Why Experiential
Arts & Learning?
From recent 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: humans have been making art to connect, reflect, and relate life experiences for hundreds of thousands of years.
Art has always been experiential. This isn’t the story we’ve been told (and sold) in westernized societies however.
The Neanderthal “Divje Babe” bone flute, discovered in Slovenia in 1995, estimated at 50,000-60,000 years old.
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 often breaks 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 arts and arts education systems in westernized societies continue to adhere to this script, prioritizing what NO FEAR calls the “Science” of artmaking, being the didactic learning of intellectual concepts and their technical methods of production and presentation.
Offering an integrative approach and holistic counterbalance to this over-emphasis on instructional training and presentational formats, Experiential Arts and Learning (EA&L) works to re-prioritize participatory and communal artmaking in what NO FEAR calls the “Soul” of artmaking and puts meaning and purpose at the heart of arts experiences.
EA&L serves to renew the ancient, universal, and experiential “Spirit” of art and artmaking, which manifests when “Science” and “Soul” are fully integrated and in balance, and has served to connect, reflect, and relate human experiences for hundreds of thousands of years.
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, European, West African, Caribbean, Latin American, Asian, and more. The Spanish architecture of a French Quarter that became “American” only 223 years ago.
New Orleans is indeed a metaphorical gumbo of humanity. A near mythical place (both in space and time) where music acts as medicine, food is a love language, and humanity is expressed experientially 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 make “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.