Public Art Review issue 50 - 2014 (spring/summer)

25TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE

Public Art Review Issue 50 • Spring/Summer 2014 • publicartreview.org

ARTIST AS LEADER Frances Whitehead on being lead artist for The 606, Chicago’s massive public works project

CULTURE IN MOTION Anish Kapoor’s inflatable concert hall CITY AS STAGE Performance art in Cape Town WHERE PEOPLE GATHER The Confluence Project: Maya Lin at the Columbia River

TRULY EPHEMERAL Meet the artists who draw in sand and snow $16.00 USD

FRANZ MAYER

OF MUNICH

GLASS MOSAIC TIMELESS MODERN

Daniel Mayer -“Trace Elements“ PHX Sky Train Connector Bridges, Sky Harbor International Airport Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture Public Art Program, AZ, USA

Franz Mayer of Munich |

1-347-907-2399

|

info@mayer-of-munich.com | www.mayer-of-munich.com

Public Art Review

Issue 50 • Spring/Summer 2014 • Volume 25 • Number 2

FEATURES 39 Self-Made Worlds ERIKA NELSON Meet the makers of hand-built art environments

48 Culture in Motion LEON TAN, PH.D. Ark Nova: Anish Kapoor’s inflatable concert hall 56 Portrait of the Artist as a Leader JOE HART A profile of Frances Whitehead, lead artist on The 606

Photo courtesy Africa Centre, ITC2014, Sydelle Willow Smith.

64 Highly Infectious JON SPAYDE Performance art on the streets of Cape Town

ON THE COVER Summer Return of the Hunters (July 2013) is a sunset sunspot drawing raked into sand at the Bedruthan Steps in Cornwall, England, by artist Tony Plant. Learn more about him and other artists who create ephemeral works in snow and sand on page 27.

THIS PAGE Dancers in the group DA MOTUS! perform in Cape Town. See story on page 64.

Inspired by the Great Basin, Illuminated light towers with fossil-like sculptural patterning brighten up Meadowood Mall Way. The towers feature programmable LED lighting, celebrating community events, holidays, and seasons.

THE POWER OF LIGHT TRANSFORMS

I-580/Meadowood Complex Improvements Reno, NV 2013 Client: Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County & NDOT Prime Team: CH2M HILL 2013 ASLA NV Merit Award Featured in: CODAmagazine March 2014: The Art of Place Photographer: Dan Newton

VICKI SCURI SITEWORKS

vickiscuri.com vicki@vickiscuri.com 206 930 1769

Public Art Review

Issue 50 • Spring/Summer 2014 • Volume 25 • Number 2

DEPARTMENTS 15 PUBLISHER’S NOTE Why Public Art Matters

JACK BECKER

EDITOR’S NOTE An Interconnected Field KAREN OLSON

19 IN THE FIELD News, views, and ideas

TOP: Photo by Robin Friend. © 2011 Hossein Amirsadeghi. MIDDLE: Photo by Jill Watt. BOTTOM: Untitled (Two Rabbits) by Tom Claassen, photo by Stefan Hester Photography, Stefan Hester.

22

19 The 3D Revolution: Printing sculpture

22 Wide-Open Spaces: Yinka Shonibare on his studio HOSSEIN AMIRSADEGHI

JON SPAYDE

27 Gone Tomorrow: Art in sand and snow

JEN DOLEN

30 Purl Jammers: Yarn bombing’s international festival

AMELIA FOSTER

33 Accidental Environmentalist: Mary Jo Aagerstoun

KEITH GOETZMAN

34 In Memorium: Anna Valentina Murch

LAUREN BEDOSKY

35 A Bright Star: Remembering Nancy Holt

BILL FITZGIBBONS

37 SOAP BOX Free Your Mind: Activating the public imagination

ROB GARRETT

73 ON LOCATION Global reports

73 Where People Gather: Maya Lin’s Confluence Project

JACQUELINE WHITE

79 Standing at the Gateway: Public art in St. Louis

STEFENE RUSSELL

84

30

Once More to the Island: NYC’s Governors Island

VALERIE GLADSTONE

87 BOOKS Publications and reviews SHAUNA DEE

JEN DOLEN THOMAS FISHER LAUREN BEDOSKY

97 FORECAST NEWS News from the organization that publishes Public Art Review 98 LAST PAGE Follow the Leaders: Isaac Cordal’s installation in Nantes, France

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Public Art Review

Issue 50 • Spring/Summer 2014 • Volume 25 • Number 2

MULTIMEDIA

PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

TAKING IT TO THE STREETS Jon Spayde walked the streets of Cape Town, South Africa, for five days in March.

He was there for the Infecting The City festival, which is filled with performance art (read the feature story on page 64). Go online to hear Spayde, a regular contributor to Public Art Review, talk about the sensory explosion of this experience. search: Jon Spayde Cape Town interview

GLOBETROTTER

TOP: Photo courtesy Africa Centre, ITC2014, Sydelle Willow Smith. MIDDLE: Photo courtesy Sonja Hinrichsen. BOTTOM: Photo courtesy Forecast Public Art.

German-born artist Sonja Hinrichsen travels the world, making art from place.

Hear her talk about her life and work in a Public Art Review podcast. See one of her snow drawings in Colorado on page 29 of this issue. search: Sonja Hinrichsen interview

MAGICAL SPACE MAKER Minnesota artist and organizer Joan Vorderbruggen envisions possibilities for the most dejected spaces, transforming vacant storefronts into magical, whimsical worlds. In a video interview, she talks about her roles as the cultural district arts coordinator for Hennepin Theatre Trust and as founder and director of Artists in Storefronts. search: Joan Vorderbruggen video

Multimedia at Forecast Public Art is made possible by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Public Art Review is published by Forecast Public Art, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that strengthens and advances the field of public art—locally, nationally, and internationally—by expanding participation, supporting artists, informing audiences, and assisting communities. publicartreview.org / forecastpublicart.org

Public Art Review ISSUE 50 • SPRING/SUMMER 2014 • VOLUME 25 • NUMBER 2 PUBLISHER

Jack Becker

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Karen Olson

SENIOR EDITOR

Joseph Hart

COPY EDITOR

Loma Huh

EDITORIAL ASSISTANCE

Lauren Bedosky Jen Dolen

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DESIGN MCAD DesignWorks ADVERTISING SALES

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OPERATIONS MANAGER

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CIRCULATION Shauna Dee COORDINATOR MULTIMEDIA Kirstin Wiegmann COORDINATOR ADVISORS David Allen

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EDITORIAL INQUIRIES

© 2014 Public Art Review (ISSN: 1040-211x) is published twice annually

by Forecast Public Art. Annual individual subscription rates are $30 for USA, $36 for Canada/Mexico, and $42 for Overseas. Annual institutional subscription rates are $60 for USA, $72 for Canada/ Mexico, and $84 for Overseas. Public Art Review is not responsible for unsolicited material. Opinions expressed and validity of information herein are the responsibility of the author, not Forecast, and Forecast disclaims any claims made by advertisers and for images reproduced by advertisers.

Public Art Review is indexed by Art Index and ARTbibliographies Modern.

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and advances the field of public art

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locally, nationally, and internationally —by expanding participation, supporting artists, informing audiences, and assisting communities.

FORECAST STAFF Jack Becker

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The El Paseo Invitational Exhibition lifts spirits as it elevates culture. Part of the City’s Art in Public Places program, the rotating installation punctuates the mile-long median of Palm Desert’s renowned shopping destination. Juxtaposed with boutiques, restaurants, fine art galleries and international retailers, the collection is on display through 2014.

Daniel Meyer

2013/2014

Dee Anne Wagner

18 exuberant sculptures.

Talent that knows no limits.

Additional exhibition artists include: Lina and Gus Ocamposilva, Patrick Blythe, Alisa Looney, Ron Simmer, Deedee Morrison, Delos Van Earl, C.J. Rench,

For information, contact dschwartz@cityofpalmdesert.org Find us on Facebook at Public Art Palm Desert 760.346.0611 www.palmdesertart.org

Heath Satow

Daniel Stern and Patricia Vader

california

From the executive editor

Why Public Art Matters

An Interconnected Field

BY JACK BECKER

BY KAREN OLSON

For 25 years, we’ve been sifting through the incredible array of public art being created around the world. My love affair with the steady stream of artists and projects highlighted in these pages since 1989 has been like a long-distance

When I sat down with Jack Becker more than five years ago to talk about taking on some editing for Public Art Review, I had one burning question: What, exactly, is public art?

I felt strange asking. I’d edited and read magazines

speed-dating marathon. I’m impressed by the number of people from different backgrounds, disciplines, and cultures who are entering this field with unique definitions of what public art can be for themselves and their audiences.

One of the common threads we are observing is a DIY ethos in public arts. Recent civil rights movements, the environmental movement, and the hyper growth of new technologies all contribute to this new era of participatory culture, which encompasses social practice, placemaking, and a growing commons movement.

The term cross-sector collaboration is heard more often in our lexicon. Grassroots efforts with a bottom-up approach are becoming the norm. We’re turning the corner from me to we.

That’s good news for an urbanizing world. We need to work together more closely and open ourselves to new ways of thinking and doing. As populations swell, diverse cultures come together, and urban cores increase in density, humanity’s well-being increasingly depends on successful social and cultural development.

Artists working at the avant garde—the front edge—of our culture are poised to help. Like the shamans of contemporary society, they sense what is needed to improve the health of life on our planet. Art experiences that help us grow emotionally and intellectually play vital roles.

Yet public art has been and remains a contested and misunderstood field. We don’t have a shared, critical language around public art like we do for music, theater, and art in galleries. The general public it seeks to serve is still quite unaware what public art is, and what it has achieved. Imagine how things might be different if more people were aware of, interested in, and supportive of public art.

What if governments and foundations invested in public art like they do medical research? What would be possible in our community, our city, our country, our world?

In honor of Public Art Review’s 25th anniversary, we’re asking for your help. Please spread the word about public art. Share our content. Get involved in education, policymaking, and informing your local media. The future depends on it.

and books that focus on arts and culture for decades.

I had a degree in art history. And yet public art remained only a vague notion.

Jack smiled, took a breath, and gave me a brief synopsis of the field, something he’d undoubtedly done hundreds if not thousands of times. What I remember most vividly is Jack telling me that while public art still involved plop art—sculptures conceived in the studio and perched permanently or temporarily in public spaces with little regard for their surroundings—the field was rapidly evolving toward an interconnected approach between artist and community. Public artists were now collaborating with people where they live and work, and with other design professionals, to address our social, environmental, and aesthetic needs. Public art was, and is, about improving public spaces and the fabric of public life.

I was hooked.

Since its inception, Public Art Review has documented the field.

In recent years, we’ve been slowly making changes to the way we tell stories so that public art is less of a mystery. We want to provide tangible inspiration to the broad array of people involved in public art’s creation—the architects, urban planners, community organizers, designers, fabricators, consultants, environmentalists, and more.

In this issue, you’ll find more interviews and larger photographs. Instead of focusing on one theme, the feature articles include a mix of timely topics. We’ve moved our well-loved Recent Projects section to our website where we can feature slideshows of multifaceted works. We’re also excited to announce that we’ve started to branch out with multimedia journalism on publicartreview.org (learn more on page 9), an effort led by Kirstin Wiegmann, the director of education and community engagement at Forecast Public Art, which publishes Public Art Review.

We hope you’ll subscribe to the magazine to continue learning more about public art’s people, places, and projects. May the next 25 years be as amazing as the last.

13 PUBLISHER’S NOTE

From the publisher

PUBLICARTREVIEW|SPRING/SUMMER2014|PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

LEFT: Photo by TKTKTKTKTK. RIGHT: Photo by TKTKTKTKTK.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

WE’RE CELEBRATING 25 Years & 50 Issues

Join us for the next 25 years.

Visit publicartreview.org to subscribe and purchase limited edition back issues. issue 45 • fall/winter 2011

PARKS

Recreation

and

Ai Weiwei Janet Zweig Mel Bochner Donald Lipski Stephen Korns

Public Art Review

Jason deCaires Taylor Fred Kent and Cynthia Nikitin Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam Christo and Jeanne-Claude Andy Goldsworthy Cathey Billian Lauren Bon Carolyn Law Ben Garthus

FIRST CLASS ART AT SFO When it comes to art, San Francisco International Airport’s new Terminal 3, Boarding Area E offers a museum-quality experience with two sophisticated installations and an exceptional suite of paintings by such greats as Wayne Thiebaud, Jay DeFeo, Robert Bechtle, James Torlakson and Carlos Loarca.

Clockwise: Eric Staller, Spirogyrate, 2014. Robert Bechtle, San Francisco Nova, 1979. Wayne Thiebaud, 18th Street Downgrade, 1978. Merge Conceptual Design, Sky, 2014.

Photos by Bruce Damonte

sfartscommission.org/pubartcollection

IN THE FIELD News,views,andideas TECHNOLOGY

PUBLICARTREVIEW|SPRING/SUMMER2014|PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

17 IN THE FIELD

The 3D Revolution

New technology gives artists a novel way to build models and fabricate works

Photo by Sophie Kahn. All work © Sophie Kahn.

BY JON SPAYDE No matter how much trouble the creators of digital tech may be having actually creating popular new products these days—and they are having trouble—they continue to hype the novelty and game-changing capabilities of each new bit of soft- or hardware. There is one digital area, however, that so powerfully combines an unlikely premise with an almost surreal set of potentialities that, for once, cyber-hyperbole seems justified: printing.

Three-dimensional printing, to be precise. That’s the idea, bizarre on its face, that machines modeled on the ones that shoot layers of ink onto paper in response to software commands can, by building up layers of liquid plastics, molten metals, or even compounds of concrete, shape objects in the round according to the determinations of modeling software like 3ds Max, Maya, and Cinema 4D. The first three-dimensional printer was created by California inventor Chuck Hull in 1984 (he dubbed the process “stereolithography”) and the techniques and technologies have taken off in many fields since the turn of the century.

The resulting objects are wildly diverse: toys, eyeglasses, jewelry, lamps, a prosthetic human ear, women’s shoes, buildings (yes, build-

ings), a working plastic pistol that was in the news a few months ago, and even 3D-printed parts for 3D printers.

And then there’s art. Artists are in the early stages of exploration of 3D printing, using it not only to create prototypes and models, but also to print artworks directly. The ability to eliminate hands-on fabrication—to go immediately from digital design to completed object —offers some amazing precisions.

As Naomi Kaempfer, who handles liaison with artists and designers for the Minnesota-based printer maker Stratasys, puts it, “You can generate geometries that require formulations, sequences, and proportions that can only be calculated on 3D software, and create really intricate structures with convoluted shapes.”

Intricate cases in point: the lacelike skull-sculptures of Joshua Harker and the intensely gnarly “selfish objects” of Tobias Klein, featured in the 2014 edition of 3D Printshow, the field’s official international convention, held in New York in February. Harker and Klein joined a couple of dozen 3D-printing artists at the conference, including London-born, Melbourne-raised, and New York–based Sophie Kahn.

IN THE FIELD

PUBLICARTREVIEW|VOL.25|NO.2|ISSUE50|PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

18 IN THE FIELD

Kahn’s elegantly and disturbingly fragmented sculptural body forms, mostly self-portraits, are the result of a marriage between laser scanning and 3D printing, and between digital precision and digital error. She began by scanning her body. “I asked a technical guy in my art school what would happen if you used the scanner wrong,” she says, “and he said, ‘Oh, you just get chunks of stuff. Why would you want that?’ But my eyes kind of lit up. I’m very interested in that unpredictability.”

The scanned “chunks” she then printed digitally, either in silicone, using them as casts for bronze, or in plastic to stand as artworks in their own right. “The plastic looks like marble from a distance,” she says, “but when you get up close it doesn’t—there’s a kind of play with expectations, a feeling of the forgery that’s very interesting to me as well.”

Kahn declares that she would love to print bigger pieces and work in the public realm. For that, she would need a really big 3D printer and a very durable print medium. Enter Enrico Dini, based in Pisa, and his “robotic building system,” D-Shape—essentially a huge 3D printer that lays down layers of concrete to create small, habitable

buildings and other structures. His colleague Andrea Morgante, a London-based architect and designer, used it to fashion Radiolaria, an artwork inspired by radiolarians, which are unicellular organisms with intricate mineral skeletons. This hybrid of sculpture and Paolo-Soleri-esque pavilion is the closest printed object yet to a traditional piece of big public art.

“At one time the biggest thing you could print 3D was something the size of a shoebox,” says Morgante. “When Dini first told me of his plans for D-Shape, I thought it was too futuristic. But he impressed me with his seriousness, and I eventually created a design, a file, to demonstrate D-Shape. To create something that could only be built in this way.” In 2008 a 10-foot prototype was created before the elements of the final 32-foot pavilion emerged from the printer two years later.

(At this scale, some traditional assembly was required.)

Morgante calls 3D printing “a spectacular and flexible tool that really crosses the boundaries of disciplines. With its scale growing as it is, it will find its way into disciplines like public art.”

JON SPAYDE is a frequent contributor to Public Art Review.

Photo by Sophie Kahn. All work © Sophie Kahn.

ABOVE: Detail of Reclining Figure of a Woman (five years of sleep) by Sophie Kahn. OPPOSITE: Radiolaria by Andrea Morgante was built by D-Shape, Enrico Dini’s robotic 3D printer system that creates forms by laying down layers of concrete. PREVIOUS PAGE: Triple Portrait of E by Sophie Kahn.

PUBLICARTREVIEW|SPRING/SUMMER2014|PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG IN THE FIELD

Photo © Shiro Studio.

IN THE FIELD

19

IN THE FIELD INTERVIEW

Wide-Open Spaces

Yinka Shonibare on why he turned his London studio into a “mini-community”

BY HOSSEIN AMIRSADEGHI, EXCERPTED FROM SANCTUARY PUBLICARTREVIEW|VOL.25|NO.2|ISSUE50|PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Hossein Amirsadeghi: What role does the studio play in your work?

Yinka Shonibare: The studio is something productive for me, but not only in relation to the creation of art objects. It is divided into two parts.

The top part is where I do my production meetings and my drawings and paintings. But I also have a project space, which I see as an essential part of my practice—it has a more performative element to it that involves a wider constituency and public than just having a studio where you work. I have a proposal box outside. Young artists put proposals there and I select three projects a year. The studio is also a space where seminars happen and performances and film screenings. So I don’t have the kind of old-fashioned studio where the artist works. This is a space

lic sculpture—Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle—in Trafalgar Square there were serious challenges to producing a bottle that size, so experts had to be brought in to solve the problem. It took nearly a year to solve, but it was an interesting exercise. I learned ways of doing something new. I like challenges in that they enable me to resolve difficulties and to think in different ways. I also like discovery. I’m pushing my work into different media now.

For example, I’m going to be doing more public sculpture. What’s required in relation to putting together a production team, doing visibility studies, budgets—that’s quite a challenging aspect, as is getting new commissions and managing them.

for the exploration of ideas. It therefore has a broader remit than just my needs.

20

When you reference a fresher outlook, is this about finding inspiration or rethinking certain ways of working?

It’s more about seeing things again—or reconsidering ideas in different ways, perhaps even ones you once thought good or useful. It’s rather like writing a text before going to bed and thinking it’s absolutely wonderful.

Then you read it in the morning and you can’t believe what you’ve written— and that you thought what you had written was actually good. You need to maintain a distance to get perspective—my studio functions in this way to a certain degree.

Do you think of your studio as a sanctuary?

The notion of “sanctuary” sounds a bit romantic and melancholic, and there’s a kind of isolation about it. My studio is the opposite of that. There are four of us working in the studio on a full-time basis, and then other people coming and going. So my studio is very much a mini-community.

A sanctuary seems a bit elitist and separatist—that wouldn’t be my idea of a studio.

What are the most challenging aspects of the creative process?

I encountered a lot of challenges at the beginning of my career. For me, challenges are part of the creative process. I love problem-solving.

My practice is always going in new directions. When I did my first pub-

Photo by Robin Friend. © 2011 Hossein Amirsadeghi.

IN THE FIELD

Does location matter?

The location of the studio is essential. It is in the East End of London, where a lot of artists work. So artists passing by can drop in and look at the show and look at my project space, and I can get feedback from them.

There was a time when my studio was primarily in my house and mostly in my head. That wasn’t out of choice; it was because I didn’t have the resources to set up a studio. It’s essential that the studio is separate from where I sleep, from my home. I get a fresher outlook when I come into the studio, and that is partly down to the broader context with which the studio engages.

IN THE FIELD

PUBLICARTREVIEW|SPRING/SUMMER2014|PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

21

TOP: Photo by Robin Friend. © 2011 Hossein Amirsadeghi. BOTTOM: Photo courtesy the artist.

IN THE FIELD

So is the studio a space in which to play out the challenges you face, for example when making public sculpture commissions?

In the studio we produce virtual scenarios on the computer so we can get a sense of scale before we make the proposals. Just to give you an idea of how that aspect of the studio works: I have a production assistant who is in charge of co-ordinating the production of work and also making some things as well; she trained as a prop maker. Then there’s my personal assistant, who deals with the administrative side; she also organises the project space downstairs. Then I have my studio manager.

The role of the studio manager is to be the ambassador, if you like, for the studio. For all external constituencies or meetings, she is the person they approach first. She also deals with the four galleries I work with.

Of course, I have overall directorial control of the studio, but I also do some drawings, collages, and paintings here, so it functions on a number of levels.

ABOVE: The Crowning (2007) by Yinka Shonibare. TOP: Inside Shonibare’s studio.

OPPOSITE: Artist Yinka Shonibare, who lives and works in the East End of London.

Photo by Robin Friend. © 2011 Hossein Amirsadeghi.

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ABOVE: Shonibare’s first public sculpture, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, on the Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square, used brightly colored fabrics from Brixton Market. Shonibare was the first black British artist to be commissioned for the Fourth Plinth.

RIGHT: Shonibare at work with his assistants, the origins of his work reflected on the studio walls.

OPPOSITE: Detail workbench.

from

Shonibare’s

Photos by Robin Friend. © 2011 Hossein Amirsadeghi.

So in a way, a lot of the work, despite its visuality, is pure research?

Absolutely. There is a lot of research because I tend to work in series.

Finally, how does art address the challenges that we face in the contemporary world: the uneven effects of globalisation, for example, and how it has created a new underclass?

The best thing about art is its superiority to the mundane. I don’t think that the job of the artist is simply to mirror the world or, indeed, its problems. Art has to be better than the world—it has to go one better than what already exists.

So the artist is constantly pushing at the boundaries of what can be seen, said, and heard at a given moment in time. We are the producers of dreams, of fantasies. They are dark fantasies sometimes, but they can also inspire or “twist” how we look at things, and why. That is the only claim I would make for art.

Excerpted from Sanctuary: Britain’s Artists and Their Studios (TransGlobal Publishing, 2014). Edited by Hossein Amirsadeghi, this new book features in-depth interviews with artists as well as gorgeous photography. Copyright © 2011 Hossein Amirsadeghi. Reprinted by permission of Thames & Hudson, Inc., thamesandhudsonusa.com.

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Photo: El Monte Station, The Steps We Take, Eloy Torrez, artist

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Photo: El Monte Station, El Monte Legion Stadium Nocturne, Vincent Ramos, artist

Metro congratulates artists Vincent Ramos and Eloy Torrez for their public art contributions to our transit system.

Measure R, approved by a two-thirds majority vote in California, commits a projected $40 billion to tra;c relief and transportation upgrades throughout Los Angeles County over the next 30 years. Artwork enhancements are a result of this bold funding initiative.

To learn more, or to add your name to our email list for information about upcoming opportunities for artists, visit metro.net/art. facebook.com/metroartla

14-1821ps Š2014 lacmta

Metro has commissioned artists for a wide array of projects throughout Los Angeles County.

IN THE FIELD ENVIRONMENT

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Gone Tomorrow

Five artists trace evanescent designs into sand and snow

BY JEN DOLEN The effort that goes into large-scale projects would seem to demand long-lived rewards. But the artists featured here find their rewards in large-scale works on sand or snow that last as little as an hour or two.

These pages explore this evanescent art.

Photo by Simon Beck.

TONY PLANT

Tony Plant has made temporary landscape works for more than two decades in England and Australia. He says of sand drawing, “you can’t get it wrong, because there is no right.” Still, he puts a great deal of time into his works, although his style makes them seem spontaneous. “I will not step onto the beach until I’ve sat on the cliff top above and sketched or watched the space below for a period of time, sometimes days,” he says.

Once he begins, he tends to follow the landscape’s natural contours—bringing out what Plant calls “areas of focus, tension, and balance.” In spite of his plans, the final forms of his sand drawings only reveal themselves through the act of their creation. “They are not made by pushing a rake in front of you across a beach,” he says.

“They are made by walking out into open space—moving forwards, looking upwards. The outcome can never be predicted.”

ANDY MOSS AND JAMIE WARDLEY

Sand In Your Eye artists Andy Moss and Jamie Wardley used lifesize stencils of humans for their project The Fallen, which celebrated International Peace Day by commemorating the 9,000 soldiers and civilians who died on D-day, June 6, 1944. Hundreds of volunteers assembled on the landing beach of Arromanches, France, to make the project a reality. Among them was a WWII veteran, as well as people who had traveled thousands of miles to commemorate their own fallen soldiers. The volunteers raked up the sand using the stencil for an outline to create 9,000 images on the beach. Eventually, the sand figures were swept away—“erased totally by the incoming tide as their own lives were”—but their impact reaches around the world.

SONJA HINRICHSEN

Sonja Hinrichsen believes the earth is “already terribly cluttered” with human-made “stuff.” Instead of making more, she prefers the impermanence of snow drawing. Her snow drawings—“subtle expressions,” she calls them—are made by “walking into pristine snow surfaces with snowshoes.” She is joined in the work by volunteers.

The work requires flexibility and respect for nature: She must

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make the drawings before a storm rolls through and quickly document them while the sun maintains enough contrast to pick out the subtlety of white footprints on white ground. Although she captures photographic evidence of each project, that’s not the most important part. For Hinrichsen, “It’s the experience—the creation process itself for those involved.”

lists physical stamina as essential to his success. But his geometric snow drawings require something else, too: “accurate use of a compass and distance measurement by pace counting.” Beck’s imagery is drawn from mathematics, and often creates a 3D effect when photographed from the right angle. Originally, the artist titled his works, but no more: “They were just meaningless names.”

SIMON BECK

Simon Beck regularly walks up to eleven hours in a day of drawing —only to have a new snowfall erase his work. Not surprisingly, he

JEN DOLEN is a photographer and writer based in Minneapolis/St. Paul, and is an editorial assistant for Public Art Review.

Photo by Tony Plant.

ABOVE: Tony Plant’s Free Jack Daw, a void drawing on the north coast of Cornwall. PREVIOUS PAGE: Simon Beck walks up to eleven hours to create his untitled works.

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TOP: Photo courtesy Sand In Your Eye. BOTTOM: Photo courtesy Sonja Hinrichsen.

Sonja Hinrichsen and 60 volunteers used snowshoes to create these snow drawings at Catamount Lake, Colorado, over three days in 2013. “Getting people out into nature and having them experience the environment first-hand by walking in it for a long time is a major goal with the work,” says Hinrichsen, as is sharing it with a wider audience.

IN THE FIELD

On September 21, 2013, International Peace Day, hundreds of volunteers assembled on the D-Day landing beach of Arromanches, France. With rakes and stencils, they helped Sand In Your Eye artists Andy Moss and Jamie Wardley create The Fallen, which commemorates the 9,000 people who died on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

IN THE FIELD ENVIRONMENT

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Purl Jammers

Yarn bombers celebrate their colorful craft with an international festival

ON JUNE 7, knitters around the world will brandish their needles and skeins to celebrate International Yarn Bombing Day. Yarn bombers wrap the urban landscape—lampposts, tree limbs, bicycles—with colorful knitted creations. It’s a playful twist on ephemeral street art like graffiti, and its following has grown exponentially since its emergence in the early 2000s, prompted in part by photo-sharing social media.

Derived from the matronly world of tea cozies and wool sweaters, yarn bombing adapts knitting, crocheting, and felting to add color and warmth to the urban streetscape. Installations vary in scale and message: Danish artist Marianne Joergensen covered a military combat tank with an enormous pink crocheted blanket as a protest to the Iraq war; Magda Sayeg knitted leg warmers for bronze statues in Paris.

Sayeg is generally credited as the mother of yarn bombing. On a slow day at her Houston, Texas–based boutique in 2005, she picked up her knitting needles and made a cozy for her door handle. The piece was such a hit with passersby that she gathered her friends (a collective now known as Knitta Please) and, in the months to come, “tagged” a series of lampposts and street signs.

Not long thereafter, she was fielding commissions from the likes of Toyota (a knitted Prius), the Etsy.com headquarters (wrapped

air ducts), and Brooklyn’s Montague Street Business Improvement District (yarn-bombed parking meters). Demand is now so high she’s ditched the knitting needles for looms, and her studio keeps busy with projects all over the globe.

Most yarn bombing happens under cover of darkness and fits neatly into the realm of vandalism or littering, though law enforcement often tolerates the renegade installations. Increasingly, however, the practice is invited into many communities. Organizations have turned to yarn bombing as a means to spread awareness for a cause. The UK National Health Service’s Blood Doesn’t Grow on Trees blood donation campaign, for instance, asked knitters to “knit one, save one.” Their knitted blood drops hung in public parks to encourage blood donation. Other neighborhood groups support yarn-bombing outings to beat the winter blues.

Sayeg’s rise to fame and fortune is the path less traveled. “In the early years I identified with underground graffiti artists,” she said in an interview with the New York Times. “Now the very people I feared I would get in trouble with are the ones inviting me to do this work for them.”

AMELIA FOSTER lives in Minneapolis and works in the arts community.

Photo courtesy Magda Sayeg.

BY AMELIA FOSTER

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Photo courtesy Magda Sayeg. Photo courtesy Street Spun. Photo by Jill Watt. Photo by Hannah Busekrus. Photo by Kings Cross.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Magda Sayeg’s work transformed a sculpture in Bali, Indonesia. Streetspun yarn bombed this bike rack in Cleveland, Ohio. Lorna and Jill Watt turned a telephone booth into iPayPhone in San Mateo, California. Hanasaurusrex knitted The Daughters of Triton in Honolulu. Knitters for the UK National Health Service’s Blood Doesn’t Grow on Trees campaign created these blood drops in Sheffield, England. OPPOSITE: Magda Sayeg knitted a leg warmer for Paul Niclausse’s Spring (1937) in Paris.

IN THE FIELD INTERVIEW

The Accidental Environmentalist

Mary Jo Aagerstoun, founder of EcoArt South Florida, gives an update on her work

BY KEITH GOETZMAN

Photo by Greg Matthews.

Describe the system you’ve developed for determining where to focus on developing eco-art.

Artist Aviva Rahmani believes that you can apply the idea of triage to serious environmental problems. The way it works is that you identify a place where a number of things come together to make it a very hot area: some place like New Orleans, or Miami because it’s going to be underwater in 2030, or Bangladesh, which is also going to be underwater, probably before then, because of climate change.

Many of EcoArt South Florida’s projects have a science or engineering element. How do you foster good collaboration between artists and the scientific and engineering community?

The artists that we’ve found who are the most successful here in Florida —and probably anywhere—are the artists who have personal relationships with those kinds of people. So if you have never had anything to do with scientists before; if you’ve never been involved with environmental activism so that you’ve met some of these people; if you’ve never worked on a public art project so you have no idea how to work with an architect or an engineer, chances are you probably are not going to be very successful as an eco-artist.

There are two artists here who have had the most sophisticated practice.

Michael Singer has his own team of people that includes an engineer, an urban planner, and a landscape architect. That’s the kind of team you need to do eco-art. He is a great model for that.

The other person is Lucy Keshavarz, who has emerged directly out of EcoArt South Florida. She has a B.F.A. in theater design, which, when you think about it, is a great preparation for eco-art. And for almost 10 years, she was a public art consultant. She had never considered being a public artist herself until she met me and we started getting involved in eco-art. It took her until 2012 to actually do a project. She ended up doing a project with her husband, who is a civil engineer. I don’t know why she didn’t do it sooner.

This whole thing is like magic. You just never know what’s going to happen.

The challenge is, how do you get that to happen with other people?

That’s what we’re struggling with right now. How do you home-grow eco-art?

KEITH GOETZMAN is a Minnesota-based writer and editor who covers the arts and the environment.

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Public Art Review: What is the difference between ecological art and environmental restoration?

Mary Jo Aagerstoun: Eco-art is human-centric in the sense that its purpose is to engage humanity, human beings, with the problems that ecologies are facing, in as direct a way as possible, so that culture will change.

If you do an ecological project way out where the South Florida Water Management District is removing invasives and planting new trees, nobody is going to see it except the South Florida Water Management District, and maybe a couple of hunters. It needs to be someplace where people can see it, and where it can have an effect on people’s perspective. The purpose of eco-art is to change our behavior.

I worked with a professor at Dartmouth, who was an expert on geographical information services, and his undergrad students. We gave them 15 categories, so there were 15 maps that were layered on top of each other. You can look down through the maps and see where things converge.

You can find the places where there is ecological damage that can be addressed by humans. You can also find the places where there are artists, science institutions, higher education—human institutions that can support this practice.

We were able to identify the best locations across South Florida’s five watersheds that would be the best places to organize around eco-art—in other words, to try to make eco-art happen. That was in 2011, and over the past three years now, we’ve been reaching out to these areas, trying to pull together stakeholders that can support this practice.

It’s our intent in EcoArt South Florida that we want sustained activity.

We want support from the ground up. We don’t want artists to be hanging out there by themselves.

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The wet, low-lying landscape of southern Florida is fertile ground for ecological restoration: Many of the area’s natural water systems have been dammed, diked, drained, or polluted; nearby ocean waters face serious environmental threats; and the region is especially vulnerable to the effects of hurricanes and climate change. These critical issues are partly what prompted Mary Jo Aagerstoun to found EcoArt South Florida, with the idea of combining art, science, and activism in ecological art projects.

Aagerstoun, who calls herself an “accidental environmentalist,” arrived in South Florida in 2004, armed with a recent Ph.D. in art history and a strong interest in activist art. With an eye toward both the ecological destruction around her and what she terms “cultural desert issues” outside the Miami art scene, she founded EcoArt South Florida in 2007. The nonprofit arts group has shepherded 12 projects to completion, ranging from biosculptures that filter water to a nature park that provides wildlife habitat.

Aagerstoun recently spoke with Public Art Review about Florida’s changing landscape—cultural and physical—and her development of a technique for identifying prime “hot spots” for ecological art.

IN THE FIELD INMEMORIUM

Anna Valentina Murch (1948–2014)

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Artist and teacher Anna Valentina Murch died Wednesday, March 26, in San Francisco at the age of 65. Originally from Scotland and raised in London, Murch spent more than 20 years as a professor of art at Mills College in Oakland, California. She was known for harnessing the beauty of water, wind, and light in her installations.

“She created an oasis in urban spaces,” said Murch’s husband, artist Doug Hollis, in a recent article for the SF Gate. “A place to be more contemplative, to really engage people in a multisensory way.” Her public art projects are sited across the country, from Water Scores in Miami to Waterscape in San Jose, which she created with Hollis for the Civic Center Plaza.

Murch and Hollis were collaborating on six public commissions at the time of her death. One of those commissions includes a piece for San Francisco General Hospital’s new trauma center, which is scheduled to open this summer. —Lauren Bedosky

TOP LEFT: Photo courtesy Doug Hollis. BOTTOM LEFT: Photo by Spike Mafford. RIGHT: Photo by Esther Kutnick.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Anna Valentina Murch. Murch’s works included Chaotic Chains (1989) and Confluences (2008).

IN THE FIELD INMEMORIUM

A Bright Star

An Alaskan road trip with Nancy Holt inspired a lasting friendship

Nancy’s philosophical approach to public art was inspirational.

She was not only a pioneer for women in art, but also a pioneer for public art in general. In a casual conversation she once said, “In order for us to have public art we must accept all public art, the bad with the good, because it is with the all that we get the good.”

BILL FITZGIBBONS is a San Antonio, Texas–based artist who has received over thirty public art commissions in five countries. Known for his large-scale light sculptures, he has served on the board of the International Sculpture Center and is a founding member of the Texas Sculpture Group.

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Nancy Holt was a pioneer in land art and public art; she passed away in New York City on February 8, 2014, at the age of 75.

Nancy received several NEA grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Last October, in New York City, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center.

In 1986, as the sculpture director of the Visual Art Center of Alaska in Anchorage, I invited Nancy to do a site visit of the State of Alaska as possible inspiration for an exhibition. We toured the state in March. We experienced several glaciers, viewed the Alaskan pipeline up close, and visited the village of Chitina near the port of Valdez.

The spectacular beauty and sublime scale on display while driving the Alaskan highways made a powerful impression and carried great significance to Nancy. The impact of a possible oil spill in this untarnished environment quickly became one of her primary concerns. During our excursion she created a word drawing consisting of the pipeline and the names of each town that the two million barrels of toxic oil passed through every day. After ten days of exploring the magnificent and immense landscape, she returned to New York to develop a proposal for her installation.

Later that summer, Nancy returned to install her Trans-Alaska Pipeline–inspired sculpture titled Pipeline. She explained, “The pipeline relentlessly snakes through the landscape, half in and half out of the ground, spanning rivers and traversing mountain ranges as it precariously channels warm primordial fuel through the frozen landscape from one end of Alaska to another.” In her piece, meandering metal ductwork (representing the pipeline) traversed through the main gallery and reemerged outside in the parking lot. Inside the gallery a slow drip of oil created an expanding dark puddle under the sculpture.

Prophetically, three years later the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in Prince William Sound, where an oil tanker spilled over 260,000 barrels of oil into pristine Alaskan waters.

In conjunction with Pipeline, Nancy created Starfire on the banks of Ship Creek and Starfire II as a part of Sky Art Alaska, located in Anchorage’s Delaney Park. The Visual Art Center, in collaboration with artist Otto Piene of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, created Sky Art Alaska to celebrate the Alaskan environment, a fortuitously well-suited venue for Nancy’s work. Both Starfire pieces were inspired by the Alaskan state flag, which has gold stars representing the Big Dipper and the North Star. As in Sun Tunnels, Nancy Holt brought the sky down to earth by representing the Big Dipper and North Star with circles of fire erupting from the ground.

Stemming from that brief time that I spent with Nancy in Alaska, we formed a lifetime friendship. Nancy was a kind and generous soul with a twinkle in her eye and the keen ability to observe her environment and react with thought-provoking creativity. She left behind a great legacy of engaging and inspiring artwork.

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Photo courtesy Bill FitzGibbons.

BY BILL FITZGIBBONS

Bill FitzGibbons and Nancy Holt in Chitina, Alaska, in 1986.

w w w . l a r s o n - c r a m e r. c o m

ART IN PUBLIC PLACES

MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE

Celebrating thirty years of public art on campus with the reinstallation of Vito Acconci’s 1983 Way Station I (Study Chamber), the artist’s first permanent work. www.middlebury.edu/arts/campus

SOAP BOX

Free Your Mind

Perhaps the most radical act of a public artist is to activate the public imagination

BY ROB GARRETT

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Art causes us to reflect on who we are and how we relate to others.

Community engagement in public art comes in many forms; and probably just as numerous are the reasons we should be interested in such engagements. But one reason, above all others, is profoundly important—especially given the widespread insistence (as evidenced by recent “Occupy” movements, citizen uprisings, and public protests) on full involvement in public political, social, and economic life.

In this context, meaningful engagement is connected to the notion of publicness in the term public art. On the one hand, this sense of publicness is linked to a desire to elevate public art above the sometimes reasonable charge that it is spendthrift frivolity. But the notion of publicness also affirms the role art can play in awakening the imagination and radicalizing thought and subjectivity.

For those who saw them, who can forget the images that flew around the world on the night of November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall started coming down? These were inspiring and poignant pictures that still have the power to reinforce our belief that people can and ought to be able to shape their own world. They are a potent reminder that although systems and structures seem cemented in place, the common sense they are built upon can be challenged and undermined.

Let us be clear, I am not arguing for “political” or “issues-based” public art per se. To the contrary, art’s political potential stretches well beyond issues and slogans—for whenever the imagination reigns free, it offers hope that things might be different. This dynamic represents art’s distinctive power. But what I do think is important is that site-specific artworks ought to engage a wider social contingency so that they respond to the real social situation of people.

OUR GREATEST ASSET IS AN UNFETTERED IMAGINATION

The public sphere is where ideas compete to show us how life could be organized. It is also the place where inequalities and exclusions

are exposed—and challenged. Political change cannot occur without direct action, and art is not sufficient action on its own. But art can play an important role by giving voice to what is silent in the existing balance of power.

Art causes us to reflect on who we are and how we relate to others. Thus, individual works can either reproduce the “common sense” that secures structural inequalities and exclusions, or they can challenge it. And the result of such challenges will be the same awareness reawakened by images of the Berlin Wall: an awareness that people made these structures and people can tear them down.

Because of the central role that the unfettered imagination plays in its creation, art is especially well suited for such awakenings.

Therefore, it is important to find ways to engage in and with communities to release and empower people’s imaginations.

There are many possibilities. Les Nouveaux Commanditaires (the New Patrons) model in Europe engages communities as the decisionmaking commissioners of public art projects, thus championing the ideal that people should participate as citizens. Working in Gdańsk, Poland, I recently witnessed a range of neighborhood projects that were initiated, and democratically selected, by the communities they served. The projects were staged under the umbrella of the Narracje (Narratives) festival of temporary public art and encouraged local residents to co-author projects about their lives and neighborhood.

Whether empowering engagement occurs at a project’s inception or during its presentation to audiences, the key question is what new sensations and challenging thoughts can be born out of the sensitive pairing of art projects with public spaces in order to shed light on the real situation for ordinary people.

ROB GARRETT is an independent curator and public policy expert.

Recent projects include curating the Narracje 5 public art festival in Gdańsk, Poland; a public art video program for Ängelholm, Sweden; and a citywide public art policy for Auckland, New Zealand.

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Photo by Justyna Gruszczyk-Woltman.

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“Crystal Light“ by Catherine Widgery - Salt Lake City Transfer Station - Arts in Transit - a partnership between Utah Transit Authority, Salt Lake City Corporation, Salt Lake Art Design Board and Salt Lake City Arts Council - Technique: Laser etching on two sides of laminated safety glass

Glass fabrication by:

PETERS STUDIOS Further Information:

www.peters-studios.com

Germany:

United States:

GLASMALEREI PETERS GmbH Am Hilligenbusch 23 - 25 D - 33098 Paderborn phone: 011 - 49 - 52 51 - 160 97 - 0 fax: 011 - 49 - 52 51 - 160 97 99

PETER KAUFMANN 3618 SE 69th Ave. Portland, OR 97206 phone: 503.781.7223 E-mail: p.kaufmann@glass-art-peters.com

Self-Made Worlds Meet the makers of hand-built art environments, where the creative spirit reigns.

BY ERIKA NELSON

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folk art environments by others, self-made worlds are generally the works of individuals not trained in the formal arts (but by no means untrained in their own fields), using nontraditional materials and building methods. Raw Vision editor John Maizels addressed the difficulty of defining self-made worlds in an early issue of his magazine: “Although there is no actual outsider art movement as such—each outsider artist being an art movement of one—there is a broad critical and appreciative following which Raw Vision has sought to serve.”

This slippery eel of a topic feeds on obsessions. In the introduction to Detour Art: Outsider, Folk Art, and Visionary Environments Coast to Coast, Kelly Ludwig admits to a “mild obsession” for the artists she documents, in part because of their freedom of expression. “These artists don’t rely on focus groups or target audiences or care that much about staying inside the lines. Their art comes from deep within their souls: they have to let it out.”

While self-made worlds are the works of individuals, they are seldom isolated from community. The defiance of convention may set up difficulties, but can serve as cornerstones for reimagining place. S. P. Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden, for example, established a continuing timeline of creativity in rural Kansas, combating an

epidemic of regional outmigration. Tyree Guyton (see “Public Art as a Spiritual Path” in Public Art Review issue 44) activates his Detroit neighborhood through collaborative artworks, transforming empty lots and buildings into community canvases, despite naysayers and repeated arson attacks. Wilson, North Carolina, recently secured an NEA Our Town creative placemaking grant to support the restoration and preservation of home-grown folk artist Vollis Simpson’s Whirligigs as a means of kick-starting a cultural corridor.

Using nontraditional materials and methods, many makers work to fulfill their visions without longevity in mind. The sites evolve and change over time, then are suddenly suspended when the artist can no longer sustain the environment. Some sites die with the owners, quickly being bulldozed or gradually fading away with neglect, while others live on through the efforts of committed individuals and organizations (notably, Wisconsin’s Kohler Foundation). Many documented self-made world stories involve sites whose builders have passed on, but there are many active sites currently in progress.

In Rye, Colorado, Jim Bishop builds a castle, stone by stone, metal rail by metal rail, reaching ever more terrifying heights year by year.

In Kiowa County, Kansas, farmer and curmudgeon M. T. Liggett fills his highway frontage fence line with moving metal totems, poking

PREVIOUS PAGE AND BELOW: Photos by Fred Scruton. BELOW LEFT: Photo by Geronimo Patton.

CALLED OUTSIDER ART BY SOME,

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ABOVE: Artist Tyree Guyton and visitors to his Heidelberg Project. RIGHT: M.T. Liggett’s Semen Bill shows President Clinton searching for conquests. OPPOSITE TOP LEFT: Jim Bishop has worked on site for nearly 40 years without drawings or plans. TOP RIGHT: Bishop’s Castle features a fire-breathing dragon. PREVIOUS PAGE: M.T. Liggett in his workshop.

Photos by Kelly Ludwig.

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Driven by an internal creative force, they aren’t worried about completing something by a certain date; they’re worried about running out of time to do what they want to do.

fun and fury at politicians, nosy neighbors, and anyone else who raises his ire. This sharp-witted cultural commentator believes that there’s a duty inherent in being an artist: “See, where you’re an artist, you can just do any damn thing you wanna do. And you’re a damned fool if you don’t.”

While large-scale public works can take years, even decades, to realize, some selfmade worlds, once started, often demand a lifetime. There is no budget. There is no deadline. The work is seldom viewed as finished by the person wielding the welding wand, and expansion stops only when the maker is unable to continue. Driven by an internal creative force, they aren’t worried about completing something by a certain date; they’re worried about running out of time to do what they want to do. They use every moment to continue, not to complete.

Rural to urban, coast to coast, these environments are hidden along the byways and back alleys of every region, in every state. If you’re lucky, you will find and explore these creations in situ, in progress. You’ll get a tour of the environment from an artist so passionate, so infused with the place, that they become an integral part of it. The artists are only here for a short while, even if their creations continue on. Stop and see these places, talk to their creators, hear their stories, from their own lips. These stories are best found out there, in person, on the road.

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Photo by bdearth / Flickr / Creative Commons License.

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LEFT: Photo courtesy Brendan Greaves. RIGHT: Photo courtesy Jefferson Currie.

WHIRLIGIGS (Lucama, North Carolina)

Created by Leonard Knight (1931–2014), 1989–2001. Adobe and found materials, recycled paint, hay bales, trees, metal. Currently maintained by an independent board of directors, with on-site caretakers.

Built by Vollis Simpson (1919–2013), 1984–2010. Recycled metal, salvaged road signs, gears, fan blades. Currently being restored and relocated to Whirligig Park in Wilson, North Carolina.

If you drive along a desolate stretch of crumbling asphalt through the Southern California desert, past abandoned ammunition bunkers and graffitied guard posts, you’ll find Salvation Mountain.

Emerging like a mirage, Leonard Knight’s painted adobe mountain is a riot of color and texture in the midst of Slab City, a community of snowbirds and squatters. Built entirely of salvaged materials, Salvation Mountain is of this harsh land. “I found the car tires out in the desert, and I find the limbs out in the desert. Everything is donated here—it’s out in the desert.” Knight once said in an interview.

A slight man with clear, sparkling eyes, his hands curled in a signature thumbs-up, Leonard greeted each and every visitor with the words “I’d love to show you.” The small New Englander lived and worked on the mountain from 1982 to 2011, when his health began to fail. He had a simple goal, as stated in his self-produced video tour: “I wanted to put ‘God is Love’ in a beautiful simple way to everybody. God loves everybody and I love everybody too.”

Construction of the current Salvation Mountain began in 1989 after a previous endeavor collapsed (without causing injuries). As with other self-made world builders, Leonard embraced failure as part of the process and rebuilt. Now, up to 350 visitors per day see Leonard’s message during the busy winter months.

But Leonard’s mountain lives in an unstable world. The natural materials are prone to deterioration. Nomads in a no-man’s-land bring vandalism. This temporality adds to the wonder of the site, but also compounds the problems. In 2000, the Folk Art Society of America declared it “a folk art site worthy of preservation and protection,” but who will steward a mountain created on reclaimed land that belongs to no one?

Vollis Simpson’s massive metal whirligigs emerge from the green, creeping kudzu at the intersection of five twisty back roads in rural North Carolina.

A house mover by trade, Vollis knew how to manage large things. He was also intrigued by the potential of a never-ending source of mechanical power: wind. Working “every weekend for ten years, more or less on Sundays,” Vollis filled his family property with massive, multiple-figure whirligigs—wind-powered constructions reflecting his own biography and the stories of the Appalachian hills. Bits of reflective road signs cover kinetic pinwheels the size of jet turbines, catch the sun during the day, and reflect the lights of passing vehicles at night.

In his spare hours, Vollis crafted, balanced, welded, painted, and tinkered with his whirligigs. He’d swap stories and visit with people drawn to his fix-it business and whirligig shop, often giving away small works to people who touched his heart. While smaller works and large-scale commissions can be found throughout the country (including a centerpiece whirligig at the Baltimore Visionary Art Museum), Vollis’s Lucama installation was intended to forever embellish the family farm.

For years, Vollis refused to let his whirligigs go. “I didn’t make ’em to sell, I made ’em to stay right here.” At the age of 91, however, he decided he would rather have his creations live on than slowly stop spinning. In 2010 he partnered with the neighboring city of Wilson to make the work available for restoration and relocation to a new Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park. While his sculptures had long been recognized as a folk art treasure outside of his home community, this regional partnership meant even more to Vollis and his family, with honor and recognition of the county’s native son serving as a platform for the revitalization of a downtown district, while preserving one of the region’s cultural resources.

ABOVE LEFT: Vollis Simpson at his workshop in North Carolina, 2010. RIGHT: Simpson’s whirligigs at the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park, 2014. OPPOSITE PAGE: Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain, which is on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea near Niland, California.

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SALVATION MOUNTAIN (Niland, California)

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WATTS TOWERS (Los Angeles, California )

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Italian immigrant Simon Rodia was a tile setter who worked on his home environment after-hours and on weekends. Using familiar tools and techniques, but in a way unlike anything at work, Rodia built towers: sky-hugging, 99-foot-tall towers of interconnected circles and arcs, formed from hand-bent steel rods secured with wire, covered in mortar, and ornamented with bits of pottery, bottles, shells, and other material collected nearby.

In the 1957 documentary The Towers, Rodia says, “Some people, they think I’m crazy, and some people they think I’m gonna do something.” Large-scale works are typically first rendered, then evaluated by structural engineers. In self-made worlds, plans expand and develop as the artist responds to materials; as Rodia puts it, “A million time, I don’t know what to do myself.”

Many sites come under scrutiny after the fact of building, checked and tested by municipalities wanting to condemn or demolish questionably built structures. Shortly after Rodia finished (and then abandoned) his towers in 1954, the City of Los Angeles placed a demolition order on the structure. Rodia knew the strength of the towers, but as the property changed hands this needed to be proven. In 1959, a stress test proved that the structures were, indeed, safe. Preservation of Watts Towers could then proceed, assuring the continuance of a community icon.

LEFT: Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles, California.

RIGHT: The Garden of Eden built by Samuel P. Dinsmoor in Lucas, Kansas.

Photo by Katie Wilson / Flickr / Creative Commons License.

Built by Simon Rodia (1879–1965), 1921–1954. Reinforced concrete towers, embellished with tile, dishware, bottles, cans, shells, and castoffs from the surrounding urban environment. Owned and operated by the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.

THE GARDEN OF EDEN (Lucas, Kansas)

Visitors follow brown directional signs through well-maintained streets, past stick-built homes with tidy lawns. On the corner of Kansas and Second sits “the most unique home, for living or dead, on earth.” S. P. Dinsmoor’s Cabin Home and Garden of Eden is a stone log cabin surrounded by three-story cement sculptures that climb, reach, point, chase, and intertwine in allegorical tableaus that rally against bank trusts and monopolies of the early twentieth century. Dinsmoor’s populist vision has been at Lucas’s core since 1909, reflecting and shaping history in this community of practical prairie people.

Dinsmoor was an instigator. Early on, he and his Civil War buddies started a series of community debates, pitting neighbor against neighbor in lively discussions. After he started working on his own home-built environment at the age of 64, his boundlessness intensified. Erecting mostly nude male and female forms, reinterpreting familiar Bible passages, Lucas’s most outspoken citizen cast his views in cement for all to see.

Portland cement was a new material. As Dinsmoor experimented with this new medium, he perfected his sculptural material mix, and his innovative use was featured in Cement Era, a trade magazine for the exciting new building industry. He used it in both his home and his sculptures, ensuring that the Garden of Eden was built for the centuries.

Dinsmoor opened his house to visitors as soon as people showed interest, conducting tours even while building. He electrified and illuminated his politically charged vignettes, drawing people to his property likes moths to a flame. He sold his own guidebooks (the images and text of which are still used today), and charged for tours to insure the continuation of the Garden.

One final arrangement was intended to assure his legacy: He is interred on-site, a part of the Garden of Eden tour, forever on display through a glass window in his coffin. He wrote, “I have a will that none except my widow, my descendants, their husbands and wives, shall go in to see me for less than $1.00. That will pay someone to look after the place.”

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Photo by Dan Smith.

Built by Samuel P. Dinsmoor (1843–1932), 1907–1930. Stone log cabin, reinforced concrete sculptures. Recently restored (Kohler Foundation), owned and operated by the nonprofit Friends of S. P. Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden.

43 ERIKA NELSON is an independent artist and educator from Lucas, Kansas. She assisted in the project to restore the Garden of Eden.

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A mobile, inflatable auditorium brings arts programming to tsunami-devastated regions of Japan.

BY LEON TAN, PH.D.

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Photo © 2013 Lucerne Festival Ark Nova.

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Ark Nova, designed by artist Anish Kapoor and architect Arata Isozaki, was installed in Matsushima, Japan.

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ON MARCH 11, 2011, a magnitude-9 earthquake, one of the most powerful in recorded history, hit Japan, and was followed by a devastating tsunami. The catastrophe claimed more than 18,000 lives and left vast swathes of the northeast severely damaged if not destroyed. In the Tohoku region, whole towns were swept away; the force of the quake even moved Honshu Island nearly eight feet eastward.

To make matters worse, the tsunami also led to system failures at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, resulting in the release of massive amounts of radioactive material. More than 160,000 residents were forcibly displaced from their homes due to the danger of radiation poisoning.

Like the mythical Noah’s ark, Ark Nova is intended as a symbol of renewal and recovery after a tremendous disaster.

Ark Nova is an ambitious project initiated by Michael Haefliger of the Lucerne Festival (a Swiss international music festival founded in 1938) as a gesture of compassion for, and solidarity with, the survivors of this disaster. Conceived as a mobile, inflatable auditorium with a 500-person capacity, it brings music and art to the Tohoku region with the hope of healing psychosocial traumas. According to the organizers, Ark Nova, meaning new ark, takes inspiration from the biblical narrative of the great flood and Noah’s ark.

The ark is also inspired by the ancient Japanese notion of marebito—“sacred guests” who arrived from foreign lands with special religions or festivals that rejuvenate society. Like the mythical Noah’s ark, Ark Nova is intended as a symbol of renewal and recovery after a tremendous disaster. It is a visitor bringing those vital elements out of which culture is periodically composed and recomposed—namely, music, dance, improvisation, and ritual interaction.

The mobile architecture results from the collaboration between the Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor and the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki. Kapoor is renowned for large-scale abstract sculptures such as Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park and Sky Mirror in Nottingham, England. Isozaki is perhaps most famous for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Team Disney Building in Florida, and, most recently, the Qatar National Library.

Their concert hall consists of an inflatable membrane modeled after Kapoor’s Leviathan installation inside Paris’s Grand Palais in 2011. The structure is about 120 feet long and is made of PVC-coated polyester. It comes fully equipped with stage and sound rigs. The entire hall and its equipment pack down into a truck, making it easily transportable.

Unlike Leviathan, which was created for the interior of a building, Ark Nova is itself an interior, a continuous space that can accommodate a diverse range of cultural events and a variety of equipment and arrangements. Visually, the abstract form of the structure is reminiscent of an eggplant or body organ, and its smooth curves recall organic processes of folding, such as embryogenesis.

Photo © 2013 Lucerne Festival. Ark Nova.

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PREVIOUS PAGE: Inside Ark Nova.

ABOVE: Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Tohoku Youth Orchestra.

LEFT: After pulling Ark Nova out of the truck, the ground crew prepares it for inflation.

Photos © 2013 Lucerne Festival Ark Nova.

RIGHT: During rehearsals, musician Otomo Yoshihide holds a workshop with the orchestra.

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as workshops with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Yoshihide Otomo, and Gustavo Dudamel. Sakamoto himself believes that this engagement with music can assist in the healing of traumas, an idea that is borne out by the literature on expressive and music therapies.

THE POWER TO HEAL?

The realization of the project from its conception in 2011 took two years. In the first installment of Ark Nova, the concert hall was erected in Matsushima City in the Miyagi Prefecture (part of the devastated Tohoku region) between September 27 and October 13, 2013. The inaugural festival featured performances by acclaimed musicians and conductors such as Ryuichi Sakamoto and Gustavo Gimeno, a street jazz festival, and Japanese dance and kabuki performances by Tojuro Sakata, Kichizoh Wakayagi, Kikunojo Onoe, and Motoi Hanayagi.

In keeping with the project goal of revitalizing culture, organizers also established the Tohoku Youth Orchestra, drawing on the talents of more than 280 local children chosen by teachers from schools across the region to produce public performances, as well

Almost three years after the quake and tsunami, thousands are still officially missing and thousands more living in temporary shelters. Even though much of the physical debris has been cleaned up, the invisible psychological trauma of such upheavals is likely to persist, and the suicide rate remains high. While undoubtedly innovative (it is the first inflatable concert hall in the world), Ark Nova has also been viewed with skepticism. What could “high art” possibly do amid the more pressing concerns of basic survival and recovery of livelihoods?

In attempting to evaluate the cultural significance of Ark Nova, we can take a cue from how Anish Kapoor understands art. Kapoor has said that “artists don’t make objects. Artists use objects to make mythological events.” Ark Nova then is first and foremost a vehicle for resurrecting the mythological in the midst of preoccupations with realistic or pragmatic concerns. In other words, Ark Nova creates encounters for its audiences with other mysterious —or even spiritual—worlds.

This interpretation is consistent with the notion of the marebito, which the folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi explains is a visitor not only from foreign lands, but also from tokoyo no kuni: the outer, or everlasting world. In Japanese folklore, these rare guests from the everlasting world visited villages on special occasions such as the construction of new buildings or the new

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Photos © 2013 Lucerne Festival Ark Nova.

THE FUTURE OF ARK NOVA

LEFT: When inflated, Ark Nova can hold 500 people.

So far, it has been installed only once.

One of the challenges that socially ameliorative public art projects face is that of effecting lasting change. In Ark Nova’s case, after just one installment it is too early to evaluate its success or failure. In the meantime, one indicator may be to see whether or not the Tohoku Youth Orchestra, formed during the festival in 2013, survives beyond its initial performances.

There are currently no firm plans for the next installment of Ark Nova. The original idea, though, is for the ark to tour several of the affected areas. Perhaps the first edition will serve as a model for an annual or biennial Ark Nova festival in the coming years. Perhaps it can also serve as a new model for arts and cultural institutions.

Similar projects include Marysia Lewandowska’s Open Cinema, a temporary public movie theater that first opened in Portugal, as well as Rachel Tess’s Souvenir, a mobile theatre/performance space based out of New York City. Such projects encourage us to consider mobile platforms and temporary infrastructures as an alternative to permanent museum buildings and concert halls. It’s worth asking if such initiatives could improve accessibility to art and culture, particularly in “peripheral” regions and communities.

LEON TAN, PH.D., is an arts and culture critic, educator, and psychotherapist. A member of the International Association of Art Critics, Tan writes on contemporary art and culture, teaches art history and theory, and maintains a small clinical practice.

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year and autumn harvest festivals. Their presence was believed to join the visible and invisible worlds, transmitting blessings from the latter to the former. Ark Nova’s programming of music and dance, like the marebito, brings the visible world of people together with the invisible world of personal and cultural memory, by immersing them in experiences that are by turn contemplative and improvisational.

These experiences should not be underestimated, even if they contribute nothing directly to “concrete” rebuilding and recovery efforts. For one thing, they provide respite from pragmatic concerns, many of which are intertwined with posttraumatic stress responses such as hypervigilance, emotional numbing, or intrusive recollections of the event. Whatever the symptoms, the aftereffects of trauma tend to follow a repetitive logic. Without intervention, many spend the rest of their lives bound in habitual, life-negating patterns of thought, feeling, and action. Reflective and improvisational encounters within the womblike membrane of Ark Nova interrupt this repetition—and may even diminish post-traumatic stress and open up new ways of living with the past and present.

Kapoor also says that the organic forms he prefers are designed to evoke a “primordial” memory of human forms. For Kapoor, the mythological is also the primordial: the images, energies, and emotional intensities of our collective human unconscious or deep past. He believes that color, and monochrome in particular, has a special propensity to facilitate primordial human recall. For those who have become emotionally numb in the aftermath of personal and collective trauma, then, the red glow of sunlight filtering through the purple membrane of the concert hall may be especially revitalizing.

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Frances Whitehead, lead artist on Chicago’s 606 project, tells Public Art Review about her role and how she got there

BY JOE HART

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a Chicago wind nudged around the corners of a few construction trailers parked behind a chain link fence on a vacant lot just off the Kennedy Expressway. At the start of the construction season, there wasn’t much to recommend this shabby and largely forgotten corner of the big city. But as this issue goes to press, the abandoned lot on North Ashland Avenue will be the busy easternmost access point of what is arguably the most ambitious experiment in placemaking ever undertaken.

The 606, as the $90 million project has been dubbed, is massive in scale. It turns a nearly three-mile-long abandoned, elevated rail spur into a mixed-use trail that, when complete, will connect five parks in four neighborhoods.

The project is notable not only for its size but for its leadership: The primary design team includes not only an engineer and a landscape architect, but also an artist—the sculptor-turned-eco-social-practitioner, Frances Whitehead.

Placemaking, of course, is the topic du jour in public art.

In the past few years alone, billions have been invested in the notion that creative artists have a role in defining our public space, and hence our public life. The 606, which began as a garden-variety rails-to-trails project before it morphed into its current form, is perhaps the biggest test of the principle.

If that sounds like a lot of pressure, you are right. But Whitehead, who turned 60 this year, is in many ways the ideal candidate for such a grand test. For one thing, she possesses a coiled, vibrant energy suited for the breathtaking pace of the project. In conversation, she frequently interrupts herself, building excited sets of parentheticals that eventually topple of their own weight. She’s opinionated and blunt. But she has a way of delivering truths with a twinkle in her eye that makes them palatable.

She also brings the insider art-world cred of a gallery career and tenure at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and she is an outspoken advocate not only for her artistic ideas but for a broader ecological agenda that transcends human time, to say nothing of artistic time. Most importantly, Whitehead has spent the past decade and a half making artistic experiments in the public realm —specifically, in civic planning and infrastructure.

“I have spent ten years consciously preparing myself to work at this scale—the scale of the city,” Whitehead says. “I had to ramp up in every way.”

In most large-scale public art projects, the artist’s handiwork is self-evident. Chicago’s Millennium Park, for instance, is a smarter, savvier, more user-friendly and interactive version of the kind of signature public art that we’ve been used to since the dawn of monumentalist public art. Call it Plop Art 2.0.

By contrast, in her role as “lead artist,” Whitehead’s hand is, if not invisible, camouflaged by the scale of The 606, by its long history, and by the collaborative nature of the team charged with its completion. Her work on the eastern trailhead is as good an example as any. Early in the design process, an idea emerged to expand the existing Walsh Park to include a new skate park, and Whitehead inherited the idea.

OUT OF THE GALLERY

Whitehead never set out to become a public artist—much less a rabble-rouser. As the daughter of two artists, the studio was literally where she felt at home. She went straight to college out of high school, then to graduate school at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, where she earned her M.F.A. Her artistic practice evolved in those years from printmaking to sculpture. Her work resonated, and her career blossomed. She exhibited in increasingly important galleries and museums. She earned tenure at SAIC. As an artist, she had arrived.

But where had she arrived? That was the question that increasingly nagged Whitehead, even as her career took off. It was a personal gardening project that first gave Whitehead pause. “I was gardening in this place where crap was in the soil from a house that had been there. After a freeze-thaw cycle, you’d see this little piece of fluff, and you’d go to pick it up—and it would be an eightby-ten-foot rug that would come out of the soil,” she recalls. “I was

THIS PAGE: Artist Frances Whitehead.

OPPOSITE: Whitehead on railway spur that is becoming the site of The 606 in Chicago.

perceiving a ‘dis-ease’ around me, and it threw me into a personal, artistic crisis.”

This personal crisis had something to do with art, something to do with the reality of life in postindustrial America, and everything to do with the role of an artist in society. Whitehead had always been interested in science, especially biology, and her sculptural works frequently explored environmental themes. In the garden, she literally dug into these themes—touched and smelled them—in a very different way. The complexity and severity of our ecological problems was beyond the reach of making, displaying, and selling sculptural objects and installations.

“I’m digging every day and pulling this shag carpet out of the ground, and then I’m in the studio making art about what? The death of nature!?” she says. “The postindustrial just was knocking the stuffing out of any pretense I made at meaningfulness. I knew the gallery was a bankrupt metaphysic for me.”

Fifteen years later, Whitehead can discuss this artistic crisis in detail—and even joke about it. But at the time, she says, “it was terrifying.” Gallery art had provided the language, values, and structure of not only her life’s work but her family’s. Without it, she recalls, “my studio practice kind of went black. I walked away from a very vigorous gallery career. One day I woke up and I had stopped believing.”

Faced with the complete disruption of her career, Whitehead did what any self-respecting artist with a well-developed sense of curiosity and an outsized capacity for abstract thinking would have done: She started looking for a new metaphysic—a fundamental understanding of how and why the world works that could give meaning to her work.

For one thing, she discovered the world of design: On an airplane, she by chance met Stanley Tigerman, a trailblazing architect and socially conscious designer. He became a mentor, and their friendship introduced Whitehead to the conversation and ideas in architecture at that time. The Australian design and sustainability theorist Tony Fry became another important influence.

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Constructed from energy-intensive concrete, skate parks aren’t exactly an ecologist’s dreamscape. “Skate parks have a high-carbon, impervious footprint, so one strategy for efficiency is to get more bang for your buck,” explains Whitehead. “I said ‘Skate park/ jazz club.’” When the skaters go home, out come the musicians with cocktails. To that end, Whitehead designed a space that uses energy-sipping LED lighting to “de-ghettoize skating” and welcome in adults. At dusk, the landscape will literally begin to glow and the skate park features will transform into a stage, lights, sound system, and seating area for an outdoor amphitheater.

The lighting in the park is based on the acorn-shaped glass fixture that’s been ubiquitous since the advent of urban street lighting. In this case, however, Whitehead’s design turns the acorn-shape upside down. “Skaters flip upside-down, so I flipped the light upside-down.

And so we’re flipping expectations. The kids are upside-down, the light fixtures are upside-down, we flip the park at dusk. In every way, it transforms, right? It’s a shape-shifter.”

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The Trust for Public Land is The 606 project manager, in partnership with the Chicago Park District and City of Chicago.

An overview of the nearly three-mile-long abandoned railway spur that will connect five parks in four Chicago neighborhoods.

What Whitehead found useful about design was the scale at which it works—its seriousness in addressing ecological issues.

“The intellectual discourse coming out of the design world is deeply philosophic,” she explains. “It’s not about ‘green,’ and not about ‘do-it-yourself.’ It’s not the kind of stuff that goes on in the art world, but deep conversation around change and around sustainability, and what it’s going to take. It captured my imagination, and there was no going back after that.”

It was a turning point that led, step-by-step, to her role on The 606. Today, Whitehead has no regrets. “I didn’t turn away from something,” she says. “I turned toward something.”

INTO THE FIELD

In 2008, Whitehead approached Chicago’s director of innovation, Matt Guilford, to propose that she be “embedded” in the city government. The idea led to her being placed, first, in the Department of Planning and subsequently in the Department of Environment, where she was given the task of exploring a new approach to sustainable brownfield cleanup. Many of Chicago’s brownfields are abandoned gas stations and, as is true in cities like Detroit and St. Louis, there’s no demand for the property—they simply sit there. “There’s

no development pressure,” says Whitehead, “so the asset we have is time itself.”

Based on this realization, she coined the term “Slow Cleanup,” and enlisted the help of Dr. Paul Schwab, a leading soil scientist who works in phytoremediation—the science of cleaning soils with plants. Together with partners in the city and the Morton Arboretum, they’ve launched several long-term test sites in Chicago, including one seven-acre plot slated to become a “remediation arboretum,” restoring the soil to health.

Through the Slow Cleanup project and other similar works that she’s undertaken since she abandoned the gallery, Whitehead is exploring two connected artistic constructs that have come to define her practice: One is “postnormal art,” and the other a document she calls “What do Artists Know?”

The concept of postnormal art is borrowed from philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm shift. As Whitehead explains it, Kuhn’s theory is that a scientific paradigm shift takes place when the “normal” way of doing science leaves a growing number of anomalies unaccounted for. Eventually, the anomalies become interesting and attract more and more attention. And the more attention they attract, the more that scientists working in the “normal”

Image courtesy Frances Whitehead.

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ENVIRONMENTAL SENTINEL A CLIMATE MONITORING ARTWORK Use the beauty of a flowering “phenologic” spectacle to visualize and monitor our relationship to Lake Michigan

Why does the Serviceberry reveal the Lake Effect?

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American Serviceberry, Amelanchier x grandiflora , our most beautiful native ornamental tree, is very temperature-sensitive.

Using existing temperature data for the area, a 5 day bloom spread is expected for this planting.

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The 2.7 mile length and east-west orientation of The Bloomingdale creates a world-class opportunity to study our climate.

The 5 day bloom spread reveals how large bodies of water effect local temperature patterns in Spring and Fall, known as the Lake Effect.

CLIMATE

What is phenology and how does it monitor the climate?

Bud and bloom of the Chinese Lilac, Syringa x chinensis 'Red Rothomagnesis'

Bud and bloom of Weeping Forsythia, Forsythia suspensa var. sieboldii

Images: Robert Vidéki, Doronicum Kft., Bugwood.org (left),

Images: Robert Vidéki, Doronicum Kft., Bugwood.org (left),

The Dow Gardens Archive, Dow Gardens, Bugwood.org (right)

The Dow Gardens Archive, Dow Gardens, Bugwood.org (right)

National Calibration species, Chinese Lilac Syringa x chinensis 'Red Rothomagnesis'

Illinois Calibration species, Weeping Forsythia Forsythia suspensa var. sieboldii

Phenology is the ancient science of observing nature’s calendar and the cycle of biologic events. There has been a resurgence of interest in phenology as it is the best way to understand micro-climate.

Additional species that grow thoughout the USA and Illinois provide comparative data for the American Serviceberry, helping us understand our local, national, and global climate over long periods of time.

CITIZEN

How can I get involved?

CITIZEN ARTIST

CITIZEN SCIENTIST

Our local phenological efforts will be led by The Trust for Public Land in collaboration with Chicago Wilderness and the USA National Phenologic Network.

RTUS IN URB E HO

The Trust for Public Land is The 606 project manager, in partnership with the Chicago Park District and City of Chicago.

Image courtesy Frances Whitehead.

Whitehead’s signature work on The 606 is a climate monitoring planting scheme that will reveal how Lake Michigan’s temperatures affect flowering trees.

way see them as a threat. “The people working under the old paradigm start getting conservative and freaking out. This is where we are today,” Whitehead says. Eventually, though, the paradigm shifts, when the new way of working becomes more prevalent than the old “normal.”

Similarly, Whitehead proposes, artists like her who have left behind the gallery system are entering a postnormal artistic world characterized by “a deeper engagement with systems, complexity, and context.” Artists are moving from an old “normal” in which the artist’s role is primarily to comment on the world in some way through his or her art, to a new way of working that is hands-on, involved, active in making change and providing solutions. They are, in other words, coming off the sidelines.

If that’s true—that artists have a role to play in the larger project of adapting to a changing planet—then what skills do they bring to the table? That’s the question that led Whitehead, over a period of several years culminating in 2006, to develop her list of “What do Artists Know?” The eleven competencies include “synthesizing diverse facts, goals, and references,” “creative in-process problem solving,” “participation and maneuvering in non-compensation economies,” and other types of know-how unique to artists.

All this might sound like the age-old battle of the latest art movement against the past, but that would be missing the point, Whitehead insists. “It’s not about being the ‘un-gallery,’” she says.

“It’s about how artists can participate in creating the future city.”

A lot of this thinking is deep in Whitehead’s past, but her call to action could serve as a working manifesto for the “social practice” age of public art—the rapidly approaching postnormal public art. As a manifesto, it has a special resonance for artists who are stepping out of the studio and into the streets. It responds to the proverbial question, Is it art? with a reasonable answer: I don’t know, but I am an artist, and I possess special knowledge to apply in the real world.

DESIGNING THE 606

When Whitehead is not in meetings or the classroom, she works from her enormous studio, attached to her home in the near-west side of the city. On the day I was there, she’d hung oversize printouts of highlights along The 606, as well as an aerial photo of the entire trail. Architectural mock-ups stood on surfaces around the room, and years of projects were tucked into corners, shelves, and storage spaces. Still, the studio is not cluttered, thanks to its spaciousness, and like the rest of the home (which Whitehead

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“I have spent ten years consciously preparing to work at this scale —the scale of the city.”

-Frances Whitehead

ABOVE: Frances Whitehead. RIGHT TOP AND BOTTOM: The 606 will connect city neighborhoods with an alternative transportation corridor and a living work of art.

shares with her husband, James Elniski, also an artist), it’s built with state-of-the-art sustainable technology.

It’s lucky that Whitehead possesses as much vitality as she does.

The pace has been intense. When Rahm Emanuel ran for the mayor’s office in 2011, he pledged from the campaign trail that he would ride his bicycle down The 606 before his term was out. Since then, work on the project has accelerated dramatically. In spite of the complexity of the project, it appears that Emanuel will indeed ride his bicycle over at least a small segment of the trail by the end of the year.

The project manager, land partner, and partial funder—and the organization that insisted an artist be included in the planning—is the nonprofit agency The Trust for Public Land, with Beth White serving as director of the Chicago Region Office. Along with Whitehead, an engineering group led by Collins Engineers (a Chicago firm responsible for massive infrastructure projects, including the expansion of the tollways) and a New York−based landscape architecture firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, sat at the planning table.

So too did personnel from the Chicago Park District and representatives from the City of Chicago, including the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.

This collection of people certainly made for some conflicts. But

it also has opened the way for some exciting and unusual public placemaking. One of Whitehead’s favorite examples is a bridge project proposed by the engineering firm. Essentially, they suggested moving an original, 100-ton steel railroad bridge from one end of the line, where it wasn’t needed, to another site where it could prevent a pinch-point in a busy street that passes under the trail. “It’s like a found-object sculpture,” says Whitehead. “This is a work of art made by the engineers.”

Another example of collaborative placemaking is the western park and trailhead. Early in the project, the decision was made to remove some of the dirt and fill that forms the base of the elevated line so that the landscape of the trail undulated for variety. “The problem is that creates all this extra soil—and I’m trying to keep it out of the landfill,” says Whitehead. The landscape architects came up with the idea of making a pile of it at the west end—tall enough to view the trains running on a nearby track. “Well guess what else you can view? Sunsets. So all of a sudden, it’s an observatory.”

The park might have been left at that had it not been for Whitehead’s passion for science. She took the landscape architects’ original earthwork design and brought it to Adler Planetarium. Astronomers there helped her reorient it and design a bladelike structure

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Photos by Yoni Goldstein.

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that aligns with the sun during the annual solstices and equinoxes.

“It was one of the most successful collaborations that we did.”

Other ideas fell by the wayside. One of the stated objectives of The 606 was to preserve the cultural heritage of the neighborhoods and the old rail line itself. Whitehead devised an unusual way to do so. At each access point along the multi-use trail, the engineers must cut into the concrete embankments that contain the earth on which the rail bed was constructed. After making cardboard scale models of these walls, Whitehead devised a number of clever re-use ideas for them, including as the platform of a stage. When it came down to budgets, however, the concrete re-use got the axe.

For Whitehead, part of the process has been learning which battles to fight. In this case, she deferred. When the engineer’s bridge relocation came into question for its expense, she argued in its favor and helped to preserve it in the plan. (As it happens, the re-use ended up costing about $300,000 less than building from scratch.

This collaborative process is work that she feels especially qualified to do after her experiences of being embedded in the city. And she is highly conscious of speaking not only on her own behalf, but on behalf of the very concept of embedded artists in large-scale public work.

“That’s one reason I have worked so hard on the project. I’ve really given it my all. Because what is at stake is that now we have a bunch of pretty powerful people putting big projects together who now understand what an artist can do.”

A PHILOSOPHY BLOOMS

Like everyone who works in the fuzzy edges of “postnormal” public art, Whitehead has struggled with what to call herself and her work.

She’s settled on “civic practice” and likens it to citizen science—the practice of enlisting everyday citizens in the task of collecting scientific data, and thereby accomplishing more than could be done without many hands. Perhaps the best-known citizen science efforts are the annual Christmas Bird Count conducted by the Audubon Society, and Project BudBurst, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, which tracks the phenology, or timing, of flowering plants.

It’s fitting, then, that Whitehead’s signature contribution to The 606 is a phenological planting of flowering trees designed to demonstrate Chicago’s lake effect. The trail runs east-west, with the lake at the eastern end, so the idea is that you can see the impact of the lake’s temperature on the flowering trees along the trail as you traverse it away from the lake.

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LEFT: When inflated, Ark Nova can hold 500 people. So far, it has been installed only once.

“Phenological data is the oldest climate data we have,” says Whitehead, referring to the timing of the Japanese festivals to celebrate the blooming of the cherry blossoms, “and that data is generated by culture, by beauty—not by social responsibility, not by science.”

Whitehead worked with climate scientists, who determined that there should be about a five-day difference between the timing of blooming from one end of the trail to the other. Several different species will be planted along the entire length of the trail for their phenological value, including the apple serviceberry, a small tree; cloned Chinese lilac, a species used in the United States to calibrate the timing of spring blooms; and weeping forsythia, an Illinois calibration species.

Not only will the plantings show the five-day lake effect, but over the years, by comparing the timing of the blooms, observers will be able to gauge the impact of climate change on the city. “The runners and the bikers are actually going to be observers, whether they want to be or not,” says Whitehead. “And we’ll see if this will grow climate consciousness.”

The phenology project—out of the thousands of decisions and hundreds of individual works along The 606—is among the

most important to Whitehead. “I want to see if we can create a long-term phenological project similar to the cherry blossom festivals in Japan.”

In the postnormal art world that Whitehead inhabits, this climatechange yardstick would constitute success. It’s not that the “artifact” disappears—The 606, you could argue, is one gigantic artful object.

But it was the result of a complex, collaborative process, and it’s situated out here in the world—in the city. “That’s really what it’s all about,” says Whitehead. “Artists help make the future city.”

JOE HART is senior editor of Public Art Review.

TOP LEFT AND RIGHT: Images courtesy Frances Whitehead. BOTTOM RIGHT: Image courtesy Trust for Public Land.

ABOVE: The 606 will include an earth work that serves as an observatory. RIGHT TOP AND BOTTOM: Moving a bridge solves a problem and turns it into a work of art.

ART + ENGINEERING

ART of PLACEMAKING A

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W ES T

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AV EN

AV EN

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WESTERN AVENUE

Ashland Avenue Bridge Re-location

Intermodal Transport Hub Art Commission Enlivens Space Mobilizing Materials

Western Section

BORROWED BRIDGE

TYPICAL HERITAGE BRIDGE

FOOT

BIKE

ART COMMISSION SITE WESTERN PLACE WITH “BORROWED” ASHLAND BRIDGE

BUS

TRAIN

RTUS IN URB E HO

The Trust for Public Land is The 606 project manager, in partnership with the Chicago Park District and City of Chicago.

EXISTING CONDITIONS

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Cape Town’s annual public art festival trades on the city’s rich and sometimes contradictory culture

BY JON SPAYDE

Programme A, for example, I joined the crowd at 6:00 pm at the South African Museum in the Company’s Garden for the first event; then, in a mob, we all followed a tall man carrying a bunch of balloons up to Queen Victoria Street at the north edge of the Garden, then on to Greenmarket Square and Long Street, spotting art and sitting, standing, or squatting for performances all along the way. Infecting The City was thus a sort of hybrid, attracting an audience at a set time like any indoor performance, but moving that audience along the city streets, picking up and losing members as it went. (This ambulatory format was devised by festival curator Jay Pather, who modeled it on a performance project he did in Denmark.)

Programme A began indoors, under a gigantic whale skele on in the South African Museum. Four performers from the Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative at the University of Johannesburg performed a fluid and energetic, if not particularly original,

the economic legacy of apartheid exactly 20 years after white rule ended with the triumphant election of Nelson Mandela.

None of Cape Town’s richness, and none of her contradictions, are lost on the people who organized Infecting The City, a weeklong public art festival that I attended in mid-March. Centered on Church Square, the nearby Company’s Garden area, and the historic City Centre, all in the heart of Cape Town, the fest spread out for many blocks in all directions and was characterized first of all by an almost bewildering variety.

Live performances dominated the event, and included choral singing, pops concerts, and a music-less “opera,” as well as complex solo performance-artworks and African-inflected modern dance. It also included installations, paintings and videos in urban spaces, and a surveillance camera hijacked by an artist and turned into a gigantic exterior-wall projection. Some 50 artists took part; the majority were from South Africa but the roster included participants from the Philippines, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, France, England, and Denmark.

Infecting The City was forthright about engaging the country’s unjust past and troubled present, while also generating a lot of soulful excitement about what democracy has created in the past 20 years and what a truly multiracial South Africa could be.

modern dance piece entitled Back. Moving across the park to the Centre for the Book, a big domed building probably modeled, like many libraries, on the Roman Pantheon, we settled in to hear the Alumni Choir of Cape Town’s Simon Estes Music High School perform Thoriso le Morusu, a stirring choral work by the Soweto-born and Cape Town–based composer, librettist, and sound artist Neo Muyanga, based on Afrikaner poet and anti-apartheid activist Antjie Krog’s poem “Country of Grief and Grace.” Sung in Sesotho, Afrikaans, and English, the text is an intimate, moving apology that can be read on both personal and political-historical levels. It ends like this: “we know each other well/each other’s

Photos courtesy Africa Centre, ITC2014, Sydelle Willow Smith.

A MOVEABLE FEAST

The first thing that a newcomer realizes about Cape Town is that the city itself is as dramatic and colorful as any street performance. The City Centre, a six-by-ten-block historic district where my hotel, the century-old Grand Daddy, is located, contains both rocking Long Street, with its touristy bars and eateries and colorful small shops, and leafy, cobblestoned Greenmarket Square, where sellers of everything from produce to panini to T-shirts set up shop daily. The zone teems with shoppers, strollers, school kids in deep-blue uniforms, hiking-trip tourists in sneakers and shorts, and the city’s ubiquitous uniformed security guards. Afrikaans, Xhosa, scores of other African languages, and English tinged with a dozen accents fill the air. South Africans of all colors are a voluble, demonstrative, friendly lot; add some surprising, puzzling, outrageous, or soul-stirring public art to the mix and the result is a plein air party.

And that’s just how Infecting The City worked—as a series of organized but lively group walks through the city, entirely free of charge, during the afternoons and the evenings. To follow Monday’s

OPPOSITE: Popular interactive dancing from the troupe DA MOTUS!. ABOVE: Festival crowds fill the streets.

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CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, was ranked as the top vacation destination in the world this year by two newspapers of record, Britain’s Guardian and the New York Times. It’s a bustling, beautiful city of close to four million. Tourists can hike up 3,500-foot Table Mountain for a stunning view of the city, take a day trip to the Cape of Good Hope for penguin-watching, or scuba-dive in a cage next to great white sharks.

The city is a lively, polyglot ethnic mosaic of black, white, Indian, and the group once known as Cape Coloured—descendants of early black-white unions—along with many immigrants from elsewhere in Africa. It’s a sophisticated creative hub, too, anointed as 2014’s World Design Capital.

Cape Town is also one of the most racially segregated of South African cities. To the southeast of the business district stretch the Cape Flats, where “informal settlements”—vast conglomerations of shacks—house a mainly black population still struggling to escape

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Mamela Nyamza, a choreographer and performance artist from Cape Town, performs a signature work from Hatch.

Photos courtesy Africa Centre, ITC2014, Sydelle Willow Smith.

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scalp and smell/each other’s blood/we know the deepest sound of each other’s kidneys in the night/we are slowly each other/anew/ new/and here it starts.” Wild applause.

Following the balloon man to Queen Victoria Street as the sun went down, we were treated to a series of encounters and performances. In the crush of the crowd it wasn’t always easy for this rather short writer to get a clear view of the goings-on, but simply being part of the youngish, multiracial, good-natured, and very attentive group was energizing. This was an audience of smartphone-photo-snappers, obviously convinced of the value of the public work they were seeing and eager to see more as we went along.

Two performances on Queen Victoria illustrated the crucial role of duration in this kind of street theater. The internationally recognized Cape Town-based choreographer and performance artist Mamela Nyamza performed a signature work from 2008, Hatch.

The focus of this poetic and poignant exploration of the frustrations of domesticity was a set of orange-red cloths set out on a line in front of the artist. These flowing, flapping scarlet sheets—billowing in the always-brisk Capetonian breeze—seemed to metamorphose from drying laundry into the flames of regret, discontent, and rebellion as Nyamza moved before and among them, accompanied by music that ranged from Western classical to traditional African. It was riveting and beautiful—but it went on too long.

What would have been triumphant in a theater felt interminable on the street, and it was hard to tell whether the applause that ended it marked its actual close or an audience intervention.

The simple but delightful Couched, choreographed and performed by Cape Town dancers Shaun Oelf and Grant van Ster, on the other hand, felt a little too short, but in the best “leave ’em wanting more” tradition. In the middle of the blocked-off street the pair enacted a graceful, funny, balletic, athletic pas de deux on and around a beat-up couch that somehow managed to evoke all of the tensions, joys, and confusions of domestic partnerships, gay and straight.

And then there was Wall-Hug—architectural installation, living sculpture, performance, and therapy moment rolled into one.

At two spots along the route, Johannesburg artist Kira Kemper installed collaborators costumed as sections of wall, with their arms and hands encased in long gloves of the same color. You could approach this wall-with-arms and get a hug. It was as if architecture had undergone group therapy and come out more caring.

The evening wound up with a couple of wildly contrasting events—a concert by the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra in Greenmarket Square, and Surveillance Stage at the corner of Wale and Long Streets.

Hip international public art festival notwithstanding, the orchestra grandly abandoned any attempt to be edgy, eschewing Philip Glass or Osvaldo Gojilov in favor of The Blue Danube and a medley from The Sound of Music. The crowd loved it. Then, at Wale and Long, Dutch artist Alien Oosting created a disorienting public “stage” by projecting a gigantic image of what a surveillance camera sees onto a nearby government building. What the camera saw, of course, was us, the Infecting The City crowd at the corner, and it was an invitation to spontaneous performance. Interestingly, most of

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the people who took up the challenge lay down and pretended to be corpses, perhaps imagining themselves gunned down on the street.

This year’s Infecting The City was the seventh. Its immediate ancestor was the Spier Summer Festival, held in an amphitheater on the Spier Wine Estate in nearby Stellenbosch from 1995 to 2007. The Spier family, winemakers for more than 300 years, have long been major funders of the arts throughout the continent, and the Summer Festival brought big South African names like trumpeter Hugh Masekela onto the same stage with innovative projects like an Africanized Macbeth directed by Brett Bailey, an internationally known Cape Town theater artist and playwright.

Eventually the Spiers decided that the multi-month festival wasn’t working well enough as a business venture for them to continue it, but they wanted to explore supporting a performance

Methvin, calls “a Guggenheim-like art museum in South Africa.”

It wasn’t long before the Centre found itself abandoning the brickand-mortar idea in favor of a more dynamic approach to the relationships between art and society. It became a major backer of Infecting The City after its first couple of years.

“Very quickly,” says Methvin, “the festival moved from the simple idea of making performance more accessible to a broader exploration of what could happen in public space. It became a tool to explore issues like to whom does public space belong and how do we use art as a way of changing the conversation about who is allowed to do what in public space?”

Bailey and Pather curated it for its first year, then Bailey did three years, and Pather has been in charge since 2012. They faced the challenge that all serious public artists eventually confront: finding a balance between attracting, pleasing, and entertaining the public and challenging it. “Of the seven Infecting The Cities,” Methvin says, “I’d

series that was shorter and more widely accessible.

Spier representatives got together with Bailey and with Pather, an influential choreographer, curator, director, and performance artist who teaches at the University of Cape Town and had also been involved in Spier Summer Festival productions. They retooled the festival as a series of accessible public events in the center city, and Infecting The City was born.

Another venture backed by Spier was the Africa Centre, a group that promotes new ideas about Africa on a number of fronts, but was originally set up to establish what its executive director, Tanner

say that there were three that had way too many pieces that alienated the public and had the reverse effect of what we were striving for.”

Five years ago the organizers polled audience members frankly with questions like “Are you being confused, scared, informed, or entertained by what you are seeing here?”

“The result,” Methvin says, “was that we developed a touchstone: People don’t have to understand what they’re looking at, but they have to be able to feel it. Everything needs to have a point of emotional access.”

Pather worked to maintain this access point in his curation

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Photos courtesy Africa Centre, ITC2014, Sydelle Willow Smith.

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ABOVE: Themba Mbuu in Dark Cell. LEFT: DA MOTUS! dancers. FAR LEFT: Anne Rochat in Say Yes or Die! TOP LEFT: Shaun Oelf and Grant van Ster in Couched.

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of the 2014 festival; for him, art-world esotericism is a lose-lose proposition. “When something is palatable only to an elite,” he says, “they are actually not experiencing its ‘edge,’ because they know all the codes too well—meanwhile you are alienating the people you want to reach.” At the same time, he is committed to the degree of discomfort implied by the word infecting in the festival’s title. “We are all very aware of infectious disease in this country,” he says. “The name is a way of rather ironically playing on that awareness and suggesting that art is a benign ‘infection.’ But it’s also a way of reminding ourselves of one of the points the festival is here to make: that twenty years into our democracy, equality is very far away.”

There were, of course, many pieces where an emotional appeal, light or dark, was front and center. Themba Mbuli’s riveting solo performance Dark Cell, in which he cast himself as a Robben Island prisoner and used gleaming silver pails as percussion instruments and props, went straight to the heart; and the primary-color-clad dancers of DA MOTUS! delighted onlookers by forming writhing body-chains that slithered along the ground, climbed trees, and even wrapped around the occasional audience member.

It was interesting to note, too, how many pieces charged with a certain degree of art-worldliness also included clear points of accessibility. A case in point was Oosting’s surveillance-video piece, which turned conceptual austerity into a lively if somewhat macabre do-it-yourself video party. The throbbing, roaring, abstract sound-art piece that Spanish composer Francisco Lopez played in

ABOVE: Swiss artist Anne Rochat in Say Yes or Die! TOP: Wall-Hug, an architectural installation, sculpture, performance, and impromptu therapy session by Kira Kemper.

OPPOSITE: Drag queen Odidi Mfenyana, aka Odidiva, performs Homecoming Ball.

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Photo courtesy Africa Centre, ITC2014, Sydelle Willow Smith.

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the Centre for the Book included a call-and-response pattern that evoked traditional African music and dance.

Another of Pather’s balancing tactics was what he calls “layering”: interspersing the more austere pieces with ones that were frankly entertaining. Since the audience was experiencing the works in a traveling group and in order, if you were put off by one piece, you could expect something more to your liking down the road.

I was able to experience this dynamic in following Programme E. It kicked off with a free-jazz set with an electronic gimmick—tune your smartphone’s FM-radio app to a certain frequency and stroll around the space, and you would hear modifications of the music.

Since my brand-new iPhone was lacking such an app, and I couldn’t download one with my back-home data plan, I was left listening to the rather tame music unaugmented. A little later our group strolled into the Company’s Gardens for Say Yes or Die!, an odd little performance piece that billed itself as an opera without music. What it did have was Swiss performer Anne Rochat pronouncing words in multiple real and imagined languages, then climbing atop a log held upright by her colleague Gilles Furtwängler. (It was actually less Euro-ponderous and more strangely compelling than it sounds.)

But the night’s high point came next, with the Homecoming Ball,

a sassy, brassy turn by Odidi Mfenyana, aka Odidiva, a drag queen with a mission and a message. In the courtyard in front of the South African National Gallery, bathed in blue, purple, and yellow light, she did a collage of tunes with moves, including a breathy version of “I Hear You Knocking (But You Can’t Come In),” and announced that she was reclaiming the dance moves and rhythm-and-blues grooves that American pop culture has spread around the world —reclaiming them on behalf of their original homes, places like Soweto and the Cape Flats. (“That’s why it’s called the Homecoming Ball, bitches!”) She spoke up for all the queer children of Africa, now threatened by the law in Nigeria, Uganda, and elsewhere—but not in the new South Africa. (Wild applause.)

She infected the grounds of the Gallery, which is near the provincial parliament building—once the seat of white tyranny in Cape Town—with a wild vision of human desire and human truth fulfilled, and was edgy, conceptual, popular, and fabulous, the way art ought to be every night.

JON SPAYDE is a regular contributor to Public Art Review.

W IND AND WATER E XHIBIT Downtown Rapid City, South Dakota

30 South Dakota Artists inspired by

THE SCULPTURE PROJECT PASSAGE OF WIND AND WATER Prairie Edge Gallery 606 Main St. Oct. 3 to 31, 2014

RCSculptureProject.com

CONGRATULATIONS!

Public Art Review on 25 years.

Thank you for inspiring and educating us to elevate our communities.

Ed Carpenter, Ascendus, 2012

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Where People Gather

Maya Lin’s work on the Confluence Project honors the past, and the project’s new executive director reaches out to the public on behalf of the future.

Photo by Kent Derek.

BY JACQUELINE WHITE Back in 1999, when Vancouver, Washington, nonprofit leader Jane “show the American people what the tribes have done on their own Jacobsen first learned of a potential $500,000 gift to fund a public with their sovereignty.” art project commemorating the upcoming bicentennial of the Jacobsen, who eventually became the first executive direcLewis and Clark Corps of Discovery Expedition, the bare outline tor of what would become the Confluence Project, and Minthorn, of how to spend the money was immediately obvious. “Let’s start who is currently the project’s board chair, joined forces with the in the West, where Lewis and Clark first saw the ocean,” Jacobsen city manager of Long Beach, Washington, who was also casting remembers thinking, “and look back.” Rather than taking as its about for a public art bicentennial project to mark the spot where starting point St. Louis, the city from which the expedition set off Meriwether Lewis and William Clark finally saw the Pacific. in 1804, installations at multiple sites along the Columbia River in It turned out all three had set their sights on the same artist: the Northwest could explore what “discovery” meant to the Native Maya Lin, who is most famous for creating the Vietnam Veterans people who were already on the land, as well as for the land itself.

Memorial, which Minthorn, a Marine Corps veteran, had once Given that the expedition paved the way for subsequent settlers visited in Washington, D.C. Jacobsen had also seen The Women’s who eventually forced the Native people onto reservations, Antone Table, created by Lin to mark the advent of coeducation at her alma Minthorn, who was then chair of the Confederated Tribes of the mater, Yale University, but which also pointedly acknowledges the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon, had been seriously ques- previous absence of women. tioning whether participating in a bicentennial “celebration” made any kind of sense at all. But after considering his tribe’s success FOUR DOWN, TWO SITES LEFT TO GO in restoring self-governance, as well as salmon and water to the Now, 15 years later, with four sites finished and two more schedUmatilla River which had been drained by irrigation, Minthorn uled for completion in the next two years, Jacobsen laughs at her came to see a bicentennial public art project as an opportunity to initial budgetary naiveté. The total capital goal for the Confluence

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TOP: Photo by Colleen Chartier. BOTTOM LEFT: Photo by Betsy Henning. BOTTOM RIGHT: Photo by Andrew Brahe.

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TOP: The Cedar Circle at Cape Disappointment. Shown here in a 2006 in-progress photograph, the circle has since been completed. ABOVE LEFT: A “before” image of the original fish cleaning table at Cape Disappointment State Park, where the Confluence Project began. ABOVE RIGHT: An “after” image of the permanent fish table designed by Maya Lin. PREVIOUS PAGE: Maya Lin reviewing potential driftwood materials for her design at the Cape Disappointment Cedar Circle.

ON LOCATION Project ballooned to $38.17 million. (A seventh site, a research facility to investigate pollutants threatening fresh water, was put on hold after the economic downturn.) The funding sources break down approximately into thirds, divided between government sources, foundations, and private donors. The most expensive site, at $12.7 million, includes Land Bridge, which crosses over a highway and reconnects the historic Klickitat Trail and Fort Vancouver with the Columbia River in Washington.

to interpret the art, but we can tell you more about the history and the place where you are.”

— Colin Fogarty, Confluence Project

A SEVEN-GENERATION PERSPECTIVE

LEFT: Image courtesy U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. RIGHT: Photo by Bruce Forester.

Now, with the end of the construction phase in view, the ambitious Confluence Project, with sites spanning nearly 400 miles along the Columbia River, is facing an issue that confounds many public art projects after their dedication ceremonies: Who will steward the art from now on?

Enter the Confluence Project’s new executive director, Colin Fogarty, who will be guiding the organization as it considers not just how to maintain the installations, but how to create opportunities for the public to interact with them. A self-described “history nerd,” Fogarty describes his previous award-winning journalism career as “telling stories on the radio and the web, ” which he sees as apt preparation for his new task, transitioning the Confluence

LEFT: Celilo Falls is a sacred site for many Native peoples who came together there for fishing and gatherings. Lin has been in dialogue with tribes about an installation to mark this historic site, which was submerged by The Dalles Dam in 1957. RIGHT: After discussions with Maya Lin, Jones and Jones Architects designed the Land Bridge, recreating an important historic path from Fort Vancouver and the Klickitat Trail to the Columbia River, previously separated by a highway and railroad.

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The other completed sites include a fish-cleaning table inscribed with the Chinook origin legend with a boardwalk and viewing platform at Cape Disappointment near Long Beach, Washington, on the Pacific Ocean; Bird Blind at Sandy River Delta, Oregon, which references the flora and fauna that would have been present 200 years ago; and Story Circles at Sacajawea State Park, Washington, featuring text from tribal stories, tribal elders, and Lewis and Clark’s journals exploring themes of salmon, people, trade, coyote story, geologic history, and time.

The next site on the docket is Listening Circle at Chief Timothy Park, Washington, sculpted out of a natural amphitheater.

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“We don’t want to tell you how

Depending on the osprey nesting migration season, creation of the earthwork, along with the full restoration of native grasses and wildflowers, will be finished in either fall 2014 or spring 2015. The final public art piece, scheduled for completion in spring 2016, is at Celilo Falls, Oregon, which was the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America until the falls, a bustling hub of commerce at one of the best fishing sites on the continent, were submerged by the construction of The Dalles Dam. Minthorn recalls fishing at Celilo Falls in 1956, the last year that Native fishers speared the plentiful salmon or caught them in dip nets. “Tribes came from all over. That’s what a confluence is,” he says, “where people gather, where they work and trade.”

But now what used to be a dramatic torrent is a slack pool of water—and a place of such deep hurt for Native people that even marking the place with an artwork was initially deemed too painful. The tribes eventually reconsidered: Lin’s plans call for a graceful walkway that recalls the wooden scaffolding once built by the Native fishers and which ends overlooking what had once been the rushing waters.

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The Land Bridge is the Confluence Project’s most expensive site at $12.7 million.

It replaces a three-mile drive with a quarter-mile walk. The circular form of the bridge implies a round basket in progress. Landscape and planting design reflect the site’s original ecosystem.

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Photo by Lara Swimmer.

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Project to more of a public media organization, in order to “tell stories in the landscape.”

“We can transform the ‘heritage experience,’” Fogarty says, describing the potential for the public art sites to become “museums without walls.” Yet Fogarty makes a careful distinction: “We don’t want to tell you how to interpret the art, but we can tell you more about the history and the place where you are.” To that end, Fogarty will be leading the effort to revamp the Confluence Project’s website so that visitors can access “a rich digital experience” on mobile hand-held devices at each of the six public art installations.

“The tribes have a presence, a culture, a history, and a story that needs to be understood,” says Minthorn. “But the strategy behind the Confluence Project also looks to the future through the seven generations to consider the natural resources of the region and Mother Earth, so that the children that are yet to come will see that their world will be made better for them.”

JACQUELINE WHITE is a Minneapolis writer.

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LEFT: Photo by Kent Derek. RIGHT: Photo by Maegan Moore.

ON LOCATION

ABOVE: Maya Lin with Nez Perce elder Horace Axtell at a blessing ceremony at Chief Timony Park. RIGHT: Each slat of the Bird Blind at the Sandy River Delta is carved with the names of birds and animals noted by Lewis and Clark.

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Standing at the Gateway

Public art projects in St. Louis are reconnecting the city’s fragmented infrastructure—and its people

Gateway Arch by Eero Saarinen, photo courtesy Gateway Arch.

BY STEFENE RUSSELL

Word for word, no public artwork in St. Louis has been discussed more than Richard Serra’s Twain. It’s been disparaged at dinner parties, criticized in the newspaper, and one vandal-critic even spray-painted “GET RID OF THIS THING!” on its weathered Cor-Ten surface. Located on the Gateway Mall, a block-wide park that ribbons through downtown, Twain fills a city block with its eight huge steel plates. It was one of the first pieces Serra designed to be walked into; the gaps between slabs change the way your eyes track the landscape outside. When it was installed in 1982, though, St. Louis didn’t like the view. And it didn’t matter that it was, after Manhattan, only the second American city to receive a major Serra work. Twain’s inner chamber struck them not as a spot for contemplation, but a great place to get mugged.

When Citygarden opened in 2009, the conversation about Gateway Mall shifted. Located on two formerly vacant lots, Citygarden is a roughly three-acre parcel split into three areas of varying elevation. Plantings include 235 trees from 20 species as well as native plants like bottlebrush buckeye, sedge grasses,

and meadow rue. Charlottesville, Virginia’s Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects designed features mimicking the natural landscape (a limestone wall echoing the Mississippi river bluffs) as well as the urban environment (narrow paths inspired by alleys on nineteenth-century Sanborn fire maps).

Owned by the city, Citygarden is maintained by a private entity, the Gateway Foundation, which also curated the art. The collection is world-class, and meant to delight; one of the most popular pieces is Igor Mitoraj’s Eros Bendato, a hollow, two-ton bronze Greek head that is guaranteed to have someone, usually several someones, playing inside it during park hours. Citygarden is also free, has a restaurant onsite, and every one of its 24 artworks can be touched, despite the fact that this increases the cost of maintenance.

St. Louisans love it. Its superlative, generous presence transforms the entire mall—especially the block containing Serra’s piece, which sits just west of it. “Twain is a great work of art, really,” says Leslie Markle, curator for public art at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University. “It’s a great

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REMAKING AN ICON—AND RE-ENVISIONING EMPTY LOTS

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Citygarden was in part what first attracted Michael Van Valkenburgh to St. Louis. Van Valkenburgh’s Brooklyn-based architecture firm was chosen to redesign the grounds of the Gateway Arch for the monument’s 50th anniversary (the opening is currently slated for October 28, 2015).

Working in collaboration with private and public organizations, Van Valkenburgh has unveiled a design that “lids” the I-70 highway with a park, connecting downtown to the Arch for the first time. The plan also includes a new Arch museum; renovation of the historic Old Courthouse; major landscaping improvements, including five miles of pedestrian walkways; and an overhaul of the stark and outdated Kiener Plaza, the first city block on the Gateway Mall. Van Valkenburgh explained at a public meeting on February 5 that the redesigned grounds “will feel much more welcoming to all—and that from every approach there will be a feeling of being interwoven with downtown.”

Located just west of downtown is St. Louis’s Grand Center arts district, home to the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (site of another Serra), and another interesting project launched by the foundation and Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Art & Architecture. PXSTL (an acronym for Pulitzer, Sam Fox, and St. Louis) is an urban design/build competition for architects

and designers to create temporary installations on two empty lots facing the Pulitzer building. On May 9, Lots, designed by Brooklyn firm Freecell Architecture, opens to the public. It consists of an interactive, gridded metal structure equipped with fabric tunnels and canopies; the museum will be programming heavily around it.

Leslie Markle, who oversees PXSTL with Pulitzer’s Gretchen Wagner, explains that, though funding sources differ, he sees the competition as an extension of the university’s new percent-for-art program, which he manages. The program sets aside 1 percent of campus construction budgets for public art; its first installation was Jaume Plensa’s Ainsa 1, a stainless steel figure made of letters from nine different alphabets. Markle says that Sam Fox dean Carmon Colangelo views campus projects like these as “part of the continuity of public art that you have in the city of St. Louis.”

ST. LOUIS AS “SCULPTURE CITY”

Located on 105 acres in the suburb of Sunset Hills, Laumeier Sculpture Park is an innovative hybrid between public park and contemporary art museum. When it opened in 1977 with a donation of 40 pieces by the late St. Louis sculptor Ernest Trova, there was nothing like it in the country. Some of its best-known pieces include Alexander Liberman’s The Way, constructed of steel oil tanks painted bright red; Beverly Pepper’s epic earthwork Cromlech Glen; and Tony Tasset’s Eye, a 38-foot fiberglass reproduction of the artist’s own eyeball, which is arguably one of

Beverly Pepper was inspired by Angkor Wat, Cambodia, when she designed Cromlech Glen for a wooded area at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis.

Photo courtesy Laumeier Sculpture Park.

complement to Citygarden being there now—the context is totally different.”

ON LOCATION

RECONNECTING THE URBAN AND SUBURBAN

Recess also connects the city and the county—a particularly profound and often acrimonious disconnect in St. Louis. The often-cited stereotype that culture thrives only in the city is disproved by Chesterfield Arts, which in nearly 20 years has spent $5 million placing public art. Executive Director Stacey Morse says public art makes up about 40 percent of its mission, and includes the University Sculpture Competition, a competition for students in the region. Last year’s winner was Rod Callies’s Aspire, a 5,800-pound sculpture made from steel pipes cut at angles and painted white, which Chesterfield Arts paid to fabricate, then placed alongside a stream walk in Chesterfield Central Park.

“We’re working to make that an ongoing initiative,” Morse says, “so that every other year we’ll be able to launch a new project where we can put a call out to the next wave of student sculptors throughout Missouri.”

Clayton is another St. Louis suburb with a deep commitment to public art, says Gary Feder, outgoing president of the Clayton Century Foundation, a nonprofit formed in 2008 to focus on the city’s history, arts, parks, and sustainability. In conjunction with the city’s 2013 centennial, it commissioned James Surls to create the site-specific, bronze and stainless steel Molecular Bloom With Single Flower, which references both Clayton’s modern skyline and

Alexander Liberman composed The Way out of 18 salvaged steel oil tanks. Since 1980, it has been an iconic sculpture at Laumeier Sculpture Park.

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Photo courtesy Laumeier Sculpture Park.

Krawczyk says, “then Recess seeks to look more closely at the rough edges.”

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the most popular pieces among Laumeier’s 300,000 yearly visitors.

“People love that piece,” says Meridith McKinley, partner at public art consulting firm Via Partnership. “And it’s not an easy piece!”

This year, McKinley and Laumeier executive director Marilu Knode co-convened Sculpture City Saint Louis 2014, an initiative that celebrates public art on the occasion of St. Louis’s 250th anniversary. Its projects have included a content-rich website, sculpturecitystl.com; an Instagram feed that instantly uploads photographs hashtagged as #sculptstl; and events in partnership with other institutions, including the Saint Louis Art Museum.

In April, Sculpture City hosted Monument/Anti-Monument, an international conference that attracted artists, curators, urban planners, and historians to St. Louis to discuss “the intersection of sculpture and the public realm.”

Laumeier’s current exhibit, Mound City, which opened during the conference, includes a permanent commission from artist Geoffrey Krawczyk. The New York–based artist was struck by the renovated and collapsing houses he saw standing side-byside in the Old North St. Louis neighborhood. The Recess Project is an architectural folly that mimics the decaying remains of one of the neighborhood’s distinctive four-family brick flats. Using bricks from a neighborhood brickyard, Krawczyk worked with local architects and bricklayers, and invited locals to submit short phrases to be inscribed on the bricks. Krawczyk sees the piece as a historical time capsule, as well as a counterpoint to the Arch. “If the Arch stands for a smooth, shiny narrative about our history,”

A history of the Mural Arts Program

and what it can teach other cities about public art

Philadelphia Mural Arts @30 edited by jane golden and david updike

Philadelphia Mural Arts @ 30 traces the program’s history and evolution, acknowledging the challenges and rewards of growth and change while maintaining a core commitment to social, personal, and community transformation.

Available online and at your favorite retailer

Curriculum Guide Available for Fall 2014 for more information visit our website www.temple.edu/tempress

$35.00 paper

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LEFT: Photo by Stefan Hester Photography. RIGHT: Photo by Juan William Chávez.

culture

editor

and

Juan William Chávez aims to help St. Louis reclaim the history and landscape of Pruitt-Igoe

BY LAUREN BEDOSKY

Juan William Chávez, an artist and cultural activist, sees potential in vacant spaces. Since 2010, he’s been exploring the former site of the failed Pruitt-Igoe urban housing project in St. Louis, Missouri. Built in 1953, the development was riddled with poverty, violence, and segregation until it was eventually demolished in 1972. Over the years, a vast forest with diverse wildlife has sprouted in its place. But the site remains a historical scar on the landscape.

“Pruitt-Igoe has a lot of attention on the history, but that attention is usually about the violence or the modernism, or the actual implosion of the buildings,” says Chávez, who is originally from Peru and now lives in St. Louis. He considers the city his studio. “I was really interested in continuing that conversation, and seeing how we can take all that energy and reverse the current.”

In an effort to activate the local community around healing this negative chapter in the city’s history, he developed the Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary project. Its premise: to revivify the infamous space through beekeeping and urban gardening. To prepare, Chávez studied bees in public space at the Luxembourg Gardens in France, and went to Spain to see the first known cave art showing human interaction with bees. In 2012, Laumeier Sculpture Park featured an exhibition of his research as well as a sculpture that replicated the 81 footprint of a Pruitt-Igoe building.

Also that year, Chávez launched a pilot version of the Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary project through his nonprofit Northside Workshop. Located in a small urban garden near the Pruitt-Igoe site, the pilot includes educational workshops to engage the community in beekeeping, urban gardening, and reclaiming neglected spaces. Chávez hopes to eventually take the project—an outstanding example of community-based public art, which Chávez referred to as public sculpture—to the Pruitt-Igoe site itself.

“Monuments on pedestals in parks serve their purpose, but public sculptures can actually be alive,” Chávez says. “They can be slowly developed right in front of you.” –Lauren Bedosky ON LOCATION

STEFENE RUSSELL is St. Louis Magazine’s oversees SLM’s arts blog, Look/Listen.

Pollinating Neglected Places

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the natural setting of the park. “I think it says something about the population that people in Clayton care about public art, and want to support it,” Feder says.

Another of Clayton’s public works is Fernando Botero’s Man on a Horse, a permanent loan placed by the Gateway Foundation, which is overseen by philanthropist Peter Fischer (who prefers to stay out of the public eye). Gateway has long been working to suture together the city’s fragmented built environment with public art—and heal its social divisions in the process. Gateway places sculpture in welloff inner-ring suburbs such as Clayton and Webster Groves as well as on community college campuses; it has lit antique water towers and landscaped a playground in distressed North City. And of course, it created Citygarden.

Via’s Meridith McKinley says the Foundation’s work has “elevated the conversation about public art and sculpture and what an asset it can be in the community.” But she adds that multiple organizations in St. Louis participate in that conversation: “It’s the zoo. It’s private foundations. It’s municipalities. It’s the sculpture park. There are lots of different organizations—Arts in Transit, the airport. It’s a really diverse group of organizations that are doing this type of work, and engaging people in this conversation.” The only uniting thread of these good works is that there is no uniting thread—each player is helping to translate broken fragments into an artistic kaleidoscopic pattern.

ABOVE: Juan William Chávez stacked these beehives in the shape of a Pruitt-Igoe building. LEFT: Kiera and Julian Walking, 2002, by Julian Opie at Citygarden.

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Once More to the Island

Governors Island, a former military base near Manhattan, becomes an open oasis for the arts

Riding the ferry to Governors Island on a foggy February morning, it’s easy to imagine that you’re heading to a new and foreign land. Only a half mile from the bustling southern tip of Manhattan, it seems a world apart. In many ways, it once was. A retreat for the British royal governors in the eighteenth century, it later served for 200 years as a U.S. Army and Coast Guard base with its own schools, shops, and places of worship. Off-limits to civilians, it went almost completely unnoticed by most New Yorkers. Things began to change in 2001 when 22 acres of the island, including Fort Jay and Castle Williams, were designated Governors Island National Monument, to be overseen by the National Park Service. In 2003 the federal government sold the remaining 150 acres to the State of New York; a joint city-state partnership, the Trust for Governors Island, was established to oversee the operations, planning, and redevelopment of this portion of the island.

Not much else happened until Leslie Koch came on board as president of the Trust for Governors Island in 2006. Previously chief executive of the Fund for Public Schools, she seemed to

know just what it would take to bring the island back to life.

Under her leadership, it has become a welcoming public space, alive with arts events, performances, exhibits, art classes, Little League games, a spa, a miniature golf course, grassy knolls, bike paths, and a 10-acre grove with 50 inviting red hammocks.

Dedicated to public art, Koch works hand in hand with the island’s advocate for public art, Tom Eccles, whose distinguished record in the field includes serving as director of New York City’s Public Art Fund. Changes that she and her team have brought about have more than paid off. In 2006, 26,000 visitors spent time on the island; in 2013, the figure soared to 398,000.

Koch figured out that to draw New Yorkers to the island the Trust would have to offer something unavailable elsewhere in the city. “Many people don’t have a platform for what they would like to present because most venues are too expensive for them to afford,” she says after welcoming a visitor at Soissons ferry landing. “The Trust could offer them that. All they’d have to do is to get a permit, and they could put up sculpture, hold dance performances or cooking demonstrations—it doesn’t matter.

Photo by Guru Sno Studios / Flickr Creative Commons license.

BY VALERIE GLADSTONE

ON LOCATION

ABOVE: Ann Ha and Behrang Behin’s Living Pavilion was built for the 2010 FIGMENT festival and was the winner of the City of Dreams Pavilion Competition. TOP: Yankee Hanger by Mark Handforth, who was commissioned by the Trust for Governors Island to create several works. OPPOSITE: FY-Langes, an installation at FIGMENT 2012.

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Memorial Day weekend through the last weekend in September, and the island will now be open to visitors seven, rather than three, days a week. Additionally, 30 new acres of park and public spaces will become available for public use in May, as well as The Hills (composed of recycled construction and fill materials) on the southern half of the island, which will rise 25 to 80 feet. From the tallest point, visitors will get a 360-degree panorama of the Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor, and the Lower Manhattan skyline.

Dressed for the weather in sturdy boots and heavy jacket, her reddish blond hair unprotected from the sleet, Koch climbs into the golf cart that she uses for transportation when not on her bike. There are no cars or roads. Everything is covered with snow, the hickory, oak, and chestnut trees bending under the weight. The Dutch named it Nutten Island for these nut-producing trees, after they bought it from its Native owners in 1637. To get to the Hills, we pass by the handsome Victorian and Romanesque Revival houses dating from the mid-nineteenth century. “They are all landmarked,” she says. “In the summer, we open them up for arts programming.”

We arrive at one of the three recently commissioned works, Mark Handforth’s Phone in Tree, which is literally a huge blue phone hanging on the branch of a tree. Looking at it from the neo-Georgian Liggett Hall Arch, she points out how it draws the eye to the vast expanse of sky and the Statue of Liberty just offshore. His second sculpture, the bright yellow and very cheerful Saffron Star, stands, slightly tilted, in front of the South Battery. He likes to use recognizable shapes.

Handforth was among the first to benefit from the Trust’s new art commission program, which invites a small group of artists to respond to the island and its many layers of meaning.

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BOTTOM: Photo by Jessica Sheridan / JessyeAnne / Flickr Creative Commons license. TOP: Photo by Timothy Schenck Photography, courtesy the Trust for Governors Island.

I like the idea of New Yorkers creating events and experiences for other New Yorkers. To me, the key agents are arts, culture, and design—and by culture, I also include food and anything else that makes us people.”

In the coming months, an even greater number of visitors should be drawn to the island. The season now stretches from

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It allows them time to explore, understand, and respond to the traditional bugle call is played every evening at every American actual landscape, history, emerging democratic culture, and military base in the world but also at the funeral of every veteran. symbolic and physical transformation. Created for the site, Once back in her high-ceilinged, old-fashioned office, the pieces will be long-term installations. “Mark’s sculptures decorated with colorful posters from past events, Koch embody the spirit of the island as a place for art and play,” Koch elaborates on how the Trust works. “We don’t select,” she says, says, “and respond with subtle irony to the new landscapes.” “and we’re not partners with the people who bring their projects Figuring out what works on the island isn’t necessarily easy, here. It’s completely open—we want young, emerging artists as however, Eccles explained later. “While it seems ideal for public well as established artists. The point is to allow them to create works, its size and open spaces can be daunting. It’s also a an experience. We’re asking, ‘What is a performance?’ and challenge because of the many events that take place there,” he intentionally blurring the lines between traditional cultural says. “You don’t want to tell people to be careful when they’ve experiences and what’s new and happening now.” The Trust has come out for a day of fun. We had to thoroughly consider what never turned anyone down. we would put up and where. But the freewheeling aspect of the Koch spreads out other posters, to give some idea of the island means it’s a good place for art. People don’t come and go; range of groups that have presented work on the island. The they usually stay for the day.”

Trust creates posters for them all. They have included the Handforth enjoyed the challenge. “Governors Island is an International Center for Photography, the New-York Historical unusual place for sure,” he says, “with a very strange history Society, the Sculptors Guild, the Unicycle Festival, the Jazz and a different kind of role even now—not exactly a park, not Age Lawn Party, FIGMENT, the Earth Matter Compost Learning exactly a monument, kind of a wild chunk of nature in the Center, Rite of Summer Music Festival, and choreographer Jody bay but also originally mannered and ordered by the military. Oberfelder Projects. Among the most unusual was Fête Paradiso, People do what they please and the island lives for all kinds of a collection of vintage carousels. In 2011–2012, Storm King Art disparate events and energies. Clearly any artwork there has to Center exhibited Mark di Suvero sculptures all over the island. hold its own, while also engaging with all that craziness and “Since 2006,” Koch says, “our trademark has been freedom, playing with it, loving it. I’m hoping my work will engage with offering organizations both free space and free rein to create people at whatever level they’re approaching it—the full gamut exhibitions, events, and experiences without a traditional of experience.” selection, funding, or curatorial process.” The Trust’s program He selected materials that float and stay loose, for their ability, OpenHouseGI continues in 2014, with more than 150,000 square as he says, “to weather the weather.” The bronze will blacken feet of indoor space in the island’s historic homes and acres of but not weaken, the cast iron will rust but not fade, and the green space available for the special mix of free cultural and painted aluminum surfaces are bold and graphic and will stay recreational programming that have made the island lively that way. “People go to the island and enjoy it in many different and loved. ways for many different reasons,” he says. “I tried to make work “We embrace the diversity, risk, and serendipity that come that would speak to that messy freedom but not cramp it. If with our open process,” Koch says, “but we also recognize the art is a conversation, then you could really talk to all kinds of unique opportunity the island offers artists. There is truly no people there.” other site like it in the nation, and few in the world.”

Sound artist Susan Philipsz’s piece Day is Done had not yet been installed for the season in Liggett Terrace, but Koch waxed lyrical about its haunting beauty. Simply an aural experience, VALERIE GLADSTONE writes about the arts for the New York Times, it consists of the playing of “Taps” over speakers every evening. the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, ARTnews, Metropolis, The hope is to connect every visitor not only with the island’s and many other publications. She has published books on the past but also to larger themes of military culture and death. The visual arts and dance.

BOOKS &BOOKS MEDIA Publications and reviews

Tag Team

New insights into the world of contemporary graffiti art

BY SHAUNA DEE BOMB IT 2

Photos Courtesy courtesy Hybrid Cinema.

Photo of Hybrid Cinema

is the information and communications coordinator at Forecast Public Art.

SHAUNA DEE

85 BOOKS

Jon Reiss’s documentary of unexplored graffiti scenes in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Australia, and other locations features more than 20 artists in 11 cities in 73 minutes. It’s a frenetic pace that mirrors the movement of the artists as they spray the contents of their minds onto walls and objects. Some wear masks and work with urgency, given the varied acceptance of graffiti in different locales. Jumping among cities around the world, from the West Bank to Copenhagen to Perth, the documentary provides a diverse array of contexts in which contemporary graffiti artists work.

Unlike 2007’s acclaimed Bomb It, Bomb It 2 skips the history lesson, affording Reiss more room to explore today’s graffiti art scene at ground level. The sequel is noticeably stripped down in another way: the filmmaker’s equipment was necessarily compact, since he functioned as producer, director, and soundman, as well as cameraman in places without easy access. While on location, he climbed into a sewer, visited a red-ant-infested building, and fractured his ankle in the Estonian hall of fame.

“I am particularly fascinated in how each culture (and each person) takes this art form and makes it their own,” says Reiss. “Tel Aviv and the refugee camps of Bethlehem couldn’t be more different. The former is on the verge of a street art explosion similar to Barcelona in the early ’90s. In the West Bank, graffiti is much more about a political statement and ‘art’ is often viewed as reconciliation.”

Reiss is an independent filmmaker who explores and writes about innovative ways to market and distribute films (Hybrid, DIY, P2P independent distribution, and “direct to fan”).

Artists featured in the film include Ash Keating, Alex Face, Ayed, Beejoir, Bon, Darbotz, Foma, Great Bates, Husk Mit Navn, Inspire, Killer Gerbil, Klone, Know Hope, Muhnned Alazzh, Mars, MIC, Phibs, Sloke, Stormie Mills, Thor, TwoOne, Vexta, Victor Ash, Xeme, and Zero. It was filmed on location in Singapore, Bangkok, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Perth, Melbourne, Copenhagen, Chicago, Austin, and the Palestinian refugee camps on the West Bank.

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Produced and directed

by Jon Reiss Released August 6, 2013, on iTunes and Amazon; November 5 on DVD

Scene from the documentary Bomb It 2.

GRAFFITI SCHOOL: A Student Guide with Teacher’s Manual Christoph Ganter New York: Thames & Hudson, 2013

Public perception of graffiti has changed radically in the past 50 years. Here now is a textbook to teach students not only the history of graffiti, but also how to create it.

Ganter, a teacher and graffiti artist who lives in Germany and works under the tag “Jeroo,” offers tips on handling a spray can, creating a unique tag, and getting work up safely and legally. Various effects and styles are covered, including bubblestyle, blockbusters, and wildstyle. The teacher’s manual at the end of the textbook features sample plans for a single lesson as well as guidance on structuring a longer course.

BOOKS

Less Starving

Artists share their secrets on making a living from their work

BY JEN DOLEN

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LIVING AND SUSTAINING A CREATIVE LIFE: Essays by 40 Working Artists Sharon Louden, editor Chicago: Intellect, 2013

BOOKS

Although artists are inundated with an overflow of wisdom on how to feed their muses, advice slows to a trickle on how to feed their families. Editor and artist Sharon Louden explores the latter in this personable, easy-to-read volume of pragmatic artist testimonies.

Forty essays and interviews with artists such as Amy Pleasant, Austin Thomas, and Julie Heffernan collectively answer the question Louden asked herself after graduating: How am I going to sustain a creative practice while trying to survive?

This down-to-earth collection offers simple nourishment: Creative people can nurture a creative life. The selections can be read at random or devoured in sequence. Fittingly, each chapter begins with a large color reproduction of the featured artist’s work—

the creative life they wish to sustain—followed by their written input on how to practically support such work.

Each artist brings a unique voice to the volume. New York artist Blane de St. Croix thrives on a schedule, enjoys company in the studio, and calls himself “an artist first,” but also feels that teaching supports a dialog and keeps him “connected to the next generation.” Jenny Marketou was “surviving on a teacher’s salary with no benefits or health care,” before she transitioned into full-time status as a self-employed artist. Michael Waugh, with his English graduate degree, recalls the social difficulties of growing up “secretly dreaming of being an artist,” while Thomas Kilpper notes that an artist’s work is “25/8, not 24/7.”

Though their art—and their journeys—vary, these artists share similarities. Many live by strict schedules or self-imposed rules.

Many teach, and many don’t. Some work more than one job while some live by art sales. Most discuss choices, risks, family, budgets, studio spaces, and homes. A few, like printmaker Justin Quinn, confess larger-than-life art career fantasies. “My art career is so different from this fantasy that it’s almost funny—but it’s what I have and it’s sustainable, and I’m totally into it.” Many reveal uncertainty along with satisfaction. All prioritize creative time.

JEN DOLEN is a photographer and writer based in Minneapolis/St.

Paul and is an editorial assistant for Public Art Review.

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EGAWA + ZBRYK,

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HUETHER,

ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC.,

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BOOKS

C’mon, Get Happy

PROJECTS

A look at how cities make us miserable —and what can be done about it

BY THOMAS FISHER

Shepherd Steiner London: Afterall Books / Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013

HAPPY CITY: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

in having more space and possessions.

Research into the causes of happiness, writes Montgomery, shows just the opposite. People report greater happiness living in denser and more accessible, affordable, and diverse communities that provide most necessities within walking distance and a higher likelihood of casually encountering people we know. Slowness, not speed, and purpose, not possessions, make us happiest.

Montgomery devotes most of the book to urban design issues: creating more pedestrian-friendly public space, bike-friendly streets, shopper-friendly sidewalks, and child-friendly cities. His analysis, though, shows why we need public art: It attracts our attention and prompts us to gather with other people or simply to slow down and take the time to reflect. This does not mean that the art itself should be about “happiness.”

Nor can art, any more than the city itself, make us happy; the source of that lies inside each one of us. But the postwar American city has made a lot of people unhappy and unhealthy with an increasingly isolated, sedentary existence, and we should do what we can to remove the obstacles to happiness with human-scaled, pedestrian-friendly places that accommodate a wide spectrum of activity—including public art.

It matters, though, where we locate public art. Although Montgomery doesn’t directly address this, his argument suggests that public art placed along a highway, for instance, or in an isolated location where relatively few people will stop or gather may do little for us. Making the driving experience more pleasurable with roadside art may have some value, but I suspect Montgomery would see this as embellishing the unhappy city rather than using public art to create a happier one. Public artists, of course, do not always have a say in where their work goes, but Montgomery’s book should cause us at least to ask: Aren’t the placement and the placemaking potential of public art as important as the art itself?

THOMAS FISHER is the Dean of the College of Design at the University

A SPACE CALLED PUBLIC Ingar Dragset, Michael Elmgreen, Nan Mellinger, Eva Kraus, editors Köln, Germany: Walther Konig, 2014

A chronicle of the temporary exhibit A Space Called Public in Munich’s city center, this title explores the special meaning (in both essays and pictures) behind the 17 different artworks that the show comprised. Each piece provoked questions about both Munich and the changing nature of public spaces around the world.

ROSALIE: LightScapes Peter Weibel, editor Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2013

In 2013, Stuttgart-based artist Rosalie introduced new concepts to the genre of light art with three large-scale, kinetic, and interactive light and space sculptures for the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig. Rosalie: LightScapes documents these and other works in fullpage color photographs. Included with the publication is a DVD that shows the artist’s works in motion. An augmented reality app is available.

87 BOOKS

Although not explicitly about public art, this book by journalist Charles Montgomery gives plenty of reasons why we need public art in our cities and where such art should be placed to have the greatest effect. Montgomery makes a compelling case that the cities we have built, especially in the United States since World War II, have made Americans “sicker, fatter, more frustrated, socially isolated, and broke” with our dependence upon automobiles, our dispersal of human activity, and our delusion that happiness lies

This title is an illustrated study of Phonokinetoscope (2001), a performance piece in which Graham rides a bicycle around Berlin while high on LSD. Captured in a five-minute film, the performance confronts issues of topology, irony, and memory—and has helped shape the ways audiences understand public and performance art.

PUBLICARTREVIEW|SPRING/SUMMER2014|PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Charles Montgomery New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013

of Minnesota.

RODNEY GRAHAM: Phonokinetoscope

Metro congratulates artists Phung Huynh and Martin Durazo for their public art contributions to our transit system.

Measure R, approved by a two-thirds majority vote in California, commits a projected $40 billion to tra;c relief and transportation upgrades throughout Los Angeles County over the next 30 years. Artwork enhancements are a result of this bold funding initiative.

To learn more, or to add your name to our email list for information about upcoming opportunities for artists, visit metro.net/art. facebook.com/metroartla

14-1822ps Š2014 lacmta

Metro has commissioned artists for a wide array of projects throughout Los Angeles County.

BOOKS

The Case for Problem-Solving

How can artists effectively solve problems and make the world a better place?

BY LAUREN BEDOSKY

THE WORK OF ART IN THE WORLD: Civic Agency and Public Humanities Doris Sommer North Carolina: Duke University Press, January 2014

DALLAS LOVE FIELD The Dallas Love Field Art Program enriches the public’s travel experience through the collection of 15 works of public art found throughout the airport. In 2014, 11 new commissions join three existing works acquired for the airport between 1957 and 2003. The Art Program embraces themes of flight, the history of Dallas and Love Field Airport.

’s PUBLIC ART Two new works are featured at the terminal entrance. Diana Goldberg and Julie Cohn’s Luminaria and Tom Orr’s Intersected Passage are among six works in the collection created by Texas artists. The Love Field Art Program is a joint project of the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs, Department of Aviation, Southwest Airlines and the Love Field Modernization Project.

Luminaria Artists: Diana Goldberg and Julie Cohn

To learn more, please visit: WWW.LOVEFIELDARTPROGRAM.COM or WWW.DALLASCULTURE.ORG/COLLECTION.ASP

Intersected Passage Artist: Tom Orr

89 BOOKS

LAUREN BEDOSKY is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis/St.Paul.

She is also an editorial assistant at Public Art Review.

PUBLICARTREVIEW|SPRING/SUMMER2014|PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

College arts and humanities funding has declined, as many students, school administrators, and everyday citizens question the value of art in addressing the pressing issues of our times. This is a mistake, according to Doris Sommer, a language, literature, and African/ African-American studies professor at Harvard. Sommer argues that creative people are uniquely positioned to generate effective solutions to social issues. Further, she challenges her fellow humanists to step beyond conceptual boundaries and become agents of cultural change.

Sommer demonstrates through real-life examples that artists are transforming societies where traditional approaches failed.

One noteworthy example is that of Antanas Mockus, the philosopher-turned-mayor who reformed the famously dangerous Bogotá, Colombia. During his two terms (1995–1997 and 2001–2003), Mockus reduced the homicide rate by 67 percent and traffic deaths by 51 percent by asking himself, “What would an artist do?”

To begin, he hired mimes to encourage obedience of traffic laws by turning offenders into subjects of ridicule and giving kudos to those who followed the rules. Fifteen hundred stars representing pedestrian deaths were painted on the streets as a call to greater alertness.

And weekly “Rock the Parks” concerts gave youth a safe platform for engaging with public space after dark.

Sommer uses such illustrations to present a convincing case for the transformative power of art, and the need for humanists to exert their creative thinking skills outside the classroom—especially in solving civic issues that have resisted more traditional approaches. Sommer writes, “Artists think critically to interpret existing material into new forms. How else can one imagine and then realize a project—including social, political, or economic development?”

BOOKS

PROJECTS CROSSOVER

HÉLIO OITICICA: The Great Labyrinth

Cecil Balmond London: Prestel, 2013

Susanne Gaensheimer and Cruz, editors Frankfurt: Hatje Cantz, 2014

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This dense, rich book by artist-architect Balmond is a compilation of his plans, sketches, and written notes about his recent building projects (including collaborations with Anish Kapoor and Rem Koolhaas).

It is both an explanatory guide and an art project all its own.

PEPÓN OSORIO

Friedrich Achleitner Zurich: Park Books, 2014

Jennifer A. Gonzalez Los Angeles: UCLA CSRC Press, 2013

This work is a visual anthology of Bogdan Bogdanovic’s striking surrealist memorials that dot the landscape of Eastern Europe, from Croatia to Montenegro to Macedonia.

The artist’s works hold a special place in European public art; they commemorate life in a way that is unique in the sculptural history of memorials—and they stand alone as seminal artworks in the context of European modernism.

BOOKS

A thoughtful, fully illustrated survey of Osorio’s collaborative, site-based works, this book explores the same themes as Osorio’s installation art: prison life, domestic violence, AIDS, poverty, death, gender, survival, alienation, and belonging. Taken together, the essays create a powerful narrative of a transformative artist.

PEOPLE

ROBERT INDIANA: The Monumental Woods

MEL CHIN: Rematch

Krystyna Gmurzynska, Mathias Rastorfer, and Mitchell Anderson, editors Zurich: Galerie Gmurzynska, 2013

Miranda Lash, editor Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014

Published in conjunction with an exhibition by the same name at the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art, Mel Chin: Rematch spans the multimedia artist’s 40-year career. In addition to full-page photographs, Rematch includes essays from writers including Andrei Codrescu, Eleanor Heartney, and Patricia C. Phillips, who explore a variety of themes in Chin’s work, including social activism, surrealism, and identity politics.

Hinderer

Following in the footsteps of Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, artist Oiticica helped further democratize the concept of art by actively involving viewers in his presentations of multimedia works. This book compiles photos of Oiticica’s colorful, accessible work with his own writings on the subject.

A FLOWER FOR THE DEAD: The Memorials of Bogdan Bogdanovic

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Robert Indiana: The Monumental Woods showcases 50 years of the American wood sculptor’s works, many reproduced here for the first time. In addition to exhibition, archival, and detail photographs of Indiana’s sculptures, the book includes three artist interviews.

MISCELLANY PHILADELPHIA MURAL ARTS @ 30

CRITICAL LABORATORY: The Writings of Thomas Hirschhorn Lisa Lee and Hal Foster, editors Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013

This collection of Hirschhorn’s writings helps parse the meaning and message of the philosophically inclined artist’s major works. An aesthetically pleasing book with high-resolution photos, the tone discusses the full range of his art and underscores his commitment to the public sphere.

Jane Golden and David Updike, editors Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014

At 30 years old, the Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia has been an unqualified success, sparking the creation of more than 3,800 murals and public art projects that have made lasting impressions on every neighborhood in the city. This latest book about the ongoing project uses essays and photos to highlight the 21 installations completed since 2009.

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STREET-ART BRAZIL Carolin Köchling and Max Hollein, editors Köln, Germany: Walther König, 2013

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AESTHETICS OF INTERACTION IN DIGITAL ART Katja Kwastek Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013

OR TH TED F SELEC

This text-heavy tome by art historian Kwastek offers readers a set of tools for understanding and analyzing both new-media art and other contemporary art forms.

Suitable for both artists and theoreticians, the book explores the history and terminology of interactive art and highlights exemplary case studies.

THE FREAK-GARDE: Extraordinary Bodies and Revolutionary Art in America Robin Blyn Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013

Photo: Scott Groller

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In this title, storied urban planner Weiming Lu showcases his revitalization and redevelopment work in St. Paul, Minnesota —and contemplates the most important elements in any urban rejuvenation program for any city looking to transform certain neighborhoods.

LIFIE

Weiming Lu Edina, MN: Beaver’s Pond Press, 2013

-QUA E PRE

English-professor Blyn traces the history of the freak show in America, while highlighting seminal artists and writers who have appropriated freak show art—from Mark Twain to Nathanael West and Diane Arbus—to create powerful, memorable work. This book offers a more nuanced understanding of the art of human curiosity.

THE TAO OF URBAN REJUVENATION: Building a Livable Creative Urban Village

beles Kim A iga Aguin a irre Tany io Agu n o t n A e s o n J to Apple Steven Aschheim h a Debor aca Judy B Studio ogues r Ball-N altaza ulino B a P l u Ra RK DWO BROO lo Castil n y Cha Audre g n e h Carl C Loza a de la Sandr r Duckle Heidi d olan Electr r Emdu e s ly A nberg e r E Sam ndez Ferna Fausto en art Cliff G iffith ret Gr Marga er c a H do Gerar o Kain n Glenn Karlse Marie e n n A r e Kasp Dawn shi obaya K p ip K s n o mm LA Co ns a v E ri/ Lazza eci o Log r Susan ry w o L a c Rebec ject o r P ine Mach ehle son/J Mallin nn Ma Elana dez a Mén Rebec in M e Yunhe uralLab eM Mobil ker el Par a h ic M s Kinetic Poetic y e v r u Faith P jas Ro James ssetti ind Ro r a m a T b lu Ink C Sumi n u May S song Jane T ura Uyem Nancy eca V n a De Mark e Whit Emily n Woo e t s Ro ellen Jody Z ein iperst Z i r Ba

MEET

In recognition of the country’s dynamic street art scene, Brazil was presented as the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2013 for the second time. Eleven graffiti artists and artist groups were invited to exhibit works in urban areas throughout Frankfurt. The various works are presented in this photorich publication.

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www.lacountyarts.org/TheList

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Left to Right = The Light at the End of the Tunnel Right to Left = Loco/motion Painted panels, 2013

Casey Droege In this mural, an equation is used to evaluate the desires, relationships and external forces of our everyday lives. Using the language of mathematics it seeks answers to the seemingly unquantifiable. Take a moment to do the math in each direction.

Special thanks to Nicholas Chambers, Milton Fine Curator of Art at the Andy Warhol Museum. This project could not have been completed without help from the following: Derya Hanife Altan, Mark Clowney, Chris Siefert, Kristen Staab, AJ Tarnas, Linda Wallen and Alison Zapata.

photo by: Ed Massery

3 THREE *** distant memory Digital print on vinyl, 2012

Dick Esterle In the process of creating this image, the artist started with a series of three waves and ended with three stars. Walking along or driving by at different distances and times, perceptions of image and memory shift, altering our experience.

UNDERPASS Public Art Gallery is a Charm Bracelet Project of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh and is made possible by The Heinz Endowments with additional support provided by The Grable Foundation, NRG Energy, Inc., Norfolk Southern Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts. Special thanks to NRG Energy Center Pittsburgh, LLC. For more information, please visit www.charmbraceletproject.org.

photo by: Jim Schafer

PLACEMAKERS.us art projects across America are building communities and

REINVENTING PLACE

Check out our podcasts and videos from The 2013 Art of Placemaking Conference A WaterFire Providence project supported by ArtPlace America.

http://placemakers.us

ADVERTISERS IN THIS ISSUE Art in Odd Places 12-13 artinoddplaces.org

Janet Echelman, Inc. 100 echelman.com

Artifacture / Clark Wiegman

Kansas City Municipal Art Commission 88 kcmo.gov

10 artifacture.org

ArtOrg 08 artorg.info

Larson/Cramer Studio

Arts & Science Council

Los Angeles County Arts Commission 93 lacountyarts.org

72 artsandscience.org

36 larson-cramer.com

ArtWorks 95 artworkscincinnati.org

McKay Lodge Conservation Laboratory

Broward Cultural Division

Metro Art 26, 90 metro.net

32 broward.org

04

mckaylodge.com

C Glass Studio 95 cglassstudio.com

Middlebury College Museum of Art 36

Chapel Hill/Orange Co. Visitors Bureau 99 townofchapelhill.org

Mosaika Art & Design 46-47 mosaika.com

Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh

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pittsburghkids.org

Peters Studios 38 peters-studios.com

City of Albuquerque, Public Art

88

cabq.gov

Philadelphia Mural Arts Program

City of Austin, Art in Public Places 86

austintexas.gov

82

museum.middlebury.edu

muralarts.org

Plains Art Museum 32 plainsart.org

City of Dallas, Office of Cultural Affairs 91 dallasculture.org

San Francisco Arts Commission

City of Palm Desert 14 cityofpalmdesert.org

Scottsdale Public Art 34 scottsdalepublicart.org

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sfartscommission.org

cultureNOW 02 culturenow.org

Seattle Office of Arts and Culture 32

Destination Rapid City

Vicki Scuri Siteworks 06 vickiscuri.com

72, 96

downtownrapidcity.com

Fort Worth Public Art 72 fwpublicart.org Franz Mayer of Munich

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seattle.gov/arts

WaterFire Providence 94 waterfire.org

mayer-of-munich.com

HOW TO ADVERTISE Visit PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG for current magazine articles, photos, and videos.

Contact our advertising sales representative for information and ad rates: email: ads@forecastpublicart.org / phone: 651.641.1128 ext. 105

Glass and Metal Artwork

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email: cw@CglassStudio.com

ART IN THE MAKING

Main Street Square, Downtown Rapid City, South Dakota Watch artist Masayuki Nagase at work as he transforms 21 pieces of granite into The Sculpture Project: Passage of Wind and Water. See and touch completed stones. Free.

The artwork is a tribute to the local community and a gateway to the area’s famous granite sculptures, Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse.

Main Street Square is a vibrant public space active year-round with arts and culture for the whole family, in the midst of Downtown Rapid City’s shopping, dining and entertainment district.

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Main Street Square | 526 Main St. | Rapid City | South Dakota 605.716.7979 | www.RCSculptureProject.com

FORECAST NEWS

CONSULTING

Photo by Deacon Warner.

ARTIST SERVICES In 2014, Forecast celebrates the 25th anniversary of our Artist Services program, which has helped fund more than 300 compelling and completely different projects. We are marking the occasion by partnering with the Independent Filmmaker Project MN (IFP). Filmmakers were paired with artists to create short documentaries of each artist’s work over the course of their grant year. The films debuted at the 2014 Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and will be featured on forecastpublicart.org.

We are proud to announce our 2014 grantees. Mankwe Ndosi was the recipient of our McKnight Project Grant. Ndosi’s public work is in the

realm of music and song. With support from Forecast she will create a soundtrack unique to Minneapolis’s Phillips neighborhood, which will be available digitally and at neighborhood listening posts. The soundtrack will include contributions from residents, filed recordings, and Ndosi’s own vocal work.

McKnight Professional Development Grants were awarded to Lisa Bergh and Andrew Nordin for their collaborative project Traveling Museum and to Andrea Steudel for work relating to public lighting infrastructure opportunities. Jerome Emerging Artist Project funding was awarded to Jessica Hirsch and Mara Pelecis. Jerome Planning Grants were awarded to Ady Olson, Emily Stover, Aaron Squadroni, and Crescent Collective collaborators Laura Bigger, Artemis Ettsen, and Teréz Iacovino.

To further support artists’ development we launched Making it Public: Lowertown Sessions in the Lowertown neighborhood of St. Paul. This fourpart series was created for those new to working in the public arena at a time of increasing invitations for artists to participate in public space design and civic engagement projects in the region.

EDUCATION Forecast Public Art continues to host community events designed to create platforms for dialogue and learning that will support a connected and aware public art ecosystem. This spring’s OpenSpace/OpenBar, a regular event that brings together artists and community members, was held in partnership with Joan Vorderbruggen of the Hennepin Theatre Trust’s new storefront window initiative Made Here (see a video about Vorderbruggen’s work at forecastpublicart.org). At the Forecast-hosted Public Art Scrambler annual community meeting, regional public art administrators and professionals explored crowdsourcing content for this year’s Scrambler workshops and presentations.

Fabrication of Connections Gallery, a permanent work at Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High School being co-created with artist Randy Walker, is under way. The sculpture is designed to showcase student-created art, so educators are gearing up to begin offering curriculum that is focused on creating the first installation.

St. Paul’s Gordon Parks High School students are working with graffiti artist and activist Peyton Scott Russell to create portable works of art that convey messages about their school and identity to a larger public audience.

Once the art is completed, students will activate their work by designing a plan for taking their ideas to the streets and engaging the community.

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This year, Forecast Public Art’s consulting program is busy with a very diverse collection of projects, from research and planning to managing new commissions in the Midwest to giving lectures in communities across the country.

Planning is under way for a National Gordon Parks Memorial to be located in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, where Parks, a legendary photographer, composer, filmmaker, author, and humanitarian, spent his formative years. For a person referred to as a “modern-day Renaissance man,” a traditional statue is not necessarily the best approach, so Forecast, together with SoulTouch Productions (headed by Parks’s great niece Robin Hickman) is leading a series of focus groups and stakeholder meetings to determine the most appropriate and feasible strategy.

New commissions and design efforts are under way in the region, involving several Minnesota-based organizations such as the St. Louis County Government Services Center in Duluth, Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Stillwater, Model Cities in St. Paul, and Excelsior’s public library.

In March, a yearlong effort with Hennepin County’s Northeast Library resulted in the installation of a 40-foot-long photographic frieze featuring a montage of compelling images representing the work of 40 northeast Minneapolis visual artists—a fitting tribute to the neighborhood in this region with the most artists per square foot.

Several suburban communities have engaged Forecast in planning efforts this year, including the Minnesota cities of Eagan, Maplewood, and Hopkins. In the past few months, lectures or workshops have been presented in Chicago, Illinois; Grand Forks, North Dakota; St. Louis, Missouri; and Roanoke and Charlottesville, Virginia. For more information about Forecast’s consulting services or booking a lecture, please contact us at 651.641.1128.

PUBLICARTREVIEW|SPRING/SUMMER2014|PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Through an initiative of Forecast Public Art’s education program, students at Gordon Parks High School in St. Paul, Minnesota, are working with artist Peyton Scott Russell.

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Spanish artist Isaac Cordal created more than 2,000 tiny cement figures and several concrete buildings for his 2013 Follow the Leaders installation in Nantes, Frances. Representing the collapse of capitalism and the side effects of progress, the pieces in this work—including this scene in rubble and a now-famous scene of leaders talking while up to their necks in water that went viral online—make up a kind of city in ruins. “These pieces reflect our own decline,” Cordal has said. “We live immersed in the collapse of a system that needs change.”

Photo courtesy Isaac Cordal.

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Follow the Leaders