©2009 Jim Hightower, Alternet: summary republished from Alternet 12/26/09

This special season got me to thinking about America's spirit of giving, and I don't mean this overdone business of Christmas gifts. I mean our true spirit of giving -- giving of ourselves.

Yes, we are a country of rugged individualists, yet there's also a deep, community-minded streak in each of us. We're a people who believe in the notion that we're all in this together, that we can make our individual lives better by contributing to the common good.

The establishment media pay little attention to grassroots generosity, focusing instead on the occasional showy donation by what it calls "philanthropists" -- big tycoons who give a tiny piece of their billions to some university or museum in exchange for getting a building named after them. But in my mind, the real philanthropists are the millions of you ordinary folks who have precious little money to give, but consistently give of yourselves.

My own daddy, rest his soul, was a fine example of this. With half a dozen other guys in Denison, Texas, he started the Little League baseball program, volunteering to build the park, sponsor and coach the teams, run the squawking P.A. system, etc., etc. Even after I moved on from Little League, he stayed working at it, because his involvement was not merely for his kids ... but for all. (more---->)

Guest curator Susan Reisman presents an internationally selected group of artists whose techniques and works of art that perceive cultural history impacted by colonial rule, and propoposing new ethnographic possibilities. This is part of an evolving trend, first by the artists themselves, and as a result the galleries and museums that follow take on deep social and political issues in a connected, organized way to communicate a diverse statement about the nature of cultural identities. Accordiing to Reisman's gallery statement, "Ethnographies of the Future takes into account the vast geographies impacted by colonial rule by bringing together artists whose works present a critical relationship to post-colonial identity politics. The artists in the exhibition, with their diverse historical reference points, make clear that the terms of cultural identification are unstable. In installations, videos, and mixed-media works, they suggest an ever-shifting discursive field where the possibilities for defining ethnography are unending. Drawing on histories of the Caribbean, South Asia, Israel, China, Korea and Japan, the South Pacific, Europe, and the Americas, the exhibition addresses colonial rule from a contemporary, global perspective."

Artists Include

* Elia Alba

* Rajkamal Kahlon

* Seung Young Kim and Hironori Murai

* Simone Leigh

* Ohad Meromi

* Marc Andre Robinson

* Pak Sheung Chuen

* Allison Smith

* Sriwhana Spong

* Roberto Visani (with John Movius)

According to Christopher Balla on the BRIC Rotunda blog, most of the artists in the exhibition are livingand working in New York City, but find their cultural identities elsewhere, mostly in famously indigenous and then colonized parts of the world. I think what Reisman alludes to in her statement and displays in the curation is the realizaiton in most theoretical, acaemic, and in art circles is that cultural identification communicated as fact, is actually cultural identification that is hazy and part mythical; factual in terms of the artist living in a post-postmodern world, using art to communicate in a way that is not cartesian or colonial or binary; it is imperfect, asymmetrical, stirred with emotion. The BRIC Rotunda Gallery is the visual arts program of BRIC Arts | Media | Bklyn, a multi-disciplinaryarts and media non-profit, dedicated to "presenting visual, performing and media arts programs that eflective of Brooklyn's diverse communities...."

Image Credits: Rajkamal Kahlon, Dummyboard, Untitled Painting no. 1, 2008, oil on wood.

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