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Project: Positive Speech prepares for takeoff!

“Let your fellow’s honor be as dear to you as your own”

-Rabbi Eliezer, Ethics of Our Fathers 2:15

RUACH, Milwaukee’s Jewish arts and music organization, is excited to announce our newest visual arts initiative for the Spring and Summer 2012 season:

PROJECT: POSITIVE SPEECH

WHAT AND WHY

The ability to speak is a powerful gift that can be used to uplift, teach, and encourage. Unfortunately however, this gift is often abused, and its misuse can cause hurt, pain, and emotional damage in people from old to young.

Project: Positive Speech, RUACH’s newest round of visual arts residencies, will use art as a means to promote the beauty and beneficial impact of positive speech. The emphasis for this RUACH project is founded upon the premise that positive speech is both a Jewish value and a universal value, with numerous applications in the area of life skills.

Our goal is to get participants of all ages, working with professional artist-educators, excited to learn how powerful and inspiring kind words can be, through the process of making art.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

~16 varied organizations serving diverse constituencies will each have the opportunity to participate in a residency.  Each residency begins with a half-hour interactive, introductory session, led by an engaging guest educator who introduces the positive speech concept to the class.  Ideas explored include:

-Defining “Positive Speech”-what is it?

-Why is it important?

-What can we do with it?

Following that are ~7 hours of art instruction with our talented artist-educators.

Our artists’ vision is as follows: Using mixed media and varied processes, each group will build and illustrate a large 3D shape, exhibiting aspects of positive words and phrases (chosen by the students).  All the while, teachers will reinforce key elements of positive speech.

Once completed, all of the organizations’ and schools’ shapes will be collected and displayed as one, building-block style, in a public space. The completed piece will prominently impart positive, encouraging messages. The installation will be easily portable, enabling it to “travel” for display.

This communal piece also illustrates the message that just as the different types of shapes come together in the building of the installation, different kinds of people can come together to build unity.

Project: Positive Speech is made possible through generous grants from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund and The Helen Bader Foundation, Inc.  The residencies run from mid April through June 2012.  Karen Reiffman serves as Project Manager and as an instructor for this exciting initiative.  The other instructors slated to teach include Wendy Bernstein, Sally Duback, Esti Hiller, Darlene Wesenberg Rzezotarski, Robert Rubovits, Kitty Dyble Thompson, and Leann Wooten.

Click here to read a really nice article about Project: Positive Speech, written by Joshua Becker of the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle.