Farms: Art as Tradition in Modern Culture: Lonnie Graham at TEDxPSU

Lonnie Graham, a Pew Fellow and Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University is formerly director of Photography at Manchester Craftsmen's Guild in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, Graham developed innovative pilot projects merging Arts and Academics, which were ultimately cited by, First Lady Hillary Clinton as a National Model for Arts Education. In 1996 Graham was commissioned to create the "African/American Garden Project." which provided a physical and cultural exchange of urban single mothers in Pittsburgh, and farmers from Muguga, Kenya, to build a series of urban subsistence gardens. In 2005, Professor Graham was cited as Artist of the Year in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and presented the Governor's Award by Governor Edward Rendell. Professor Graham served as a panel member for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts/Pew Charitable Trust Travel Grant for travel to Ghana and is a four time Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship recipient. Graham was also awarded the Creative Achievement Award by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition "A Conversation with the World," has been widely distributed by Light Work in Syracuse, New York. The Queens Museum in New York commissioned Graham to produce another international garden project as part of "Down the Garden Path" presented in 2005. Graham has exhibited at Goethe Institute, Accra Ghana; a full scale reproduction of one of the educational galleries in the Barnes Foundation was shown at La Maison de Etat-Unis, Paris, France, the Toyota City Museum in Aichi, Japan as well as a room sized installation at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Graham's work is collected by the Addison Gallery for American Art in Andover, MA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Philadelphia, PA In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)