Arts Advocates presents “Speaking of the Arts … Collaboration Conversations”

November 18, 2020 – Sarasota

Arts Advocates continues its Speaking of the Arts series with artist Judith Levine and poet Jeanne Marie Beaumont, who will share their experience collaborating on a public art project for Art in Common Places. “Speaking of the Arts … Collaboration Conversations” will be December 2, 2020, 1:00 p.m., via Zoom. Registration for this free program is limited, required, and can be made by visiting artsadvocates.org.

During the COVID-19 shutdown, Sarasota artist Judith Levine and New York poet Jeanne Marie Beaumont worked long-distance for six weeks on a deeply personal project for the public arts program Art in Common Places. Levine and Beaumont, who titled their collaboration MemoryKeeper, will share their experience and outcome in this Zoom presentation.

Levine stated, “This project was a joyful collaboration between two creative strangers. During the process, we found many crossovers in life and in art, sharing and creating a memory keeper in words and visual symbols. Jeanne’s powerful use of words inspired my visual work and created a mutual bond of friendship.”

Art in Common Places was founded in February 2020 by Sarasota residents Cynthia Burnell, Leslie Butterfield, and Teresa Carson. Its mission is to put art in public places so everyone can experience it in their daily life. The art and poetry that comes out of each cross-disciplinary collaboration is transformed into posters that are hung in places such as libraries, community centers, coffee shops and healthcare clinics.

Judith Levine is president of the Association of Florida Teaching Artists and has coordinated the Artists in Schools program for the Arts and Cultural Alliance in Sarasota, Florida, training artists to integrate their art into the curriculum. She teaches arts courses at Ringling College Continuing Studies Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Sarasota, and owns Phoenix Art Workshops, a business providing art talks and workshops. She runs The Studios on McIntosh, a teaching and working art studio. Levine attended Rutgers and Fairleigh Dickinson universities and attained a B.A. in art and art education. She earned an M.A. in visual arts from Montclair State University, New Jersey, where she was on the art education faculty. She was an art educator and district art supervisor in Parsippany, New Jersey, for more than 30 years and was awarded Art Educator of the Year locally and statewide.

Jeanne Marie Beaumont is the author of four books of poetry: “Letters from Limbo;” “Burning of the Three Fires;” “Curious Conduct;” and “Placebo Effects,” a winner of the National Poetry Series. She coedited the anthology “The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales.” In the summer of 2019, her play, “Asylum Song,” had its world premiere at the HERE Theater in New York. Her poem, “Afraid So,” was made into an award-winning short film by filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt. She also won the 2009 Dana Award for Poetry. Beaumont received her M.F.A. in writing from Columbia University, and she has taught at the Frost Place, Rutgers University, and for the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program of the University of Southern Maine. She regularly teaches adult workshops at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd St. Y in New York City, where she has lived since 1983.