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Museum to bring unique exhibition to Youngstown Do you have a complaint? Preach it to the choir
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A complaints choir sings in a European city in this scene from a video that is part of the Living As Form exhibition.
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A scene from “Haircuts by Children,” part of the Living As Form exhibition that will open at the McDonough Museum and other Mahoning Valley venues in September.
By GUY D’ASTOLFO
YOUNGSTOWN
Valley residents are getting a chance to not only air their complaints but have them sung by a choir.
The soon-to-be-formed Youngs-town Complaints Choir is accepting complaints via email until Sunday. It than will have a meeting Aug. 16 for anyone interested in joining, including musicians, singers, nonsingers and composers.
Complaints can be specific or general, serious or humorous. So far, about 11 pages’ worth have been gathered.
Complaints choirs have sprung up in the past decade, mainly in Europe but with a handful in the United States.
The Youngstown Complaints Choir will be the latest in the movement. It’s being spearheaded by Kelly Bancroft, in cooperation with the McDonough Museum of Modern Art.
Bancroft is a writer and teacher and vocalist in the Celtic group Brady’s Leap. She was the coordinator of Youngstown State University’s Students Motivated by the Arts program for 10 years.
“The original founders of the [complaints choir] wanted to find a way to channel the energy spent complaining into a positive, artistic force,” said Bancroft. “Our choir is attempting to do that, and we’re collecting complaints from the local and private to the national and very public.”
To submit a complaint for consideration, send an email to yocomplaintschoir@gmail.com.
Once it has completed its work, the choir will perform at several yet-to-be-determined locations. It will also videotape a performance for screening at the McDonough.
The choir is just one aspect of Living As Form, a unique exhibition that will come to the museum — and to other venues in the Valley — from Sept. 14 to Nov. 9.
Living As Form is a growing movement that began about a decade ago in New York. Not really an art genre, it’s more of a new spirit of cultural practice, one that emphasizes participation, challenges power and spans disciplines ranging from urban planning and community work to theater and the visual arts. In short, it’s life itself as a form of art, people-centric projects captured in videos or photographs.
One example of the works in Living As Form is “Haircuts by Children,” a short documentary on a London project in which children were allowed to trim and style adults’ hair as an esteem-building exercise.
In another, dubbed “The Roof Is on Fire,” 100 carloads of youths were gathered on a rooftop garage in Oakland, Calif., while a video crew listened in on their candid and unscripted conversations about violence, sexuality, gender and race.
Yet another is a series of photos taken at a massive open-air garbage dump in Brazil that supports a subculture of people. Giant portraits of the dump denizens were created from garbage and photographed from the air.
Leslie Brothers, director of the McDonough, saw the Living As Form exhibition in New York recently and was overwhelmed. She decided to bring it to Youngstown, which, she said, has similar home-grown projects already in play.
For its traveling exhibit, Living As Form has been boiled down to 50 works. Thirty-two have been selected for the McDonough exhibition.
The works originate in various sites and cities and are constantly being added to the exhibition. In addition to the complaints choir, five other Youngstown projects will be part of Living As Form.
They are: a mural project for the Juvenile Justice Center of Mahoning County; Dreaming Youngstown, a brainstorming session held last year at the McDonough; MYTOWN, a photo project with youth from the Ursuline Mother House; Beads for Trees, a decorative project at Fellows Riverside Gardens; and the Witness Project, which revisits and photographs certain regional sites.
The Living As Form pieces will be displayed at locations through the Valley, not just at the McDonough.
“We’re putting them in as many venues as possible so people can consider each one carefully,” said Brothers. “They will experience more this way than if they were all at the McDonough. Plus they were all site-specific projects when they were created so it doesn’t make sense to have them all in one place.”
The selected sites will be appropriate to their topic, said Brothers.