Holler artists are undertaking several projects and can always use your support. You should tune into or even call our weekly live radio broadcast, streamed on the internet, every Monday night bringing rural and urban voices together while mixing hip-hop, hill-hop and shout-outs for our region's prisoners. This program serves to educate the public about the effects of the criminal justice system through the voices of people directly effected. You can help us produce the seventh annual national call-in show for prisoners' families which will broadcast in December on radio stations across the country. Last year artists, activists, prisoner family members, and community radio stations worked together to support this important public education campaign. Please view the trailer for our new documentary film which explores the impact of prisons on both rural and urban communities and exposes human rights violations in our region's prisons. Want to support criminal justice reform using the power of arts, then you need to get involved with Thousand Kites, a multi-media and theater production which you help create. If you're interested in hip-hop and what it would sound like from a rural perspective come mix your own at our interactive site.
Holler History
Holler was started in 1999 by artists Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby in response to concerns about the rising number of prisons being built in central Appalachia, and the cultural tensions created when a large number of urban prisoners, the majority of whom are people of color, were transferred into this predominantly white, rural area. Holler to the Hood artists and grassroots partners believe that the placement of prisons in rural areas is an opportunity for building alliances between urban and rural communities.
Holler is a project of Appalshop, a rural arts and cultural center founded in 1969 in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Appalshop’s purpose has been to work with mountain communities as they create solutions to their own problems, use media and performing arts as a means to create positive social change, explore diversity and cultural respect through local identity, and participate in regional, national and global dialogue toward these ends. Appalshop is based on the principle that local people can control their images and that media-based cultural and political expression can empower communities to fight for social and economic change.
Project Staff
Nick Szuberla has worked for the last six years as an Appalshop media artist who produces cultural exchanges, multi-media productions, community trainings, and documentary films. He has worked nationally in low-income communities teaching young people how to tell their stories through the media arts. He is currently completing a documentary film titled From the Holler to the Hood, which explores economic and social tensions between urban and rural communities through the lens of the prison industry.
Amelia Kirby has worked at Appalshop for the last four years as a community artist and producer. The cultural projects she has developed to expand public debate and strengthen communities include exchanges between artists, spoken word and poetry workshops, radio and video productions, and media arts training programs. Kirby’s artistic process involves communities telling their own stories and learning media arts skills. She is currently completing an interactive digital web quilt, which incorporates stories from both urban and rural communities.
Advisors
Holler to the Hood is advised by the Prisoner Poetry Collective, a
group of fifteen prisoneners at Wallens Ridge and Red Onion State
Prisons.
Past
and Present Funders
Active Element Foundation,
Albert
List Foundation,
Appalachian
Community Fund,
Appalshop
Production and Education Funding,
Artography,
Creative Capital Fund, Kentucky
Arts Council,
Kentucky
Educational,
Television
Independent Fund,
Kentucky
Foundation for Women,
Kentucky
Humanities Council,
Kentucky
Oral History Commission,
Map Fund, Nathan Cummings Foundation, National
Performance Network,
National
Endowment
for the Arts,
Rockefeller
Foundation,
Paul
Robeson Fund/Funding Exchange,
Self-Education
Fund,
Third
Wave Foundation,
Wallace
Foundation, West Virginia Humanities Council, Virginia Foundation
for Humanities
and Many Generous Individuals
Appalshop is supported,
in part, by Artography:Arts in a Changing America, a grant and documentation
program of Leveraging Investments in Creativity, funded by Ford Foundation.
