Public Art Review issue 58 - 2019

PLACE

Issue 58 • Powerful Spaces • Memorial for Peace and Justice • WTC Subway Mosaic • Katastwóf Karavan • Permitting at the Border

COLOR

Public Art Review

LIGHT

DREAM, KNOW, ACT: BUSINESS PERMITTING AT THE BORDER

Columbia, MD

Issue 58 • 2019 • forecastpublicart.org

POWERFUL

SPACES Artists and designers make room for healing, collaboration, learning, remembering, justice —and more

Kara Walker, creator of The Katastwóf Karavan

VICKI SCURI SITEWORKS

2018

© vickiscuri.com vicki@vickiscuri.com 206 930 1769

NATIONAL MEMORIAL FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE

Public Art Review

58

Merriweather Parking Garage “Rainbow Sunset” Client: The Howard Hughes Corporation Prime Team: Howard Hughes Design Build

HUMAN RIGHTS MOSAICS IN WORLD TRADE CENTER SUBWAY STATION

$30.00 USD

Philip Noyed Leap of Joy 2017, Mixed media

INSPIRING CONNECTIONS Beautifully nestled between the Mill City and the Capital City, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is well known for connecting people to destinations around the globe.

MSP also connects travelers to local artists and musicians through its robust Arts@MSP program.

Musicians perform daily. A series of ongoing, rotating exhibits, combined with multiple permanent, large-scale commissioned pieces, enhance the sense of community between local and regional artists and travelers from across the world.

Next time you’re in MSP, look up, look around, listen and experience Arts@MSP.

Arts@MSP is a program of Airport Foundation MSP, a 501 (c3) non-profit organization, dedicated to enhancing the experience of travelers coming through MSP International Airport

FRANZ MAYER OF MUNICH est. 1847 Stained Glass, Architectural Art Glass and Mosaic US office: 1-212-661-1694 E-mail: info@mayer-of-munich.com www.mayer-of-munich.com

Detail of work in progress, Ann Hamilton, CHORUS, for WTC Cortlandt Street Subway Station, New York (comissioned by MTA Arts & Design), 2018, Photo: Markus Jans

follow us on instagram @mayerofmunich

Public Art Review Issue 58 • 2019 • Volume 30

FEATURES POWERFUL SPACES

15 Projects / 103 Pages 18 Introduction 20

28

A Steam-Powered Statement Kara Walker’s The Katastwóf Karavan A “Home” Open to the World CarryOn Homes by Peng Wu, Shun Jie Yong, Zoe Cinel, Aki Shibata, and Preston Drum

68 A Serene, Healing Space

Healing Pavilion, designed by Ball-Nogues Studio 74 A Pop-Up Design Lab in a Madrid Plaza

Mountain on the Moon by Enorme Studio and MINI Hub

80 The Presence of Others

coming home by Lava Mae, ZERO1, and collaborators

38 Permission to Dream, Know, and Act

Taller de Permiso by Las Imaginistas

84 For Love of a Neighborhood

Cook Inlet Housing Authority’s Church of Love

44 Firehouse Celebration Against Incarceration

Bring Down the Walls, created by Phil

Collins, The Fortune Society, and Creative Time

90 On “Being a Woman and Painting in the Street”

Mujeres que pintan en la calle by Mariela Ajras

54 Citizenship Explored and Expanded

Dimensions of Citizenship, the U.S. contribution

to Venice Architecture Biennale 62 Without Shelter: The Ones in the Water

Ann Hirsch and Jeremy Angier’s

Safety Orange Swimmers (SOS)

94 Taking Ownership

The community houses of Power House Productions 100 Serenity in Steel

Chris Cornelius’s Wiikiaami 106 Facing the Reality of Racial Terror

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice,

from the Equal Justice Initiative 114 Words to Reunite Us

CHORUS by Ann Hamilton

at WTC Cortlandt subway station All articles in this special section were written

by Public Art Review senior editor Jon Spayde

ON THE COVER Renowned artist Kara Walker created The Katastwóf Karavan, debuted in New Orleans, with musician Jason Moran and collaborators. Learn more on page 20. Photo by Ari Marcopoulos, Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

THIS PAGE An observer considers part of the “globe” exhibit, one of seven inside Dimensions of Citizenship, the U.S. pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Learn more on page 54. Photo © Tom Harris, courtesy the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.

LithoMosaics

honors Public Art Review on four decades of publishing the pop and circumstance of art in the public realm! Kudos also, to LithoMosaic artists, architects, licenses and clients who have created monumental public art since our inception.

Congratulations to All!

http://www.LithoMosaics.com. robinbrailsford@yahoo.comcom 619-468-9641

City of Albuquerque, NM Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority, NM AMANDA KLEMASKE ANNE MUDGE ARIELLE MASON Artistic Concrete, FL Atlanta Botanical Gardens, GA City of Avondale, AZ Belarde Company, WA* BMLA, CA County of Bernalillo, NM Bayshore Bikeway, CA BHAVNA MEHTA Bomanite Artistic Concrete, TX City of Brea, CA California Center for the Arts, CA CASSANDRA REID City of Chandler, AZ Chief Concrete, NV* CHRISTIE BENISTON Colorado Hardscapes, CO* City of Dana Point, CA DAVID O’BRIEN DAWN MENDELSON Disneyland, CA DORIS BITTAR Estrada Land Planning, CA City of Fontana, CA City of Glendale, CA Friends of La Jolla Shores, CA City of Henderson, NV Highway 101 Solana Beach, CA City of Hollywood, CA Houston Metro, TX J2 Engineering and Landscape Design, AZ KTU+A, CA KELSY HARTLEY KornRandolph Architects, CA City of Las Vegas, NV City of Lemon Grove, CA LESLIE SCOTT LGA Inc., NV City of Los Angeles, CA County of Los Angeles, CA Los Angeles Metro, CA Long Beach Transit, CA LUZ MACK Marin County Parks, CA MARY LUCKING MARY SHINDELL MATT DAEHMERS Miami Zoo, FL MIG, CA City of Moorpark, CA Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center, AK NAN MASLAND North Island Credit Union, CA Norris Design, AZ Progressive Concrete, AZ * City of Olympia, WA RACHEL RODI ROBIN BRAILSFORD RJM Design Group, CA RRM Design, CA St Regis Hotel, CA San Bernardino Rapid Transit, CA City of San Diego, CA City of Santee, CA City of Tempe, AZ City of Temple City, CA City of Queen Creek AZ Shaw & Sons, CA * Solana Beach School District, CA Southwick Landscape, NV Spurlock Landscape Architects, CA Studio Mia Lehrer, CA Studio Varone Architecture, CA STV Group, CA Sun Metro, TX SWA, CA TB Penick, CA * Trust for Public Land, CA Tucson Transit, AZ Universal Studios, CA VBN, CA City of Venice Beach, CA Walter and Mary Coakley Munk, CA City of Winter Haven, FL WICK ALEXANDER World of Concrete, NV

Public Art Review Issue 58 • 2019 • Volume 30

TOP: Photo by He-myong Woo. BOTTOM: Photo by Kate Levy for More Art.

DEPARTMENTS 10

8

PUBLISHER’S NOTE Resilience and Ingenuity

THERESA SWEETLAND

8

EDITOR’S NOTE Where We Can Be Together

KAREN OLSON

10 IN THE FIELD News, views, and ideas

10 In Neighborhood We Trust: New West Jackson/Nia Umoja

SARAH WESTLAKE

13 A Cultural Park for the Health of the Kids: Zuni/Joseph Claunch

KAREN OLSON

16 JACK AT LARGE A Change of Heart: Health and urban planning

JACK BECKER

122 BOOKS New publications

STAFF

128 LAST PAGE Night Watch: Silent film of those granted asylum

KAREN OLSON

128

the art of bringing art to the world

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Public Art Review ISSUE 58 • 2019 • VOLUME 30 • NUMBER 1

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PUBLISHER’S NOTE / EDITOR’S NOTE

Resilience and Ingenuity

BY THERESA SWEETLAND DURING PROFESSIONAL AND PERSONAL TRAVEL,

about creative placemaking. Like my own family, the artists I met in southeastern Kentucky come from generations of workers who’ve provided hard labor to heat or feed our country. Since the coal mines closed up, Appalachians have faced some of the most challenging economic and social conditions in our country. They are rebuilding, though, by connecting to the one asset that binds them to each other: art and culture.

It’s no wonder that when we at Forecast ask ourselves what has been at the core of our work for the last 40 years and what is the most compelling story to tell right now—in our work with communities and in the pages of Public Art Review— we look directly to the resilience and ingenuity of artists.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE / EDITOR’S NOTE

THERESA SWEETLAND is executive director of Forecast Public Art.

Where We Can Be Together

BY KAREN OLSON

that they love our “Projects We Love” department, which highlights new and inspiring public art and creative placemaking projects from across the country—and around the world. So we began this issue with a simple idea: add more pages and fill them almost entirely with “Projects We Love.”

To find as many new projects as we could, we reached out to our networks, searched the web, read the news, listened at conferences. We found so much important work that inspired us. When considering what truly moved us at this time in history, though,

a theme emerged. We were drawn to the work of artists and designers using their unique ability as creative visionaries, problem-solvers, and meaning-makers to create powerful spaces.

Today, in a highly divisive time, it’s crucial we find spaces where we can gather, heal, collaborate, play, learn, mourn, and face our challenges together. Our hope is that your experience reading or paging through this issue fills you with inspiration, a connection to meaning, and an infusion of beauty.

READERS OFTEN TELL US

KAREN OLSON

is editor in chief of Public Art Review.

Photos by Dan Marshall.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 30 | ISSUE 58 | FORECASTPUBLICART.ORG

8

I search alleys and parks for hidden public art gems. So I feel lucky that I regularly get invited to visit cities to speak, attend conferences, and meet artists. In the spring of 2018, I had two particularly memorable trips.

As part of a public art delegation from around the United States, I spent a week in Bahrain. We visited museums, art fairs, and historic monuments, and yet what I remember most are one-on-one conversations with courageous artists. Many artists were at the center of the initial protests during the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, some of them living under house arrest and curfews after martial law was in place. Today Bahrainian artists remain active, creating their own spaces to create and collaborate on the island and around the world.

My second trip was closer to home: through the mountains into the heart of Appalachia. I was there to learn

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IN THE FIELD News, Views, and Ideas

In Neighborhood We Trust Nia Umoja of New West Jackson, Mississippi, shares how the community is developing its own model for sustainability

BY SARAH WESTLAKE IN 2014, ARTPLACE AMERICA—a

10-year collaboration among foundations, federal agencies, and financial institutions that has supported 285 community planning and development efforts across the country—contributed funding to the Cooperative Community of New West Jackson (CCNWJ). The grant helped support this grassroots neighborhood collective, founded in 2013, as they built a new model for becoming a sustainable neighborhood from the ground up and the inside out.

The collective believed from the beginning that the people who live, work, and play in a neighborhood should be at the helm of any community envisioning process and directly benefit from any economic development as citizens, not just as consumers; that self-determination, self-reliance, selfrespect, and self-defense cast the vision for the community and determine its destiny; and that every resident has the right to contribute to the Cooperative’s development through participatory democracy.

Nia Umoja co-founded CCNWJ with her husband, Takuma Umoja, and they live in the neighborhood. She explains how this effort represented a first step toward reknitting the fabric of this fractured neighborhood and

how the collective has already met and surpassed its goals.

The Neighborhood Umoja offers a snapshot of New West Jackson. “There are 600 people—about 125 families—in our eight-block area. The whole of West Jackson has a population of 15,000. There is an 89 percent poverty rate in West Jackson, and it’s much higher in our eight-block model area, where 98 percent of residents are black,” she says. “In our neighborhood, everyone just walks to the mailbox to collect their unemployment and disability checks. The education in Mississippi is F-rated, and in this area there are no grocery stores or restaurants.”

At the same time, the collective saw from the beginning that the area had great wealth-building potential because of its central location, inexpensive commercial and residential property, and the unique character of the community. When they started their work, private developers and outside interest groups had already begun exploring the area for eventual gentrification, potentially bad news for local residents. So with local partners and grant money, CCNWJ discreetly began to acquire property.

IN THE FIELD

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Takuma and Nia Umoja, co-founders and lead organizers of CCNWJ. The Grenada Street Folk Garden, a neighborhood farm. Neighbors Mama Thigpen and Brenda pick up their CSA shares. Mulberry Tree Guesthouse interior. Neighbor TJ shows off one of his chickens. OPPOSITE: Youth apprentices harvest greens for the community’s CSA.

11 IN THE FIELD

Photos by He-myong Woo.

Nia and Takuma did all this with the community—not for it. “When we first arrived, we sat down with people and asked them what they needed,” she says. “Overwhelmingly they came up with three things: we need to make money, we need to clean up, and we need to have something for the kids to do. We did a skills assessment and found out that 95 percent had an agricultural background, so we decided to make a farm. We now operate a CSA (CommunitySupported Agriculture or, as we call it, Cooperatively Sharing Abundance) and have started selling surplus produce to the local food hub. For a two-person share, residents pay $5 for $40 worth of organic produce biweekly. If they work an hour a month their subscription is equally exchanged—they pay nothing. Residents are catching on, now starting to grow vegetables among flowers, planting small plot gardens in their backyards; even the old neighborhood drug kingpin is keeping chickens and growing food for sale. This is the start of what we hope will develop into a cooperative farmers’ market.”

Art in Community On top of all that, residents are learning how to add their own forms of artistic and cultural expression to the aesthetic of each creative reuse strategy and are beginning to understand that they have the ability to lead their own revitalization efforts. Community is being reintroduced in

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 30 | ISSUE 58 | FORECASTPUBLICART.ORG

What They’ve Achieved In a short five years since its inception, CCNWJ has built a farm and bought 65 properties, including homes, vacant lots, and commercially zoned property, for a total of $100,000. The group has worked on 16 of those properties in the last few years. They are also seeking to hold the properties in trust and eventually all the land in the neighborhood in an autonomous trust. In addition, they have created five guesthouses, including two Airbnb rentals, that now employ local residents as housekeepers and landscapers and have proved an exercise in thrifty good management and keen foresight.

“The Mulberry guesthouse cost $5,000 to buy,” says Umoja, referring to one of the Airbnb properties. “It cost $7,500 to fix up with reclaimed and salvaged materials, with all of the work being done by neighborhood residents and youth apprentices—what we call our neighbor labor crew.

In less than a year it has made $28,000 and all the money goes directly back into the project. The five guesthouses alone will bring in $15,000 per month when rented half the month, which will sustain our operations, including the youth apprentice program, and paying $15,000 per year in property taxes. Soon there’ll be a walk-up ice cream parlor, Appleshack (a fiber arts studio space), and a library in a tree.

People don’t want to leave anymore. They want to stay here and build and maintain their own homes.”

IN THE FIELD

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this area. Residents interact with each other based upon trust, respect, and reciprocity.

“We need creative thinkers on the ground modeling how we turn the place around,” Umoja says. “We are helping people reimagine what the place could be, what they could be. Arts and culture are an intrinsic expression relating people to place, and taking on a character that is dictated by community conditions given its historical and socioeconomic context. Through it, residents share their collective experiences, embrace their past, and determine their future together. Seeing their creative and physical labor put to work to transform their community allows the residents to begin to trust in their ability to develop their neighborhood in the way that best represents who they are. This process to stimulate and enhance creative action is art in itself.”

Nia and Takuma Umoja are leading residents in building a true cooperative by creating an environment where people can work together toward a viable alternative value system for the benefit of the neighborhood. Sounds like the Oxford dictionary definition of cooperative: involving mutual assistance in working towards a common goal.

“We are in the business of shifting people through the path to empowerment, taking them from despondency— living in a state of perpetual hopelessness because your future is uncertain—to determination, the understanding

that we control our destiny. CCNWJ residents are creating a cooperative economic development strategy that is building real community wealth and overall wellness,” says Umoja.

“This is a long-term vision, but it does not have to take 30 years. We have made tremendous change in five years. A change in people; how they think and feel. This is part of the artistic work of the creative placemaker. It’s my job to help people see the future. It’s my job to help people to see their potential. I am an artist and visionary, but definitely do not do this work alone! The process of engagement is one that meets people in the place where they are by creating pathways and opportunities for residents to engage in the work in the cultural comfort of their space at their own pace.

The values-driven artistic process has made transformation accessible and real for residents, restoring self-reliance, purpose, and creative vision.”

SARAH WESTLAKE is managing editor at ArtPlace America.

This August 2018 article first appeared as “Co-operation, Community and Creative Placemaking” in the ArtPlace blog at artplaceamerica.org. It was adapted, updated, and reprinted with permission of the author and Nia Umoja.

Learn more about CCNWJ at www.coopnwj.org.

IN THE FIELD

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A Cultural Park for the Health of the Kids Joseph Claunch of the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project describes how Zuni artists led the development of Ho’n A:wan Community Park INTERVIEW BY KAREN OLSON

in Tacoma, Washington, was 23 years old when he met some Zuni kids at a football camp at the University of New Mexico.

He recognized himself in them. “Meeting those kids really helped plant the seeds to give back to tribal communities and to work directly with kids to provide them opportunities to have a better life.”

So Claunch moved to Zuni, a Pueblo nation in New Mexico, in 2010 to become a teacher and coach. He soon recognized there were challenges he wasn’t helping his students to overcome. So he left in 2012 to get his PhD in sport and exercise psychology with a focus on youth development and motivation. He returned to Zuni in 2016 as co-director of the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project (ZYEP) with its founder, pediatrician Tom Faber, MD. ZYEP envisions a Zuni community where every child is able to reach his or her full potential and provides activities, primarily through sports leagues, summer camps, and mentorship, to build self-esteem. The organization was just beginning to develop a concept for a park that expands the definition of health.

“ZYEP’s vision for that park was to work with local artists to design a space that would promote cultural affirmation, the cultural transfer of knowledge, and inspiration and healing through the arts,” says Claunch. The organization

Photos courtesy Shiwisun Productions.

JOSEPH CLAUNCH, A MEMBER OF THE PUYALLUP TRIBE

received an ArtPlace Community Development Investment grant for the project.

“Zuni is a place where 80 percent of the adults self-identify as artists and many earn an income that way. It’s in every respect an artisan community,” he says. The project’s committee of artist became leaders throughout the development of the park. They include Jeff Shetima (carver), Carlton Jamon (silversmith), Edward Lewis (painter), Daryl Shack (carver), Noreen Simplicio (potter), Eldrick Seoutewa (silversmith), and April Unkestine (potter). “They have helped us design and create a park space that is integrating Zuni art into every aspect of the landscape.”

The Ho’n A:wan Community Park opened on September 29, 2018. Claunch shared with us how a youth development organization and community artists came together to create a place where kids can become healthier and stronger physically, spiritually, and psychologically.

TOP LEFT: An aerial view of Ho’n A:wan Community Park, which emphasizes sports, culture, and arts. TOP RIGHT: Muralist Keith Adaki wanted to find a way for all the kids to participate in a large-scale mural. He asked them What does it mean to be Zuni to you? The kids painted their ideas and designs as petroglyphs included in this 4’ by 8’ mural. Among other art projects not pictured, potter Noreen Simplicio worked with all 700 kids at the local elementary school to create a mural representing Zuni migration from the Grand Canyon to its current location.

Each child made a pottery shard and painted a traditional Zuni design on it.

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IN THE FIELD

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What were the beginnings of the Ho’n A:wan Community Park?

Zuni represents one of the most intact language and cultural systems, and longest continually inhabited villages, in North America. And so the passing along of traditions, of Zuni culture, of Zuni religious practices, is of the highest priority for local families. ZYEP recognizes that and has really aligned its mission and programs to reflect that. So building a park space that integrates traditional Zuni art in the landscape, and the type of art that reflects Zuni identity and history, makes sense.

When we had a meeting with local artists, about 15 showed up. The way they talked about caring for the youth and about what the youth needed—it was so aligned with our mission that bells and lights were going off for me. They could take youth development to a deeper level because they had grown up in Zuni. They were culture bearers, they were religious leaders, and they were artists. They had a different language and way of approaching youth development that was culturally responsive, with a deep sense of what local kids need.

The artists had these amazing ideas for how to build the space in a way that’s going to make families want to be there and engage in healthy activities, while also learning about Zuni history, gaining a deeper sense of who they are as Zuni people, of where they come from.

Could you describe the park?

The park includes a community center that has murals on the exterior walls and inside the building walls, that has Zuni art polished into the floor. It is a space where master artists are able to teach their craft to generations of younger Zuni students. The park also features a walking trail, a fullsize athletic turf field, a traditional community garden, and a basketball court.

What is the significance of the park’s location?

The park is in a neighborhood in the heart of Zuni’s main village next to really significant areas where the most important religious events happen. So we’ve designed the space with colors and features that would really blend in with the frequency of Zuni and be a cultural asset instead of a threat to those areas. The Zuni artists have advised us in how to do that every step of the way. An example would be instead of doing a chain-link fence around the perimeter to secure the space, we do coyote fencing made of local wood that the community has been using for thousands of years for fencing.

Zuni artists are world renowned for their skill and abilities.

But when you come into the Zuni community you don’t see public art. It’s not visible. We hope this park space will help

IN THE FIELD bring visibility to the brilliance of Zuni artists and inspire the next generations to carry on this excellence in the arts.

How does the park contribute to health of the community?

One of the religious leaders in the Zuni community expressed to us that we want our kids to be physically strong and active, but it’s really important that they are psychologically strong and spiritually strong. He felt that art being present in a space where kids are playing would give them a better understanding of who they are, where they come from, and the strength of their community. It would help in their development.

This is something our organization is continuing to evolve.

We’re ten years old. At first it was about making sure our kids were physically active and had something positive to do.

As we grow and as we learn about community needs from community members, we recognize that many of the health challenges in the community are related to successive generations of trauma across the community.

In all of our own research on best practices, the key to building resiliency for somebody who has experienced trauma is to have a competent and caring adult in the picture. And so we need to include the family unit as a whole in our activities. Our model has evolved to try to create spaces and programs that will build resiliency as an antidote to trauma and also promote healing for youth and their families.

We feel like this park space embodies that resiliency of the Zuni people and also promotes the sense of healing for Zuni youth and their families. All the local art that’s going into the park is celebrating the spirit of Zuni. Some of the murals depict the Zuni migration story from the Grand Canyon to its current location. Other murals describe Zuni’s clan system, which is elaborate and involves 16 different animals. These artistic images can teach and inspire without saying a word.

What have you learned while creating the park?

I think the biggest thing we’ve learned is how valuable a resource artists can be in community development and, in our case, youth development. Artists are not just artists—they belong to families. They wear many different hats. Bringing artists to the table and unleashing their creativity in youth development and in community development has been so valuable for us. It’s ensured that we’re doing community development in a culturally responsive way, which I think should be the goal of all community development projects.

The miracle of this whole project is that you find community members committed to kids, caring enough to follow through, and helping to build a space that will provide opportunities for a better future.

KAREN OLSON is editor in chief of Public Art Review.

Urban Still Life, Benito Huerta www.fwpublicart.org

MAKING IT PUBLIC Customized public art training, offered in your community, designed for artists in any discipline.

TOPICS: Ideation Site Analysis Stakeholder Collaboration Budget Funding Implementation Promotions and more

CONTACT US: consulting@forecastpublicart.org 651.641.1128

JACK AT LARGE

A Change of Heart Public art can do a lot to promote the health of our communities —if planners understand all the new roles it can play

BY JACK BECKER

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16 AT LARGE

Pivot Points Having worked as a public art consultant, including work as a facilitator of public art plans for cities, I’ve gained a deep respect for the difficult role that planners play, and a reverence for their ability to serve as pivot points within

complex bureaucracies. Planners have to navigate the terrain inside and outside city hall, collect input from key stakeholders, follow trends, address potential crises, learn from the past, be aware of the present, and make plans for the future. They have to interpret data, not only to make their own informed decisions, but to be able to inform others and make recommendations—recommendations that often involve taking a long and broad view and may not be seen as immediately helpful. Their view is broad because they’re channeling the needs, opportunities, and concerns of all the stakeholders in their city —residents, businesses, developers, environmentalists, and others. It’s long-term because they’re charged with creating strategies to improve their communities far into the future.

And in this complex role, the planner is very much a “health professional”—fostering soundness at multiple levels, from the (metaphorical) health of the economy right on down to the literal physical health of citizens.

Public Art: The Unknown Quantity At Forecast we’ve recently been asking the question: What do city planners—and other allied professionals in the public art field, such as place-based designers, community developers, infrastructure engineers, educators, and parks directors—know about public art today, and how can public art, in one form or another, play a role in addressing the entire range of health issues faced by their cities?

How aware are planners that public art has evolved from the commissioning of objects and wall treatments into a sophisticated practice, one that utilizes creative community engagement tactics, equity-minded techniques for bringing unheard voices to the surface and amplifying them in our neighborhoods, and out-of-the-box thinking addressing the challenges of practically every sector in our cities, our suburbs, and our rural communities? The awareness has its limits—after all, if it were more widespread and comprehensive, we wouldn’t be stuck with almost 350

Photo by Dan Marshall.

of near-death experiences. I fell out of a tree when I was 10 years old; cracked my head open on the bottom of a swimming pool a few years later; and survived a head-on collision on the highway when I was a freshman in college.

But I topped those mishaps 16 years ago when I was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a degenerative form of heart failure. It was a frightening diagnosis, but not a death sentence.

In 2007, after a long, slow decline in my health, I was extremely lucky to get a new heart, thanks to a young man named Brad who died in a motorcycle accident. He had checked a box on his driver’s license, and the result was the saving of six people’s lives, including mine. The rescue also required the efforts of many skilled medical professionals working selflessly and at the top of their game.

As a husband, a father, and a dweller in a neighborhood, I’ve also become more and more aware of a conception of health that goes well beyond my personal history and concerns. The health of the world, our country, and the communities in which we live, I’ve come to realize, is in jeopardy at many levels—from the physical health of citizens to cultural, economic, and environmental health and sustainability. Care for our community fabric, like care for our physical bodies, calls for selfless concern and professional skill.

One of the professionals most crucial to fostering the health of urban areas is the city planner. Like a physician, the planner works under tremendous pressure—and he or she needs the best tools and practices in order to do the job of restoring our communities to health. One vital tool in the planner’s kit is public art, which can do remarkable things —but only if its true nature and potential are understood.

I’VE HAD MY FAIR SHARE

JACK AT LARGE

“How aware are planners that public art has evolved from the commissioning of objects and wall treatments into a sophisticated practice that addresses the challenges of practically every sector in our cities, our suburbs, and our rural communities?”

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percent-for-art programs throughout the U.S. that can only learning resources for city planners in cities of all sizes, tools that will help city planners learn about public art and how fund the commissioning of fixed works of art.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely grateful for cities artists can help them meet health goals set by their cities, that are investing in art and artists in any way at all; but in collaboration with allied professionals and networks of how can we increase the depth and breadth of public planners in other cities.

Our pilot effort involves art programs to support the wide planners and their colleagues from range of work being done today the southern Minnesota cities of and the work of the future, which Rochester, Red Wing, Winona, is likely to be even more expansive?

Austin, and Mankato. We’re How can we work with planners to watching as they gain the ability figure out how to support vibrant and the tools needed to conduct bottom-up public art struggling to independent demonstration projmake a meaningful impact outside ects, share knowledge with their of bureaucratic systems? How can colleagues and city council we make sure artists are engaging members, and network regionally communities in creative ways to to create authentic and actionable support the goals that our cities public art plans in partnership have already established? with their own communities.

We need to help cities go beyond How can all this trickle down hosting occasional projects; help to support for artists, not just to them develop deeply meaningful make artworks, but to work in public art and community cultural and with communities? How can development programs that connect we go from percent-for-art to the with all aspects of the city, perhaps new paradigm suggested to me through the lens of health—a new —Jack Becker by one city planner: percent for kind of public health initiative. With help from city planners, cities can develop an infrastructure community engagement? (Sure, there’s misunderstanding of, that supports artists’ participation in addressing the health and resistance to, the idea of public art—but who could be of the built environment, the social environment, and the against community engagement?)

I wonder which city will be the first to step up to the plate natural environment.

Public art isn’t a frill, nor is it icing on the cake. It’s a key and devote one percent of every dollar they spend in their ingredient. But after working in this field for 40 years, and city, in every department—police, schools, public health, seeing it flourish, for some reason I still get that deer-in-the- public works, planning, parks and recreation, libraries, etc.— headlights look from all sorts of people who have no idea to artists in their communities. Imagine artists working in and what public art is, let alone what it could be. Our educational with every department, to help it maximize its impact and system isn’t helping, and probably can’t or won’t change gain access to communities it seeks to serve. The program fast enough to put a dent in the problem; artists have to do would involve the most diverse, skilled, and creative set of this themselves, by infiltrating every corner of our cities, artists possible, and would set aside funds to coordinate the meeting and talking and sharing their talents with everyone elements, guide the process, train the artists, and provide resources to city departments and leaders to help them gain they can. appreciation of what’s being done and what’s possible.

It’s time to broaden and diversify the way cities engage A Partnership for Planners Artists working with planners and other civic decision- in our field, in every way possible, with equity, intention, makers should be paid handsomely, receive specialized authenticity, common sense, and good planning. If we get training, and gain the respect they deserve as professionals it right, we just might give new life—a new “heart”—to our pushing for positive change. But how could this scenario public life and our democracy. ever come to pass?

Forecast’s two-year, NEA-funded partnership with the American Planning Association is one answer that’s gaining JACK BECKER is the founder of Forecast Public Art and director of momentum. We’re jointly creating public art curricula and its Consulting + Creative Services.

SPACES 15 projects. 103 pages. Big inspiration.

Text by Jon Spayde

IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES you’ll discover how artists and designers created 15 public art and creative placemaking projects that connect us to our shared humanity. Whether in Alabama or Alaska, Brownsville or Boston, Buenos Aires or Madrid, each project creates a space—for collaboration, education, healing, empowerment, justice, and so much more.

We’re grateful to our senior editor Jon Spayde, who has worked with Public Art Review for 15 years, for writing all these articles. And we’re grateful to all the artists, designers, and collaborators for sharing their stories with us. Our hope is that you find yourself as inspired and moved as we are by their work.

—The Editors

Photo credits for image clippings can be found on related article pages: 23, 35, 41, 46, 58, 63, 70, 78, 82, 85, 90, 98, 100, 111, 118.

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POWERFUL

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A STEAM-

POWERED Statement Kara Walker’s The Katastwóf Karavan WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING AT IS AN 8,000-POUND circus-style wagon with a propane-heated steam calliope, through which Jason Moran (seated, with headphones) is playing songs from Marvin Gaye and Prince, as well as “We Shall Overcome,” at maximum volume. On its front, back, and sides, in cut-steel silhouette, are some of the enigmatic, ominous figures that embody artist Kara Walker’s vision of the American past—a past forever darkened by slavery. As in all of Walker’s work, though, the darkness is shot through with strange whimsy and irony.

On one side, what is probably a slave family is marched through a field by a bizarre overseer made of three grotesque piggyback figures; on the opposite side, two enslaved figures carry a third, which may be a corpse, while a smaller figure squats overhead in vines.

Add to all this the high-decibel tootling of black-consciousness anthems, soul classics, African-American pop, and jazz in the style of the vanished riverboat culture of the Old South, and you have a vintage Walker mix: anger, humor, faux-nostalgia, genuine historical awareness, and an unsettling unwillingness to settle for any easy understanding of America.

Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photo by Alex Marks.

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PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS: A raucous response to racism

A collaboration with traditional artisans—and Jason Moran

Headliner at Prospect.4, New Orleans’s art triennial

THE COLLABORATORS To make Karavan a reality, Walker enlisted what she called, in her Times interview, “American manufacturing at its fringi-est”—firms run by idiosyncratic artisans dedicated to re-creating an earlier America— and a fellow MacArthur “genius” grantee.

Wagon:

To make the wagon, Walker chose an art-world firm, Workshop Art Fabrication in Kingston, New York, which is currently working on Anthony Goicolea’s New York City monument to victims of anti-LGBT violence.

Wheels:

The wagon’s wheels were fashioned in Letcher, South Dakota, by Hansen Wheel and Wagon, which bills itself as “the premier builder of authentic, horse-drawn vehicles,” including replica stagecoaches, chuck wagons, and buckboards.

Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photos by Alex Marks.

—The Village Voice

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“[IMPROVISING ON THE CALLIOPE, JASON] MORAN JOLTED THE MELODY WITH FREESTYLE BLARES AND MOANS, BRINGING TO MIND THE SHRIEKS AND CALLS OF THE AVANT-GARDE SAXOPHONISTS ALBERT AYLER, ARCHIE SHEPP, OR MARION BROWN, ABSTRACT YET UNCANNILY SOULFUL.”

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Calliope: The calliope itself was custom-made by Kenneth

Music: As a musical consultant, Walker called

Griffard, whose company, Kenny G’s Calliopes in Three Rivers, Michigan, has created steam-powered organs played with keyboards—and others played with smartphones via Wi-Fi. “The more I talked to him, the bigger it got,” Walker told Ted Loos in the New York Times. “A 10-note calliope? I was like, ‘Ehh, that doesn’t sound like enough notes.’” With 38 notes, Karavan is now one of the biggest calliopes out there.

upon jazz pianist/installation artist Jason Moran (above with Walker), like her a MacArthur grantee.

While most of the calliope’s performances were controlled by MIDI software, Moran played it via keyboard for two improvised performances.

Artwork Š Kara Walker, courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photo by Ari Marcopoulos.

THE ARTIST’S INSPIRATION

“ I was thinking a lot about music as the bearer of our

emotional history, and about the way Jazz and gospel and African American Music are testaments to survival of our

culture in the face of unrelenting, nihilistic ‘Progress’ and how it’s regarded as a monument in American History etc.

But also thinking about how the Industrial Revolution, the Steam Engine and Cotton Gin were pivotal in usurping and grinding up the bodies of laborers and how much of that action, John Henry style, occurs today, with Humans fighting uphill battles to prove themselves against the latest technology. Steam engines are quaint things of the past, but industry presses on without us. The Machines have changed, but the action stays the same. How would it be if the old steam engines that ate us, swallowed too, our songs and pain, and what if, when its time was done, and slated for the scrapheap, the Steam Engine sang out in solidarity?

—Kara Walker explains the thinking behind The Katastwóf Karavan in the performance handout

”

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Kara Walker is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship award and an internationally renowned artist. Walker tells the Village Voice that the idea to create a calliope was partly inspired by hearing the music of the Natchez, a steamboat that’s become a mainstay of the New Orleans tourist trail. Several times daily, the Natchez’s calliope plays innocuous Big Easy–associated favorites like “Ol’ Man River” and “When the Saints Go Marching In,” along with Stephen Foster tunes, “God Bless America,” and, of course, “Dixie.” Walker thought of her steam music as a direct response to this familiar, whitewashing, Old South kitsch; her handout at The Katastwóf Karavan’s performances pointedly calls the Natchez’s “the OTHER calliope.”

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THE COMMISSION wóf is Haitian Creole for “catastrophe,” a synonym for the Middle Passage and the whole slave system.

On a site visit with Prospect.4 artistic director Trevor Schoonmaker in 2016, Walker noted that there was an historical marker at Algiers Point, but it referred to slavery only indirectly. In a handout at the site, Walker called it “a cheap bronze plaque constitut[ing] a paltry memorial to the Catastrophe called slavery and Algiers Point’s nearly forgotten, but pivotal role in its perpetuation.”

Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photo by Alex Marks.

The Katastwóf Karavan was commissioned for the fourth installment of New Orleans’s art triennial, Prospect, which ran from November 18, 2017, to February 5, 2018. It was sited in one of the most grimly significant locations in the city, Algiers Point on the Mississippi, where slave ships quarantined, then offloaded their human cargo for sale in the slave market right across the river in the (legendary, picturesque) French Quarter. The title is in part an homage to the African diaspora of which New Orleans is so significant a part: katast-

THE CHALLENGES The rift was eventually smoothed over, and Prospect.4 agreed to carry the full transport cost, but the argument and construction issues delayed the arrival of the work until the last weekend of the triennial.

“There were headaches and heartaches going through it all,” Prospect.4 artistic director Trevor Schoonmaker told New York Times reporter Ted Loos. “But having a great presentation at the end is magnificent.” ■

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A row over transport costs nearly derailed the Karavan project. Walker, who had agreed in early 2017 to self-fund the costly fabrication of the work to the tune of $250,000, became angry when an email from the Prospect.4 office—the organization declines to name the sender—objected to the estimated $34,000 price tag for conveying the work from New York to New Orleans. The original estimate had been $5,000, writes Doug MacCash in an article for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

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PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS: Five artists from five countries collaborate

Portraits of immigrants with objects important to them

A music stage, photo gallery, table, and wall of viewer responses

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A“Home” Open to the World

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AT A DISTANCE, CarryOn Homes is a simple structure: two parallel panels, each a schematic image of the classic American house, an ideal of home. But as you approach the installation across The Commons, the urban gathering place adjoining U.S. Bank Stadium (home of the Vikings) in Minneapolis, you see that intriguing things have been added. A performance stage. A wildly colorful mural painted on a vertical assemblage of suitcases. A row of green plants, mirrored to infinity by reflective panels. A gallery of immigrant portraits with their stories. This is a very open “house,” and one that is making statements—about immigration, cultural richness, displacement, and the idea of home.

Photo by Zoe Cinel, courtesy CarryOn Homes.

CarryOn Homes by Peng Wu, Shun Jie Yong, Zoe Cinel, Aki Shibata, and Preston Drum

THE EVOLUTION OF A PROJECT As new people were added to the project, CarryOn Homes evolved from portrait photography to a gallery, mural, performance, and storytelling and advice space.

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“A WOMAN BROUGHT A PAIR OF CANDLE HOLDERS ALLOWING HER TO PRAY TO HER 10,000 GODS. A MAN BROUGHT A BEER OPENER HE STOLE FROM A SMALL HARDWARE STORE IN SWEDEN 30 YEARS AGO. A GIRL BROUGHT A PAIR OF SHOES HANDMADE FOR THE LOCAL MARKET IN SYRIA, WHICH HAVE BEEN WORN OUT WITH HOLES SOON ON THE ICY COLD STREETS IN MINNESOTA.

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THEY ARE PIECES OF THE HOMES THAT SUSTAIN US WITH STRENGTH SO WE CAN CARRY ON AND BUILD NEW HOMES HERE. THIS PROJECT HAS [BECOME] A SMALL COMMUNITY THAT IS BUILT ON THIS STRENGTH.” –From the CarryOn Homes website

Photos by Shun Jie Yong, courtesy CarryOn Homes.

OPPOSITE LEFT: Meng Zhang arrived in the United States in 2013. She sleeps well only when she has the quilt she brought with her from China.

OPPOSITE RIGHT: Essma Imady left Syria in 2011 and brought with her shoes made for her by a craftsman in a market. She says she wore them often “so I could always wear my home on my feet.”

ABOVE LEFT: Teyent Germa, who came from Ethiopia in 1979, holds a handmade jewelry box made by her best friend. They met in a shelter where her friend was staying to escape domestic violence.

ABOVE RIGHT: Hua Hong Gan holds a post card on which all his friends wrote their best wishes when they sent him off at the airport in Malaysia in 2009.

RIGHT: Jamal Ali worked as an aircraft engineer for Iraqi Airways. He came to the United States in 2009 and brought with him an Iraqi Airways model plane.

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AN ARTIST ADDS A CONCEPT TO ANOTHER’S PHOTOGRAPHS The CarryOn Homes project began with Shun Jie Yong’s photographs of Twin Cities friends who, like him, had come from other countries. When he asked to shoot Peng Wu, Wu added a concept. “I brought a small object from China that I had kept for many years,” he says. “A little ruby paperweight. Shun photographed me holding it.” The artists realized that if they asked other portrait subjects to come to the shoot with a single object that connected them with their earlier lives, they would have subtle images of home.

–Peng Wu The artists, here photographed with other project volunteers, include Zoe Cinel (Italy), multidisciplinary artist with an emphasis on video; Preston Drum (U.S.), multidisciplinary artist and installation maker; Aki Shibata (Japan), photographer and community activist; Peng Wu (China), project lead, social-practice artist and graphic designer; and Shun Jie Yong (Malaysia), photographer specializing in portraits.

Photo by Courtney Cochran, courtesy CarryOn Homes.

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“WE WANTED TO TELL THE STORIES OF IMMIGRANTS, STORIES THAT ARE VERY DIFFERENT FROM THE BIG, PRIVILEGED CIVIC STORY TOLD BY THE STADIUM NEARBY. WE WANTED SOMETHING A LITTLE CHAOTIC, BUT BEAUTIFUL.”

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A PUBLIC INSTALLATION REQUIRES A TEAM Yong and Wu showed their photo series in several Twin Cities gallery venues, and then, says Wu, “we decided that we wanted more people to see it, so that we could increase awareness of the immigrant community, and grow the community of people willing to be photographed.” That meant a public installation, and creating a public installation meant getting more people involved in the making. Zoe Cinel had been a photo subject; Preston Drum, like Cinel, was a Minneapolis College of Art and Design classmate of Wu’s; Wu met Aki Shibata at a book-arts workshop. The team brainstormed, and Wu created a series of prototype designs for group critique.

Then the team shopped their idea around unsuccessfully until the Creative City Challenge program made CarryOn Homes one of five finalists, then the winner. The Challenge is an annual competition administered by the city’s Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy Program, in collaboration with Northern Lights, the nonprofit that runs the Northern Spark festival, and The Commons. It’s open to Minnesota-based artists, architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and other creatives. The winner creates a temporary public artwork that acts as, in the program’s words, “a sociable and participatory platform for two months of onsite programming and encourages a sense of connectedness to the city and its rich cultural and natural offerings.”

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A MURAL MAKES PERFORMERS FEEL MORE AT HOME

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“When musicians, other performers, and other people in the community learned that the piece would be installed in The Commons, near the stadium, they weren’t feeling comfortable to perform there,” says Peng Wu. “It’s a fancy downtown area—not somewhere they go very often.

So we did a lot of research on fabric patterns of the main immigrant communities here—patterns from Central America, Africa, and Asia. We took those colors and patterns and abstracted them, to give performers a colorful background that would make them feel more at home.”

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4

A PUBLIC AUDIENCE SEES A SERIES OF PERFORMANCES The installation debuted at the Twin Cities’ late-night arts festival, Northern Spark, in June 2018.

Performers on the stage included Indian-American dancer and choreographer Chitra Vairavan, Afropop group Douala Soul Collective, Aztec-dance group Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli, and Minneapolis club DJ SciPreme.

Photo by Zoe Cinel, courtesy CarryOn Homes. OPPOSITE: Photo by Peng Wu, courtesy CarryOn Homes.

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VISITORS WRITE ON THE QUESTIONNAIRE WALL On the rear wall of the installation, there’s a suitcase collage that replicates the colorful one backing the performance stage. But all these cases are painted white.

Covering them, and rustling in the breeze like leaves, are questionnaires answered and posted by visitors. The questions invite immigrants to tell a significant story from their lives and give some advice to newcomers. â–

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“WE DIDN’T ANTICIPATE THAT THIS WALL WOULD TURN INTO A KINETIC SCULPTURE, BUT WE’RE REALLY HAPPY THAT IT DID.”

Photo by Zoe Cinel, courtesy CarryOn Homes.

Photo by Soniakapadia / CC SA-4.0 / flickr

—Peng Wu

to Dream, Know, and Act Taller de Permiso by Las Imaginistas

TALLER DE PERMISO, which means both “Permit Workshop” and “Workshop of Permission,” helps the informal economy in a Texas neighborhood thrive by redefining the very idea of “permission.” An alliance between three artist-activists who make up Las Imaginistas and the people of the Buena Vida (“Good Life”) neighborhood in the border city of Brownsville, Texas, across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Mexico, the project encourages economic development of the low-income neighborhood. Its focus: supporting the efforts of neighborhood entrepreneurs who sell street food, clothing, and other goods, often without official permits from the city—permits that can be difficult and costly to obtain. The artists, Celeste De Luna, Nansi Guevara, and Christina Patino Sukhgian Houle, are helping Buena Vida residents develop microbusiness ideas, understand the permitting process, and grow in self-confidence and self-assertion, with the aid of art.

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS: Three artist-activists help a neighborhood dream about, and develop, its economic future

Clarifying the permitting process to help microbusinesses start and grow

Celebrating the ingenuity and traditions of immigrant communities

Photo by Veronica G. Cardenas, courtesy Las Imaginistas.

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Permission

Kids in the Buena Vida neighborhood participate in Taller de Permiso’s Dream Parade.

Photo by Veronica G. Cardenas, courtesy Las Imaginistas.

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THE GENESIS De Luna, Guevara, and Houle met when the three worked together in downtown Brownsville on the Activating Vacancy Arts Incubator, a 2016 NEA Our Town creative placemaking project, the first Our Town project to be funded in the Rio Grande Valley. Houle administered an artist residency as part of the project, which brought artists and local residents together to create artworks focused on the political, social, and economic life of the valley, and De Luna and Guevara were two of the resident artists selected. As they collaborated on the six-month downtown project, they became aware of the Buena Vida neighborhood, adjacent to downtown.

The neighborhood was in the process of implementing a Choice Neighborhood grant from HUD, so they had already done an incredible amount of community organizing, according to Houle. “We were really excited by the fact that Buena Vida had identified these core concerns,” including the need for better housing, youth programs, educational opportunities, transportation, and access to jobs, says Houle, “and had a really robust civic engagement from the community, and that made it a wonderful partner.”

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“BROWNSVILLE BEING A BORDER CITY, THERE ARE A LOT OF IMMIGRANTS IN THE REGION, AND MICROECONOMIES ARE INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT FOR THEIR ECONOMIC WELL-BEING—BUT ALSO FOR SUSTAINING THE CULTURAL LEGACIES THAT THEY BRING WITH THEM FROM ALL DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE WORLD. SO WE THOUGHT THAT BY LOOKING AT PERMITTING AND SMALL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT FOR MICROECONOMIES WE WOULD BE ABLE TO FIND A REALLY RICH INTERSECTION: HOW ART CAN SUPPORT COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT AND QUALITY OF LIFE IN THE REGION.” —Christina Patino Sukhgian Houle

Photo courtesy Las Imaginistas. OPPOSITE: Image courtesy Las Imaginistas.

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Las Imaginistas—composed of Christina Patino Sukhgian Houle, Nansi Guevara, and Celeste De Luna (pictured above left to right)—are a socially engaged art collective based in the Rio Grande Valley.

Originally, Las Imaginistas laid out the two-year, Artspace-funded project in three phases: Permission to Dream—various modes of brainstorming for creating and supporting informal businesses; Permission to Know—information gathering about the permitting process; and Permission to Act—a series of actions.

“What’s actually happened,” says Houle, “is that we’ve extended the dream period and decided that instead of each section being a kind of a finite entity, it makes more sense for the three phases to weave in and out of each other. We want to emphasize the vitality and the importance of dreaming as something that you continue to return to.”

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“I THINK THE LARGEST WORK OF THE PROJECT IS TO JUST SHIFT PERCEPTIONS ABOUT WHAT IS POSSIBLE—AND ALSO TO SHIFT PERCEPTIONS ABOUT WHAT CULTURE IS, AND VALUE, AND WHO HAS A VOICE, AND HOW TO GENERATE EQUITABLE ECONOMIC VITALITY IN A REGION THAT HAS BEEN ASKING THAT QUESTION FOR A LONG TIME.” —Christina Patino Sukhgian Houle

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1. Permission to Dream In 2018, Las Imaginistas launched a “Dream Parade,” in which Buena Vida residents marched with signs announcing and depicting their dreams for the future of their community in general and for the future of businesses in their community in particular (photos, right).

“We sang songs, traditional activist chants that we rewrote specifically to be about people’s dreams,” says Houle. “That was incredibly exciting—and successful, I think, in creating further visibility for the project and then also helping people to think about dreaming as a radical action and as a community resource.”

More dream gathering and “harvesting” is planned for the duration of the project, including idea gathering by means of traditional eloteros (grilled-corn food carts) repurposed as “Dream Carts” and circling the neighborhood to invite input from community members.

THIS PAGE FAR LEFT + OPPOSITE TOP AND BOTTOM: Images courtesy Las Imaginistas. THIS PAGE RIGHT TOP AND BOTTOM: Photos by Veronica G. Cardenas, courtesy Las Imaginistas. OPPOSITE MIDDLE: Photo courtesy Las Imaginistas.

THE PHASES

2. Permission to Know

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In this phase of the project, launched in 2018, young people have become reporters and information gatherers, interviewing the city manager, other city officials, and other stakeholders about the permitting process. Digging through newspaper archives, they’re investigating the background of vending laws in Brownsville. They’re also working on a podcast and two videos that will showcase their findings.

A cohort of participants also completed La Cocina Alegre, a program of the Sustainable Food Center (below), as well as business training.

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3. Permission to Act This phase, which will launch in 2019, features a mobile library stocked with information gathered from the project’s investigation of permitting.

Also planned is a market where microbusinesses incubated throughout the project can sell their wares, and a “listening space” where residents can speak with a city official about how permitting and related laws impact them.

“The listening space is also aimed at helping people understand the process of changing laws and how individuals can express concerns,” says Houle. “We’re not lobbying for changes in the law—we can’t do that with this project. But we do want to make officials aware of laws that are impeding the vitality of the neighborhood and the region.” ■

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS: A prison-issues study center by day, a nightclub by night

Education, dance, and a record album, all aimed at ending mass incarceration

Partnership between artists, a social-service nonprofit for former prisoners, and a public art funder

CELEBRATION AGAINST

INCARCERATION

Photo by Mel D. Cole, courtesy Creative Time.

Bring Down the Walls, created by Phil Collins, The Fortune Society, and Creative Time

IN MAY 2018, BRITISH ARTIST-MUSICIAN PHIL COLLINS (from Manchester, and not to be confused with the Londonborn drummer for Genesis) teamed up with The Fortune Society and public arts organization Creative Time to debut a unique synthesis of anti-mass-incarceration and prisonabolition activism with old-school house music.

The project’s backstory began when Collins helped form a band of men incarcerated in Sing Sing, the New York maximum-security prison. He was able to bring in sound engineers and other supporters for blocks of time. “We had time and space to get to know each other, play cassettes for each other, talk about pop history, clubbing, prison life, their perspectives on ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy,’ and the tidal wave of killings of young black men by the police,” Collins told the music magazine Fader. His plan to make a film about life in the prison never materialized; instead, the groundwork for Bring Down the Walls was laid.

Housed in a decommissioned fire station, Bring Down the Walls offered educational programs by day and a dance party by night. The project also recorded an album of cover versions of house music hits sung by formerly incarcerated musicians, including Michael Austin, who was exonerated with the help of the Innocence Project after spending 27 years in prison for crimes he didn’t commit.

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FIREHOUSE

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THE FREE SCHOOL

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During the day on four Saturdays in May, Firehouse, Engine Company 31, a decommissioned fire station and historic landmark in lower Manhattan, became a free school and research center where members of the public could learn about incarceration in America—from books and periodicals, but more importantly, from the testimony of formerly incarcerated people and activists working to change the system.

Derrick Cain of the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, which pays bail for those who can’t afford it and advocates for the end of cash bail, led one presentation. Other facilitators

included Baz Dreisinger, author of Incarceration Nations, a discussion of prisons worldwide; Abou Farman of the New Sanctuary Coalition, a student organization in support of immigrants; and Black and Pink, an organization of LGBTQ prisoners and supporters.

One presentation, entitled “Origins of Control,” looked at the history of the “prison-industrial complex,” while “The Carceral Continuum” examined how law and criminaljustice policy have been influenced by prison practices.

Free legal and housing counseling was offered during the day program too.

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Photos by Nema Etebar, courtesy Creative Time. OPPOSITE: Photo by Mel D. Cole, courtesy Creative Time.

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TOP: Speakers and conversations explored the origins of the prison industrial complex and links between the current prison system and other oppressive social practices. ABOVE: Attendees of the first weekend of the free school, May 5, 2018. OPPOSITE: The schedule for the second weekend of the free school, Saturday, May 12, 2018.

THE CLUB

TOP: Photo by Monnelle Britt, courtesy Creative Time. BOTTOM: Photo by Mel D. Cole, courtesy Creative Time.

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At night, Firehouse morphed into a club in which local collectives of DJs, musicians, and activists took over. The lineup: Soul Summit, known for its summer dance parties; the ballroom-culture collective House of Vogue; Brujas, a self-described “radical collective of activists, skaters, musicians, healers, and hustlers”; and Papi Juice, an art collective celebrating LGBTQ people of color.

“Historically, house culture has often been a mode of resistance, opening up new understandings of community and solidarity,” Phil Collins told Fader magazine. “Its radical proposition of simply being together offers another way of engaging the conversation around the prison-industrial complex.”

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ALL courtesy Creative Time: TOP: Photo by Mel D. Cole. BOTTOM LEFT: Photo by Monnelle Britt.

BOTTOM RIGHT: Photo by Christos Katsiaouni.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Dancing at the club on the first weekend. On a day devoted to prison system and public policy issues, a participant’s sign reads: “More black men are in prison today than were enslaved in 1850.” A DJ at an all night party. Soul Summit Music DJs. A House of Vogue takeover featured a ballroom competition with cash prizes.

—Phil Collins, in an interview with the music magazine Fader

TOP: Photo by Christos Katsiaouni, courtesy Creative Time. BOTTOM: Photo by Mel D. Cole, courtesy Creative Time.

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“WHAT ELSE IS THE POINT OF A NIGHTCLUB BUT TO CREATE A TEMPORARY HAVEN, A TRANSIENT COMMUNITY IN WHICH SOCIAL DIVISIONS ARE CHECKED AT THE DOOR, AND WHICH OFFERS YOU A GLIMPSE OF A DIFFERENT WAY IN WHICH WE COULD COME TOGETHER AS SOCIETY.”

ABOVE: Phil Collins (center) is a filmmaker, installation artist, event-maker, and musician who specializes in collaboration with marginalized and oppressed groups.

According to his Creative Time biography, his collaborators have included “disco-dancing Palestinians; Kosovan Albanian refugees; the youth of Baghdad; teachers of Marxism-Leninism from the former German Democratic Republic; a leading anime studio in Tokyo; anti-fascist skinheads in Malaysia; a homeless center in Cologne; and prisoners, pensioners, school kids, and a symphonic orchestra in Glasgow.� RIGHT: People line up for the club outside the firehouse.

THE ALBUM The third element in Bring Down the Walls is a collection of cover versions of house music hits. The album, produced

by Collins, features 19 artists, including Empress Of (Los Angeles–based Lorely Rodriguez), the producer-performer duo Nguzunguzu (Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda), and Kyp Malone of the band TV on the Radio.

Vocals for the tracks were laid down by formerly incarcerated singers. One of the vocalists is Cameron Holmes, who sings on the cover version of Robert Owens’s 1986 house classic “Bring Down The Walls,” from which the project took its name. Holmes was one of several former inmates who were connected to the project through personal contacts, phone calls, introductions via organizations, and other means. ■

Photos by César Martínez. OPPOSITE: Photo by Monnelle Britt, courtesy Creative Time.

Michael Austin, a Baltimore native, was exonerated in 2001 with the help of the Innocence Project after spending 27 years in prison for a robbery and murder he did not commit. In 2010, he started In This Together Development, a nonprofit organization serving at-risk youth that focuses on music, community service, leadership, self-esteem, character building, and discipline.

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Vocalist Amanda Cruz, originally from Bushwick, Brooklyn, works at The Fortune Society, which has the slogan “Building People, Not Prisons.” A Bring Down the Walls partner, the nonprofit provides a wide range of services for people coming out of incarceration, including preparation-for-release help, substance-abuse and mental health counseling, family services, housing, and job aid. Cruz supports people detained on Rikers Island. The Fortune Society, based in Queens and Manhattan, also advocates for fair treatment of the formerly incarcerated through its David Rothenberg Center for Public Policy. About 70 percent of the Society’s staff have a history of incarceration, homelessness, or substance abuse.

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Citizenship Explored and Expanded Dimensions of Citizenship, the U.S. contribution to Venice Architecture Biennale

THE SEVEN WORKS that make up the American contribution to the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale (May 26 through November 25) are dense, complex concretizations of what it means to be a citizen—of a region, a nation, the planet, and beyond—during a time of fraught political discourse about citizenship. Each design team was assigned a “scale” at which to consider citizenship, the exhibition’s theme, from the individual to the cosmic.

Together they moved this familiar, currently troubled concept into unexpected dimensions.

Photo © Tom Harris. Courtesy the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.

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PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS:

Photo © Francesca Bottazzin. Courtesy the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.

A galaxy of sculptural and conceptual interpretations of citizenship

Seven “scales” of citizenship, from the individual to the cosmic

Multiple attempts to expand the concept far beyond the current debates

SCALE: CITIZEN

Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line), by Amanda Williams and Andres L. Hernandez with Shani Crowe (Chicago, IL) Employing as its “muses” Harriet Tubman, who led scores of slaves to freedom, and Harriet Jacobs, a fugitive slave and author who once lived hidden in a garret for seven years, this courtyard installation uses braided cords to evoke concepts of space as experienced and created by black women and to celebrate the lines and routes they followed in seeking liberation. Williams, Crowe, and Hernandez are pictured above.

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2

SCALE: CIVITAS

Stone Stories, by Studio Gang (Chicago, IL) Cobblestones transported to Venice from Memphis Landing, a paved landing on the Mississippi waterfront in the iconic Tennessee city, have been reassembled in the pavilion.

Studio Gang’s ongoing work in Memphis focuses on reclaiming forgotten or untold stories from the city’s past and its neglected places.

Photos © Tom Harris. Courtesy the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.

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SCALE: REGION

Ecological Citizens, by SCAPE (New York, NY) This installation rejects artistic ordering altogether in favor of simple storage: storage of biodegradable logs of coir (coconut fiber), concrete blocks shaped to create mini tide pools, and other environmentally aimed materials that, when the Biennale is over, the SCAPE team will install on nearby Certosa Island. It’s part of the team’s collaboration with the University of Bologna and the Italian Institute of Marine Sciences to restore habitat for marine animals in the heavily degraded salt marshes of the Venetian lagoon.

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SCALE: NATION

Mexus: A Geography of Interdependence, by Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman (San Diego, CA) An exploration of how a contentious political boundary intersects and conflicts with natural systems, Mexus uses maps to isolate the region on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. The area contains eight watersheds, for example, and U.S. dam construction, surveillance, and wall-building have created a galaxy of environmental problems. A collaboration among Mexican and U.S. government units and universities, Mexus envisages a cross-border land conservancy that would address one of the issues, sewage flow from an informal settlement near Tijuana, and in so doing establish “a new jurisdiction that is socially and ecologically continuous.”

Photos © Tom Harris. Courtesy the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.

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SCALE: GLOBE

In Plain Sight, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, Robert Gerard Pietrusko, with Columbia Center for Spatial Research (New York, NY) Drawing on images from a weather satellite operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, In Plain Sight displays global economic disparities in a vivid fashion: by showing which parts of the globe are illuminated by night. Densely populated areas with few lights—zones of poverty and limited access to resources—contrast with thinly populated zones that are brightly lit: luxury resorts and military installations, for example.

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SCALE: NETWORK

Many, by Keller Easterling (New Haven, CT)

Photos © Tom Harris. Courtesy the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.

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Architect Easterling and her colleagues created an online platform that links displaced people across the globe with opportunities to use and exchange their skills. Rejecting one-dimensional characterizations of global migrants—that they are either citizens or noncitizens (“legals” or “illegals”) and/or helpless victims of political and social forces, Many uses the transnational networking power of the Internet to connect migrants with short-term training and research projects and other initiatives, worldwide, that don’t involve travel or require only short-term visas.

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SCALE: COSMOS

Three powerfully ironic exhibits comment on the strange relationships between the earthbound economic/ecological/political order and space. Mining the Sky projects the future of privatized space exploration: asteroids towed to a near-Earth orbit and strip-mined. Planetary Ark imagines the International Space Station repurposed as a haven for Earth animals facing extinction. And Pacific Cemetery proposes that Point Nemo be the “landfill of the Space Age.” Decommissioned satellites and other space junk are “terraformed” into tiny sovereign states in the remote Pacific where escapees from islands inundated by rising seas can find refuge. ■

Transit Screening Lounge: Videos The rotunda of the pavilion is given over to the screening of short films that, in the words of the exhibition’s website, “[present] citizenship through a lens of movement: migration, transgression, transmission, travel, and mobility.” They range from Frances Bodomo’s quirky Afronauts, a fictionalized account of the attempt of a Zambian science teacher to create a space program for his country, to Cosmic Generator, Mika Rottenberg’s documentary-style fantasy of a tunnel connecting a Chinese restaurant in Mexico with a dollar store in California.

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Cosmorama: Mining the Sky, Planetary Ark, and Pacific Cemetery, by Design Earth (Cambridge, MA)

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Without Shelter: THE ONES IN THE WATER Ann Hirsch and Jeremy Angier’s Safety Orange Swimmers (SOS)

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS: Twenty-two figures: floating sculpture or performance art?

Photo by A+J Art+Design.

A vivid statement about the plight of refugees

Powerful reactions from viewers and on social media

BRIGHT ORANGE CAN MEAN both safety—when it’s the color of a life vest—and danger, when it warns of a hazard. Ann Hirsch says that she and Jeremy Angier intended to send both messages when they created Safety Orange Swimmers (SOS), a floating installation of 22 figures made of foam and clutching inner tubes. The ensemble was anchored in Boston’s Fort Point Channel in fall 2016, then relocated to the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, for three weeks in the autumn of 2017.

The main danger the piece alluded to was the peril faced by thousands of refugees seeking safety, typified by the struggles of people trying to cross the Mediterranean into a less-than-welcoming Europe. Each figure represented more than a million of the approximately 22.5 million refugees worldwide. The generic, gender-nonspecific figures were rendered by Angier from a digital prototype, sculpted by Hirsch, and then molded from polyurethane foam—but once they were in the water, not every viewer realized they weren’t real.

ON SOCIAL MEDIA: “IT ALWAYS STOPS ME IN MY TRACKS”

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“There was a very wide range of responses to the piece on Instagram and other social media,” says Ann Hirsch.

“Some people, of course, were already tapped into the global refugee crisis, and they brought that awareness to the project. But a lot of people put their own meaning into it, which we were also hoping for. It was an openended experience. We also loved that it was a sculptural installation that doubled as a performance art piece, and we want to develop that idea further in our work.”

The following reactions on Instagram were compiled by Hirsch and Angier:

Can’t even tell you what’s going on with “this new exhibition with people floating on the rafts in that cold ass water. Made me shiver just walking over the bridge.

”

“Cheetos Men crossing the river.”

Thank you artists, humans and human “artists who chatted today. We like this project of adventure, spontaneous compassion and conversation as an antidote to these rough and tumble times.

”

Would love to know where they got “those made. Would love to make floating sculpture! :)”

and it scared the crap “Saw this yesterday out of me.”

it always stops me in my tracks and takes my breath away. Today I stopped and said a prayer while quietly sobbing. As the world goes about their daily routines the refugees suffer. The worst humanitarian crisis in our lives [and] no plan to address it. None.

”

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No matter how many times I walk by this “refugee art installation in my neighborhood

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“No way! Are those people?”

Photo by A+J Art+Design.

harbor at some point “We all look forofsafe our lives.”

Public Art Programming: On Land and Water SOS was commissioned by the Fort Point Arts Community, a multifaceted arts organization in South Boston whose public art program offers artists an unconventional choice: installation on land or water. While the program has supported terrestrial projects like installing window shutters on a former Necco Wafers factory and painting them in Necco Wafer colors (Mike Tyrrell and Sandra Vieira), and the festooning of a bridge with thousands of twinkling blue LED lights (Starry Night by Lisa Greenfield and Daniel J. van Ackere), it’s also “launched” a number of works, including Gianna Stewart’s 12-foot Iceberg—a reminder of global warming’s effect on the poles—and Don Eyles’s polystyrene pyramid made of replicas of Boston paving stones, which has had two incarnations since he first floated a pyramid in 1998.

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Photo © 2016 Cameron Brown. OPPOSITE PAGE: Photo by A+J Art+Design.

THE PUBLIC RESPONDS: “AREN’T THEY GETTING COLD?” Ann Hirsch and Jeremy Angier, pictured above with their floating sculptures, said they accurately predicted the figures would move and rotate in the Fort Point Channel when the tides went in and out. But, says Hirsch, they were surprised that the individual figures would rotate within the group. “We also didn’t realize that the way they were animated by the channel would lead so many onlookers to believe they were real people! A lot of them were asking, ‘When are they going to come out? Aren’t they getting cold?’ Kids were worried and asking their parents. Believe it our not, we hadn’t thought about how Blue Man Group has conditioned people to think of people with full body color as live performers rather than sculpture. And that wasn’t entirely off-point in terms of what we were hoping for in the piece. They’re very generic figures, but that movement really did the job of getting people to think of them as real.” ■

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS:

A

Computer-generated design, handmade structure

Serene,

Architecture allowed to be art by the simplicity of its form

Healing Healing Pavilion designed

by Ball-Nogues Studio

Space

DESPITE ITS NAME and its Los Angeles location, the Max Factor Building has nothing to do with makeup. Part of the Cedars-Sinai hospital complex, it’s a forbidding trio of stone-and-black-glass towers rising above an elevated outdoor terrace. The terrace had little more appeal than the towers until the hospital hired AHBE Landscape Architects to refurbish it with garden concepts and greenery, and Ball-Nogues Studio to create a structure on it for rest and reflection.

Healing Pavilion was completed in 2017.

Collaborators Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues created this highly sculptural, sinuous openwork pavilion—made up of 352 two-inch-diameter steel tubes that together come to 2,293 linear feet—with the aid of a CNC (computer numerical control) machine tool called a tube bender that offered maximal precision. “This isn’t something we could have produced prior to the advent of this machine,” says BallNogues principal Benjamin Ball.

The technique and the technology were used in service of a humane goal: consoling people with illness on their minds by firing their imaginations. The shadow patterns created by the openwork are not only intriguing in themselves, but they “interfere” with each other to make shimmering moiré patterns like those created when you look through two wire screens at the same time. “We wanted to make a place that provokes a bit of wonder, that takes your mind away for a moment, that gives you pause,” says Ball.

Photo by Sibylle Allgaier.

Designed to calm and console hospital visitors

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— Benjamin Ball

Photo by Sibylle Allgaier.

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“WE WANTED TO FRAME THE SKY, SO WE MADE AN OCULUS. THIS HAD TO BE A PLACE TO SIT. IT HAD TO PROVIDE SHADE. BUT IT ALSO HAD TO BE A PASSAGEWAY.”

TOP: Photo by Sibylle Allgaier. BOTTOM: Photo by Laurent Leger Adame Photography.

TRANSFORMING SPACE Benjamin Ball: “This huge, fancy hospital had a rather dull, uninspiring podium-level terrace, and they wanted to transform it into a place for healing, a place for repose. So they turned to the landscape architects AHBE and us to make an environment that would be transporting for one’s imagination, if only for a few minutes; a place that could really help take people’s minds, for a minute, away from illness and what was happening in the hospital.”

Gaston Nogues, left, and Benjamin Ball of Ball-Nogues Studio at work.

ART OR ARCHITECTURE? Benjamin Ball: “I learned from this project that I could find a hybrid practice between architecture and public art, one that I could really believe in.… It’s more architectural than it is art. It grew out of a set of architectural considerations.

But its functions are relatively limited compared to, say, a hospital building, or even a house.

“It’s at a nice scale, with a very limited program, so that we could have a lot of creative freedom and a lot of opportunity to explore ideas about the non-utilitarian aspects of architec-

ture: the expressive potential of architecture, the potential of architecture to speak to something beyond utility.

“It was a great opportunity to do that in a permanent context.

“So some of our thinking had to do with how we could create both a space for sitting that had a degree of intimacy to it, and also make a passageway that one could freely walk through and feel as though they were not disturbing the people in the sitting area.”

1 2 3 4

Creation and Iteration: “There’s no playbook for how to design and execute a structure like this,” says Ball.

So in developing it, the design team worked closely with the fabricators, construction firm Hensel Phelps. It was a process of collaborative experimentation and iteration.

Designing the Production Process: Built into the “DNA” of the pavilion design process, says Ball, were specifications intended to make the by-hand fabrication easier and more uniform than is the case in many buildings—and artworks. “The idea was to yield something repeatable that looks very deliberate, very intentional,” he says. “…There were only five different welds that they had to do, so they could do them repeatedly and get very good at them; they didn’t have to look at dozens and dozens of drawings and specifications.”

The Human Hand: Despite the advantages that computer numerical control afforded, the fineness of the pavilion’s details and finish was the result of handwork. “The manual assembly process and the craftsmanship that goes into it—being handled by the right people—were critical to this working,” says Ball.

“The assembly process was not easy and required ironworkers with a great deal of experience.”

Fabricated with Patients in Mind: In order not to disrupt patients and hospital operations, Healing Pavilion couldn’t be assembled on-site. “It had to be installed as a single unit,” says Ball. “We needed to keep on-site welding to a minimum. So it had to be craned in as a single unit and welded to the deck as quickly as possible.”■

Photos by Sibylle Allgaier.

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Thoughtful Planning: From Design To Installation

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PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS: A portable, adaptable mini-green house that became a public workshop for generating ideas

Solar and kinetic energy to power lights and charge devices

Design intended to open up public space to new possibilities

A POP-UP

DESIGN LAB

IN A MADRID PLAZA

Photo by Javier de Paz Garcia.

Mountain on the Moon by Enorme Studio and MINI Hub MOUNTAIN IN THE MOON is an earth-friendly mini-environment for design thinking, collaboration, and hanging out. It has a triangular, gable-like structure that can be disassembled into a central section and two seating areas, complete with greenery, and deployed in any configuration. The central segment, which has desks and stools for working and cushions for lounging, looks like a diminutive greenhouse, and that’s deliberate. Mountain in the Moon is a green place for growing ideas.

Designed by the Madrid firm Enorme Studio—whose cofounder team members are David Pérez García, Carmelo Rodriguez Cedillo, and Rocio Pina Isla—Mountain appeared in Madrid’s Plaza de la Luna for three weeks during the Madrid Design Festival in February 2018.

It was initially planned mainly as a mobile design lab, with five designers invited by Enorme to work in the space, and passersby encouraged to observe them at work. But it soon morphed into a more basic urban amenity.

“The designers did participate,” says David Pérez, “but only at certain times of the day. We began to realize that, because it was a pleasant green space, and because the square doesn’t really have places to sit outside of bars or cafés, it was mainly working as a place for people to come, sit, and connect with one another any way they wanted.” Visitors observed the design process in the central unit, he says, but the designers also got to be immersed in the life of the plaza.

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Amenities On The “Moon” Besides being modular and portable—a hallmark of Enorme’s projects—Mountain in the Moon was designed to be both informal and environmentally advanced. It featured: • Raw plywood work stations • Oversize floor cushions • Solar-powered reading lights • USB charging ports powered by physical movement • Exterior plantings and interior plants for a “greenhouse” feel

Photos by Luis Alda. OPPOSITE BOTTOM: Drawing courtesy Enorme Studio.

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“WE WANTED TO DESIGN OUTDOOR ELEMENTS TO OPEN UP POSSIBILITIES FOR WHAT COULD HAPPEN IN PUBLIC SPACES.” —David Pérez

ABOVE: Built in sections and set on wheels, Mountain in the Moon offers flexible outdoor seating space with live plantings.

LEFT: A design drawing shows various ways sections of the structure can be configured.

OPPOSITE: Mountain accommodates individual workers (top) and group gatherings (bottom).

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In the center of the city, not far from the Gran Via, Madrid’s Broadway, lies Plaza de la Luna.

Created in the 1970s on the site of a demolished building, it had a reputation for prostitution and drugs until 2007, when the city government hired the Spanish/German urban-design firm Brut Deluxe to install decorative paving, a water feature that becomes an ice rink in winter, and other amenities.

Today the square is still somewhat gritty— its relative lack of greenery makes it hot in the summer, for example—but it is home to a pleasant terrace bar named (in English) The Moon, and the ground-level fountain is wadeable and thus popular with kids. (The former Luna cinema houses the Body Factory gym.)

David Pérez notes that the surrounding neighborhood is a mix of long-term dwellers and Gran Via tourists—an urban combination entirely appropriate for the site of an installation focused on connection and cooperation.

What’s Behind The Name?

The title Mountain in the Moon (Montaña en la Luna) is a puzzle. As for the “Mountain” part, David Pérez says, “The installation pretended to be in some way a mountain in the city— because of its form and the vegetation.”

Okay. But what about Moon, and why in (en) rather than on (sur)?

Well, first of all, moon doesn’t refer to Earth’s satellite. It’s a nod to the place where the project was set up: in a Madrid square called Plaza Santa Maria Soledad de Torres Acosta. But Madrileños never refer to it by that elaborate name, which honors a nineteenthcentury nun. They call it Plaza de la Luna, Plaza of the Moon—or more properly, Plaza of the “Cines Luna,” a movie theater whose neon sign was once the square’s signature.

Photo by Luis Alda. OPPOSITE: Photo by Javier de Paz Garcia, courtesy Enorme Studio.

THE PLAZA

THE PEOPLE The Mountain on the Moon project, explains Pérez, was launched when MINI Hub approached Enorme Studio for help in creating a portable design studio.

Enorme Studio Enorme Studio’s work has focused on the design of small, informal, adaptable structures using economical materials and means, and intended to rethink the relationship between architecture and daily life. Mountain in the Moon was no exception.

“We wanted to send a message about street furniture and other outdoor design elements,” Pérez says. “These things are mostly designed preventively, defensively; they have to be very solid and provide no surprises. But we wanted to design those elements to open up possibilities for what could happen in public spaces.” ■

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MINI Hub MINI Hub is a coworking and event space located, like Enorme, in the academic-bohemian Malasaña district of Madrid. Like Enorme too, MINI is committed to new ideas in design and culture. In addition to providing clients with workspaces, it hosts symposia, exhibitions, concerts, and family-friendly activities, in pursuit of what its website calls “global thinking capable of redefining concepts like ‘future’ or ‘mobility.’”

Recent MINI events have included a cardboard-toy-making workshop for kids; a symposium on the future of design; an exhibition of Spanish photographers under 30; and a discussion of the impact of virtual reality on architecture.

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ABOVE: David Pérez, seated center, with the Enorme Studio team in Madrid. OPPOSITE: Mountain in the Moon sited at Plaza de la Luna.

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS: Augmented reality images and stories of people experiencing homelessness

A collaboration between a technology-and-art organization and an innovative homelessservices nonprofit

Bringing the lives of easily ignored people into the awareness of their neighbors

The

Presence

of OTHERS FROM SEPTEMBER 7 TO 16, 2018, visitors to the city-owned PROXY open-air art-and-retail space in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley got an opportunity to “meet” some of their fellow citizens: San Franciscans who have been or become “unhoused”—homeless—in the wake of the city’s warp-speed gentrification. The meetings occurred thanks to a project called coming home (the lower case is intentional) and courtesy of augmented-reality technology.

After downloading a mobile app and scanning QR codes with your phone or tablet, you could “enter,” via your screen, any of eight scenes from different neighborhoods in the city. There you could meet people experiencing, or who had experienced, homelessness. They told you their stories and, thanks to the tech, you could approach them, walk around them, feel their presence.

Then you could record and share back how the experience had affected you.

Photo courtesy Lava Mae.

coming home by Lava Mae, ZERO1, and collaborators

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THE STORY BEHIND THE PROJECT a way to get to this kind of visceral understanding?

As a first step, Sandoval and Lava Mae put together a multimedia art exhibition in the Fouladi Projects gallery in San Francisco: video, paintings, and photography engaging the problem of the unhoused. However, Schoening says, “one of the pieces of learning that came out of that was the gallery could be a very intimidating space.”

Meanwhile, John Craig Freeman, a widely experienced new-media public artist with a focus on globalization issues who teaches at Emerson College in Massachusetts, was working with ZERO1 on a project in the Paseo Public Prototyping Festival, an arts-and-tech gathering in San José. He was interested in addressing homelessness and the economic divide in the Bay Area, and Barbara Goldstein, board chair and president of ZERO1, introduced him to Sandoval. A collaboration was born.

Freeman engineered the images for coming home. The audio was the work of San Francisco–based journalists and audio artists Tania Ketenjian and Philip Wood, who collaborate as Sound Made Public.

Photos courtesy Lava Mae.

Coming home was the result of the coming together of ZERO1, an organization promoting art-tech-science collaborations in the heart of Silicon Valley (San Jose, California), and Lava Mae, an unconventional homeless-support nonprofit in San Francisco that brings showers, haircuts, and other services to unhoused people via repurposed city buses.

Lava Mae is always looking for innovative ways to approach the housing crisis and the unhoused, says Amy Schoening, Lava Mae’s curator of arts programming. “The organization is doing an amazing job on the street level, providing services, but one of the things that Doniece Sandoval, the founder of Lava Mae, saw was that unless the attitude and perceptions of the broader community shifted, it would be more difficult for unhoused people to have the kind of resilience they need to move through that situation,” says Schoening. “We all know that awful feeling we get if we’re in a job or a relationship where the person or the people involved don’t respect us.

Now magnify that into an entire community.”

So in an effort to help shift perceptions, Shoening says, Sandoval started asking questions like: How can art serve as

Amy Schoening, curator of arts programming at Lava Mae, and Barbara Goldstein, board chair and president of ZERO1, explain what experiencing coming home is like.

“

Schoening: You look into your phone, and you see around you Chestnut Street, you see the corner of Masonic and Haight. You see the Thai food store. You see someone sitting in front of it and you walk towards them, and as you walk up to them, you start to hear them telling their story. The stories—they’re real, and they’re not easy, many of them. But in almost every one of them, there’s the possibility of a change, there’s deep humanity and connection. So the ultimate experience is not one that brings you down, but one that lifts you into an understanding that we are like each other.

”

“

Goldstein: You get to see the person in their neighborhood, in the context of how and where they live, telling you something about themselves in a very quiet and personal conversation.

”

“

Schoening: At the end of it, we have installed a kind of a confessional recording device. You press a button that’s kind of like a door bell, and there are a couple of prompts, asking you to tell us a little bit about your experience having people who are unhoused as your neighbors.

”

“

The opportunity to respond to the piece lets you record how it’s impacting you emotionally, Goldstein: and I think that’s not just a very important part of the art experience, but an important part of social practice in general: getting people to respond, and reflect about their own situation.

■

”

Experience coming home You can explore coming home’s virtual scenes in locations across San Francisco indefinitely. Go to cominghomesf.org for more information and a map of locations.

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PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS: A derelict church becomes an art-energized community center

An affordable-housing agency runs an art/performance venue

Artists transform its once-drab site with color and cleverness

FOR LOVE of a NEIGHBORHOOD

Photo by Mike Conti.

Cook Inlet Housing Authority’s Church of Love

THE BIG BUILDING WITH THE SPIRE at the corner of 36 th and Spenard Road in suburban Anchorage, Alaska, was supposed to be leveled for a parking lot. Instead it helped a housing agency discover the power of art to connect people. No longer used for religious purposes, the Church of Love is now a temple dedicated to art, performance, and community. Run by the Cook Inlet Housing Authority (CIHA), an affordable-housing nonprofit with properties all over the city, it’s a vibrant community center/art space/performance venue that, if not exactly artist-run, has been artist-inspired and artist-developed for years. It’s helping revitalize Spenard, a proud, gritty community near the airport that’s long struggled economically but inspires intense loyalty in its denizens.

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ABOVE: A new sign for the Church was designed by Karen Larsen. OPPOSITE TOP: Chad Taylor’s plans for the “Reclaiming Asphalt” project included adding greenery. Kerby McGhee turned a stretch of concrete in front of the Church into a “horizontal mural.” Graham Dane created a community cubby wall where passersby could use giant “Scrabble pieces” to spell out messages. OPPOSITE BELOW: Closeup of cubby wall.

The Church of Love began life as the Lake Spenard Baptist Church. Later, as Love Church, it had a KoreanAmerican congregation. When the congregation relocated, the church, which is next door to the headquarters of the CIHA, sat vacant for years. CIHA eventually bought it and decided to tear it down to give the growing agency more parking space.

Then the artists got involved. Sheila Wyne and Bruce Farnsworth, founding members of the Light Brigade, a local troupe of site-specific performers, needed a space to fabricate some sculptures, explains Candace Blas, who manages the Church for CIHA. Soon CIHA was agreeing to let other artists use the space.

“They ran amok and had a blast,” she recalls. “The magical thing that happened during the artists’ use of the church was that they demonstrated to CIHA that there was a real need for a space like this in our community.” About that time CIHA got a $3 million community development grant from ArtPlace America to “[explore] the intersection between the arts and culture sector and community development,” and

the idea of keeping the Church and using it to further that goal took shape.

Community development investments by ArtPlace, which will sunset in 2020 after 10 years of major funding for the arts in the United States, took a different approach to supporting the arts. “The point of the grant was not art as the final output, but rather the artistic process and involvement of creatives or artists in resolving a community-led project,” Tyler Robinson, the director of development, planning, and finance at CIHA, told The Spenardian.

FROM THE OUTSIDE: THE “RECLAIMING ASPHALT” PROJECT In 2016–2017 CIHA used ArtPlace America funds to invite landscape architects and artists to enliven the asphalt-heavy streetscape around the agency’s multi-building campus, centering on the Church of Love. “We really want to portray Spenard Road as something with the potential to be very vibrant and alive; something that’s illuminating,” project lead Chad Taylor of Anchorage’s Intrinsic Landscapes told the Anchorage Daily News. “Everything has an aesthetic value to it, but it’s more about how people use space.”

Photo by James Evans. OPPOSITE: Photos by Mike Conti.

A BRIEF HISTORY: THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE

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ON THE INSIDE: A COMMUNITY COLLAGE After community input drove the decision to keep the Church of Love, says Candace Blas, CIHA started to get booking inquiries from other community members as well as artists. “‘Can we rent it for our nonprofit? For our all-ages rock show? For our breakdance competition?’ It was this explosion in the use of the space that impressed CIHA. It showed that the building could lift up Spenard,” says Blas.

What has happened and continues to happen within the Church’s walls runs a gamut: new-circus performance (a local group called System of Strings), hip-hop and dub

shows, art installations, a singer-songwriter showcase called Spenard Song Circle, the Spenard Jazz Fest, design workshops, yoga classes, movie nights—in short, a collage of events that fuse down-to-earth community with challenging art. Some of the programming is by CIHA, but community groups rent the space as well. There are also for-rent artist studios in the back, as well as the Anchorage Community House, an intimate community-center-within-a-community -center that holds book club meetings, food swaps, classes, cooking lessons, and retreats. ■

Artworkby Photos © Mike Kara Conti.

Walker, courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, Photo by Alex Marks.

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“WE LEARN SOMETHING EACH TIME WE USE IT. THE ARTISTS ARE TEACHING US HOW TO USE THIS SPACE.”

—Sezy Gerow-Hansen, Director, Public and Residence Relations, CIHA, in the Anchorage Daily News

Bruce Farnsworth of the Light Brigade in the middle of his Follow the Light installation inside the Church of Love.

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS: Large-scale portraits of women that invite both admiration and contemplation

Images poised between intense presence and the possibility of disappearance

A movement to give women muralists their due in Argentina and beyond

On “Being a

Woman

A MALE REPORTER for a Chilean TV network asked the Buenos Aires–born and internationally known muralist Mariela Ajras a question that made her angry. “Mariela, ¿qué sentís siendo mujer y pintando en la calle?” (“How do you feel about being a woman and painting in the street?”)

“I was really uncomfortable with the question,” Ajras says. “And I wanted to ask him, why are you asking me? If you’re trying to say that there could be violence in the street, why don’t you ask the people who are perpetrating the violence? I felt like it is always us women who have to testify about, or somehow be held accountable for, the injustice inflicted on us.”

The TV crew wanted to film Ajras making a work in Buenos Aires, and Mujeres que pintan en la calle (Women who paint in the street) (right), Ajras’ rejoinder to the interviewer’s clueless question, was the one she created in front of their cameras, on a factory building in her neighborhood.

Photo by Mariela Ajras.

and PAINTING IN

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THE STREET” Mujeres que pintan en la calle by Mariela Ajras

THE FRAGILITY OF THE IMAGE For all its directness and power, Mujeres que pintan en la calle is a slightly “disturbed” image too. The right-hand panel has thin vertical streaks running from top to bottom that Ajras likens to electronic interference. Many of her works include similar distortions, often in the form of streaks of color that stretch the image or seem to be leaking out of it.

Ajras is a trained psychotherapist, and for her these distortions suggest how the mind operates. “In remembering,” she says, “we have a selection of images we remember and images we forget, and every time we go back to a fading memory to try to retrieve it, it gets more and more lost. Beyond the mind there is this force that resembles forgetting or memory

repression, a force that is trying to make us disappear—this force is time. Somehow we state our existence, we affirm it, against this force called time.”

Ajras’s fascination with forgetting has a sociopolitical dimension. “The force that wants to erase you,” she says, “can be time, it can be in the active memory, or it can operate in social life, in everyday life. There is always power, power over others, always these demands that say one group has to be subjected or erased in order for the other to be in power.

So, at least in this country, life is a struggle between this force that wants to erase you and your willingness to affirm yourself, affirm your life.” ■

—Mariela Ajras

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“I BELIEVE THAT THE MURAL BEHAVES LIKE A THIRD PARTY IN THE SOCIALIZATION PROCESS. PEOPLE ARE SUMMONED BY THE MURAL BECAUSE IT’S HAPPENING IN THEIR STREETS.… A CONVERSATION STARTS HAPPENING THAT MAYBE WOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED IF THIS EVENT WASN’T TAKING PLACE.”

Photo by Diego Rotmistrovsky. OPPOSITE: Photo by John Andrews, CreativeCollective, Massachusetts, courtesy Mariela Ajras.

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Artist and psychotherapist Mariela Ajras (opposite) incorporates distortions into her paintings to reflect the nature of forgetting and the politics of erasure.

Association of Female Muralists of Argentina Female Argentine muralists, and other women artists, have to do battle daily with a system that, if it doesn’t exactly want to erase them, certainly puts obstacles in their path. “In my country,” Ajras says, “every public art commission, every street art festival is male-dominated. In Buenos Aires, 98 percent of public art commissions are done by men.”

Determined to do something, she began holding informal meetings of women muralists in her home, and their cooperation expanded into a network of artist-activists called AMMurA, the Association of Female Muralists of Argentina.

AMMurA is starting a catalog of portfolios of every woman who paints murals in Argentina, and expanding it to cover all Latin America, and then, hopefully, the world. “So whenever a curator or a public art administrator says ‘There aren’t enough women painting,’” says Ajras, “we can say ‘Look, here’s the catalog!’ We’ve already gathered 300 women in less than a month.”

TAKING

Nandi Comer presents “Techno Poetics: My Bump-in with DJs” at Sound House, a community space created

by Power House Productions with collaborators including artists RETNA and Jon Brumit.

Photo by Darrel Ellis Photography.

Ownership

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS: An artist-led neighborhood revitalization project

Five restored community houses and a skate park

Building synergies between artists and residents

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The community houses of Power House Productions

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“A BIG THING IN DETROIT,” says Mitch Cope, “is taking ownership of your neighborhood. Because the city has neglected the neighborhoods for so long, in order for a neighborhood to survive, you have to take it into your own hands.”

The artist is talking about a lot of enterprising Detroiters, including his neighbors in the Banglatown district straddling the border between Detroit and Hamtramck: Bangladeshi immigrants, older people of Eastern European heritage, African Americans, and younger whites. They beautify their homes with the vibrant colors of South Asia, create sculptural garden trellises, carve out recreational spaces for kids, and a lot more.

He’s also talking about himself and his wife, artist-architect Gina Reichert. Since 2008, they’ve been doing their own brand of artist-led community development in Banglatown: buying abandoned houses at auction and in other ways, collaborating with artists to rehab them and turn them into centers of neighborhood creativity, and developing a skate park/sculpture park. Their goal: to help stabilize and celebrate an immigrant neighborhood, one formerly derelict house at a time.

FROM VACANCY TO VIBRANCY

Power House Productions has bought and sold more than 40 properties in Detroit’s Banglatown. They’ve rehabbed five collaborating with artists. The artist-altered houses provide space for art and cultural activities in the neighborhood.

Power House: The first house Cope and Reichert bought had been so vandalized that it was off the power grid. They decided to make the most of that by powering it entirely by wind and solar. With a colorful striped exterior, the house became a focal point in the neighborhood for discussions about renewable energy and the repurposing of the area’s derelict houses—and a model for future projects.

TOP: Image courtesy PowerHouse Productions. BOTTOM: Photo by Mitch Cope.

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“We’d lived in the neighborhood since 2005,” says Cope, “with no inclination to do anything like Power House. But then came the financial crisis in 2008. Seeing houses go vacant, people being evicted—seeing what happened to the houses after that, including vandalism and drugs—was very problematic.”

They bought a derelict drug house in that year and dubbed it the Power House. It gave its name to their nonprofit, Power House Productions, which launched in 2009. They’ve bought and sold more than 40 properties. “We’ve acted as a kind of land bank,” says Reichert. But some of the houses were transformed by artists and other collaborators into installations/ environments that also serve the neighborhood.

It wasn’t Reichert’s and Cope’s goal to create an “arts district.” Instead, they aimed to focus attention on the continuing value of houses that the city views as valueless eyesores, bring artists into dialogue with community members, and most importantly, stabilize the neighborhood. One way they did that was by buying properties that were, as Reichert told a placemaking forum in 2014, “close enough to each other to have a relationship to one another, but far enough [apart] so that the impact covers more geography.”

COMMUNITY HOUSES Today, Power House Productions is housed in the Jar House. It’s a resource, complete with a project library, for anyone in the community who wants to read and learn about the neighborhood, and about socially engaged art practice.

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TOP: Photo by Mitch Cope. BOTTOM LEFT: Photo by Gina Reichert. BOTTOM RIGHT: Still from video by Katie Barkel.

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Sound House: After buying it in 2010, Reichert and Cope invited L.A. artist RETNA to transform the interior. Jon Brumit, a sound artist who had relocated to the neighborhood from Chicago, “interpreted the painting in sound terms,” according to Reichert. He installed sound artworks and established an archive of sound art and a musical instrument library. Artists-in-residence work in the house by invitation, offering in exchange public presentations or additions to the archive or instrument library. The current artist-in-residence is Detroit native Sterling Toles, a sound artist and music producer.

Squash House: Detroit artist Graem Whyte developed a vision that revolved around squash as both a sport and a vegetable. The front part of the house has been transformed into a squash court where local kids play (right). A back portion is a greenhouse devoted to the plant; by the luck of wordplay, squash is also a staple of Bangladeshi cuisine. Neighbors are invited to take part in a seed exchange and plant squash and other vegetables in the space. Neighborhood residents and artists Anne Elizabeth Moore and Melissa Mendes added “Our Big Drawing” to the front of the house (left).

Ride It Sculpture Park: A skate park that’s also a sculpture park, initiated in 2012, Ride It has just seen the completion of the third phase of its construction process. “Most of the concrete is poured,” says Reichert, “and we’ve been installing work by New York artist Nari Ward, who’s been involved with the project for about three years.” Cope adds that the shape of the park itself is “unusual for a skate park—more sculptural than most.”

TOP LEFT: Photo by Michelle Gerard. MIDDLE LEFT: Photo by Gina Reichert. BOTTOM LEFT: Photo by Jamin Townsley. RIGHT: Photo by Mitch Cope.

Play House: A two-unit apartment house was gutted to create a space for the Hinterlands ensemble, a performance troupe that emphasizes physical theater. The ensemble performs there regularly, and the space also hosts dance, puppet productions, experimental film, folk music, and other events. The Hinterlands have forged an alliance with the Bangla School of Music, a local cultural organization that holds classes and practice sessions in South Asian music every weekend, along with seasonal concerts.

“HOW HAS THE NEIGHBORHOOD RESPONDED TO YOUR WORK?” Reflections from Mitch Cope (left) and Gina Reichert (right): Reichert: Cope:

“ We had a block party with an

“ At the beginning, neighbors were

the crossover between Hinterlands

happening, they liked the energy. But then with the beginning of programming, especially in the Play House,

”

we saw more interaction.

and the Bangla School of Music in the Play House, we’ve noticed that there’s been audience-building between the two. That’s a model for how we want to move forward in the neighborhood.

”

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just excited that there was something

MC-hosted talent show. And with

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Cope:

“ There’s been some animosity between groups,

Reichert:

residents, but we’ve noticed that at our events and

“ That’s especially been the

particularly between newer immigrants and the older sites the different groups have begun to talk to each other. We feel that we’ve helped break down barriers Photo by Doug Coombe.

by providing space for people to express themselves and have shared cultural experiences together. We’ve provided space for cross-cultural exchanges, sharing time and talent and experiences that allow people to

”

move forward as a community.

case at the Ride It Sculpture

Park. Interactions happen informally all the time there. They

”■

don’t have to be programmed.

IN STEEL Chris Cornelius’s Wiikiaami

CHRIS CORNELIUS DESIGNED WIIKIAAMI not just for a specific place, but also for a specific moment: the autumnal equinox of 2017.

The temporary structure, inspired, as its name indicates, by the lodges (“wigwams”) of Indiana’s indigenous Myaamia people, points upward through a grove of trees toward the heavens. The oculus at its top was aimed directly at the place in the sky where the sun would be at the moment of the equinox.

As for the place where Wiikiaami was sited for three months, it was Columbus, Indiana, a small city that has become a showplace for A-list architecture. More specifically, the pavilion was located near a walkway leading to the very first of the iconic Columbus buildings: Eero and Eliel Saarinen’s First Christian Church (1942), with its geometrical profile and lofty campanile.

Aiming upward at the equinox, Cornelius was also paying homage to the soaring Saarinen tower—but in most other respects, the architect (an enrolled member of the Oneida nation in Wisconsin and a professor at the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee) was honoring the culture and the building traditions of the Myaamia (the “Miami”). For their lodges, they built a framework of bent saplings and covered this skeleton with bark sections. Only Cornelius used industrial rebar and perforated, weathered metal “leaves” welded in place. And he called on the skills of regional artists and industrial craftsmen to realize his design.

The structure provided a peaceful place to rest, linger, and meditate on the leafy green space in which it was installed.

Photo by Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus.

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SERENITY

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS: A “wigwam” covered in translucent steel, designed for meditating, responds to a Saarinen church

A peaceful pavilion built on Native American principles—with a nod to High Modernism

Part of Columbus, Indiana’s rich architectural endowment

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TOP: Image courtesy studio:indigenous. BOTTOM: Photo by Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus.

Chris Cornelius drew upon wigwam architecture (above) to design Wiikiaami in response to Eero and Eliel Saarinen’s First Christian Church (right), built in Columbus in 1942.

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ABOVE: Architect Chris Cornelius (left) on-site during construction.

TOP RIGHT: Expert welders from Faurecia, a Columbus manufacturer of auto seats, volunteered 600 hours to the project. BOTTOM RIGHT: Children listen during a storytelling event inside Wiikiaami.

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Photos by Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus.

An Architectural Inheritance Exhibit Columbus is the annual architectural festival that created the Miller Prize, the competitive commission that Cornelius and four other entrants won in 2017. The festival debuted in 2016 as a culmination of 70 years of architectural excellence in this town of 46,000 people.

It mixes symposia on architecture with interactive installations downtown—but the central focus is on the five Miller Prize winners.

The town’s remarkable wealth of major architecture began with the Saarinen church, commissioned by a group of prominent local citizens—with the emphatic advice of one of their young relatives, J. Irwin Miller, who had taken an architecture course at Yale. Modernism, not neo-Gothic, was the way to go, he insisted.

Years later, Miller had become head of Columbus’s dominant corporation, the Cummins Engine Company, but was still passionate about architecture. The industrialist created a foundation to subsidize public buildings in Columbus, with the stipulation that the architects be chosen from a short list of major ones provided by the foundation. The results were works by the Saarinens, I. M. Pei, Robert Venturi, Richard Meier, and many others—and in 1991 a ranking by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) as the sixth most significant architectural city in America, just behind Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

A CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS CORNELIUS Public Art Review’s Jon Spayde talks with the artist.

What did you see in the Myaamia structures that was most interesting for you?

Well, when we make a structure out of wood, we usually cut up a bunch of trees into pieces and put all of the pieces together. But the Myaamia simply cut down saplings that could be bent, and bent them over and connected them to make this dome structure. This instead of putting together a bunch of columns and beams. They reduced the number of connections, and that interested me.

You used rebar and steel, though.

Right. What I didn’t want to do was make any kind of replica. I think to advance our awareness of Native culture, we need to make contemporary statements about it.

I chose rebar, which reinforces concrete, because it’s kind of everywhere, and it’s still part of a tradition of handwork— iron workers still tie the bars together by hand. There’s a connection there for me with how the wigwam was made.

And as for having the panels made of metal—I wanted them to weather and change throughout, to rust. Normally we don’t want buildings to rust, but since this was going to remain on-site for just three months, I let nature take its course.

A group of really great craftsmen in Indianapolis called Ignition Arts fabricated the panels for me after my initial panel contractor completely let me down. And people from Faurecia, a Columbus manufacturer of auto seats, volunteered 600 hours to the project. They’re expert welders and they contributed so much.

How did you hope the structure would be used, and how was it actually used?

I didn’t want it to have a prescribed use. There were various events programmed for it, including a dance piece by an Indianapolis company. But I mainly wanted it to have a

mysterious quality that would change how you saw the land. When you’re outside it and there’s a lot of light striking it from outside, it looks opaque. When you see it from an angle at which the sun is shining through it, it looks almost transparent. I mostly wanted it to be a sort of device for seeing nature, for people to look at the trees and at the church, while feeling protected within the space.

Any big problems to overcome?

Oh, yes. Here’s one of many. The steel didn’t actually get delivered till August 21, a Monday, and it needed to be done for the press preview on Thursday. We finished it an hour after the press preview started! Working almost night and day.

And, you know, the 21st was the day of the total solar eclipse. I think of coincidences like that as part of how nature works; as I said in my speech accepting the award, maybe the moon had to pass in front of the sun in order for this piece to be there. ■

ABOVE: Looking up through the center of Wiikiaami. OPPOSITE: Chris Cornelius inside Eero and Eliel Saarinen’s First Christian Church..

Photos by Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus.

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Chris, where did the idea for Wiikiaami come from?

My background is Native American, and in my business, studio:indigenous, I mostly work with Native clients. So I wanted to address the people who were indigenous to that area and their traditional dwellings—and have the work reflect that.

“MAYBE THE MOON HAD TO PASS IN FRONT OF THE SUN FOR THIS PIECE TO BE THERE.” —Chris Cornelius

FACING THE REALITY The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, from the Equal Justice Initiative

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS: Challenging Confederate monuments with a tribute to racism’s victims

A monument that uses architectural space to immerse visitors in a grim history

Created by a public-interest lawyer and his nonprofit in collaboration with designers

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Photo courtesy Equal Justice Initiative / Human Pictures.

OF RACIAL TERROR THE DESIGN OF THE NATIONAL MEMORIAL FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE IS ELEGANT, but it evokes unease. Its vast open rectangular roof is supported by row upon row of somber, weathered steel slabs from which slender poles rise. When you know that this new monument in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated on April 26, 2018, is offered to the memory of some 4,400 African Americans murdered by mobs between 1877 and 1950, the somberness makes sense.

But nothing prepares a visitor for the experience of traversing the four sides of the rectangle.

At first, all the slabs are at eye level and appear to support the structure. But the final two galleries take you down inclines, and it’s clear that the majority of the slabs are now suspended from the roof. As you travel lower, they rise above you: hundreds upon hundreds of them, each representing one of the 805 counties in 12 southern states, and eight states outside the South, where mobs carried out what the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) terms “racial terror lynchings”— public murders, often involving torture and mutilation, intended to remind black Americans that the slightest deviation from the rules of Jim Crow could be fatal. The slabs, roughly human-size, are inscribed with the names of the dead; for Phillips County, Arkansas, the worst of all, there are 245 names.

The memorial was conceived by Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of EJI, a Montgomery-based legal nonprofit, and designed by him in collaboration with MASS Design Group of Boston. It’s the fruit of EJI’s research into the brutal history and mind-numbing extent of lynching between Reconstruction and the dawn of the civil rights era.

INSET RIGHT: Rise Up, a Hank Willis Thomas sculpture at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

The memorial proper sits on a six-acre site owned by EJI, a few blocks from the center of Montgomery and a mile or so from the state capitol and its cluster of Confederate statues.

Figural public art on-site helps tell the story not only of lynching but, as the EJI website puts it, “of enslaved black people…African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.”

As they enter the grounds, visitors are confronted by Ghanaian artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo’s sculpture of black men and women in chains; elsewhere on the grounds, bronze figures by artist-journalist Dana King honor the women who supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Hank Willis Thomas has created a somber wall from which rise the hands and heads of black men in gestures of surrender, evoking recent confrontations—many of them fatal—between black Americans and the police.

In a field next to the memorial are duplicates of all 805 slabs. They’re intended to be brought to the counties they represent and erected as memorials there. “Over time,” writes Fred A. Bernstein in Architectural Digest, “absences will reveal which communities have helped spread the Memorial’s moving message—and which have not.”

Photos courtesy Equal Justice Initiative / Human Pictures.

A SITE FOR CONTEMPLATION AND LEARNING

—Bryan Lee Jr., designer and founder/director of Colloqate Design, quoted in CityLab

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“WHAT I FIND FASCINATING ABOUT THE ARCHITECTURE OF THIS MEMORIAL IS THE POSITIONING OF SPACE AS AN ACTIVE PARTICIPANT IN THE FIGHT FOR JUSTICE.”

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Along with the memorial, EJI has built the Legacy Museum, located in downtown Montgomery on the site of a former slave warehouse and close to a slave auction site, with artifacts and digital displays that link five themes: slavery, racial terrorism (including lynching), segregation, police violence against African Americans, and mass incarceration of black people. It’s an art gallery as well, with thematic works by Titus Kaphar, Sanford Biggers, Glenn Ligon, Jacob Lawrence, and Elizabeth Catlett. ■

ABOVE: The exterior of the Legacy Museum. TOP: On a wall in the Legacy Museum Lobby. OPPOSITE: Jars hold soil from lynching sites in Alabama (photographed prior to installation at the museum). FOLLOWING PAGES: Sculpture at memorial by Ghanaian artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo.

Photos courtesy Equal Justice Initiative / Human Pictures. OPPOSITE: Photo by Bill Sutton / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0.

THE MUSEUM: FROM SLAVERY TO MASS INCARCERATION

—Phillip Kennicott in the Washington Post

Equal Justice Institute: A Passion for Justice Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard-trained public-interest lawyer, founded the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in 1989. Under his leadership the organization has won reversals, relief, or release in the cases of 125 prisoners wrongly condemned to death row, while also working tirelessly against excessive and unfair sentencing and the abuse of prisoners and the mentally ill. Recently EJI has broadened its focus to include the history of incarceration and lynching in America.

Stevenson’s work on behalf of children sentenced as adults came into sharp focus in 2012, when his arguments before the Supreme Court resulted in a ruling that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children 17 or younger are unconstitutional. His many honors include a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, the Lannan Foundation Prize for Human and Civil Rights, and the Lawyer for the People Award from the National Lawyers Guild.

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“STEVENSON IS DEEPLY CONVERSANT IN THE RECENT HISTORY OF MEMORIAL ARCHITECTURE, CITING THE APARTHEID MUSEUM IN JOHANNESBURG, PETER EISENMAN’S HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL IN BERLIN AND THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL IN WASHINGTON AMONG HIS INSPIRATIONS.”

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Photo courtesy Equal Justice Initiative / Human Pictures.

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“CHANGING THE NARRATIVE ABOUT THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY REQUIRES SOME MEASURE OF COURAGE. WE’RE ASKING PEOPLE TO BE BRAVE. WE BELIEVE THAT UNDERSTANDING OUR HISTORY WON’T HARM US, IT WILL ACTUALLY EMPOWER US TO CREATE A BETTER FUTURE.” —Bryan Stevenson, quoted in artnet News

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PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS: A collaboration between a major American artist, German mosaic artisans, and MTA Arts & Design

A key piece in an ambitious public-transit public art program

WORDS TO REUNITE US CHORUS by Ann Hamilton

ON SEPTEMBER 8, 2018, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) opened the new WTC Cortlandt station, 17 years after the original Cortlandt Street station was damaged in the September 11 attacks.

Visitors couldn’t help but notice how far the station deviated from the fairly funky norm for New York subway stations. Fewer pillars, wider vistas, gleaming white walls. And on the walls is CHORUS, an enormous work by Ann Hamilton, one of America’s major artists. It’s made from words, many words, from one national and one international document—the Declaration of Independence and the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights—built up meticulously in white-on-white mosaics. Words that inspire, but are presented in a way that supports inner peace in an emotionally charged location.

Photo by Patrick Cashin / MTA.

A mosaic in a subway station, made up of quotations from two foundational human-rights documents

REBUILDING AND A MOVING PROPOSAL

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Cortlandt Street’s reconstruction had to wait for decisions about what would be built, or rebuilt, on the ground at Ground Zero, and those contentious discussions dragged on for years before the project took its final form: five skyscrapers (four completed so far), a museum, a memorial, and a transit hub. When the Port Authority returned control of the station to the MTA in 2015, Sandra Bloodworth, director of MTA’s Arts & Design Program, and her colleagues swung into action to make sure that the station got an artwork worthy of the site’s significance to New Yorkers and other Americans.

“We knew how special this site is. Arts & Design had a responsibility to create the right environment,” says Bloodworth. “We worked with a very thoughtful selection panel who were grounded in the same intent, and we selected Ann’s proposal because it was captivating.”

Photo by Markus Jans. OPPOSITE: Photo by Sammy Hart.

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“WITH THIS PROJECT I WAS LINKING ABOVE AND BELOW, PRESENT AND PAST. THE STATION IS A THRESHOLD, AND SO I ASKED MYSELF: WHAT IS THE QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE THAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN IN THAT THRESHOLD, A THRESHOLD THAT’S CONNECTING THE THRONG OF THE CITY AND THE QUIETUDE OF THE MEMORIAL?” —Ann Hamilton

Photos by Markus Jans.

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MAKING THE MOSAIC

THE TITLE Hamilton chose the title CHORUS to refer to the joined “voices” of the human-rights documents she quotes from, but also for subtler “musical” reasons.

“You might stand on one side of the platform and be able to read a lot of the text on the other side,” she says, “but another experience of the piece will be...as you walk along, in the pace and rhythm of your footsteps, you’ll pick out with your eye words or phrases that strike you, and when you return to the station you’ll see them again. They’ll repeat for you like a refrain.”

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To make CHORUS, Hamilton worked with artisans at Franz Mayer of Munich, a 170-year-old firm specializing in mosaic and stained glass. The company has fabricated mosaic work for public art projects worldwide, including murals for the Chicago Transit Authority, the European Monetary Institute in Frankfurt, and other MTA stations in New York.

“One of the only ways I understand things is to try to do them,” Hamilton says, “and the people at Mayer were incredibly generous. I spent a week in their studios learning about the materials, watching them work, and trying my hand at it directly.

“I’d never done a mosaic before, so it was a very new process to me, but I felt immediately a kind of kinship and excitement about it, partly because my background is in textiles. A mosaic is a large image built out of very small individual parts and that’s also true of work in cloth. And at the metaphorical level you can think about the relationship of the individual to the collective: people working together to create the social fabric. This is the aspirational language of a civic society. So it makes sense to have it made up of many little parts, because as citizens we each have to play our part.”

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“A CHORUS OF YESSES” PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 30 | ISSUE 58 | FORECASTPUBLICART.ORG

Hamilton uses the same metaphor for the remarkable degree of ease she and Bloodworth experienced in the approval and execution of the project. “I don’t think that, unless you’ve been involved in a process like this, you have any idea how many people need to believe in it, and say yes, and creatively solve problems to bring it in. I think that it’s here because of a chorus of yesses.”

Bloodworth credits the power of Hamilton’s concept with creating that chorus. “Everyone along the way who needed to say ‘Yes, and I will do this to make this happen,’ their hearts just fell open,” she says. “When people can get past all of the politics of creating something and all the unique challenges, they just want to make something happen, for all the right reasons. Ann’s concept did that for them.” ■

Photo by Patrick Cashin / MTA.

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Photo by NAARO

MARC FORNES / THEVERYMANY

Wanderwall 2018

NOVEL Stonewall Station, Charlotte, NC Commissioned by Crescent Communities in partnership with ASC Public Art 18,000 square-foot architectural faรงade

ArtsAndScience.org

BOOKS New Publications PROJECTS Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Urban Projects Matthias Koddenberg and Laure Martin-Poulet New York: D.A.P., 2017

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From 2017 to 2018, ING Art Center in Brussels held the first retrospective of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s urban works since 1981. In addition to the artists’ well-known later works, this book shows drawings, models, and plans for many earlier and little-known projects—some of which were never carried out. It includes photographs of the artists and an essay on Christo’s drawings by Laure Martin-Poulet.

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Plus: A Succession Plan for Watershed+ Sans Façon Calgary: City of Calgary, 2017 Sans Façon, an art duo composed of Tristan Surtees and Charles Blanc, spent eight years on Watershed+, an artwork developed with the City of Calgary Utilities and Environment Protection department. This book catalogues the artists involved in the project, along with essays and interviews, a manifesto, and a succession plan for the city.

WALTER DE MARIA

Ally: Janine Antoni, Anna Halprin, Stephen Petronio Adrian Heathfield, ed.

Hirmer Publishers in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, 2017; distributed by University of Chicago Press An intergenerational trio of artists—Janine Antonini, Stephen Petronio, and Anna Halprin—co-created four interconnected pieces that include movement, installation, sculpture, sound, and video. This exhibition catalogue from the Fabric Workshop and Museum incorporates photographs and essays, as well as a translation of a memoir by Hélène Cixous.

BOOKS

Walter De Maria: The Lightning Field John Cliett, photographer New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2017 Walter De Maria and Dia Art Foundation commissioned photographer John Cliett to document The Lightning Field, which was completed in 1977 in New Mexico and is still maintained by Dia. The stunning photographs in this book were taken in 1978 and 1979.

Artists on Walter De Maria Richard Aldrich, Jeanne Dunning, Faivovich & Goldberg, Terry Winters; Katherine Atkins and Kelly Kivland, eds.

New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2017 Four artists consider different aspects of Walter De Maria’s work and his influence. Part of Dia Art Foundation’s Artists on Artists Lecture Series, these essays attest to De Maria’s legacy through works like The Lightning Field, The New York Earth Room, and The Vertical Earth Kilometer.

PERFORMANCE Performing Revolutionary: Art, Action, Activism Nicole Garneau (Anne Cushwa, ed.)

Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2018; distributed by University of Chicago Press Nicole Garneau used her UPRISING performance project to train herself to be “a more revolutionary person.” She also invited others to contribute to her research on revolutionary practices and skills. This book offers strategies, learned from 60 UPRISINGs, for social-justice-based participatory artmaking.

PUBLIC SPACE Be Seated Laurie Olin Novato, CA: Applied Research and Design, an imprint of ORO Editions, 2017 Starting with a history of seating in the landscape, Laurie Olin explores her fascination with public seating—from both philosophical and utilitarian viewpoints—and what she learned about it in four decades as a landscape architect. The book is filled with her drawings and sketches.

Controversial Monuments and Memorials: A Guide for Community Leaders David B. Allison, ed.

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018 “Loving each other leads to strength. Resilience emerges from a community that cares for each other. These are the touchstones that will fuel transformation and promote true reconciliation with the painful past,” writes David B. Allison in his introduction to this timely collection of essays. The book includes thoughtful perspectives—and practical questions that can be put to use—from community leaders and public historians.

TENDERLOIN ARTISTS | TWIN CITIES: BALANCING ACTS | CARLTON TURNER | WINONA LADUKE WINNERS OF THE 2017 INTERNATIONAL AWARD FOR PUBLIC ART | NUART FESTIVAL

SICILIAN LAND ART | LOS ANGELES BIENNIAL | CANDY CHANG’S ATLAS OF TOMORROW

Public Art Review

Public Art Review Issue 55 • Fall/Winter 2016 • publicartreview.org

Public Art Review

Issue 56 • Spring/Summer 2017 • publicartreview.org

Issue 55 • The Geniuses • Sicilian Land Art • Los Angeles Biennial • Jencks’s Cosmic Landscapes • Atlas of Tomorrow

THE GENIUSES Public artists who have won MacArthur Awards

WHAT’S EMERGING

HUNTING THE SYMBOL

Resistance and reclamation

A CONVERSATION WITH CHARLES JENCKS

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BREATHING CATHEDRAL | THE ARCH AT 50 | ARABIAN ARTSCAPE | MUSEUMS GO PUBLIC

Public Art Review

Public Art Review Issue 53 • Fall/Winter 2015 • publicartreview.org

IN TUNISIAN STREETS | INNOVATIONS IN GLASS | NORWAY’S FUTURE LIBRARY | STORIES FROM BURMA

Public Art Review Issue 52 • Spring/Summer 2015 • publicartreview.org

Issue 53 • Norway • Museums Go Public • The Arch at 50 • Arabian Artscape

LEADING THE WAY Norway invests in art addressing violence, climate change, forgiveness, and compassion

THE SKY’S THE LIMIT JANET ECHELMAN DISCOVERS THE UNKNOWN

IN SEARCH OF

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BOOKS

The Future of Public Space

By Michelle Nijhuis, Jaron Lanier, Rachel Monroe, China Miéville, Christopher DeWolf, Ben Davis, Sarah Fecht. Introduction by Allison Arieff.

Contributions by Lawrence Weiner.

New York: Metropolis Books, 2018

Public Spaces: What For? Wozu? Pourquoi?

Kamel Louafi Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2016

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Algerian-German landscape architect, artist, topographer, and author Kamel Louafi shares his firm’s thinking about and plans for plazas, sculpture, and art in public space. He also offers some thoughts on completion, competitions, and the importance of design professionals clearly defining the significance of their own work through publications and exhibitions.

This second reader in the SOM Thinkers series is a collection of short stories, each exploring past implications, current observations, and future speculations on public space—real, fictional, physical, virtual, futuristic—on Earth and in the universe. Stories include utilizing scent to navigate through a densely packed urban city, a historical arc of public art, a fictional investigation about the use of public space, and surveillance as a part of our public lives.

MISCELLANY Guerrilla Kindness & Other Acts of Creative Resistance: Making a Better World Through Craftivism Sayraphim Lothian Coral Gables, FL: Mango, 2018 In this how-to book about creative resistance, Australian artist, activist, and YouTube art teacher Sayraphim Lothian offers a brief history of craftivism—craft plus activism—and step-by-step instructions on how to make and use crafts for political and social protest.

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How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse Paul O’Neill, Lucy Steeds, and Mick Wilson, eds.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017 Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives Sarah Williams Goldhagen New York: Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, 2017 In this fascinating exploration of architecture, neuroscience, and people’s feelings and well-being, architecture critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen makes the case that it’s essential we start designing and building with deep attention to the human experience.

Sculpture in Gotham: Art and Urban Renewal in New York City Michele H. Bogart London: Reaktion, 2018; distributed by University of Chicago Press Through telling the story of how people, organizations, agencies, and government helped transform New York from a city of traditional monuments to one committed to public art and sculptural projects in service of urban revitalization, Michele H. Bogart sheds light on the impact of civic collaboration over the last 50 years.

Is institution building still desirable? How can ethical principles guide its development? What new institutional models are emerging? In this collection of essays, an interdisciplinary group of international contributors examines the institution, the anti-institution, and even institutionalized anti-institutions, in contemporary art and curating.

Graffiti Alphabets: Street Fonts from Around the World Claudia Walde New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011 and 2018 With alphabets by 154 artists from 30 countries, this book—now available in paperback—celebrates graffiti writing. Each artist featured in the book received the same instructions: to write all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet on a single page.

BOOKS

RE-USA: 20 American Stories of Adaptive Reuse: A Toolkit for Post-Industrial Cities Matteo Robiglio Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2017 Architect Matteo Robiglio looks at 20 examples of adaptive reuse in seven American cities. Offering practical guidance for city makers who want to explore new uses for old industrial infrastructure, the book is both educational and inspirational.

The Making of an Artist: Desire, Courage, and Commitment Kristin G. Congdon Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2018; distributed by University of Chicago Press Using a blend of biography, journalism, sociology, and psychology, Congdon writes about six visual artists from diverse backgrounds while exploring three traits she has identified in successful artists: desire, courage, and commitment.

Albuquerque circa 1978

image courtesy of The Albuqurque Museum

Celebrating 40 years of Albuquerque Public Art 1978 - 2018 cabq.gov/publicart/at40

CONGRATULATIONS! Public Art Saint Paul congratulates artists Christine Baeumler, Amanda Lovelee, and Julie Benda for their inspired Bee Real Bee Everywhere project that sustains urban pollinators.

A project of Public Art Saint Paul, supported by the City of Saint Paul’s Public Art Ordinance and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Since 1987 www.publicartstpaul.org

Pollinator Sky Rise Photo: Andy King

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Night Watch A silent film of people granted asylum in the United States meeting September 20–27 in New York, Shimon Attie’s Night Watch introduced viewers to 12 people who were granted asylum in the United States. In a silent, looping film that lasts 10 minutes, one person at a time looks directly at the camera—and at people observing from on shore. The film was projected onto a large screen set up on a barge traveling New York’s waterways.

Commissioned by More Art, a Manhattan-based socially conscious nonprofit that specializes in public art projects, the creation of Night Watch also drew on the collaboration of community empowerment groups and legal aid organizations, such as Immigration Equality and Safe Passage Project.

Artist Shimon Attie has a long history of working with refugee and asylum communities. Most of the recent art projects that deal with refugees focus on the people trying to flee to safety, Attie told the New York Times. He chose instead to show those who live among us. “These are our neighbors. They are our co-workers. They are our friends.”

At this moment in history, he told the Times, the plight of refugees and asylum seekers is “a topic of great urgency.”

“These are people whose lives have been saved by the United States,” says Attie. “I couldn’t think of something more urgent to do.” —Karen Olson TIMED TO COINCIDE WITH THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY

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Photo by Kate Levy for More Art.

LAST PAGE

Philip Noyed Leap of Joy 2017, Mixed media

INSPIRING CONNECTIONS Beautifully nestled between the Mill City and the Capital City, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is well known for connecting people to destinations around the globe.

MSP also connects travelers to local artists and musicians through its robust Arts@MSP program.

Musicians perform daily. A series of ongoing, rotating exhibits, combined with multiple permanent, large-scale commissioned pieces, enhance the sense of community between local and regional artists and travelers from across the world.

Next time you’re in MSP, look up, look around, listen and experience Arts@MSP.

Arts@MSP is a program of Airport Foundation MSP, a 501 (c3) non-profit organization, dedicated to enhancing the experience of travelers coming through MSP International Airport

PLACE

Issue 58 • Powerful Spaces • Memorial for Peace and Justice • WTC Subway Mosaic • Katastwóf Karavan • Permitting at the Border

COLOR

Public Art Review

LIGHT

DREAM, KNOW, ACT: BUSINESS PERMITTING AT THE BORDER

Columbia, MD

Issue 58 • 2019 • forecastpublicart.org

POWERFUL

SPACES Artists and designers make room for healing, collaboration, learning, remembering, justice —and more

Kara Walker, creator of The Katastwóf Karavan

VICKI SCURI SITEWORKS

2018

© vickiscuri.com vicki@vickiscuri.com 206 930 1769

NATIONAL MEMORIAL FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE

Public Art Review

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Merriweather Parking Garage “Rainbow Sunset” Client: The Howard Hughes Corporation Prime Team: Howard Hughes Design Build

HUMAN RIGHTS MOSAICS IN WORLD TRADE CENTER SUBWAY STATION

$30.00 USD