This week on Arizona Illustrated… the first story a new six-part series ‘The Long Road: How COVID 19 Changed our World’ looks at the lessons we learned from lockdown; Act One takes students on virtual reality field trips around the world from the comfort of a classroom; longtime professor and artist Alfred Quiroz explores the origins of his subversive, irreverent art, and a children’s choir from Uganda makes a stop in Tucson.
Lessons from Lockdown
Soon after the COVID lockdowns, news stories emerged about wild animals roaming city streets. This period came to be known as the “anthropause”. Five years later, this period of reduced human activity provides scientists with useful data about animal behavior, but it may have even more to say about how and why humans connect to nature.
Act One VR Field Trip
Act One is a program that began creating arts education content using Virtual Reality. Act One’s curated, groundbreaking Virtual Reality field trip program, Arts Immersion™, allows schools, libraries, senior living facilities, and community organizations to explore the world of art from anywhere. Our VR Specialists travel to urban, rural and remote locations in Arizona in two donated vans with custom “bus cases” filled with 100 VR headsets and built in Wi-Fi. Act One is coming to Tucson schools and is piquing kids’ interest in art and culture by combining story telling with this virtual reality (VR) technology. The Arts Immersion™ experience exposes kids in 5th – 12th grade to Indigenous artists in an interactive, educational and entertaining way. The program is offered at no cost to Title I schools to help underprivileged students who lack access to arts due to economic, geographic and logistical barriers.
Art and Justice – Alfred Quiroz
Quiroz was born in 1944 in Tucson, AZ, and grew up in the Millville barrio. Upon graduation from Tucson High School in 1963 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, served in Vietnam, completed active duty as an Assistant Navigator (E5) and received an honorable discharge in 1967. The following year Quiroz used the G.I. Bill to begin pursuing what became a lifelong career as an artist and art educator. He earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, a MAT in art education from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA in painting from the University of Arizona. He was on the faculty of the School of Art at the University of Arizona for three decades, ultimately training and mentoring thousands of other artists, and was awarded Professor Emeritus status in 2018. His work has been exhibited extensively, both nationally and internationally, and featured in publications such as Art in America, Artforum and Art Week.
African Children’s Choir Visits Tucson
The African Children’s Choir brings their powerful voices and inspiring message of hope to Arizona, sharing music, culture, and joy from Uganda to the Southwest.
AZPM is a service of the University of Arizona and our broadcast stations are licensed to the Arizona Board of Regents who hold the trademarks for Arizona Public Media and AZPM. We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples.
By submitting your comments, you hereby give AZPM the right to post your comments and potentially use them in any other form of media operated by this institution.