Launching in Summer 2021 with the support of the Wopat Community Fund at the Marion Community Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Program is proud to be partnering with Caledonia Northern Folk Studiosto offer a dynamite series of workshops in community-based cultural work for social justice, taught by the Marion Voices team + extended community.
** REGISTRATION FOR THE MARION VOICES SUMMER INSTITUTE OPENS ON WEDS., JUNE 23rd, 2021 at Midnight!!! Please visit our Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Program Eventbrite page to get registered! **
Download our Marion Voices Summer Institute 2021 Lookbook here:
All workshops will be offered live (synchronous) on Zoom; workshops are free with requested donation for those living, working, and/or with roots in Marion County; & are offered at a sliding scale with suggested donation thresholds from those from further afield who would like to tune in. Our Marion Voices Summer Institute in Cultural Documentation will be our chief means of raising funds to fuel Marion Voices’ three educational outreach programs we’re standing up in 2021-2022: the Marion Voices In the Schools Folk + Cultural Arts K-12 Residency, an accompanying Marion Voices Teaching Artists’ Training Program to get local cultural artists into our schools, & a countywide folk, cultural, & documentary arts apprenticeship program. ** Please donate to the best of your ability to help sustain our work!**
Suggested Pricing Per Workshop:
- Individual Sliding Scale — $50-200 Per One Hour of Workshop Programming; Workshop “Parts”Indicate # of Hours
- Individual Marion Voices Champion — $200+ Per One Hour of Workshop Programming; Workshop “Parts”Indicate # of Hours
- Organizational or Institutional Registration for 2-3 Individuals — $300 Per One Hour of Workshop Programming
- Organizational or Institutional Registration for 3-5 Individuals — $500 Per One Hour of Workshop Programming
- Full Organizational Membership for Larger Non-Profit or Institution — $1,500-2,500 Per One Hour of Workshop Programming
Individuals and organizations may also sign up for an ALL ACCESS PASS to the full slate of the Marion Voices Summer Institute for the following suggested prices:
- Individual Sliding Scale: $750-3,000+ ** FULL SERIES **
- Individual Marion Voices Champion — $5,000+
- Organizational or Institutional Registration for 2-3 Individuals — $4,500
- Organizational or Institutional Registration for 3-5 Individuals — $7,500 Per One Hour of Workshop Programming
- Full Organizational Membership for Larger Non-Profit or Institution — $22,500-37,500 ** FULL SERIES ACCESS**
Marion Voices Summer Institute workshops are rooted in the experience & praxis of Marion County, Ohio — but are open to all. We welcome artists, cultural workers, funders, non-profits, & revolutionaries from around the world to join us in deep conversation & building movements this summer. Workshop registration & rates are for single individuals; but institution & organizational subscriptions — as well as individual & organizational packages to access the summer’s full slate of workshops — will also be available.
Our Marion Voices Summer Institute in Cultural Documentation class catalog for Summer 2021 will include the following courses, with the following anticipated workshop dates [TBD!]:
EQUITY BUDGETING: CULTURAL WORK BUDGETING FOR SOCIAL Justice [2-PARTS]
Instructor: Jess Lamar Reece Holler, Marion Voices // Caledonia Northern Folk Studios
Anticipated Dates: Monday, 08/08 + Monday, 08/16
Workshop Description:This is our “hometown,” solo version of our flagship equity budgeting workshop, based in the Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Model and movements for organizing freelancer labor, co-developed & co-taught with the incredible NYC-based oral historian & organizer Sarah Dziedzic. Equity Budgeting 101 will be an all-inclusive introduction to the pratices & rationale behind Equity Budgeting — a “full ecology” movement for economic justice in cultural work founded at the Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Program, & which insists on fair pay for both project cultural workers, and for community members expected to participate in & consult on a project — including for oral history narrators and folk/cultural artists who may be interviewed or documented for a project.
Our Equity Budgeting 101 Workshop provides a quick & accessible introduction to the necessary work of equity budgeting, its deep roots in Black-led movements for racial & economic justice, & why equity budgeting is so necessary to root out extractive practices in the cultural work sphere. The workshop also provides comprehensive tips & best practices towards enacting equity budgeting — both for practitioners & for organizations. This workshop will include access to the Equity Budgeting Workbook; donations are strongly encouraged to cover full costs of the workshop + workbook.
ORAL HISTORY 101: DOING ETHICAL INTERVIEWING PROJECTS [4-PARTS]
Instructor: Jess Lamar Reece Holler, Marion Voices // Caledonia Northern Folk Studios
Anticipated Dates: Two Intensive [2-Hour] Days: Saturday, July 17th-18th
Workshop Description: This foundational course in our Oral History Workshops series covers all of the basics of starting an oral history project — from groundwork & community relations, to navigating research, consent form design, & baseline interview questions, to the art & ethics of the interview experience, to mobilizing your interviews for community & movement projects. This four-part workshop provides hands-on instruction in the praxis of oral history, and is designed for justice-aligned organizations & practitioners who wish to interrogate & disrupt extractive legacies of oral history & cultural work. As such, the workshop also includes a quick introduction to principles of Equity Budgeting (i.e.: pay your narrators!) in oral history work; & training in reparative, post-custodial models of imagining consent & (co-) ownership of project materials. This workshop will give you everything you or your organization needs to start an oral history project or program of your very own.
No equipment, material, or prior experience in oral history interviewing required.
FOLKLIFE 101: AN INTRODUCTION TO FOLK & CULTURAL ARTS + DOCUMENTARY ARTS MASTER SERIES: PHOTOGRAPHY + RECORDING AUDIO [3-PARTS]
Instructor: Jess Lamar Reece Holler, Marion Voices // Caledonia Northern Folk Studios
Anticipated Dates: Monday, June 28th; Monday, July 12th; Monday, July 19th
General Workshop Description: This new series combines our foundational introduction to the folk & cultural arts — including folk & cultural arts genres, the history of public folklore work in the United States, & the possibilities & politics of folk/cultural/traditional arts programming — with two specific modules focused on the arts of documentary photography & audio recording. Equal parts disciplinary & public humanities history of the field of Folklore Studies & the practice of Public-Sector // Community Folklife, and a dynamic investigation of folklife & traditional arts definitions, genres, & processes, this workshop is intended for community cultural arts, heritage, & historic institutions considering beginning collecting, documentation, or programming work in the folk/traditional arts … or just for anyone interested in folklife! We’ll close with a case study from the Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Program of how folk & cultural arts can become catalysts for building arts-based livelihoods in hard-hit communities; and a potential means to solidarity economies. More than any other workshop in our series, this workshop includes instruction in aesthetics of documentary arts, & will focus on participants developing & articulating their own artistic style — & ethics — in documentary arts production focused on & partnered with folk & traditional arts.
About the Cultural Arts Documentation Master Series: Photography Workshop: This Cultural Arts Documentation Master Series workshop is a crash-course in one of the most critical but understudied aspects of public folklife + cultural arts documentation practice: photography! Very few, if any, public folklife or public history training programs include explicit, arts-based training in the practice — & politics/ethics — of documentary photography; yet photography is the primary way most public folklife programs not only document & share local cultural arts for their audiences, but make the case for why this work matters to funders. But what are the ethical and political dynamics of documenting other peoples’ faces, homes, & cultural arts traditions … especially across lines of significant racial, ethnic, gender, socioeconomic, or linguistic difference? And who owns documentary folklife photography: the photographer? The program you work for? The artist whose work or face you are documenting? This workshop covers both conventional principles of aesthetics in documentary photography — including portrait photography, object photography, & landscape/context photography — and gives you space to reflect on & reparatively write into your own ethical expectations & standards around documentary arts. You’ll come away with an active artists’ statement of ethics you can use to guide your own photography practice; as well as a honed sense of the aesthetics of composition & photography practice that will meet you, your program, and your collaborators’ needs while also matching your ethics.
About the Cultural Arts Documentation Master Series: Audio Recording Workshop:This Cultural Arts Documentation Master Series workshop covers perhaps the most versatile & pervasive documentary arts form across public folklife + oral history practice: recording audio. This workshop frees up the practice, aesthetics, & technics of recording audio from particular interview formats; & instead looks at recording audio holistically. We’ll cover equipment, practices & politics of audio recording, & we’ll cover the range of genres of audio recording that need to be in the toolkit of folklife // documentary arts practitioner — including the oral history // life history interview, the object interview, the process/practice interview, the walking interview, & both music & ambient sound documentation. We’ll also explore the ethics of each of those audio recording situations, since audio recording is almost always a dialogic experience; & think about how consent, ownership, rights, & involvement to collaborate on future derivative works may look different across these different formats & situations. We’ll also, briefly, explore the vast range of derivative arts, public humanities, & movement works that can come from raw field audio recording: including edited interview clips, soundscape compositions, community radio, & more. You’ll come away with deep reflection on your own praxis & philosophy of audio recording work; & a versatile toolkit to support your future audio documentation work. Note: this is not a podcasting workshop!
CULTURAL ARTS DOCUMENTATION MASTER SERIES: SOUNDSCAPE RECORDING [1-PART]
Instructor: Jess Lamar Reece Holler, Marion Voices // Caledonia Northern Folk Studios
Anticipated Dates: Saturday, July 10th — 10AM
Workshop Description: Following in the tradition of Irv Teibel, this Cultural Arts Documentation Master Series Workshop explores the history & praxis of ambient, environmental soundscape recording. We’ll cover the uncomfortable but important politics of the rise of environmental soundscape recording as a part of the very white soundscape ecology movement led by Canadian soundscape artist R. Murray Schafer in the 1970s; & then will explore the explosion of environmental sound recording as a New Age phenomenon with the ENVIRONMENTS LP series, & the vibrant 1980s history of experimental ambient music production, including the Japanese kankyo ongaku // “environmental music” moment. Then, we’ll pivot to practical hands-on training in the art of environmental soundscape recording. Modules will cover equipment choices, soundscape recording techniques, the ethics of soundscape recording; & the destinies & ethics of editing raw soundscape materials into composed soundscape pieces! Participants will come away with a 1-pager project sheet for an ambient/environmental soundscape project of your choosing!
AFRO-FUTURIST FUNDING [3-PARTS]
Instructor: Johnnie Lewis Jackson, Marion Voices // Marion City Schools // Johnnie Jackson, LLC.
Anticipated Dates: Saturdays, August 7th, 14th, & 21st — 10 AM
Workshop Description:This dynamic workshop on thinking speculatively about money & cultural // community funding in the Black radical tradition is led by Johnnie L. Jackson: Marion County’s resident abolitionist educator & organizer for solidarity economics. Drawing from traditions in Critical Race Theory, Black Futurisms, & movements for solidarity economies & co-operative futures from Cooperation Jackson + the Boston Ujima Project, Johnnie will guide participants through ways to radically fund projects & visions for community change from the grassroots: while building towards abundant ecologies on the other side of capitalism.
SOMATIC ABOLITION [2-PARTS]
Instructor: Whitney Gherman, Cypress + Oak Somatics
Anticipated Dates: Coming Soon — Stay Tuned !!!
Workshop Description: This signature workshop from Marion & Delaware County somatic anti-racist educator Whitney Gherman will introduce participants to the theory & practice of somatic abolition: an embodied approach to anti-racism work rooted in polyvagal theory. Participants will explore how anti-Black & anti-Brown racism, for white bodies, ground themselves in bodily responses; & will learn somatic techniques to build capacity for tolerance, towards necessary anti-racist futures.
Click here to be added to the interest list for the Marion Voices Summer Institute — we’ll launch sign-ups in early June 2021!
EQUITY BUDGETING: CULTURAL WORK BUDGETING FOR SOCIAL Justice [2-parts]
Instructor: Jess Lamar Reece Holler, Marion Voices // Caledonia Northern Folk Studios
Anticipated Dates: Monday, 08/08 + Monday, 08/16
Workshop Description:This is our “hometown,” solo version of our flagship equity budgeting workshop, based in the Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Model and movements for organizing freelancer labor, co-developed & co-taught with the incredible NYC-based oral historian & organizer Sarah Dziedzic. Equity Budgeting 101 will be an all-inclusive introduction to the pratices & rationale behind Equity Budgeting — a “full ecology” movement for economic justice in cultural work founded at the Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Program, & which insists on fair pay for both project cultural workers, and for community members expected to participate in & consult on a project — including for oral history narrators and folk/cultural artists who may be interviewed or documented for a project.
Our Equity Budgeting 101 Workshop provides a quick & accessible introduction to the necessary work of equity budgeting, its deep roots in Black-led movements for racial & economic justice, & why equity budgeting is so necessary to root out extractive practices in the cultural work sphere. The workshop also provides comprehensive tips & best practices towards enacting equity budgeting — both for practitioners & for organizations. This workshop will include access to the Equity Budgeting Workbook; donations are strongly encouraged to cover full costs of the workshop + workbook.
ORAL HISTORY 101: DOING ETHICAL INTERVIEWING PROJECTS [4-PARTS]
Instructor: Jess Lamar Reece Holler, Marion Voices // Caledonia Northern Folk Studios
Anticipated Dates: Two Intensive [2-Hour] Days: Saturday, July 17th-18th
Workshop Description: This foundational course in our Oral History Workshops series covers all of the basics of starting an oral history project — from groundwork & community relations, to navigating research, consent form design, & baseline interview questions, to the art & ethics of the interview experience, to mobilizing your interviews for community & movement projects. This four-part workshop provides hands-on instruction in the praxis of oral history, and is designed for justice-aligned organizations & practitioners who wish to interrogate & disrupt extractive legacies of oral history & cultural work. As such, the workshop also includes a quick introduction to principles of Equity Budgeting (i.e.: pay your narrators!) in oral history work; & training in reparative, post-custodial models of imagining consent & (co-) ownership of project materials. This workshop will give you everything you or your organization needs to start an oral history project or program of your very own.
No equipment, material, or prior experience in oral history interviewing required.
FOLKLIFE 101: AN INTRODUCTION TO FOLK & CULTURAL ARTS + DOCUMENTARY ARTS MASTER SERIES: PHOTOGRAPHY + RECORDING AUDIO [3-PARTS]
Instructor: Jess Lamar Reece Holler, Marion Voices // Caledonia Northern Folk Studios
Anticipated Dates: Monday, June 28th; Monday, July 12th; Monday, July 19th
General Workshop Description: This new series combines our foundational introduction to the folk & cultural arts — including folk & cultural arts genres, the history of public folklore work in the United States, & the possibilities & politics of folk/cultural/traditional arts programming — with two specific modules focused on the arts of documentary photography & audio recording. Equal parts disciplinary & public humanities history of the field of Folklore Studies & the practice of Public-Sector // Community Folklife, and a dynamic investigation of folklife & traditional arts definitions, genres, & processes, this workshop is intended for community cultural arts, heritage, & historic institutions considering beginning collecting, documentation, or programming work in the folk/traditional arts … or just for anyone interested in folklife! We’ll close with a case study from the Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Program of how folk & cultural arts can become catalysts for building arts-based livelihoods in hard-hit communities; and a potential means to solidarity economies. More than any other workshop in our series, this workshop includes instruction in aesthetics of documentary arts, & will focus on participants developing & articulating their own artistic style — & ethics — in documentary arts production focused on & partnered with folk & traditional arts.
About the Cultural Arts Documentation Master Series: Photography Workshop: This Cultural Arts Documentation Master Series workshop is a crash-course in one of the most critical but understudied aspects of public folklife + cultural arts documentation practice: photography! Very few, if any, public folklife or public history training programs include explicit, arts-based training in the practice — & politics/ethics — of documentary photography; yet photography is the primary way most public folklife programs not only document & share local cultural arts for their audiences, but make the case for why this work matters to funders. But what are the ethical and political dynamics of documenting other peoples’ faces, homes, & cultural arts traditions … especially across lines of significant racial, ethnic, gender, socioeconomic, or linguistic difference? And who owns documentary folklife photography: the photographer? The program you work for? The artist whose work or face you are documenting? This workshop covers both conventional principles of aesthetics in documentary photography — including portrait photography, object photography, & landscape/context photography — and gives you space to reflect on & reparatively write into your own ethical expectations & standards around documentary arts. You’ll come away with an active artists’ statement of ethics you can use to guide your own photography practice; as well as a honed sense of the aesthetics of composition & photography practice that will meet you, your program, and your collaborators’ needs while also matching your ethics.
About the Cultural Arts Documentation Master Series: Audio Recording Workshop:This Cultural Arts Documentation Master Series workshop covers perhaps the most versatile & pervasive documentary arts form across public folklife + oral history practice: recording audio. This workshop frees up the practice, aesthetics, & technics of recording audio from particular interview formats; & instead looks at recording audio holistically. We’ll cover equipment, practices & politics of audio recording, & we’ll cover the range of genres of audio recording that need to be in the toolkit of folklife // documentary arts practitioner — including the oral history // life history interview, the object interview, the process/practice interview, the walking interview, & both music & ambient sound documentation. We’ll also explore the ethics of each of those audio recording situations, since audio recording is almost always a dialogic experience; & think about how consent, ownership, rights, & involvement to collaborate on future derivative works may look different across these different formats & situations. We’ll also, briefly, explore the vast range of derivative arts, public humanities, & movement works that can come from raw field audio recording: including edited interview clips, soundscape compositions, community radio, & more. You’ll come away with deep reflection on your own praxis & philosophy of audio recording work; & a versatile toolkit to support your future audio documentation work. Note: this is not a podcasting workshop!
CULTURAL ARTS DOCUMENTATION MASTER SERIES: SOUNDSCAPE RECORDING [1-PART]
Instructor: Jess Lamar Reece Holler, Marion Voices // Caledonia Northern Folk Studios
Anticipated Dates: Saturday, July 10th — 10AM
Workshop Description: Following in the tradition of Irv Teibel, this Cultural Arts Documentation Master Series Workshop explores the history & praxis of ambient, environmental soundscape recording. We’ll cover the uncomfortable but important politics of the rise of environmental soundscape recording as a part of the very white soundscape ecology movement led by Canadian soundscape artist R. Murray Schafer in the 1970s; & then will explore the explosion of environmental sound recording as a New Age phenomenon with the ENVIRONMENTS LP series, & the vibrant 1980s history of experimental ambient music production, including the Japanese kankyo ongaku // “environmental music” moment. Then, we’ll pivot to practical hands-on training in the art of environmental soundscape recording. Modules will cover equipment choices, soundscape recording techniques, the ethics of soundscape recording; & the destinies & ethics of editing raw soundscape materials into composed soundscape pieces! Participants will come away with a 1-pager project sheet for an ambient/environmental soundscape project of your choosing!
AFRO-FUTURIST FUNDING [3-PARTS]
Instructor: Johnnie Lewis Jackson, Marion Voices // Marion City Schools // Johnnie Jackson, LLC.
Anticipated Dates: Saturdays, August 7th, 14th, & 21st — 10 AM
Workshop Description:This dynamic workshop on thinking speculatively about money & cultural // community funding in the Black radical tradition is led by Johnnie L. Jackson: Marion County’s resident abolitionist educator & organizer for solidarity economics. Drawing from traditions in Critical Race Theory, Black Futurisms, & movements for solidarity economies & co-operative futures from Cooperation Jackson + the Boston Ujima Project, Johnnie will guide participants through ways to radically fund projects & visions for community change from the grassroots: while building towards abundant ecologies on the other side of capitalism.
SOMATIC ABOLITION [2-PARTS]
Instructor: Whitney Gherman, Cypress + Oak Somatics
Anticipated Dates: Coming Soon — Stay Tuned !!!
Workshop Description: This signature workshop from Marion & Delaware County somatic anti-racist educator Whitney Gherman will introduce participants to the theory & practice of somatic abolition: an embodied approach to anti-racism work rooted in polyvagal theory. Participants will explore how anti-Black & anti-Brown racism, for white bodies, ground themselves in bodily responses; & will learn somatic techniques to build capacity for tolerance, towards necessary anti-racist futures.
Sign up here to be added to the interest list for the Marion Voices Summer Institute — we’ll launch sign-ups in early June 2021!
Contact us for questions or organizational // institutional subscriptions at marionvoicesoralhistory at gmail dot com !!!
