Why Experiential
Arts & Learning?
From the archeological discoveries of 50,000-year-old musical instruments, 70,000-year-old rock art, and jewelry crafted more than 140,000 years ago — the evidence is clear and profound:
Humans have been making art to connect, reflect, and relate life experiences for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. Art has always been experiential.
The Neanderthal “Divje Babe” bone flute, discovered in Slovenia in 1995, estimated at 50,000-60,000 years old.
This isn’t the story we’ve been told (and sold) in westernized societies however.
Ushered in by “high art” ideals of the European Renaissance and reinforced by the scientific, colonial, and industrial revolutions that followed, the past 500 years of artmaking in the West have in large part adhered to the technical presentation and instruction of what break down to scientific principles including formulas, theories, methods, data, instruments, and more.
The Altamira cave paintings, discovered in Spain in 1868, estimated at 36,000 years old.
Fast forward to today, and traditional arts and arts education systems in westernized societies continue to adhere to this script and prioritize what NO FEAR calls the “Science” of artmaking, being intellectual concepts and their technical methods of production and presentation.
Offering an integrative and holistic alternative to this emphasis on training and instruction, Experiential Arts and Learning (EA&L) reprioritizes participants and their intrinsic meanings and purposes for experiencing art at the heart of arts experiences, in what NO FEAR calls the “Soul” of artmaking.
EA&L works to restore balance between the “Science” and “Soul” of human artmaking, in an effort to renew the ancient, communal, and experiential nature of art. This effort serves to connect, reflect, and relate human experiences in meaningful and purposeful ways, as artmaking has done for tens of thousands of years.
We invite you to participate in this integrative and holistic process and join us for the illuminating adventure ahead.
Why
New Orleans?
Artmaking in New Orleans has served to connect disparate communities, reflect diverse cultures, and relate individual and collective experiences for over 300 years, with evidence of indigenous artmaking in the area dating back over 1,500 years.
Echoes of Bamboula drums still echo in time through Congo Square. Jazz Funerals and Second Line Parades still wind whimsically through the one-way streets of the Treme neighborhood. Black Masking Indians still rise at dawn every Mardi Gras to show off their stunning new suits. Generations of Creole families still seduce the senses with their cultural mashups of culinary delights.
Indigenous Peoples, Europeans, Africans. Haitians, Cubans, Chinese, Irish, Germans, Italians, Hondurans, Vietnamese. The Spanish architecture of a French Quarter that became “American” only 223 years ago.
New Orleans is indeed a metaphorical gumbo of human experiences. A near mythical place where music is medicine, food is a love language, and humanity is reflected so compellingly through the city’s parades, festivals, architecture, neighborhoods, street names, and more.
No other city in the U.S. epitomizes Experiential Arts like New Orleans.
Why
NO FEAR?
NO FEAR’s mission to create “art for heart’s sake” is more than a motto. It is an active and integrative approach to artmaking that explicitly places meaning and purpose at the heart of arts and arts education experiences.
We invite you to participate in this process and join NO FEAR’s growing community of partners, as we work together to cultivate the transformative power of Experiential Arts and Learning, and the meaningful and purposeful objectives it can serve.