Incorporated in 2001, The Golda Foundation is a non-profit foundation rooted in the belief that art is essential to life.

The Foundation provides subsistence grants to poets, writers, painters sculptors and performers and seeks to promote public interest in the creative process, while affording artists a modicum of dignity in a country where most of their work is neither appreciated nor rewarded.

The Golda Foundation was founded by Robert W. Yarra and is named in memory of his loving mother, who fought for basic human rights and instilled in Robert an intense desire to help those in need. He has been and is a long-time benefactor of artists, providing financial assistance as well as other resources and friendship. As he writes, "There are many great artists who suffer the tribulations of Job - trying to write, paint, and compose, while at the same time wondering where their next meal will come from or when they will lose the roof over their heads. In many other countries, the artist is lauded and respected and given enough money to keep body and soul together. In America, except for a small audience, most artists are not appreciated unless they are seen on the TV or the Big Screen or heard and seen on MTV."

The Golda Foundation, being based in the Central Valley of California, realizes its responsibility to the community. The Foundation acts on this responsibility by sponsoring and funding various art and literary related projects within the community and the communities educational system.

We believe that offering positive recognition and reward for young people's creative and intellectual expression will expand the way they view and respond to their community.

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IRA COHEN Writer artist and publisher who devoted his life to his ...
Although others often grouped Ira Cohen with members of the Beat movement, he always firmly resisted any such classification. He was, he insisted, a . . .
www.independent.co.uk/.../ira-cohen-writer-artist-and-publish...

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LIONEL ZIPRIN , Mystic of the Lower East Side, Dies at 84

“We are not after all intended to be consumed.” So begins Lionel Ziprin’s “Sentential Metaphrastic,” a “poem in progress” of more than a thousand pages. (con't) (Obituary - NY Times)

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Jack Hirschman Documentary -- Friends of the Poet

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The Australian artist, Vali Myers, was a legend in her own time. Première danseuse of the Melbourne Modern Ballet at seventeen, she left home and spent ten years in Paris, living much of the time on the streets but never ceasing to draw. Ed van der Elsken famously put her on the cover of his Love on the Left Bank, that manifesto of Paris in the 1950’s and her work was praised by George Plimpton in his Paris Review. Then, saying goodbye to all that, she spent forty years in semi-seclusion in a wild canyon in Italy, where she continued producing her minute, mystical, and passionate drawings. Tough as nails, she fought the local authorities who wanted to introduce loggers into the valley, after a long struggle succeeding in having it designated an Environmental Oasis. Finally, Vali returned triumphant to her native Melbourne, where she was recognized as an artist sui generis.

In this brilliant memoir by her friend and lover, Gianni Menichetti, her art, times, and personality come through unforgettably. For thirty years, Gianni Menichetti, the author of this memoir, lived with Vali Myers in the wild canyon of ‘Il Porto’—first as lover and willing slave, ultimately as friend, confidant, and protector. Vali Myers ● ● ● A Memoir ● ● ● by Gianni Menichetti         BOOK REVIEW by Allan Graubard                                                                                             PRESS RELEASE         

                                          

Domestic

“You saw in her the personalization of something torn and loose and deep down primitive in all of us.” —George Plimpton, Paris Review

“Vali’s dogs, Vali’s trees, Vali’s donkey, the birds, the flowers, the caves, the spiders of Vali. We have seen for the first time the old skeleton of nature."  —Bernardo Bertolucci, film-maker, Last Tango in Paris, Stealing Beauty

$25.00 US
ISBN 0-9785606-0-4
Published by The Golda Foundation © 2007