If you dare to give a child a chance, the possibilities are infinite. That’s what a new documentary, If You Dare, examines movingly through award-winning film maker Norah Shapiro’s lens.

Children are natural storytellers, actors, directors (as in “please put the fish stick on this side of my plate, next to the peas but not touching the noodles.”) Willie Reale recognized these traits in kids and created a beautiful program in the 1980s called the 52nd Street Project, which matches up inner city kids with playwrights, directors and actors to help youth create and realize the gifts they possess. Through the theater arts, the kids gain confidence, bond with a supportive community and, perhaps most importantly, enjoy the process.

The 52nd Street Project has been replicated in communities across the country. Norah’s film, which will have its regional premiere at the Minneapolis/St Paul International Film Festival, follows the kids at Minneapolis’ Chicago Avenue Project, a program based on the 52nd Street Project and hosted by the Pillsbury House Theatre.

I love my pop culture as much as I love my high culture. I also love great food, so when pop culture and great food collide, it’s a magical thing.

I’m a big fan of that wonderful melding of food and pop culture — Bravo’s Top Chef. This despite the fact that when I got the Top Chef cookbook I needed to google a bunch of the ingredients that were obscure to me (salad burnet? char siu barbecue sauce?)

Anyway, I’m thrilled that Stephanie Izard, winner of Top Chef season 4 and a highly accomplished chef/restauranteur, gives Mom Culture insight about her experiences on the show and as a chef who makes food a high art.

We also get a sneak peak at…

Does the following statement describe you: “Values resilience, loyalty, and creative expression in everyday life.”

It’s a great statement, but it wasn’t offered up as a description for parents. Those words are how Dessa describes a basic tenet of the hip hop community, and Dessa knows what she’s talking about. She not only teaches “The Language of Rap and the Spoken Word” at a college of music, but she’s also a successful rapper/lyricist/singer/author – a rising star in the world of hip hop. I’m mad – good mad, as in wild about – her sound. I could probably add 6 more words to try to describe her sound and it still wouldn’t capture it, so take a listen here and throughout the interview.

What Pam Longobardi’s art is made of will surprise and disgust you.

This piece, “Human Mirror,” was created from plastics and debris that were washed up on the gorgeous beaches in Costa Rica.

Artist and Georgia State University art professor Pam Longobardi has made it a mission to use her art to draw attention to how we treat our earth. The vehicles for her message come in the form of luminous paintings, award-winning video, photography and halting installations using netballs and man-made debris that washes up on shores (more on this in the q&a.)

“It’s liberating to have another way to think of yourself.”

“America is a basin into which so much has been poured and we don’t understand the half of it.”
That’s how Malcolm Gladwell (journalist and author of The Tipping Point and Outliers) and Elizabeth Alexander (the Yale professor and poet who delivered the poem at President Obama’s inauguration) reacted when Dr. Henry Louise Gates Jr presented their genetic history to them in the upcoming PBS documentary “Faces of America.”

She cemented her leg in bucket for the sake of her art!

Ok, the cementing was an accident, but Kate Gilmore is committed to her work at all costs (see the bucket story in her answers below.) Kate is part of the Whitney Biennial 2010, which opens February 25. I was going through the amazing list of Biennial artists and was glued to my laptop screen when I got to Kate’s website.