LEA Sims Go Offline

 Despite efforts to save the Linden Endowment of the Arts or bring it back in another name, the LEA sims, which were due to close soon after August 31, went offline yesterday on Wednesday September 3.

Checking the LEA group, there was one last post from the Committee. 

Linden Endowment for the Arts in its current form comes to an end on August 31st and the remaining sims will be taken offline by Linden Labs on September 1st. 

We would like to thank all those who came to support this program and the many artists who took part in it as Artists in Residence,  Core grant holders or as collaborators with others in the many projects hosted on the LEA regions or took advantage of the Sandbox .  The creativity demonstrated by the artists of Second Life at LEA was truly extraordinary and made the program a huge success from its inception in 2011. 

We hope that Linden Labs will institute a new program to support the Arts in Second Life in the near future.

Thank you everyone

The LEA Committee
PatriciaAnne Daviau, Joan Bree Balogh, Lapiscean Liberty , Jayjay Zifanwe, Corcosman Voom, TheDove Rhode

There were a number of comments in both the Second Life LEA group posts and the Facebook LEA group posts. Among them was one illustration (left) and the following comments:

"The LEA was never easy to negotiate or to manage. But maybe this is a reflection of the diverse ungovernable minds involved in this extraordinary project and the historic convergence of artists and audience from all over the Earth. Congratulations to this mind bending media (social, virtual) art movement and to the convergence of a peak artistic moment in a video game world."

Over the years, the Linden Endowment of the Arts has featured hundreds of art exhibits. Some of them the Newser has featured in it's articles. Hopefully there will be another organization that takes the place of the LEA. But such a group would have a tough act to follow. 

Bixyl Shuftan