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Art events welcome military service members, veterans

The New Orleans Advocate - 3/22/2017

There's a lot of new art to see in the Warehouse District this weekend - and an opportunity to create some of your own.

In conjunction with an upcoming play at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans theater company Goat in the Road will be presenting "Get Your Art On" on Saturday.

Described as "an afternoon of art-making for military service members and veterans, their families and the community at large," the event is free and open to the public.

Goat in the Road co-artistic director Chris Kamenstein says the idea for the event came about through the company's association with the New Orleans Veterans Arts and Humanities Alliance.

"One of the founders of the organization, Ray Facundo, organized a similar event in Portland, Oregon, for many years, and he brought it to the table during these meetings," said Kamenstein. "Goat in the Road loved the idea of a low-key day where people could really engage in art making, food eating and drink drinking and wanted to help make it happen - and the Alliance, the Contemporary Arts Center, and Goat in the Road all worked to make it happen."

The event will feature the participation of several local visual artists, performers and arts organizations.

Bryon Reiger, of the University of New Orleans, will conduct a playwriting workshop in which participants will be able to write their own scenes and see them performed by actors onstage. Whole Village Art Therapy will conduct hands-on art-making sessions. Babette Beaullieu and Jan Gilbert's installation "Louisiana Prayer Flags" will invite participants "to celebrate who we are in Louisiana today," according to a news release.

And the Combat Paper Project will take participants through the process of paper making, whereby old military uniforms are cut up, turned into pulp, and made into actual paper.

"It's just an amazing experience that I had the fortune of being part of this past fall," said Kamenstein. "I'm not a vet, but we had a few people in our workshop who brought in uniforms. Hearing their stories about the significance of the uniform for them - and their pleasure in making it into something new - was truly powerful."

And Kamenstein stresses the fact that the event is open to everyone regardless of whether they're veterans themselves or part of a military family.

"This is a low-key, fun, art-making event for everyone, not just for vets and their families," Kamenstein said. "In America, about half of 1 percent of Americans serve in the armed forces, and this creates a distance between veteran experience and civilian perception of that experience. Get Your Art On is really about trying to create space where vets and civilians can be in space together, can make art, eat food, and drink together."

Goat in the Road's original production of "Foreign to Myself" will open at the CAC in May and will explore the various - and often difficult - ways that military personnel adapt to their environments following the stress of combat.

But Kamenstein says the Saturday art making event will be an opportunity to participate in the more creative aspects of the some of the ideas the production is concerned with.

"It's nothing forced," Kamenstein said. "Just a nice, meditative day of creation."

For more information or to RSVP, visit http://cacno.org/public-programs/get-your-art.