October 8th and 9th, 2010
Noon - 10:00pm
Opening Reception:
October 9th
7 - 10pm
All events are FREE!
The Davis Jazz Festival is co-sponsored by John Natsoulas Gallery and Davis Downtown Business Association.
TThe 4th Annual Jazz and Beat Festival: Beyond the Beat Generation
Performance Painters Event
Background for the Davis Jazz Artist Festival
Cultural Art Adventure in Davis
John Natsoulas Center for the Arts has put on over 200 poetry reading jazz festivals and 30 educational conferences and festivals. The Davis Jazz Artist festival is a collaboration of Jazz and performance artists.
The inspiration is the history of the Beat generation and the important tie the gallery has to the movement. The John Natsoulas Center for the Arts held the first major beat exhibition on two of the first beat galleries in San Francisco back in the 1980's. John Natsoulas Center for the Arts continues to celebrate the spirit of collaboration and creativity that flourished in California during the 1950's and 1960's.
This retrospective and reunion of the artists, poets, and musicians, led to some of the first performance painters that painted to jazz at that time. Allen Ginsburg, Gary Schneider, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, and Amiri Baraka all read at the gallery. There were several important evenings of jazz and performances with many of the poets of their generation. One special night Michael Bowen did a performance (see photo below) that really began the performance portion of the Jazz.
The beats idea was to collaborate and have a mixing of all the different mediums. This is the goal of the Davis Jazz Artist Festival. We are dedicated to bringing music and the visual arts together at one place and one time.
For the past two decades, John Natsoulas has pursued his vision of making fine art accessible in a friendly setting. Although this is a rarity in the gallery world, his dedication to art history, art education, and the exhibition of California art has translated beautifully into the John Natsoulas Center for the Arts. The gallery maintains a strong relationship to the University of California, Davis' Art Department. One of the major roles of the John Natsoulas Center for the Arts is to provide a place for cultural meetings, conferences, and public activities, which create a wonderful community dialogue through a variety of visual, literary and musical events. John Natsoulas has mobilized considerable support from artists and the Sacramento Valley's public for humanitarian and educational organizations, and he considers this to be one of the gallery's greatest accomplishments.
Contact us if you would like to be a performance painter at art@natsoulas.com
