Concert and Dedication for New Silver City Podium Aug 19th

Silver City, Nevada - Join us on Saturday, August 19th from 5pm-9pm at the Silver City outdoor stage, known as the Silver Pavilion, for an evening of music, food, and story telling, plus a dedication for the town’s beautiful new handcrafted podium, designed, built and funded by Bruce Douglas and Sue Mark of marksearch, with input from locals.

Help us wish a fond farewell to visiting artists Bruce, Sue and their son Roli as their time at the Resident Artist Program in Silver City comes to a close.

*Live music by local musicians.

*Dedication for the unique new podium built for the town by marksearch.

*Open-mic for storytelling, sharing a memory or a favorite book passage or poem.

*Check out the 10 postcard designs with photos of Silver City marksearch is developing as a gift to the community.

*Bring a potluck dish to share if possible.

Sponsored by Yellow Truck Productions; the Resident Artist Program in Silver City; marksearch; and Evangeline Presents.

More about marksearch at marksearch.org

What is marksearch? The marksearch team (Sue Mark + Bruce Douglas) focuses on place-based cultural preservation and social memory. Their performance-based projects explore intersections of lost history and cultural complexities. As conversation artists, they engage people in collaborative expressions of local stories to expose and deepen multifaceted bonds between people and their environment. Their methodology synthesizes their academic backgrounds. Bruce Douglas is a fabricator and professional mechanical engineer who has meshed his values of building community and using recycled materials to build things such as functional, quirky human-powered vehicles. Sue Mark, with a BA in philosophy and linguistics and an MFA from the California College of the Arts, creates national and international projects about local history, culture and community challenges.

Since 2000, marksearch has collaborated with non-profits, community groups, students, historians, urban planners, and municipalities worldwide, designing interactive projects for empowerment and preservation. For instance, a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowship helped them to research cultural preservation strategies in Japan. Their 6 month residency in Kanazawa, Japan included studying the traditional architecture in Kanazawa such as the Machiya, townhouses from the Edo period (1603-1867). In a completely different sort of project, in 2013 marksearch researched the disappearance of handicraft and agricultural practices in a region of Portugal comprising 26 villages. They created portraits of traditional makers of baskets, shoes, olive oil, bread, wine, tools, and more. These portraits, permanently installed in each of the region's 26 villages, now form a new regional cultural landmark. Other Marksearch explorations have been presented in the US and Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Norway, and Spain with support from California Humanities, Fulbright Commission, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, San Francisco Art Commission, and others. For more about their work, see marksearch.org.

About the Resident Artist Program in Silver City: Located in rural northwestern Nevada 3 miles from Virginia City and 29 miles from Lake Tahoe, Silver City is a small, unusually creative and productive community on the Comstock within one of the nation's federally designated historic landmarks.

Entering its fourth year, the Program provides a venue for those from other parts of the U.S. and the world to engage with people of the region through the arts. Those creating in the performing, visual, media, design, or literary arts are invited to apply to reside for up to 3 months at McCormick House, a geodesic dome designed in the 1970s by Nevada artist Jim McCormick. In exchange, visiting artists offer public performances, exhibitions, readings, workshops, etc. in Silver City and other northern Nevada communities. The Program is privately funded and directed.

2017 Summer and Fall Residents will be from the marksearch team, which includes Sue Mark (Bachelors in philosophy and linguistics and a Masters of Fine Arts) and Bruce Douglas (fabricator and professional mechanical engineer). They have focused on place-based cultural preservation and social memory with projects around the world, including Japan, Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, the U.S. and beyond. Back by popular demand, Autumn 2017 Resident will be New Zealand painter Sophie Scott, who was also a Resident in 2015.

Past Residents: Over the past several years, the Program has hosted Pulitzer Prize nominated poet David Lee; internationally acclaimed photographer Frances Melhop (her Lake Tahoe Haldan Gallery exhibition of Comstock Portraits opens in October 2017); illustrator and senior lecturer at Brighton University, Claire Scully of the UK; writer/artist Scott MacLeod whose work is now being collected by the Farhat Art Museum; multi-disciplinary artist Brian Schorn of Michigan; dancer Jessica Sanford; emerging artist Marielle Toll; emerging musician Mylo McCormick; and London-based artist Stewart Easton, whose work has recently been on view at both the Tate Modern and the Ashmolean in London, the University of Oxford’s museum of art and archaeology.