our youngest and most vulnerable citizens. Protecting our children and freeing them from situations of abuse and victimization remains a core priority for everyone in our community, which makes events like today’s conference so vital.”

Over the duration of the conference, dozens of speakers including Congressman Steve Cohen, Memphis City Schools superintendent Kriner Cash, Memphis Police director Toney Armstrong, and local pastor Ricky Floyd discussed problems and solutions relating to safety inside and outside of Memphis schools.

“This year, we wanted to concentrate on cyber-bullying, because that is a big thing right now,” Pope said. “Children committing suicide is another thing we focused on. And this year we focused more on the exploitation of minors, particularly in the sex trade, which is something we have noticed picking up.”

In addition to their community outreach efforts, Memphis City Schools is working with a number of committees and city offices to make schools safer.

Pope said his office is meeting weekly with the district attorney’s office, the Memphis Police Department, the Department of Children’s Services, and juvenile court to talk about situations affecting specific children.

“There is also a collaboration with the [federal] Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention on our juvenile justice board, which is a group of local people who try to influence policy,” Pope said. “We’re working with the [Memphis-Shelby] Crime Commission, trying to make sure there is collaboration within the city of Memphis and also out of Washington.”

Additionally, Pope works with truancy prevention programs, gang prevention and intervention, pupil services, youth court, and a soon-to-be-developed school-based probation officer program.

A couple of University of Memphis grad students are proving that you don’t have to be on the same stage — or even in the same country — to play music together.

Ionut Cosarca and Liviu Craciun, both originally from Romania, have collaborated with more than 100 young musicians from around the world to create a “virtual symphony.”

Their virtual symphony video, which was recorded and performed by musicians from more than 30 countries, has reached more than 11,000 hits on YouTube over the last couple of weeks.

What originally began as a small project between Cosarca and Craciun at the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music at the University of Memphis quickly grew to unexpected popularity.

“Craciun recorded the first violin and viola parts, and I played the second violin and the cello part on a viola,” Cosarca said. “We put [our recordings] together with some video and audio editing, and in the end it sounded like a string quartet.”

In the beginning, the recording was only of Craciun and Cosarca, but they decided to invite friends from Romania and other countries to join. From there, they realized they could do a virtual orchestra that would allow a lot of people to cooperate on a single piece.

“We were originally thinking about doing an arrangement of a pop rock song,” said Cosarca, “like something from Radiohead.”

But something a bit more baroque, Pachelbel’s Canon in D, was in the cards for Cosarca and Craciun, and the virtual symphony project became a means of advocating classical music to young musicians around the world.

Nearly all of the collaborating musicians are between 10 and 20 years old and joined the project through Cosarca and Craciun’s social media campaign.

“We created a website, littlesymphony.com, as well as a Facebook page and a YouTube channel and started sending messages to musicians,” Cosarca said. “We posted the musical part on the Facebook page along with instructions and a metronome beat.”

Soon, dozens of musicians from around the world joined in on the collaboration, far surpassing the pair’s expectations.

“People just started recording their parts and submitting them, and they got more and more involved as time passed by,” Cosarca said. “Initially, we were only expecting to get around 20 or 30 musicians.”

In the opening minute of the video, each musician and a conductor is shown on-screen, arranged in a way that resembles a symphony onstage. This dissolves to show a handful of musicians at a time, labeled by their country of origin. The video can be viewed on littlesymphony.com and YouTube.

Cosarca and Craciun expect to begin working on their next virtual symphony project within two months.

“For our next project, we hope to get more musicians involved,” Cosarca said, “and we’re thinking about doing a piece by either Bach or Beethoven.”

Residents of the downtown neighborhood around Vance Avenue have grown accustomed to the short end of the stick.

High crime rates, deteriorating homes, and poor accessibility to jobs, food, and city services have plagued the neighborhood’s residents for years. But since last summer, the Vance Avenue Collaborative has been making plans to renovate the area between Crump, Beale, East, and Third.

The collaborative of city officials, faculty and students from local colleges and universities, and residents of the Vance neighborhood are competing against other urban development organizations across the country for a $45 million federal Choice Neighborhoods grant.

Last Saturday, at a public meeting at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, the group presented four proposals for the redevelopment of Vance area housing. Nearly 100 residents and business owners were in attendance, as well as Mayor A C Wharton, representatives from the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, and members of the Memphis chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Attendees were given the chance to vote on their favorite proposals.

“Generally, the people are informed after the plan is finished by somebody else, and you only realize that something is going on in the neighborhood when the bulldozer shows up in your front yard,” said Ken Reardon, professor of city planning at the University of Memphis.

Of the options given, residents selected two during Saturday’s meeting. The first option calls for nearly doubling the size of apartments around Vance by combining and improving existing units while creating more green space. The second option calls for demolishing deteriorating housing units and renovating those in good condition. New homes will be constructed in place of those that are torn down. The Vance Avenue area is home to one of the city’s remaining federally funded public housing projects, Foote Homes.

In addition to physical transformations, the collaborative intends to improve educational facilities, health care, and youth development, among other services.

“We want to run [a mobile farmers market bus] six days a week into neighborhoods where you can’t get access to fruits and vegetables,” Reardon said.

The Vance Avenue Collaborative procured a 45-foot bus from the Memphis Area Transit Authority to serve as a mobile grocery store that will offer fresh produce and nutrition courses. Later this week, collaborative members will be meeting with architecture firm Looney Ricks Kiss about retrofitting the bus.

The Choice Neighborhoods grant deadline is April 10th, and the collaborative plans to use the input from Saturday’s meeting as a guideline for their final draft.

“If we don’t have the plan ready in 60 days, we could be out of the poll; waving goodbye and seeing the money go [to another community],” Reardon said.

Last Monday, the Division of Housing and Community Development hosted a meeting to discuss the Triangle Noir plan, which touts the redevelopment of Vance Avenue as an opportunity to promote African-American history and culture. Thus far, there has been little effort on their part to include Vance residents in their proposal.

“It was a little weird that they had this meeting [to discuss the Triangle Noir plan] with no notice to us. None of us were invited to it, and [the meeting was held] outside the historic center of the neighborhood [at Bridges],” Reardon said. “When they listed the stakeholders being consulted, not one of the groups we know recognized throughout this neighborhood was listed. This process has to have, at its core, the concerns and the needs of the residents.

“The Triangle Noir plan could inadvertently result in a new level of displacement and gentrification, and we don’t want that,” Rearden continued. “We don’t want to save the neighborhood at the expense of the people who live here.”

A new red, white, and blue flag waves over a storefront on South Main. But it’s not the American flag.

The Russian Cultural Center (RCC) opened its doors at 509 South Main in mid-January, welcoming Memphians to learn about Russian culture. As part of the grand opening, Mayors A C Wharton and Mark Luttrell declared January 14th to be “Russian Federation Day.”

“The city of Memphis wishes to strengthen our bonds with multicultural nations, such as the Russian Federation, and develop educational, scientific, cultural, and business relations with this country,” Wharton wrote in his proclamation.

While the center aims to serve the local Russian and Russian-speaking population, RCC president Anna Terry said they encourage everyone to visit the center.

“The Russians have been here,” Terry said, “but they haven’t really had a face in Memphis. They tend to stick together, and we want them to interact with Memphians in a real way. We really want [RCC] to be more of a place where Americans can interact with Russians and vice versa, not a Russian club.”

For Terry and the other founders, Memphis was an obvious choice for the new center.

“Everyone around the world loves [Memphis] culture, our food, and music,” Terry said, “so we started bringing [Russian] students here in 2010 for business training programs. They just loved it. This is kind of the more real, gritty America, and a lot of Russians only know New York or maybe California. This is like the heart and soul of America.”

Terry and the RCC are hoping to work with Memphians who want to travel or study in Russia and are currently working with the Russian Language Department at Rhodes College to connect students who want to study abroad with exchange programs.

“We want to [help produce] a more global economy here. We build relationships through culture, and that leads to doing business together. We want to help make Memphis a more multicultural city,” Terry said.

The RCC plans to host educational events like Russian cooking classes, lectures, language courses, and biweekly Russian film screenings in their makeshift theater. There are also plans to hold craft and language courses geared toward children. Part of the RCC’s efforts will focus on introducing Memphians to a more accurate image of the Russian people.

“Most people’s perception of Russia and Russian culture is about 30 years outdated. There are a lot of stereotypes that need to be pulled apart,” Terry said.

The RCC looked to the Russian Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., for much of their funding and the materials to renovate their South Main storefront, but they are still seeking donations through their website, newworldconnection.org.

The staff at Elmwood is hoping to give new meaning to the term “graveyard shift.”

In celebration of the cemetery’s 160th anniversary, Elmwood is launching two “colleges” aimed at training new volunteers to work at the cemetery preserving monuments and leading guided tours.

The Stone College teaches volunteers both to preserve and restore the cemetery’s famous Victorian funerary monuments, while the Ambassador College trains them as tour guides or costumed actors.

“We have people ask us how they can get involved all the time,” said Kim McCollum, executive director of Elmwood Cemetery. “So this program was really brought about by people wanting to help. We thought it would be a great way to introduce people to a side of the cemetery that they’re naturally drawn to anyway.”

The cemetery grounds, where the classes will be held, cover nearly 80 acres of Midtown and South Memphis land and serves as host to more than 70,000 graves.

“Everyone [buried] here has a story,” McCollum said. “That’s how we feel about it.”

The thousands of gravestones and monuments that pepper the garden cemetery are icons of the city’s past. Veterans from every American war, victims of the yellow fever epidemics, civil rights leaders, and African-American slaves share the same hallowed ground. The cemetery joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.

“There are very few institutions in the city that speak to our collective history that are as old and remain this beautiful,” McCollum said.

Over the past couple of years, Elmwood has seen an increasing number of visitors and school groups that bring over 5,000 students each year. The new training colleges will serve to meet the cemetery’s growing demand.

“We are looking for people dedicated to and interested in history,” McCollum said.

The first round of classes, which will be taught by staff members and experienced volunteers, will begin March 3rd at 9 a.m. Spots in both colleges are still open to those interested in volunteering at Elmwood.

Graduates from the Stone College will be invited to help with monument cleaning and restoration events. Those from the Ambassador College will participate in tours and help out with special events.

Though McCollum is confident new sessions will be added for both colleges throughout the year, plans for the next round of classes depend on the interest generated by the first round.

Registration for either class costs $25 per person, and those interested should call Kim McCollum at 901-774-4312 or visit elmwoodcemetery.org/events.

Along the local banks of the Mississippi River, faded green and white signs bearing the logo of a bicycle and the letters “MRT” stand unnoticed and largely forgotten.

Those signs mark a segment of the 3,000-mile Mississippi River Trail, (MRT) that stretches along the river from Itasca, Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Much of the section of the pedestrian and bicycle trail that runs through Shelby County has fallen into disrepair, but a number of organizations are banding together to do something about it.

The Mississippi River Corridor-Tennessee (MRCT), the University of Memphis, and the Memphis Regional Design Center have teamed up on a study of how to improve the trail’s local segment. The results of the study will be discussed at a public meeting on Thursday, January 19th.

“Diana Threadgill [president of the MRCT] raised the modest funds to undertake an examination of the current trail with an eye towards making it a more available and meaningful asset to county residents,” said Ken Reardon, director of the graduate program in city and regional planning at the University of Memphis.

One of the most obvious problems is inadequate signage indicating the Memphis portion of the trail, according to the study.

“The trail isn’t well marked in Shelby County,” Threadgill said, “and a lot of bikers, pedestrians, and hikers don’t even realize they’re on the trail. There are some markers north of the city — some with bullet holes — so we’re looking at adding new signage and deciding where signs need to go.”

In addition to new trail markers, they’ll also consider adding signs that indicate connections with other trails and greenlines, as well as local attractions like Meeman-Shelby Forest, historic downtown and civil rights tours, and Soulsville.

The largest proposed change will redirect the trail from its current river crossing at the I-55 bridge and extend the trail from downtown through South Memphis and into Mississippi, where cyclists and hikers will cross into Helena, Arkansas.

“Currently, the entrance to the bridge is a very difficult site to navigate,” Reardon said. “You have to cross a lane with heavily trafficked streets, and you have to carry your bike up 20 steps to the top of a 30-foot section [of trail] where you are totally exposed to heavy trucks moving at a rapid pace.”

Threadgill also hopes a revamped trail will attract more users who can generate some extra economic vitality for communities along the river.

“[MRCT] is involved in economic development for our counties, so we don’t view this trail as being strictly recreational,” Threadgill said. “We’re also looking at the economic benefits the county will enjoy by people riding and stopping at different restaurants, destinations, and cultural events.”

The Memphis Regional Design Center is hosting Thursday’s community meeting at 6 p.m. in the Main Hall of Central Station.