Appalshop Marketing & Sales

As the “Recent Releases” and “Works in Progress” sections show, Appalshop’s marketing project is deep in the twin endeavors of getting the organization’s new work to the public and of getting Appalshop’s extensive catalog of film and video into today’s digital formats. Marketing and Sales also debuted a new online General Store for purchases over the web. In 2005 the project added Hazard, Kentucky, native Derek Mullins to the staff. To purchase items from Appalshop, visit our online General Store.

Systematic Transition Project

With the help of a grant from The Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Appalshop organized the Systematic Transition Project this year. This is a three year project that will take young workers through a course of work and study to prepare them as community cultural workers. Over the next ten to fifteen years, leadership in Appalshop will undergo a transition from the group of people who founded and built the organization, to a new generation. This project will make this transition systematic and intentional, assuring that Appalshop will be around for many years to come.

Appalshop Artists Awarded by Creative Capital Foundation

Creative Capital Foundation, the national arts organization that supports individual artists, announces the recipients of its 2006 grants. So far Creative Capital has devoted more than $3 million to the Artists Services Program, serving nearly 300 artists in its seven-year history. Selected from among 2,205 applications, the funded projects come from as many as 14 states across the country. Appalshop artists Donna Porterfield, Amelia Kirby and Nick Szuberla were awarded individual artist support for the Roadside Theater and Holler to the Hood collaboration called “Thousand Kites.”

Creative Capital President Ruby Lerner said (about all grantees) , “We know that with these projects, these talented individuals are given the opportunity to further pursue their goals, which is not only energizing for them, but for their audiences, their communities, other artists, and not incidentally, those of us who get the chance to help facilitate their ideas. We very much look forward to supporting these grantees, helping them grow their projects; encouraging their coming together as a creative community; and helping them to engage a wider public.

Appalshop & PRX.org

Appalshop producers posted several radio programs for licensing on the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) this past year. PRX is a web-based marketplace for public radio pieces by both emerging and veteran producers. Appalshop’s radio productions were aired both regionally and on stations across the country, from Morning Edition to the Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana on a prisoner run radio station.

Here are some reviews of Appalshop’s programs by other producers:

"I wish more radio stations would devote this kind of time and space for those who find themselves in prison. It reminds one of old radio days, combined with a real community radio mission: to reach out and touch those in need."
– PRX review of Calls from Home by Holler to the Hood.

"This piece provides a timely and relevant look at an issue that is increasingly politicized ... the very simple style adds greatly to the emotional gravity of the piece: instead of being edited into sound bites, Ruby's story is allowed to tell itself with no interference - the hallmark of an excellent radio piece."
–PRX review of Abortion by AMI.

"It's a poignant piece of work, and you can hear the labored breathing of her father as he matter-of-factly describes the work in the mine and his own condition from working on a rotary drill."
–PRX review of Living with Coal Series by AMI.

"We're introduced to three youths … all of whom explain the basic choices they have to make to survive in the relative poverty of eastern Kentucky, coal mining country. Machlyn Blair's presentation is reminiscent of a Richard Avedon photograph, unadorned portraits that speak volumes in their perfect simplicity."
– PRX review of Living with Coal Series by AMI.

Buffalo Creek Named to National Registry

The Appalshop Documentary Buffalo Creek Flood, directed by Mimi Pickering, was named to the 2005 National Film Registry. Each year the Librarian of Congress names 25 "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant motion pictures to the Registry. The list is designed to reflect the full breadth and diversity of America's film heritage, thus increasing public awareness of the richness of American cinema and the need for its preservation. In making the announcement, the Librarian said, "The moving picture is not so much the art form as the language of our century.

Youth Activism

"Our “next generation” is multigenerational."
– Tammy Bang Luu, Bus Riders Union in Regeneration: Young People Shaping Environmental Justice

Appalshop’s youth media program AMI was reported as part of a study by the Movement Strategy Center titled “ReGeneration: Young People Shaping Environmental Justice.” Movement Strategy Center interviewed groups across the country, and found that youth organizers in the environmental justice movement are creating new ways to expand leadership, build intergenerational alliances, work sustainably and bridge issue areas and communities. Download a pdf of the report.

Mountain Community Radio WMMT-FM

WMMT celebrated its 20th Anniversary last fall. Check out the special website.

Also with generous support from its listeners, Appalshop’s community radio station WMMT-FM is in the process of increasing the power of several of its translators throughout our broadcast area. Translators pick up the signal from the main transmitter on Pine Mountain and transmit to the hard-to-reach valleys and hills in the region. In two or three areas we are back on the air where the old equipment failed. The new translators give a cleaner signal and in some communities, a stronger signal for people to listen to mountain community radio.

StoryCorps at Appalshop

StoryCorps made one of its first stops at Appalshop in May of 2005. The national project, a favorite of some on NPR, is a project designed to instruct and inspire people to record each others' stories in sound. Appalshop was happy to host the StoryCorps team and many people participated in recording and sharing their story.

StoryCorps -- in spirit and in scope -- is modeled after the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s, through which oral-history interviews with everyday Americans across the country were recorded. These recordings remain the single most important collection of American voices gathered to date. We hope that StoryCorps will build and expand on that work, becoming a WPA for the 21st Century.

Presenting Appalshop

Keeping you up to date on all the presentation Appalshop takes part in would require a separate website. Here is just a sampling:

Traditional Music Project was invited to the Portland Old Time Music Festival in Portland, Oregon, to screen Appalshop films and hold listening sessions of archival recordings of traditional Appalachian musicians. Rich, Suzanne, and Julie represented Appalshop and were received with great enthusiasm by festival attendees.

Appalshop produces and presents its 19th annual Seedtime on the Cumberland festival of Appalachian Mountain heritage and culture featuring music, storytelling, and theater performances; art exhibits; craft displays; film showings; and food.

Appalshop releases filmmaker Tony Slone’s film, Whippin’ The Devil, that documents life on the Kentucky-Virginia border during the great depression.

A fine cut of Thoughts in the Presence of Fear is screened at the Big Muddy Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Ozark Foothills Film Festival.

Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center in Abingdon, VA hosts the Appalshop Film Festival, featuring screenings of Sunnyside of Life, The Ralph Stanley Story, It’s Hard to tell the Singer from the Song, and Coal Bucket Outlaw.

Appalshop presents the Kentucky Arts in Education Showcase, an opportunity for regional artists to showcase their work for regional teachers and arts presenters.

Appalshop’s gallery curates 12 exhibitions featuring local and regional artists, and an annual Images from the Mountains exhibit that tours Kentucky.

The Appalshop Learning Center conducts a week-long cultural exchange, in Whitesburg, KY, with 17 New York University Tisch School of the Arts students and professors, through which students work with local artists to create media and theater productions.

Holler to the Hood hosts advance screenings of its documentary film work-in-progress, Holler to the Hood, at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH; Sinclair Community College, Dayton, OH; the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY; and Southeast Community College’s “Issues in Appalachia” course, Cumberland, KY.

Roadside Theater tours its repertoire of original Appalachian plays nationally.

Roadside Theater collaborates with the University of Virginia’s College at Wise to create and produce an original musical play, Miners and Millhands, in celebration of the College’s 50 th anniversary.

Roadside Theater co-produces residency performances of its new musical Betsy with the Nashville Jazz Workshop, Nashville, TN; Pregones Theater, Bronx, NY; and the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, VA.  Performances incorporate local musicians into the musical’s band.

WMMT-FM broadcasts its local programming to a regional audience in eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia, and southern West Virginia, and to an international audience through streaming on the internet.

WMMT-FM presents its monthly Bluegrass Express Live, a music concert at Appalshop broadcast live on the station.

Appalshop’s Traditional Music program presents monthly Old Time Music Jams in which local mountain musicians of all ages get together to play and learn.