Public Art Review issue 51 - 2014 (fall/winter)

YOKO ONO’S EARTH PEACE | MAPPING | BERT BENALLY AND AI WEIWEI IN THE DESERT ART VS. OIL | MARY JANE JACOB ON CURATION | LEXINGTON TATTOOS ITSELF

Public Art Review

Public Art Review Issue 51 • Fall/Winter 2014 • publicartreview.org

Barbara Grygutis

Issue 51 • JR’s Big Vision • Art vs. Oil • Artists & Fabricators • Nantes • Mapping

South Park Bridge Entry Monuments and Pedestrian Railing Seattle, Washington Repurposed steel rocker arms from the historic 1930 drawbridge flank the approach.

3200 ft. of artist-designed railing is inset with original gears and other salvaged components.

Commissioned by 4Culture, King County Public Art Collection Fabrication: Jesse Engineering, Tacoma, WA Photo:Spike Mafford

51 T: M:

520.882.5572 520.907.9443

barbara@barbaragrygutis.com barbaragrygutis.com

$16.00 USD

BIG VISION JR talks about boundaries, limits, seeing people, and being bold

Inspired by the nearby Franklin Mountains and the diamondback rattler, the faceted surfaces for the 375 E & W Outer Loop include over 400,000 sq ft of sweeping pattern motifs that reflect light along the highway and complement the natural terrain.

REFLECTING LANDSCAPE

375 East and West, Outer Loop Client: TxDOT, CRRMA & The City of El Paso, TX Prime Team: TxDOT, Vicki Scuri SiteWorks

El Paso, TX

VICKI SCURI SITEWORKS

2013

vickiscuri.com vicki@vickiscuri.com 206 930 1769

FRANZ MAYER

OF MUNICH

GLASS MOSAIC TIMELESS MODERN

Robert Mangold “Three Columns“ US Courthouse, Buffalo, NY, USA, Art in Architecture Program US GSA

Franz Mayer of Munich |

1-347-907-2399

|

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

Public Art Review Issue 51 • Fall/Winter 2014 • Volume 26 • Number 1

FEATURES 32 Artography Putting maps at the heart of public art

SUZANNE LINDGREN

42 Lexington, Ink. Citizens of Lexington, Kentucky, tattoo themselves in a poem

LAUREN BEDOSKY

46 So Happy Together How the collaboration between artist and fabricator works

ELIZABETH KEITHLINE

56 Constructing A Relationship Mark Dion and Rick and Ido Yoshimoto create The Ship Chandler

ARLENE GOLDBARD

60 Homestead Act Peter von Tiesenhausen stops an oil pipeline with art

JACQUELINE WHITE

66 Seeing People Cover Story: An interview with French artist JR

GEORGE SLADE

Photo by Scott London.

ON THE COVER JR, a French artist, travels the world bringing communities together through photography. Photo courtesy www.jr-art.net.

THIS PAGE At Burning Man, The Temple of Transition (shown here in 2011) offers a sacred space for contemplation that’s free from religious or denominational tenets. The temple’s design changes every year as flames ritually engulf the building during the closing night of the festival. See more images from the new book Burning Man: Art on Fire on page 86.

“Metamorphosis� by Martin Donlin - Raleigh-Durham International Airport Terminal 1, North Carolina Technique: Hand painting, screen printing, airbrushing, slumping, sandblasting and laminated elements combined together on multiple layers of tempered and laminated glass.

Glass fabrication by:

PETERS STUDIOS Further Information:

www.peters-studios.com

Architects: Clark Nexsen

Germany:

United States:

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

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

Public Art Review Issue 51 • Fall/Winter 2014 • Volume 26 • Number 1

DEPARTMENTS 13 PUBLISHER’S NOTE A Wide Umbella

JACK BECKER

15 IN THE FIELD News, views, and ideas

27

15 Sugarcoated: Kara Walker’s A Subtlety

JOE HART

17 Lighting Up Lives: Atlanta’s BeltLine development

JACQUELINE WHITE

20 Public vs. Private: The Calder debate

JOE HART

22 More Than an Object: A profile of Sans façon

JOE HART

24 From Security Risk to Flying Fish: Cruising School

JEN DOLEN

25 All About Site: A choreographer’s online course

VALERIE GLADSTONE

27 Co-Creationists: The role of the curator

JOE HART

28 Making Better Places: On creative placemaking

PATRICIA WALSH

31 SOAP BOX Art with Story: Invigorating permanent works

GLENN WEISS

75 ON LOCATION Global reports TOP: Photo by Joshua Cogan. MIDDLE: Photo © Bernard Renoux, courtesy Le Voyage à Nantes. BOTTOM: Photo by Scott London.

75 A French Revival: The city of Nantes invests in art and sees big returns 75

JON SPAYDE

81 Cultural Landscapes: Ai Weiwei and Bert Benally collaborate in the New Mexico desert 86 BOOKS & MEDIA Publications and reviews

CAITLIN OLSEN SHAUNA DEE CATHY MADISON JESSICA FIALA PETER PLAGANS

97 FORECAST NEWS News from the organization

that publishes Public Art Review

98 LAST PAGE Yoko Ono’s Earth Peace 87

JOE HART

Public Art Review Issue 51 • Fall/Winter 2014 • Volume 26 • Number 1

MULTIMEDIA

PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

TOP: Video still courtesy Forecast Public Art and Line Break Media. MIDDLE: Kenneth Bailey. Photo courtesy Design Studio for Social Intervention. BOTTOM: Video still courtesy Forecast Public Art and Upheaval Productions.

SCRAPS OF FANTASY (video) Dr. Evermor’s Sculpture Park in Sumpter, Wisconsin, is filled with Dr. Evermore’s large metal sculptures, including Forevertron, a monumental kinetic sculpture that stands 50 ft. high by 120 ft. wide and weighs 300 tons. In this video interview, Dr. Evermor (AKA Tom Every) and his wife Lady Eleanor (AKA Eleanor Every) offer a visual tour of the park and discuss the vision behind building and sharing fantastical sculptures with the public. search: Dr. Evermor

INTERVIEW BETWEEN WORKS PROGRESS AND DS4SI (podcast) Shanai Matteson and Colin Kloecker of Minnesota-based Works Progress Studio host an artist-to-artist interview with Kenneth Bailey of Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI). Based in Boston, Massachusetts, DS4DI develops public projects that reimagine the way complex social issues are addressed. In this podcast, the artists grapple with questions unique to their work in civic engagement, social practice, and public art. search: Kenneth Bailey

SITES SPEAK TO HER (video) In Su-Chen Hung’s installations, the audience is an active participant, bringing the artwork to life. Some of her temporary installations, such as Red Walk, Red Union, and Cascading Red, invite the audience inside to walk inside and interact with the piece. In this video, Su-Chen Hung shares her philosophy and the significance of her materials. search: Su-Chen Hung

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

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

Public Art Review

artifact art, memory & place

ISSUE 51 • FALL/WINTER 2014 • VOLUME 26 • NUMBER 1 PUBLISHER

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PUBLISHER’S NOTE

A Wide Umbrella

From Hong Kong to Ferguson, public art is supporting grassroots efforts toward democracy

BY JACK BECKER

13 PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Ferguson, tensions continued to grow. Once invited to give a talk to a roomful of students again I’ve heard about artists working with and local artists at The Chinese University of young people in Ferguson to help them cope, Hong Kong. Following my presentation, Oscar heal, and address the unsettling atmosphere Ho Hing Kay, director of the master of arts that’s consumed the community. Again, I’m program in cultural management, prompted recalling the stories from an issue of Public a conversation about the changing field of Art Review that focused on healing, and how community art. It turns out there’s a strong relevant that content feels at this moment. interest in developing grassroots initiatives A couple weeks later, as the Umbrella by independent artists and NGOs in Hong Revolution turned ugly on the streets of Hong Kong, in part because the city has done little to Kong, Oscar wrote me an email. While he was develop a public art program that involves local moved by the local strength and international talent or goes beyond commissioning outdoor support, he was worried about his students, sculptures. Waterfront buildings have begun to many of whom have been passionately involved add programmable, high tech lighting to their in the demonstrations. “I am terrified by what facades and present nightly “light shows,” but might happen,” he wrote. He went on to say it’s mostly for tourists and some self promotion. that he’s planning a community art conference The students at Chinese University were in late November and would I be willing to I was moved by interested in learning about strategies to come back and give a keynote. I didn’t hesitate engage the larger community and smaller with my “yes.” I’m now filled with anticipation their determination neighborhoods in creative activities that address and uncertainty about what Hong Kong will be to make a difference issues of shared concern. Hong Kong, like many like, and what I can contribute. cities facing rapid urbanization, hasn’t done On both sides of the world, democracy is in the future of much to create green space, plazas, or pocket being tested. Yet democracy is a concept that is their city. parks in its compact, congested, and extremely still new and raises many questions. What does vertical urban core. This lack of common space, it take to start a good democracy and what does as we’ve discussed in previous issues of Public it take to sustain one? What does democracy Art Review, is not healthy; it constrains the afford public art and artists, and how can development of livable cities. artists reinforce what makes a good democracy The students implied that it’s up to their generation to make through community engagement and other creative work? the kind of city they want to live in, not just accept the one that’s It’s time to revamp, or at least upgrade, the 55-year-old percentbeen handed to them by previous generations. I was moved by their for-art model we’ve had in the United States since Philadelphia determination to make a difference in the future of their city. first adopted its ordinance back in 1959. We need to broaden the That was mid-September, and I was told that the following scope and increase the effectiveness of government-run public art week students and faculty would be canceling classes to allow for programs. Let’s recognize, celebrate, and find a way to support the peaceful protests that were planned. Little did I know it was the vital and nimble work being done at the grassroots level—the the calm before the storm—and that the storm’s symbol would “bottom-up” public art. be an umbrella. Little did I know that umbrella-themed public Don’t get me wrong; there’s a lot to be said for a good top-down art interventions would soon fill the streets and become historic strategy, with an emphasis on high artistic achievement, fair cultural artifacts. treatment of artists and program managers, and sustainable How simple an idea is an umbrella, and what a powerful symbol maintenance and educational programs. To borrow from Abe it can be. For me, it’s personal; the silhouette of a figure holding an Lincoln, let’s resolve that the work of community-based artists shall umbrella was the longstanding iconic logo for Forecast Public Art, not be in vain, that public art shall have a new birth of freedom, a Magritte-like image I dreamed up 36 years ago. Today we still use and that art of the people, by the people, and for the people shall the umbrella as a symbol that personifies the public art field, an not perish. umbrella under which all kinds of creative and social practices have emerged and developed.

As we talked in Hong Kong about creating positive change through art, back in my hometown of St. Louis, on the streets of

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2014 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Photo by Bob Becker.

I RECENTLY HAD THE GOOD FORTUNE to be

Cloudbreak

Catherine Widgery Denver, CO

Revivir (Orphan Sign) Ellen Babcock, Friends of Orphan Signs Albuquerque, NM

Every Beating Second

Janet Echelman San Francisco, CA

Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse

Slade Architects Queens, NY

Clyfford Still Museum

St. Cloud Library

Kenneth vonRoenn St. Cloud, MN

Makes a House a Home

Sky Boulder

Hiromi Takizawa Pasadena, CA

Willie Ray Parish El Paso, TX

Conga Room at LA Live

Texas Rising

Leap

Ropemaker Place

Belzberg Architects Group Los Angeles, CA

Lawrence Argent Sacramento, CA

About Place About Face

Allied Works Architecture Denver, CO

Rob Neilson Los Angeles, CA

Permanent Residents and Visitors

Starlight

Alfredo Ceibal Bronx, NY

Bell Pagoda

Collentine and Larsen Sacramento, CA

Cooper Joseph Architects New York, NY

Joe O’Connell + Blessing Hancock Lubbock, TX

Griffith Observatory

John C. Austin, Frederick M. Ashley, Pfeiffer Partners, Levin & Associates Los Angeles, CA

Adventure’s Crossroads Jonnie Parker Hartman Ogden, UT

Trilobite Shade + Iron Wave

Chris Levack Austin, TX

Formosa 1140

Clive Wilkinson Architects London, England

Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects Los Angeles, CA

Neighborhood

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Addition

Jennifer Bartlett Sacramento, CA

Park Avenue Paper Chase Alice Aycock New York, NY

art architecture + history in the public realm

Renzo Piano Building Workshop Boston, MA

The Shakespeare Machine Ben Rubin New York, NY

Grasshopper Pedestrian Bridge Ed Carpenter Phoenix, AZ

Frisco Flyer

Larry Kirkland Frisco,TX

Deer Valley Rock Art Center

will bruder architects Deer Valley, AZ

If You Lived Here You'd be Home

Janet Zweig St. Louis, MO

Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant Ennead Architects Brooklyn, NY

Wave Arbor

Douglas Hollis Arlington, VA

IN THE FIELD News, views, and ideas IN THE MEDIA

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2014 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

15

15 IN THE FIELD

Sugarcoated

Photo by Jason Wyche. Artwork © 2014 Kara Walker.

Kara Walker explores the bitter legacy of colonialism in A Subtlety More than 100,000 people, according to the New York Times, stood in line this summer to view A Subtlety, Kara Walker’s monumental sugar sculpture, constructed in Brooklyn’s iconic Domino Sugar factory. It isn’t the attendance numbers, however, but the ongoing conversation about the work that indicates indicates it is one of the most important public artworks in recent memory.

As a set of sculptures, the installation—full titled A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant—was anything but subtle. Its centerpiece was a 75-foot-long sculpture of a nude sphinx, built in the caricatured likeness of Aunt Jemima, and coated with some 80

tons of confectioners’ sugar. Attending sculptures, made from candy and rosins, depicted the child slaves of the sugar industry.

As a set of sculptures, A Subtlety speaks to the sugarcoating of the African-American experience, the image and role of black women in our culture, the rise and fall of corporate colonialism. As a public event, the work digs even deeper: Months after the piece was dismantled, commentators were still struggling with the notably unsubtle, #nofilter Instagram and Twitter posts of largely white audience members who responded, with virtually no reflection, to the sexualized sculpture.

“Human behavior is so mucky and violent and messed-up and inappropriate,” Walker told the LA Times. “And I think my work draws on that.” Some things simply can’t be sugarcoated. —Joe Hart

artinoddplaces.org

IN THE FIELD TEMPORARY EXHIBITS

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2014 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

17 IN THE FIELD

Lighting Up Lives

Artworks rejuvenate the landscape—and residents’ artistic potential—during Atlanta BeltLine development

Photo by Christopher T Martin LLC.

BY JACQUELINE WHITE

“IT’S A GALLERY FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T DO GALLERIES,” says Jenny Odom, describing the annual Art on the Atlanta BeltLine outdoor sculpture exhibition. Odom is communications coordinator for Atlanta BeltLine Inc., which is currently constructing 22 miles of modern streetcar lines and transforming a former railway corridor into 33 miles of combined pedestrian and cycling paths that will circle Atlanta.

The curated exhibits began in 2010 as an opportunity to acquaint the Atlanta public with newly acquired, but not yet developed, sections of the trail. “It gets people out and moving along the line,” says Odom, who also notes the public health benefits of having to hike to go see art. Some sculptures, such as Phil Proctor’s Iron Column, have been constructed from railroad artifacts recovered from this rails-to-trails project. The beltline will also rejuvenate 1,300 acres of green space that had been abandoned industrial wasteland.

This year, more than 100 artists or artistic groups, who are predominately local, will receive up to $6,000 for a sculpture, a

mural, or for performances. Funding comes from a variety of sources but most notably from the Atlanta BeltLine Tax Allocation District, which provides a mechanism for collecting the increased property tax revenue that will result as the previously underutilized sections of the beltline are developed. And for the first time this year, Art on the Atlanta BeltLine, which also receives funding from the Fulton County Arts Council, is soliciting donations directly from the public.

Some of the artworks, such as the approximately one dozen murals that are painted each year, as well as Iron Column, which was commissioned by the International Interior Design Association and is extremely heavy, end up on permanent display. But each fall, the temporary exhibit season is kicked off by the joyous Lantern Parade, which started with 500 participants in 2010 and has quickly grown to more than 10,000.

“I don’t have to sell the participation piece. Civic play is a universal desire,” claims Chantelle Rytter. The self-proclaimed “parade artist” spearheads the annual lantern processions, which trace

IN THE FIELD

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 26 | NO. 1 | ISSUE 51 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

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IN THE FIELD

IN THE FIELD

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19 IN THE FIELD

Photo by Sinan Sinharoy. RIGHT: Photo by David Feldman.

ABOVE: Against the Midtown skyline, white giants light up the night of the Atlanta BeltLine Lantern Parade in 2013. OPPOSITE: A time lapse photograph shows the movement of lit lanterns along the beltline during the parade. PREVIOUS PAGE: The Seed and Feed Marching Abominables drum along the Atlanta BeltLine Lantern Parade.

their lineage to Asia, with a stop, perhaps, in New Orleans, where Rytter previously lived and fell in love with that city’s exuberant parade culture.

“You can’t just come see the parade,” she says of the Lantern Parade. “You have to be in the parade.” And being in the parade preferably involves dancing along with your own homemade lantern (lit for safety by battery-powered LED lights, not candles).

People who make the mistake of attending the parade with, say, a store-bought glow stick, pack her lantern-making workshops the following year. “They didn’t know that people made their own incredibly wonderful things,” she observes. This year, for example, at a large-form lantern-making workshop, aspiring parade-goers crafted tissue-paper lanterns in the shape of a bookworm with glasses, a giant heart with wings, a crown, a fish, and a dancer. “They blow me away every time,” she says.

“The average person really wants to make stuff,” Rytter contends.

“They don’t know that they do, but they do.”

JACQUELINE WHITE is a Minneapolis writer.

IN THE FIELD OWNERSHIP

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 26 | NO. 1 | ISSUE 51 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

20 IN THE FIELD

Public vs. Private

15 years after Fort Worth lost its beloved Calder, the debate about privately owned public art continues

MANY CITIES BOAST A SINGLE, ICONIC PUBLIC ARTWORK—a

sculpture, like the St. Louis Gateway Arch, that is intrinsically identified with that place. In Fort Worth, Texas, that piece was once Eagle, a 39-foot-tall, origami-like steel sculpture by Alexander Calder that stood for some 30 years downtown, in front of the Fort Worth National Bank.

But although many in Fort Worth identified the Calder as a symbol of the city, it turns out the piece was privately owned. The bank commissioned it in the early 1970s, shortly before the artist’s death.

When the bank was sold, so too was the sculpture. In 1999, with little fanfare, Eagle was auctioned off to the highest bidder and dismantled in an afternoon. It had a brief stay in Philadelphia and is now part of the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park.

Eagle’s disappearance sparked (in addition to innumerable puns on the “flight of the Eagle”) a heated debate in the city about just who owns public art anyway. Many residents, including local newspaper

commentators, considered the artwork “stolen,” according to Mark Thistlethwaite, an art historian at Texas Christian University’s School of Art, and author of a research paper on the Calder.

“It was a wake-up call to the community that we can’t count on the private sector to give us public art that will stay ours,” says Martha Peters, who heads the city’s public art program. That program, which is funded in part by a two-percent-for-art policy, was part of the wake-up; the sale of the Calder, Thistlethwaite writes, contributed momentum to the city’s drive for an official public art program.

Earlier this year, 15 years after Eagle’s removal, the sculpture made a comeback of sorts—as a pop-up, inflatable piece constructed by the artist collective Homecoming! Committee. In February 2014, the artists inflated the tongue-in-cheek replica, titled The Eagle Has Landed, in eight locations, spreading the word through social media.

“We thought a good-natured, comedic re-creation was in order,” says Devon Nowlin, one of the founders of Homecoming! “People from a

Photo by Joe Mabell / Creative Commons license.

BY JOE HART

IN THE FIELD

JOE HART is senior editor of Public Art Review.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2014 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

really broad range stopped and talked to us. It’s amazing that [15] years after the fact, those who remember the sculpture still have very strong feelings about it one way or the other.”

Nowlin and her colleagues hoped to reignite the debate over who owns public art—and to make a plea for a new, iconic sculpture to represent Fort Worth. As it happens, Peters reports that the city has begun conversations (inspired in part by the success of Chicago’s Millennium Park) to create such an icon. Ironically, it will have to rely in part on private funding to do so. “Percent-for-art programs are tied to projects, so you don’t always have the option of doing something big,” she explains.

This need for private funding, however, speaks to the true complexity of the conversation about who pays for, and who owns, public art. Nowlin, for one, says the experience of running The Eagle Has Landed changed her understanding of these dynamics. “I began the project thinking that the fact that the Calder was privately owned was the problem,” she says. “But I came to the realization that there’s a limit to what a city-funded program can provide us. They have a certain responsibility to the public that doesn’t always translate to taking risks. In 1974, that risk was the Calder.”

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LEFT: Photo by Devon Nowlin. TOP RIGHT: Photo by Bradly Brown. BOTTOM RIGHT: Photo by Carrie Conditt.

IN THE FIELD

PREVIOUS PAGE: Alexander Calder’s Eagle, formerly an icon of downtown Fort Worth, Texas, is now part of Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park.

THIS PAGE: The Eagle Has Landed, an inflatable sculpture by the artist collective Homecoming! Committee, popped up in several Fort Worth locations in early 2014.

IN THE FIELD ENVIRONMENT

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22 IN THE FIELD

More Than an Object

EACH YEAR, the Public Art Network (PAN) of Americans for the Arts nominates 50 public artworks as outstanding representations of the genre. When Charles Blanc and Tristan Surtees, collectively known as Sans façon, put a few projects in the hopper for the distinction, they never expected to be chosen; they simply hoped to make a case for the kind of process-driven works they produce.

“We just wanted to talk about the fact that public art can be more than objects,” explains Surtees. “The most important thing, and the most successful thing for us here, is not the outcome but the process and relationships. That’s an important shift in public art practice—of the spectrum of public art and how public artists work.”

As it turns out, the judges of this year’s nominees agreed. Not one, but three of the Calgary-based collaborative duo’s works were chosen as finalists.

Moreover, those three pieces are remarkably distinct. For one project, Cacher pour mieux montrer (which translates as “Hide to show better”), the duo wrapped iconic public sculptures in the city of Saskatoon in industrial shrink-wrap. The other two projects were contained within Sans façon’s Watershed+ project, which is an ongoing collaboration with the City of Calgary’s Util-

ities and Environmental Protection department. The city’s project embeds artists in the department with an intention to “build an emotional connection between Calgary’s citizens and their watershed by placing creativity at the heart of projects and initiatives related to Calgary’s watershed.” Included in PAN’s list were Fire Hydrant Fountains, which temporarily repurposes fire hydrants as drinking-water stations, and a 12-month artist residency, facilitated

by Sans façon, that embedded UK-based visual artist Rachel Duckhouse in the City of Calgary’s Water Resources, Water Services, and Parks units’ staff. Duckhouse produced a series of water-flow maps as well as podcast-like conversations with city staff.

The wide range of approaches and outcomes represented in these three pieces is a deliberate result of the artists’ process, Surtees says. “We don’t come with a recipe, and we don’t come with a predetermined idea. We’re looking to form a relationship with the situation, the people who live there, the organization, and also the geography and history of the site—with all the given contexts. Our only agenda is to explore those relationships and allow them to be present in the work.”

Of course, that exploration is an evolving, face-to-face process.

In order to facilitate it, says Surtees, the artists assemble everyone

Photos courtesy the artists.

Artist duo Sans façon makes context and relationships the center of each project

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Photo courtesy the artists.

ABOVE: Fire Hydrant Drinking Fountains (2013) provided safe, free drinking water for thousands at festivals and major public events around Calgary, Alberta.

PREVIOUS PAGE: For Cacher pour mieux montrer (Hide to Show Better) (2013), Sans façon covered public art pieces in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in shrink-wrap.

INSET, PREVIOUS PAGE: The artist duo Sans façon: Charles Blanc and Tristan Surtees.

involved early on in the project. “Even if it’s a chain supplier or a ent City of Calgary departments participated in Watershed+, for wooden boat maker; if we have just an inkling they’ll be involved, instance. Yet the collaboration among all those people is crucial to we want to gather their input and insights.” the outcome—in a sense, it is the outcome—of any given project.

Unlike a more traditional relationship between artist and fabri- “Not knowing exactly what you’re going to get in the end is vital,” cator, these conversations are free-flowing. “You don’t draw out the Surtees says. “That’s a level of unknown, of educated risk.” lines and fill in the color; you respond to the work as it evolves,” For Sans façon and a growing number of public artists who explains Surtees. “If we go into a situation with ten people in the adopt similar tactics, that risk and flow lie at the heart of what room, and I ask them to do this or that specific thing, then they makes an artist. “Artists are not like designers or architects— are essentially technicians. But if you take the time to open the they’re not solving some particular problem, like how to design a process to their contributions, we end up being more like a theater public square,” says Surtees. “Artists are good at asking questions, director, gently nudging things in one direction or another.” and they bring a quality of exploration to any situation. That is This method can lead to some complex meetings; 32 differ- what excites us.” —Joe Hart

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From Security Risk to Flying Fish

A public art installation puts an end to potential terrorist threats for Royal Caribbean cruisers

WHEN ROYAL CARIBBEAN—owner of the largest cruise ships in the world—unveiled its expanded terminal in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, security consultants raised concerns over possible safety problems.

The solution? Public art.

Originally opened in 1996, the terminal expanded from 67,500 to 240,000 square feet in 2009. Terminal 18 is the largest cruise terminal in the world built to serve a single ship: Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas, itself the world’s largest cruise ship. Oasis typically carries more than 5,000 passengers (its capacity is over 6,000), consists of seven distinct neighborhoods, and boasts a Starbucks on board.

In the terminal serving Oasis, 12,000 visitors pass each week with their luggage from an unsecured ground level, through security, and up to a second level for boarding. With so much traffic, Port Security feared the open air between the unsecured lobby and the mezzanine would allow access for wrongdoers on the ground to toss explosives, guns, weapons, or other packages up to accomplices in the post-screening area. A call for artwork in the space required that a creative solution deter such activity. As soon as officials deemed the atrium a prime target for terrorist activity, they tried several solutions, including a tent company. As Royal Caribbean is known for commissioning artwork for its ships, they wanted to make the entire experience more artful. Enter Larry Kirkland, who had just completed a piece for the Ft. Lauderdale art commission.

In a swirl of sizes—22 feet high and 36 feet wide by 36 feet deep —Larry Kirkland’s Cruising School (above) casts a wide net across the space. Installed in 2012, the $605,000 piece was commissioned

by Port Everglades and Broward County, and selected through the Broward County Cultural Division’s Public Art & Design Program.

Cut from enameled aluminum and suspended from a rotating oval bracket, 300 king mackerel and pompano cast shadows upon the walls as they spin on air currents. Floating among them are reflective acrylic “bubbles,” as well as a wave of solid acrylic rods gilded with 24 karat gold. The larger of two openings in the atrium is filled by the main fish portion of the sculpture, while the wave covers the smaller opening.

An avid swimmer, artist Larry Kirkland “wanted the work to fulfill the security requirement but also to enhance the space and the experience of the thousands of passengers passing under the artwork.” After passing through security, these same passengers can view the piece from above, and, hopefully, be deterred from catching any fishy objects tossed from below.

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

and is an editorial assistant for Public Art Review.

Photo by Craig Collins.

BY JEN DOLEN

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All About Site

A choreographer’s course about creating site-specific works draws artists from 148 countries

Photo by Julie Lemberger.

BY VALERIE GLADSTONE AWARD-WINNING DIRECTOR AND CHOREOGRAPHER Stephan Koplowitz never could be confined to traditional spaces. Even though he knew early on that he wanted to choreograph, he didn’t take it as a given that his dances should be presented in theaters. He appreciated the genius of Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, and Merce Cunningham—pioneers of staging dances in alternative spaces. “I never thought of my work as public art,” he said in a recent phone conversation. “I just thought of what dance could do in a public arena. I love to connect people to art. I want audiences to see a site as they’ve never seen it before.”

One of the leading exponents of multimedia, site-specific performance, Koplowitz has been lauded for his incursions into Grand Central Station, London’s Natural History Museum, the British Library, the Los Angeles Metro, and a coal factory in Essen, Germany. “What draws me to a site is the wow factor,” he said. “I can be inspired by its history, architecture, design, how it’s used, and the public’s view of the site.”

Since 1984, he has choreographed for windows, swimming pools, staircases, various museums, parks, fountains, train stations, churches, government buildings, tennis courts, rivers, beaches, an air force fighter jet, a pier, a seaport, and public sculptures, including a Calder stabile. He has also created permanent public art in the Center for New Media on the campus of Salt Lake Community College,

called Light Camera Action. An array of three camera obscuras tethered to HD video, which then broadcasts to three monitors, it is a descendant of his original camera obscura project that was installed at the World Financial Center and MASS MoCA in 2006.

“I am struck by how skillfully Koplowitz articulates the space.

I want the dancers to keep at this longer so I can ponder human architecture and the witty illusion of harmony and cooperation in a space that resonates with our own restlessness,” writes Deborah Jowitt, a critic at the Village Voice, of his Grand Step Project in 2004, which featured dancers and choral groups on New York City staircases.

As dean of the Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles since 2006, Koplowitz has taught hundreds of students the logistics and aesthetics involved in bringing performance to audiences in public spaces. “In this kind of work,” he says, “fifty percent of our time is spent on learning how to fund-raise and produce and fifty percent on creating the performance.” Now not only his students at CalArts but also thousands of people from around the world can study the subject and connect with one another through his online course, “Creating SiteSpecific Dance and Performance Works,” on the Coursera platform.

He initiated it in the fall of 2013 and is offering it again this fall.

An overnight hit, the 2013 course drew thousands of applicants,

www.broward.org/arts/publicart

ABOVE: A collage of Stephan Koplowitz’s Grand Step Project at New York Plaza. PREVIOUS PAGE: Choreographer Stephan Koplowitz’s Grand Step Project in 2004.

VALERIE GLADSTONE wrote about the arts for the New York Times, the

Washington Post, the Boston Globe, ARTnews, and Metropolis, among others. She published books on the visual arts and dance. As this issue of Public Art Review was going to press, we were very sad to learn that she passed away on October 21. We invited Stephan Koplowitz to comment: "Valerie was not only an insightful and sensitive writer about the arts, and dance in particular, but she cared about the field and brought a generosity of spirit to everything she touched and everyone she met."

Photos by Julie Lemberger.

CARLOS ALVES Spiral of Life Suite,1996 Ceramic with multiple components Broward Addiction Recovery Center

with 148 countries represented. Artists from theater, the visual arts, dance, music, and film signed up. A young artist from Egypt was inspired by the class to start a large-scale sculpture project in the Sinai Desert and used the course as the basis of her proposal to a foundation. Vermont-based choreographer Joy Madden signed up that year, finding that during its six weeks, the course gave her a deep understanding of the field. “We got into everything from insurance and licenses to assignments to document two of our own site-specific works,” she says. “One of the best things about the course is that we had to grade other people’s projects, and of course, ours were graded too. I looked at work from South Africa, Colombia, and San Diego, all of it dealing with entirely different issues than mine. You learn so much that way.” Since taking the course, she has presented events in an art gallery and on a farm.

Of course, nothing beats joining Koplowitz on a project. When he did his work at London’s Natural History Museum, he took inspiration from Darwin’s theory of evolution, focusing on how emotions evolved. Choreographer/dancer Samantha Lyons, who took part in the performance, says, “It was the most innovative, inspiring, and thought-provoking time in my creative life.”

This summer he taught at the Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston, Maine, for the sixth year. Inspired by the city’s environment, immigration history, industry, and architecture, he began working with several students on creating a film that could be woven into a live performance relating to the city’s particular character, asking them to delve into archives and study the buildings and landscape.

Dancer Josh Hines worked with Koplowitz at Bates. “Steve gives you a lot of freedom,” he says. “He doesn’t want dancey stuff, like leaps and turns. He wants pedestrian movement that shows the artistry of the human body without embellishing it. Through simplicity, he exposes the humanity and poetry of the site as well as of the human body.”

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Co-Creationists

Photo by Joshua Cogan.

Curators are emerging as an important force in the world of public art WHERE DOES PUBLIC ART COME FROM? How does it get made?

These are simple enough questions, but they raise some complicated issues—especially when it comes to the emerging forms of “social practice” that are rapidly reshaping the world of public art.

Consider the monumental steel sculpture that towers over a corporate plaza or the mural on the side of a health clinic. In such instances, the process of planning, commissioning, budgeting, and approving (or revising) the artwork is relatively prescribed. In some cases, a private individual or corporate backer takes on the project; in many others, a city commission is responsible for overseeing the work, which is often funded by a percent-for-art scheme that dedicates development dollars for the purpose.

A growing number of public art projects don’t fit this model.

Instead, they are oriented more toward processes and people than outcomes or objects. Corporations looking to enhance their public image aren’t likely to pay for, let’s say, an artist-led effort to map a community’s cultural assets. And while public art administrators may be sympathetic to such endeavors, they’re often embedded in a city planning culture that values a visible product or measurable aftereffects.

Enter the curator. Long a staple of museums and galleries, curators are gaining increasing prominence in the world of public art. But

unlike a museum curator, who curates a collection—of photographs, sculptures, or other art objects—public art curators tend to curate, for lack of a better word, artists and their processes.

“Public art curators are co-makers with the artists,” says Mary Jane Jacob, a pioneer in the field. “Where I fit in is to understand how to work as a partner to the artist in a creative dialog toward the realization of the work.”

Jacob began her career in institutions; she was chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. She has written extensively on the subject of public art and has worked with many stars of the public art world. She also teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Jacob is adamant that the new forms of public art require less bureaucracy and more risk-taking and time than the typical city arts administration can manage. “I cannot realize my work within the legislated public art, or even within corporate commissions,” she says. “It very quickly gets flattened into a few phases of projects. It’s very different to spend that long-process time to follow through with something.”

That’s not so surprising, since the existing administrative structures were largely developed to handle individual, large-scale works. “When Alexander Calder was making a sculpture, he was

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ultimately making an object where he could dictate how the process would go. There is a kind of accountability to specifications,” she says. “What’s really changed is the nature of art and the nature of art-making, and the motivations and drive of what artists are contending with. And those changes require a different kind of process and a different kind of curator. It’s not about an execution from maquette to full scale. It’s about conceiving and realizing something in its relationship to people and place.”

Brooke Anderson, executive director of Prospect New Orleans, an international biennial art festival launched in 2007, echoes this reality: “Public art has become performance art,” she says. “What I’m observing is that our artists are working quite collaboratively with the city and its history and future—and with the artistic director, Franklin Sirmans.”

Like Jacob, Sirmans has an institutional background; he is currently department head and curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For the third Prospect New Orleans (P.3), he serves as director of some 60 artists, living and dead, with whom, in many cases, he has personal relationships spanning years. “The biennial couldn’t happen without him,” explains Anderson. “He creates the framework under which we are working. There isn’t a thing we could do without his intellect, emotion, and heart. We wouldn’t have a project without his vision.”

In a biennial or citywide art festival, the sheer complexity of the task is one reason to bring in a curator/artistic director. But cities like New Orleans are discovering that a curator brings something more to the table than a project manager. In Washington, D.C., this fall, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities invited five curators to choose five artists for a public art project called 5x5. The idea, says Sarah Massey, the commission’s communication director, is to “turn the city over to the curators. All the artwork is political, and I don’t know if you would have that without the curatorial approach. They are looking at what it means to be the nation’s capital—because as people who live here, we forget.”

That outside perspective is perhaps the key difference possessed by a curator and not by a “commissioning body.” The curator’s only agenda is to help the artist fully realize the artwork. “The curator is problem-solver and sounding board and even proposes shifts in the work,” says Jacob. “As best as I can, I always try to be there.

To somehow make them confident and to make it urgent. And the project goes forward.” — Joe Hart

Making Better Places

Creative placemaking is heading toward Disneyfication—but artists can change that

BY PATRICIA WALSH

CREATIVE PLACEMAKING has been an outcome of public art projects for years, and the term has recently become an engaging catchphrase for decision makers and developers around the United States. It is encouraging that the arts have become an accepted aspect of developing a place, but the current focus on placemaking also raises important questions: Does the practice of placemaking, with its focus on the product of an artwork, capture the true spirit of creativity and art-making? Can it truly engage the artist’s mind in the process of developing a place?

These questions spun a common thread at the 2014 Transatlantic Symposium: The Role of Artists & the Arts in Urban Resilience, held in Baltimore in May. The symposium gathered creative and intellectual minds from North America and Europe to consider how art and artists play a role in building and designing the urban landscape.

Many of these thinkers posited the notion that placemaking has become a product-driven practice designed to achieve specific goals within rigid boundaries—in contrast to the organic ebb and flow of the built environment, as people reshape their surroundings in response to relocation and cultural shifts. Placemaking efforts tend to take history into account, and also to consider the needs of current and near-future communities. What these developments lack, however, is a focus on maintaining the histories of a place and the long view of natural human resettlement.

The newly developed Monroe Street Market in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, D.C., serves as one example. Projects like this one are designed to re-create the feel of an old-world, caféfriendly streetscape with European-like brick buildings and narrow streets. Such redevelopments attempt to create a place for a community to gather, and also, in most instances, to drive revenue.

Photo by Taikkun Li.

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ABOVE: Curator and public art pioneer Mary Jane Jacob. PREVIOUS PAGE: The New Migration by Abigail DeVille, selected by curator Justine Topfer for Washington D.C.’s 5x5 project in 2014.

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Illustration by Frank Mondragon.

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But do these engineered locations responsibly remember the past and appropriately accommodate the needs of future generations? Or do they merely serve the immediate short-term—and fashionable—directives to make creative spaces that build creative economies?

When I was managing public art collections, it became clear that there is more excitement, planning, and community engagement in the development of the artwork than in the life of the work after the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The creative placemaking fad faces a similar dilemma. The notion of developing a place that incorporates the art crowd is something to be celebrated, at least on some level. (I drafted parts of this article in a café in one such development in Silver Spring, Maryland.) But Americans have a terrible habit of getting excited about the new without planning for maintenance and sustainability—of creating something great and then walking away. This pattern must be addressed.

One solution is to fully integrate artists in the creative placemaking process. As artist Barbara Holub pointed out at the Transatlantic Symposium, artists maintain an independent role because of their ability to question and reflect upon artistic processes, while their understanding of societal and spatial development makes them ready-made experts in the planning field.

There are many examples of artists integrated in master-planning processes. It is difficult, however, to find long-term successes in a processoriented and sustainability-focused design project. Perhaps it is simply too early to see such results: Public art has been included in master-planning processes since at least the 1990s, but including artists in the placemaking process itself is still relatively new.

Most master plans treat public art as an addendum—adornment to make an area look nice—leaving the artist, and by proxy the art, as “other” to be inserted later. The field has made progress toward integrating artists

more deeply into the placemaking process: The San Jose International Airport Art & Technology program and Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston are two examples of these successes. The next stage is to hire artists into the design and planning firms, where they (and, as collaborators, art administrators) sit at the table with the engineers, designers, and decision makers to solve the challenges of creating a sustainable placemaking process.

Artists have the skill and knowledge to ensure that developed places allow communities to engage with each other and dream about the future. Proof of this skill comes from artists like Theaster Gates and the LA Commons and Rosten Woo. Gates’s Dorchester Projects is a prime example of an artist’s understanding of a community. The project turns formerly abandoned structures into community-oriented spaces and has spawned a nonprofit organization to continue this work. LA Commons and Rosten Woo’s Project Willowbrook (one of 37 chosen for the 2014 PAN Year in Review) not only explores and celebrates existing community assets in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Willowbrook, it also pioneers new methods for community outreach in civic planning processes (learn more on page 32).

Projects like these show that by engaging artists early and focusing on a creative placemaking process, planners can harness a creativity that will make a place unique. The artist—not the artwork—can rethink problems and scenarios to develop a creative place that responds to immediate needs and allows space for the generations to come.

PATRICIA WALSH is the public art programs manager for Americans for

the Arts. She has worked in the public art field for over six years and holds a master’s degree in arts administration from Boston University.

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

Ship Shape Shifting Time

by Nobuho Nagasawa, pays tribute to the WWII “Liberty” ships that formed the backbone of the country’s post-war cargo fleet, transporting freight to and from port cities like San Francisco. The sculpture is built to trace these ships’ actual built dimensions.

Collection of the City and County of San Francisco Photo credit: Perretti and Park Photography

sfartscommission.org/pubartcollection

SOAP BOX

Art with Story

With their huge success, public art events and DIY socially engaged artists offer clues to invigorate the commissioning of permanent artworks

BY GLENN WEISS

MY GUTTER CURATOR LIFE IN NEW YORK during the exploding experimentation of expressionism in the 1980s was followed by an escape to Seattle. I landed in the heart of experimentation and freedom among public art administrators such as Jerry Allen, Richard Andrews, Mickey Gustin, Sandy Percival, and Diane Shamash. Artists like Buster Simpson, Jack Mackie, Carolyn Law, and Norie Sato were marching forward, asking everyone they met: Why can’t artists do that, or this?

At that time, the possibilities for creative acts within municipal governments were gloriously unsettled. Those early experiences taught me that public art administration is a creative act. Invention is both collaborative and competitive.

Since 2000, I have witnessed the implementation of placemaking through new urbanist principles in suburban Florida, the dramatic changes in the civic reputation of the arts that occurred via Art Basel–Miami, and the complete acceptance of public art by the average American visiting Times Square. Now, with a condo on a golf course in Delray Beach, I serve several cities and write about public art.

Here’s what I’m seeing: In Florida and elsewhere, civic branding, placemaking, and creative programming have been adopted by the growth-oriented, municipal leadership fueled by an uptick in downtown living. The Gates, the Blue Bear, and the Bean have proven that public art can have equal standing to architecture in the city. Now the mayors want it—engaging, splashy, and photogenic art, of course achieved within a “reasonable” budget.

The mandate is now clear to administrators: Deliver visual and economic success.

Even if a project is called “public art” with its static permanence, the art is evaluated like an event. Opening day, Twitter crowds, participation on-site, singles on the prowl, wandering tourists. No settling into the background. The art must keep giving.

GLENN WEISS lives in south Florida and writes master plans and

manages projects for public art agencies. Clients this year are IBI Group and the cities of Pompano Beach, West Palm Beach, and Tamarac. He writes the “Aesthetic Grounds” blog for ArtsJournal.com. He directed programs for the Times Square Alliance, Broward County, 4Culture, and PS1. Learn more at glennweiss.com.

31 SOAP BOX

Photo by Maria Foladori.

All too often administrators point to a general location, hire craftsmanship, and pray that a purposeful story emerges.

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Classic municipal public art has been outgunned by the festival with public art or the public art event. Whether through DIY Kickstarter/Indiegogo crowd funding or massive grants from Knight, ArtPlace, or Bloomberg, entrepreneurial creatives have entered the pubic art sphere. One Spark, Fringe Festival, Nuit Blanche, Mural Fest, and art fair satellite projects can be 100 percent privately funded based on attendance numbers. Nonprofits—like New York’s Creative Time, the UK’s Artichoke, New Orleans’s Prospect, and Sarasota’s Season of Sculpture—need and achieve significant public participation. Quality still matters, but many seem to have adopted P. T. Barnum’s philosophy: “The noblest art is that of making others happy.”

Outside this celebratory atmosphere, many artists seek that one-to-one or one-with-a-community depth of meaning and connection. They’re called socially engaged artists or impact designers. The administrators, city staff, and elected officials are attracted to these projects filled with community value and artistic experimentation, but are sometimes unclear about how to support them. Not enough physical product or too much design instead of art.

So what do we do with regular, good old public art? Commissioning permanent public art has always been a crapshoot in terms of long-term appreciation. All too often administrators point to a general location, hire craftsmanship, and pray that a purposeful story emerges to link the work to the ongoing public imagination.

Permanent work has been pushed into a corner and isolated from the excitement of the temporary.

To invigorate the permanent, we need creativity in the “what are we doing” project phase. No event promoter or socially engaged artist would be as vague regarding purpose, audience, and results as is codified in so many public art master plans and implemented through the “call to artists.” The valuable and exciting project story should be developed prior to the call to artists. Imagine the Kickstarter video. Write a fake sponsorship letter to Red Bull, Clear Channel, or United Way. Declare your primary audience and get its input. Write the pitch.

In a way that I do not fully understand, these events and socially engaged art lead me to recommend that administrators and artists work together to mix the premodernism storytelling of public art with Kickstarter campaign promotion. Within the call to artists, a story should be identified for telling or honoring that matches the desires of the place. Or require that the artist first submit the story for approval prior to the proposed work. Like the administrative experimenters and artist questioners of the 1980s, we can find a way to free permanency from its civic aimlessness. Start the stories.

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ARTOGRAP

BY SUZANNE LINDGREN

Place is often the soul of public art. The artists and innovators in the following pages are putting maps themselves at the heart of their projects.

Maps in the ’Hood

HY

In the middle of South Los Angeles, practically hidden between Watts and Compton, sits Willowbrook. Though few have ever heard of the unincorporated neighborhood, it’s been home for decades to the Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital—one of the only medical facilities accessible to residents of South L.A. After the hospital lost its accreditation in 2007, Los Angeles County pledged to reopen it, providing the funds necessary to do so.

With investment dollars looming, the county set out to better understand Willowbrook. The Los Angeles County Arts Commission worked with LA Commons to map the neighborhood’s cultural institutions. While that map was informative, it didn’t provide much insight into the mindset of Willowbrook’s residents—what they loved about their neighborhood or the desires they had for it.

To help fill the gap, the Arts Commission asked artist and designer Rosten Woo to create a map that would help planners understand the people of Willowbrook. After almost two months doing on-the-ground research in the neighborhood, Woo decided that a stand-alone aerial-view map wouldn’t do the trick. He needed a different kind of map, one that would generate a “snail’s-eye view.”

He put together a book of photos and stories of residents with the things they cared about: their homes, gardens, and vehicles. Here, he talks about his experience, the limits of mapping, and the intersection of mapping and public art.

Rosten Woo designed this cultural asset map of Los Angeles's Willowbrook neighborhood using his research, as well as research by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and LA Commons.

Will you explain the kind of art that you make?

Generally speaking, I’m interested in helping people understand public policy and politics and engage with those processes. I come at art from a fairly purposive direction in the sense that I’m really interested in what it can do in the world, and not making an object for its own sake. A lot of my work you would consider design, because it is something that circulates outside of a gallery context and it is designed for a specific community. But there are also some analogs and inspirations from conceptual art.

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LEFT and ABOVE: Map images courtesy cultureNOW. RIGHT: Map image courtesy Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

Project Willowbrook

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In the second phase of Project Willowbrook, Rosten Woo asked residents to pose with their homes and favorite places.

Photos by Alyse Emdur, courtesy Rosten Woo.

Did [the L.A. County Arts Commission] ask for a map specifically?

Yes, I guess so. It’s funny, because I did literally make a map, but I don’t think that map is particularly interesting or useful. The county wanted what’s called in planning circles a “visioning tool,”

some sort of device by which people who lived in Willowbrook could make their desires for the future of Willowbrook known, because there’s all this investment happening in Willowbrook.

They wanted to create some sort of baseline of knowledge: What’s here and what do people want out of this investment that’s happening?

[I created a book that's] actually a home and garden tour, portraits of people with their homes and gardens and vehicles, talking about what they like about their homes, gardens, and vehicles.

One of the things that’s very clear when you go to Willowbrook is that there’s not a lot of public space. There’s not necessarily a delineated “main drag” of stores or things that might be considered the cultural public sphere. It’s really a residential neighborhood, so a big part of the project was just talking to people about what they have in their backyards and trying to show the way that creativity was being expressed in the neighborhood. To a drive-by urbanist, someone who’s just going to drive through and make some recommendations or look at stats or a map, a lot of that is totally invisible.

In the broadest sense of mapping, the book is a kind of mapping insofar as it’s information about a place. But the scale of the map form, in terms of the overhead plan view, that’s definitely not the kind of perspective I was trying to generate. I was trying to generate the perspective of the snail’s-eye view. What does it look like on the ground? What does it look like in people’s backyards and these kind of private places?

Because I think that in that community in particular, for a lot of reasons but one of the largest being structural racism, people who are in positions of power are not seeing that community at an intimate scale: knowing the residents on a first-name basis, being able to see their backyard and see what they care about.

Certainly this is a generalization of county bureaucrats, but for someone who’s doing planning work there’s a tendency to resort to hard numbers and the overhead perspective, and unless you actually do know people, you never supplement with that other side. And I think there are some structural barriers that make it so that people who are in planning professions don’t actually know the people in Willowbrook.

So what I produced is this intermediate measure: Here’s a book of pictures and stories, and if you look at this as a planner you might have a much better sense of what this place is like and the beauty and character of it than you’ll ever get by driving around or looking at a map.

Do you think that that’s possibly part of the reason they commissioned it?

It’s hard to say. That project is not necessarily typical of my work. I actually do make a lot of maps and have made more statistically driven and quantitatively based visualizations of data.

I think they commissioned me, I’m guessing, because I have a lot of experience working on projects that relate to planning and are somewhere at the intersection of art and civic infrastructure.

Because I was familiar with the set of issues and had a background in design and mapping, I think that was why they asked me. I think they’re happy with what I produced, but I don’t think it was necessarily what they were expecting.

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I’m curious about your experience in Willowbrook. How did you go into this community and start making contacts, and what was that like?

It was unusual for me the way that it worked, because the funding and direction of the project preceded me. Usually, a project that I work on has a pretty organic relationship to what I’m doing, but this was commissioned by the county for this specific place that I had no prior connection to.

That was unusual and in some ways an uncomfortable place to be coming from for many reasons—one of the big ones being, here I am being given a budget to do a project in a community that has very few resources. I think people were sort of justifiably like “Who is this person? Why do they have resources to do a project in our community?” In some ways I don’t have a good answer for that.

In any case, I didn’t have any prior relationship with anyone there, so more than half of the time of the project was spent just building those relationships and spending time with the community trying to understand the way it was structured and concerns of people who live there.

I usually think it’s naive to try and work with “the public” in a general sense. The public is always made up of pretty specific communities and specific sets of interests.

You can’t just sort of work with the general public. When I engage a community it’s usually a pretty specific and pre-organized community, like tenants of a public housing development, or people who all work at a community organization, or a labor center.

So there’s already a structure, and I’m working with that structure and those people who already have a unified purpose.

In Willowbrook there wasn’t as expansive of a pre-organized social network, so I did end up having to do something approximating trying to reach the general public.

Going, literally, door to door for almost two months, just knocking on doors and talking to strangers, which is not a way I would ever work unless I felt it was a last resort.

It’s time consuming; it’s very different than working with an organization that already has a sense of purpose or connection. But I found this was the best way to reach a lot of people who weren’t connected to churches or the few nonprofits that are in the area.

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BELOW: cultureNOW public art map of Manhattan, New York.

Map courtesy cultureNOW.

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Something else I’m wondering about is how you see mapping interacting with art in the future, or even now.

I think that abstract representations of what the physical world is like, or what the nonphysical social world is like, are becoming more and more important in our everyday life through the power of computing and data and all of these things. There are all these ways that maps are starting to have social power—not that they haven’t before, they’ve always had a huge amount—but I think if anything that’s only increasing and becoming more overwhelming.

Because maps also belong to the regime of the visual, it’s naturally a pretty interesting place for artists to be working. Even just in a literal way, the ability of any and everything to be tied to a geolocated, specific place and have that exist somewhere in a database and have that be able to be represented on a two-dimensional surface. All those kinds of tools and technologies are just exploding now. Anything and everything has some sort of location attached to it, and that location is increasingly visible and worked with.

My interest is in the social ramifications of mapping. By this I mean all of these things that have to do with art and how to visually represent things, but also have to do with the really powerful social effects. Like what kinds of things become more and less visible when you can represent everything on a two-dimensional plane from a bird’s-eye perspective?

I make maps as part of my design work, like working with nonprofits to make public health data visible. I think that work is really interesting and exercises part of my brain. But the Willowbrook project, if anything, is a response to that kind of work and thinking. This is a little bit of a clichéd point, but I think it’s enduringly true: that there’s this huge amount of texture that’s lost when you try to create a uniform schematic representation.

If anything, the point of the Willowbrook mapping project was anti-quantitative, trying to make people who are routing highways and moving things around on a spreadsheet and having huge effects on the ground, to have them pause and see things from a non-macro view, to see at the scale of an individual.

Mapping Cultural Assets

“The maps started as a tool for getting people would allow people to learn about art and back downtown,” says architect Abby Suckle, architecture via maps. who began mapping New York City’s cultural Once they got the app up and running, the assets in response to 9/11. “It was way before idea began to catch on. The first taker for creatGoogle Earth. I actually created the first map out ing an interactive map of public art outside of of old real estate maps and something from City New York City was Porter Arneill, executive Planning. I squashed it all together. They were director and public art administrator for the done in Illustrator. Very old-fashioned.”

Kansas City Municipal Art Commission.

Suckle’s mapping project would eventually “It didn’t cost him anything,” says Suckle, become cultureNOW, a nonprofit organization “but it solved a big problem, and he was accesthat houses interactive maps of public art and sible and he didn’t have to put QR codes all architecture for cities around the world, accessiover the place. Once we had one done, everyble to the public online. body in public art thought that was a great At first, there was no big vision for the projidea.” That was in 2010. ect, says Suckle. Then, the question became: Since then, cultureNOW has become a tool How are we going to live in the future?

Abby Suckle of cultureNOW. that helps people understand place in cities As Lower Manhattan rebounded, cultureacross the globe.

NOW set its sights on mapping New York City’s public art. The “At this point I think we might have 85 collections online,” initial map took three years to complete, as members of the orgasays Suckle. “We’re looking at place as a juxtaposition of the built nization pursued a grant and walked the city cataloging artwork. environment, which is architecture; the cultural insertions, which Once their list was complete, circa 2007, the project began to take are public art or monuments; and the history of what actually on a life of its own. happened there.”

“The physical map became an eight-foot-long document,” says The maps have also proven useful in post-disaster scenarios. “We Suckle. “It had to be printed in four parts and glued together by hand, became very interested in how you preserve cultural assets. How do so that wasn’t a very practical thing.” you design for the future? What do you need to do to protect that?”

After a few more trial-and-error attempts, the organization had After Superstorm Sandy, disaster workers used the tool as a helpa stockpile of digital photos and recordings of artists talking about ful overview of the areas in need of support. “You had a bunch of their work, with no great way to show it off. If it weren’t for the people who didn’t know the city coming in, and then you had a lot of rise of the smartphone, the mapping project might have ended stuff that was in clumps depending on what organization had authorthere, or been scaled down. Instead, Suckle and others at cultureity. What we happened to have was a list of everything cultural. It NOW were inspired by a smartphone app at the Cooper-Hewitt became very useful. You could see what the problems would be and Museum. They wasted no time developing their own version that what you had on your list.”

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Photo courtesy Abby Suckle.

cultureNOW

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In addition, cultureNOW’s maps can be used as a design tool for artists and architects. “Nowadays public art is used when people don’t know what to do with a place,” says Suckle. “It’s this leftover place somewhere and they say, ‘Well, we’ll find an artist.’ As if the art is going to miraculously come in and pull it all together for you.” Instead, Suckle advocates for a more integrated approach.

“You have to fold the art in. You have to fold in what happened, and you have to make it so that your insertion resonates and works.

If I can make a tool that helps my colleagues do a better job, that’s better for everyone.”

Given the diverse—and often surprising—uses that individuals are finding for the technology, Suckle expects the platform to continue evolving. “I would say this is very much a work in progress,” she says. “We’re really excited because it’s kind of taken off and the way it’s used in the art world is as a way of understanding where you are. There are over two thousand podcasts now, where you can listen to the artist or architect talk about their buildings. It’s really something you could never do any other way.”

Street Art, Meet Google Maps Street Art Project In its seeming quest to make all things navigable, Google has turned its sights on the half-underground world of street art. The corporation unveiled the Street Art Project—its online museum of graffiti, murals, and wheatpaste—last June, inviting the public to “discover an evolving collection of street art from across the globe” and participate in the celebration of this rogue art form via hashtag.

The Street Art Project manifests as one of Google’s interactive maps, pinned with street art from nearly every continent. Zoom in on Buenos Aires to check out graffiti by Chilean artist Ene Ene, then scroll over to the Philippines to see a wheatpaste from the Gerilya collective.

While the Street Art Project and Google’s interactive maps are officially separate projects, says Laura Scott of Google Cultural Institute, they’re also overlapping.

“We do work very closely with the mapping team,” says Scott.

“They help us take photographs, and then we make those available at the Cultural Institute.”

This teamwork is front and center in a short video offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how some of the online displays have been put together. In it, we see a program manager for Google Street View, Pascale Milite, capturing images of The Bestiary, an exhibition of work by Sheffield street artist Phlegm at Howard Griffin Gallery in London.

“This show is entirely noncommercial,” says Richard Howard Griffin in the video. “After it’s finished and closed to the public it’ll be destroyed. All of Phlegm’s fans aren’t going to be able to get here, as much as they’d like to. Therefore [the Street Art Project] is just a really unique way of bringing it to that audience.”

The results of Milite’s image gathering are shown separately in an interactive display that gives viewers the ability to move through the gallery space, zooming in and out on details.

Aside from the mapping features, the project includes a database searchable by artist, city, and medium, though the Cultural Institute has taken pains to establish that its job is not policing genre.

TOP: Photo by Urban Forms, courtesy Google Cultural Institute. BOTTOM: Photo by Street Art Buenos Aires, courtesy Google Cultural Institute.

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TOP: Spanish artist Aryz's 2011 mural in Łódź, Poland.

BOTTOM: Martin Ron's "Pedro Luján and his dog" in Buenos Aires.

The Journey Is the Destination Wayfinding: 100 NYC Public Sculptures Part map, part artwork, part public art scavenger hunt, Wayfinding: 100 NYC Public Sculptures turns a viewer’s journey toward a sculpture into an artwork of its own. The temporary installation consists of directional signs and maps bearing black-and-white icons of public sculptures, paired with the distance to each from the Queens Museum at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park.

The project was conceived by U.S.-based Thai artist Bundith Phunsombatlert, who researched every public sculpture in New York City before curating his list of 100, drawing each and calculating distances with GPS coordinates. The results were printed on aluminum signs and mounted onto 99-inch-tall posts, which were placed in groups of six in several of New York’s high-traffic parks. There are four clusters in Manhattan and one in each of the other boroughs.

With Wayfinding, Phunsombatlert invited the audience “to participate, to feel, to think, and to build their own experience.”

Through his art practice, he hopes “to connect with other people and discover something about my position in the world by engaging a diversity of perceptions, uncovering cultural meaning as it affects our day-to-day lives.”

The installation ran from May through November 2014. A map is online at www.wayfindingNYC.com.

SUZANNE LINDGREN studied art history and theory in Vancouver,

British Columbia, and in New York City. She is now a freelance writer and reporter living in rural Minnesota. Public art is her favorite kind of art, especially the renegade varieties.

Images courtesy Bundith Phunsombatlert.

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“In the community there are lots of different opinions about what constitutes real graffiti versus street art versus other forms of art,” says Scott. “It’s not Google’s job to get involved in that debate.

Our goal is to make available information, make available these works of art.”

Street art enthusiasts can contribute to the conversation—though not the official collection—by taking photos of street art and posting them to social media with the hashtag #streetartproject.

It’s not always possible to get an artist’s permission to show their work, and Google has promised to remove images from its database at the artist’s request. But so far no one has asked them to, says Scott. Since the June rollout of the Street Art Project, “the feedback is great,” she says. “We’ve had lots of fantastic collaborations with our partners and with individual artists. We’re working hard to add more content. It’s a long-term project for us.”

Check it out at https://streetart.withgoogle.com.

Where to Look Working together, databases and maps increase the visibility of public art.

Putting art outside, whether in the street or the forest, is only a first step in getting it to resonate with the public. Another element is making sure people can find it, or find out more about it. Paired with geo-tagging technology, databases are becoming an invaluable tool for spreading the word about public art, near or far, past or present.

“How do you make public art more public?” is a question posed by the Public Art Archive. Its database, The Archive—which holds images of more than 8,000 public artworks searchable by location, artist, medium, title, venue, or year—is one answer to the question.

Search results link up to Google Maps, making the database practical for finding public art within walking distance.

PAN’S YEAR IN REVIEW

In an effort to celebrate public art, the Public Art Network (PAN) annually selects 50 favorite projects in the U.S. for recognition through its Year in Review. Since the review’s start in 2000, it’s been a great way to keep track of fresh projects and ideas, but as years and awards piled up, past work could be difficult to find. Until last summer, that is, when PAN launched beta-testing of its Year in Review Database, making it easier to discover public art nearby or research stunning work based on medium or budget. The database is searchable by artist, title, commissioning agency, or materials, and browsable by state, venue type, and budget. If all goes accord-

ing to plan, the official database will be running in June 2015. Do a search at http://bit.ly/1vjx1IE. RESIDUE

Each year, Forecast Public Art (publisher of Public Art Review) helps fund site-specific public artworks, many of which are temporary. Although they disappear, “those works become part of the memory of the site,” says Jack Becker, founder and executive director of Forecast. To help people learn more about works that have come and gone, the organization is working on a smartphone app called Residue, which will hold images, reports, and quotes about past projects Forecast has helped bring to fruition. Like the Public Art Archive and Year in Review Database, Residue will link its database to a map to create a user-friendly tool for learning about art and place. Forecast worked with students at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design to develop the app, which is scheduled for release in early 2015.

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PUBLIC ART ARCHIVE

The Public Art Archive also does educational outreach and has a Tumblr blog, “Find, Know, and Grow Your Public Art.” Visit the Public Art Archive at www.publicartarchive.org or the blog at publicartarchive.tumblr.com.

Photos courtesy Bundith Phunsombatlert.

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TOP LEFT: In Bundith Phunsombatlert’s Wayfinding: 100 NYC Public Sculptures project, people are invited to view a map online at http://www.wayfindingNYC.com. ABOVE and LEFT: Wayfinding is composed of 100 directional signs, each with a drawing of a permanent public sculpture in New York City and the distance—mapped with GPS coordinates—between the artwork and this sign at Flushing Meadows‐Corona Park.

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a collective tattoo connects people who where they live

by Lauren Bedosky

Photo courtesy Kurt Gohde and Kremena Todorova.

HOW MUCH DO YOU LOVE YOUR HOMETOWN? Enough to tattoo a few

words of adulation on your body? For more than 200 residents of Lexington, Kentucky, the answer is yes. Arts administrators, city officials, and even a family of five—two parents, three children—braved the tattoo artists’ needles for the Lexington Tattoo Project, a community-wide artwork that was honored by the Americans for the Arts’ Public Art Network 2014 Year in Review.

Spearheaded by local interventionist artists Kurt Gohde and Kremena Todorova, the project was inspired by ideas and observations gleaned from their eight years of artistic collaboration.

One key trend they observed through working within various communities—from Lexington’s vibrant drag community to motorists making their daily commute along one of the city’s major motorways—was a growing sense of pride about living in Lexington.

“People had this growing commitment to Lexington that in some ways mimicked the same kind of commitment to a tribe, or tribal markings, which is where tattoos come from,” Gohde explains.

With the seeds of their community engagement project in hand, Gohde and Todorova approached local poet Bianca Spriggs in May 2012 and asked her to write a poem—a love letter—to the city of Lexington. The poem, “The ______ of the Universe: A Love Story,” was then broken up into words and phrases, each to be claimed by a different project participant. The artists wanted broad participation, so they sought private funding to cover the cost of the tattoos.

Along with a snippet of the poem, each tattoo included a unique pattern of tiny, specially placed circles that, when put together, created a larger image. Gohde and Todorova selected an image that they felt people in Lexington would have a personal connection with—steering clear of clichéd Kentucky associations such as horses, basketball, and bourbon. Instead, they designed a stylized representation of a street sign for New Circle Road, a Lexington ring road that is both a landmark and a conversation piece.

Neither Gohde nor Todorova could have anticipated the widespread interest the project would generate. At the outset, they wondered if they would be able to find 100 people interested in participating. By the end, 253 devoted Lexington residents —including Gohde and Todorova—had signed on. And there was a long waiting list.

Participants embraced the project, forging new connections and deepening old ones as the project progressed. “There was a tremendous sense of ownership, which is another thing we didn’t expect,” Todorova says.

This sense of ownership helped the project to evolve in unexpected ways, as members took it upon themselves to connect with one another. Among the members’ initiatives was a hefty book brimming with photographs of participants posing with their tattoos; a meet-and-greet event where members swapped stories; and a blog where participants could share the inspiration behind the words or phrases they chose for their tattoo. “At every juncture in this project, it was really surprising and humbling to us how people embraced it and made it their own in ways that people often don’t do with artwork,” Gohde says.

After the success of their project in Lexington, Gohde and Todorova were invited to launch a similar project in Boulder, Colorado; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Detroit, Michigan. And in September 2014, they launched a global version of the project titled Love Letter to the World, which centers on a poem written by Kentucky’s poet laureate, Frank X Walker. As with the Lexington version, interested participants can select words or phrases to have tattooed on their bodies.

Once their tattoo has healed, people are encouraged to share stories and photos on the project website, building a global community that transcends cultures and borders.

LAUREN BEDOSKY is a writer and artist living in Minneapolis.

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Tattoo artist Robert inks a section of the title of Bianca Spriggs’s poem “The _____ of the Universe: A Love Story,” onto Lexington Tattoo Project volunteer John.

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ABOVE: The tattoo on poet Bianca Spriggs’s foot is from her poem “The _____ of the Universe: A Love Story,” part of the Lexington Tatto Project. It reads “gravitational pull.” TOP: Enrique Jordan and his tattoo from the Lexington Tattoo Project.

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LEFT and TOP RIGHT: Photos courtesy Kurt Gohde and Kremena Todorova. BOTTOM RIGHT: Photo by Nash Werner.

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ABOVE: Participants in The Lexington Tattoo Project, all residents of Lexington, Kentucky, got together for a party to celebrate love for their city. TOP: Kayti McCormick’s aptly placed tattoo from the Lexington Tattoo Project poem reads, “The Armpit.”

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SO HAPPY TOGETHER ARTISTS & FABRICATORS:

Most public art projects are the result of collaboration between artist and fabricator. What makes this relationship tick?

by Elizabeth Keithline

ARTISTS CURIOUS ABOUT WORKING in the public realm are some-

GETTING TO KNOW YOU JAUME PLENSA/HEAVY INDUSTRIES

In 2012, artist Jaume Plensa worked with the Canadian fabricator Heavy Industries to produce Wonderland, a 39-foot-tall, awardwinning sculpture of a young girl’s head, located in the plaza of the Encana Corporation in Calgary.

Plensa’s work with Heavy Industries started in spring of 2010 with his expression of interest in the project. “When you start with a particular shop, it takes a certain period of time for them to learn about you and your work,” says Plensa. “There can be discussions or fights. Each of us is trying to catch the true capacity of the other. It sometimes seems like a waste of time, but that’s not the case at all.

The president of Heavy was especially kind. It’s pretty important that the company who has to help you is also excited. Those guys were really a pleasure in that direction.”

Plensa first had Heavy build a full-scale model of the young girl’s ear. The model was designed on computer and then fabricated. “The digital model is the brains and the hands of the project,” explains Encana’s Ken Heinbecker. During this phase, Plensa and his preferred welder would visit to check on the work (and attend hockey games), and Heavy would also check in from time to time with Plensa’s team in Barcelona. They were getting to know each other.

Public commissions have a set budget and it’s unusual for that number to change. Private developers potentially have more play to make additions to the budget and to make changes and improvements to a project. This is a great problem to have, but changes require communication and everyone has to be kept in the loop. A good fabricator willingly attends to these details and manages communication carefully.

When you are working on a Plensa, you are aware that you are producing a very high-visibility project. It has to be right. Heavy Industries was happy to oblige.

LEFT: Jaume Plensa’s Wonderland (2012) in Calgary, Alberta. Commissioned by Encana Corporation and fabricated by Heavy Industries.

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times told that public artists work in teams, but if one hasn’t been exposed to this way of working, it’s hard to understand what that really means.

How do artists and fabricators decide to work together? What makes for a fruitful partnership? What are some of the challenges of this kind of relationship?

We decided to find out by talking with artist/fabricator teams.

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Photo courtesy HY Architecture. PREVIOUS PAGE: Photo © Jaume Plensa, courtesy Gallery Lelong, New York.

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49 ONE-OF-A-KIND TECHNICAL FIREWORKS

TOP: Photo by Stacey Irvin. BOTTOM: Photo by Erik Carlson.

ERIK CARLSON/PARALLEL DEVELOPMENT

Erik Carlson, a public artist, and Mohammad Asgari, a tech designer and fabricator at Parallel Development, recently completed Circulate, a public art project for the Lentz Public Health Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

The two met as co-subcontractors on a larger project: Carlson did the sound component for Aviary, an installation that Parallel built for The Village at the Dubai Mall. When Carlson won the commission in Nashville, he knew he wanted to work with Parallel Development again.

That’s because Carlson uses technology as a medium. If a foundry closes, you can always find another one; but Parallel’s digital works are usually one of a kind, so they aren’t as easy to replace.

“We are using the same things as industry,” says Asgari.

“The main difference is that we’re probably only going to make something one time. We can’t use that iterative process. There are always new issues that arise that aren’t typical. The client’s expectation is that it will work. But if we haven’t done it before, that may be unrealistic.” This environment suits Asgari, who began his working life as an electrical engineer and joined Parallel to work on cutting-edge projects.

Another challenge is that no matter how good an artist’s power of visualization, installation day is often the first time to see the piece in its final form. Carlson, a musician, is familiar with both collaboration and risk.

Together, the two collaborators have two of the most important elements of a good public art partnership: the temperament and the tolerance required for the work.

Asgari’s definition of the perfect artist client is “a friend who is doing really interesting things.” How many in the corporate world can say the same?

OPPOSITE: Aviary, installed at The Village at the Dubai Mall, was created by collaborators HY Architecture (design/lead artist), Erik Carlson (audio/artist), and Parallel Development (engineer). TOP: Circulate at Nashville Tennessee’s Lentz Public Health Center was created by Erik Carlson (artist) and Parallel Development (tech consultant and engineer). BOTTOM: Carlson, a musician, relies on Parallel Development for technological expertise in projects like Circulate.

AN EYE ON THE LONG TERM LAURA HADDAD AND TOM DRUGAN/SILO WORKSHOP

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Amorette Lana and Conor Hollis are the principals of Silo Workshop.

In addition to working as fabricators, they are also conservators and working artists.

Laura Haddad and Tom Drugan began working with Silo when they won a public art commission for the Denver Animal Shelter.

The City of Denver recommended three fabricators. The artists used a larger firm, Demiurge, for the exterior portion of the commission, but they decided to go with Silo for an interactive, oversized dog collar that was being installed in the lobby.

It’s important that Lana and Hollis understand the artists’ aesthetic, but, thinking like conservators, they also tend to see durability and conservation issues up front. As a result, they bring important knowledge to the design phase on both an aesthetic level as artists and a practical level as conservators.

Laura Haddad told this story about Silo: They were once on a New England site at 5:00 PM on the Friday of Easter weekend.

Drilling into walls that had a lot more rebar than had been anticipated, they realized they needed a special drill bit, but stores selling such an item were closed. Quickly harnessing the time difference between the East Coast and Seattle (where they are based), they special-ordered the bit, had it delivered overnight, and were back drilling by Saturday morning.

This is the kind of commitment that artists should look for when thinking about whom to hire. There will never be anyone who cares about your work quite as much as you do, but there are a few companies out there that will care almost as much. Silo showed their stripes on that Easter weekend far from home.

TOP: Silo Workshop installing Laura Haddad’s Semaphore (2014) in Rhode Island.

BOTTOM and OPPOSITE: More views of Semaphore after installation was completed.

Photos courtesy the artist and Silo Workshop.

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FROM THE CRADLE TO THE PUBLIC MIKYOUNG KIM/AMUNEAL

Mikyoung Kim, principal of Mikyoung Kim Design, has created many public art installations. Kim is a landscape architect and public artist who often includes metal sculptural components in her work.

Kim has worked with Amuneal of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for 12 years. Although the fabricators work with many materials, “custom metalwork is a core element of nearly everything that we build,” according to Amuneal’s website.

Kim’s sculptures often feature many precisely drilled perforations that require strict attention to detail to produce a fine, lacy look.

At the same time, the pieces naturally demand the strength and durability of an exterior public art commission: The work must withstand all that the public can throw at it. Kim feels that Amuneal understands both ends of this spectrum.

Amuneal also ships the work, which Kim likens to a baby going home from the hospital. If it leaves the mother’s arms during this time, something might happen. As Kim says, “Amuneal makes sure that the baby arrives safely.” Amuneal knows what has gone into the piece in production and what it requires as it travels.

She also says that when she visits Amuneal’s factory, owner Adam Kamens often takes her through the shop so that she can see everything they’re working on. She likes the feeling of being connected to the other contemporary projects in the shop.

BOTTOM: Photo © Alan Karchmer. TOP: Photo by Briana Brough Photography.

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OPPOSITE: Mikyoung Kim’s Exhale (2013) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was created in collaboration with Amuneal. LEFT: The grand opening party of Exhale.

BELOW: Mikyoung Kim also worked with Amuneal to create The Pendulum Project (2012), a resin wall at Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C.

Photo by Donald Lipski, courtesy Galerie Lelong.

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FRIENDSHIP COMES FIRST

ELIZABETH KEITHLINE is an artist, curator, and owner of Wheel

Arts Administration, whose clients include the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts’ Percent for Art Program, the Governors Island Art Fair in New York, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Barr Foundation, the Charles River Conservancy, and private public-artist clients.

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Photo by Donald Lipski, courtesy Galerie Lelong.

DONALD LIPSKI/JOHN GRANT

A different team structure, and probably one of the sweetest relationships examined here, is the one between public artist Donald Lipski and project manager John Grant.

Imagine two guys in bathrobes sipping coffee while talking on the phone on a Sunday morning, and you may begin to envision Lipski and Grant’s relationship. Though Grant is a project manager, not a fabricator, this relationship is worth looking at if for no other reason than it is so effective. These two have built 25 projects together over the course of their 15-year partnership and currently have another 6 in the works.

The two met when Grant was managing the City of Denver’s public art program.

Lipski applied for a commission and didn’t get selected, but a private donor ended up buying the piece. Grant and his wife took Lipski ice skating, and Lipski reportedly turned to Grant and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could work together?”

Grant’s experience as a public art administrator led him to conclude that fabricators often work beyond their comfort level. They try to do it all, which isn’t necessarily the most efficient path for their artist clients. So he built a roster of specialty fabricators upon whom he can call, based on the needs of the job.

Lipski is famous for never proposing the same piece twice, so Grant’s stable is a good fit for him. What he mainly needs is an administrator who can relieve the pressures of applications, contracts, and schedules. If he dreams up an idea, he knows there will be someone able to turn it into reality.

Grant says that in the very beginning of their work life, they sat down and wrote a half-page document which said that their friendship was more important than their work and that they would stop working together if work ever got in the way of it. Fifteen years later—no problems.

55 ABOVE: John Grant with Donald Lipski’s Candy Box (2013) in Lincoln, Nebraska.

OPPOSITE: Grant installs Lipski’s Time Piece (2012) in El Monte, California.

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Constructing a Relationship Artist Mark Dion and fabricators Rick and Ido Yoshimoto forged a collaborative bond in creating The Ship Chandler

by Arlene Goldbard

PUBLIC ART IS PUBLIC MEMORY, in either intention or effect. Some pieces commemorate history; others become landmarks, anchoring new memories. The Ship Chandler, Mark Dion’s installation for the Port of Los Angeles, plays with this truth. The work disrupts the present with a visitation from a past that is not so much remembered as imagined.

Dion’s piece was commissioned by the Port for its 1.2-acre waterfront redevelopment project: Downtown Harbor and Town Square, situated in the San Pedro Historic Waterfront District. Once shaped by fishing, canneries, and shipbuilding, San Pedro is now the nation’s largest mechanized, container-shipping site. Few vestiges of fishing culture remain.

The redeveloped waterfront parking lot was transformed into

a recreational boat harbor and an assertively contemporary promenade dotted with palm trees. From it, The Ship Chandler sprouts like an ancient mushroom, not a replica but a riff. It is a 9-by-12-foot wooden shack with low windows that allow clear sightlines inside.

Through them, viewers peer at shelves and display cases overflowing with merchandise: paintbrushes and pill bottles, twine and toggle floats, towers of unopened mail.

The work alludes to the personality—obsessive, intent, hoarding—of an imagined shopkeeper who stocked it. Dion doubts that those who commissioned it understood that it would have “such a strongly manic quality. I’m really pleased that its edge came out as hyperbolic as I wanted.” It has a contradictory aspect, the vulnerability of a relic and the determination of a squatter.

Photos by Rick Yoshimoto.

RELATIONSHIP Dion’s working relationship with the Yoshimotos was initiated through the matchmaking of Jody Rassell, a Los Angeles-based advisor who manages public art programs, including the three-year development of this project. Dion knew fabricators on the East Coast who could have built and trucked the work, “but Jody knew the perfect person with the right sensibility,” he says. “She has such a trustworthy aesthetic and she’s great to work with. That let me think it was a great idea.” Rick Yoshimoto knew Jody well and felt the same.

Her confidence in the match allowed them to skip some of the getting-to-know-you that might otherwise have felt necessary.

Working with the Yoshimotos, who live 3,000 miles west of Dion’s home base in New York and Pennsylvania, made this project different. “Many times we move the whole studio to make something on-site,” taking four or five people on location for as much as a month, he says. Working on-site creates a different management challenge—the social dimension of a studio situation. But in this project the task was to forge an effective, satisfying working relationship across distance.

All three men understood the primacy of good communication.

All three applaud the others’ willingness to share wants, needs, and ideas. It was in the nature of this piece that “simplicity and commonsense craftsmanship” predominate, Dion says. “Most of Rick’s suggestions took things in a better direction. He always understood that the simplest way was the best way.”

For his part, Rick Yoshimoto describes the relationship with the artist as the most important factor in successfully executing a project.

“The more open dialogue and open areas for each other’s creativity —you get a better product.”

ABOVE: Ido Yoshimoto spraying borax solution onto the interior of Mark Dion’s The Ship Chandler (2014) to prevent infestation by insects and fungus. TOP: Fabricated on a horse ranch in northern California by Rick and Ido Yoshimoto, The Ship Chandler was loaded onto a 36-foot flatbed truck for transport to the Port of Los Angeles, where it was installed at the San Pedro Historic Waterfront District.

SKILL When it comes to skill, Dion says he looks for collaborators who bring ingenuity to the table. “You don’t hire people just for their hands,” he explains. “You hire people who are problem-solvers, who can think on their feet and make suggestions that you wouldn’t have thought of.

You hire them for their hands and their head and you’d be foolish if you didn’t listen to their suggestions.”

As a testament to this principle, it helps to know that the Yoshimotos actualized Dion’s design without the three ever meeting at the construction site. “The cell phone,” says Rick Yoshimoto, “was a fantastic communication tool for this project.” Ido Yoshimoto was also hired to acquire objects to stock the shelves of the

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STARTING A “VISUAL DIALOG” The Ship Chandler has another aspect, hidden to the plaza-goers in Los Angeles: It is the outcome of a unique relationship between artist Dion and father-and-son fabricators, sculptors Rick and Ido Yoshimoto, who constructed the work in a dusty corner of a horse ranch in Northern California.

Dion says that he has three primary concerns in hiring a fabricator—relationship, skill, and freedom—but his “number one rule” trumps them all: “Hire people who are better than I am. The people I work with all demonstrate a higher degree of craftsmanship than I can deliver.” We discussed each of his three criteria in some detail as an exploration of the relationship between artist and fabricator.

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Chandler. Dion says that the “visual dialogue” between them—each would prowl flea markets, texting the other photos of their discoveries—reassured him they were in sync.

The elder Yoshimoto’s own artwork is in wood and ceramics. He has also built many custom houses. The younger’s sculptures use wood, glass, and found objects. Before construction started, Ido made a systematic study of Dion’s writings, finding uncanny coincidences.

“I had the exact same pieces he had collected from flea markets on road trips.” This aesthetic compatibility gave him a dual role: He hauled wood and pounded nails at the construction site, taking direction from his father; but at the same time, he felt authorized by his strong alignment with Dion’s aesthetic to oversee elements of nuance and texture.

As it happens, Dion began his career fabricating work for Ashley Bickerton, doing research, carpentry, metalwork, and more, and eventually serving as studio manager. “So I can find my way around a wood shop,” he explains. He points out that he has the skills to perform much of a fabricator’s job. “But there are a lot of artists who don’t know those things and aren’t able to make clear what they want. That can be frustrating for a fabricator.”

Finding the right materials, especially the right wood, was a challenge. They needed 1" x 12" redwood siding for the exterior. “We wanted it to look a hundred years old,” Rick Yoshimoto explains, while also building to current environmental standards to ensure the piece will last. They searched online and through suppliers. Then “luckily, right in our town, we found somebody who had reclaimed wood and was willing to sell. We went through a huge pile to handpick what we needed. And that was just the siding.”

Decisions about structure and permanence were Rick Yoshimoto’s, since he knew current materials and their capabilities. Weather was the big question. To keep moisture from entering the structure, they built an invisible membrane. “There are two roofs,” he explains.

“From the interior, you see shingles and skip sheathing on top of the roof supports. But it’s not weathertight, so on top we put another roof with another shingle look from the outside.” They layered Bituthene in between to keep the weather out.

For the windows, Dion wanted chicken-wire glass, which is no longer manufactured. Rick Yoshimoto also discovered that any type of embedded wire creates glare in direct light, making it hard to see in. In this instance, Dion deferred to “a higher degree of craftsmanship.” He says, “I’d have to bite my lip and say, well, if he tells me this is not going to get me there, I trust that he’s telling the truth.”

Dion approved contemporary wire glass for the door and small front window, and clear safety glass for the main window.

Dion explains that hiring someone to shop for his installations is extremely difficult because you can’t easily teach your particular taste. “If you put six padlocks down and say, ‘Which one is right?’ it’s very rare that you’re going to find someone who understands what you know is clearly the right one. Ido is very skilled in that. I’d only trust a few other people.”

Working this way was a learning curve for Rick Yoshimoto. His experience building houses led him to expect detailed plans. But once he got used to it, Dion’s approach excited him, leaving “room for the unexpected, for the skill and ideas of the fabricator to come into play.”

The Port Authority’s requirements also came into play. For example, they wanted graffiti-proof paint, so Rick Yoshimoto researched coatings. All available options would alter the wood’s appearance, undermining the impression of age. “We decided not to do that,” he told me, “but it took a lot of thought and negotiation. The Port was also concerned about seagull shit. They wanted spikes on the roof to keep the seagulls away.” But the artist told them that seagull droppings are part of the experience, and the spikes were nixed.

Dion explains that he often works with fabricators, so he’s seen the problems that can arise when a builder’s ideas clash with the artist’s. “Sometimes you get into these really difficult battles. The placement of the light socket might make a difference to the artist or it might not.” In this case, something like that did matter. Post-installation, the artist asked that a timer be added to the interior light.

But with agreement on the importance of relationship and skill, no requirement constrained the sense of trust and freedom between artist and fabricators.

ARLENE GOLDBARD is a writer, speaker, consultant and cultural

FREEDOM Dion’s drawings were simple sketches in his trademark red and blue pencil. He makes his drawings very general because too much specificity can preclude a fabricator’s creative contribution. “When you hire people who are better than you,” he told me, “they fill in with their skills in a way that you can’t even imagine.”

activist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics, and spirituality. Find her work at www.arlenegoldbard.com. Her two newest books—The Wave and The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future—were published in spring 2013. She is chief policy wonk of the US Department of Arts and Culture and president of The Shalom Center.

Photos by Dana Sherwood. Sketches by Mark Dion.

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ABOVE: Interior view of The Ship Chandler by artist Mark Dion and fabricators Rick and Ido Yoshimoto. TOP LEFT: One of Dion’s interior concept sketches for the project.

TOP RIGHT: Artist Mark Dion installing The Ship Chandler interior at the Port of Los Angeles. BOTTOM RIGHT: An exterior concept drawing by Mark Dion.

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Homestead An artist watches over—and copyrights—his land

By Jacqueline White

Photo courtesy Peter von Tiesenhausen.

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Act

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ABOVE: Sanctuary (2012) was an installation of 1,000 wooden poles up to 30 feet in height at the Leighton Art Centre in Millarville, Alberta. It was later used by other disciplines including dance performance. RIGHT: Artist Peter von Tiesenhausen. PREVIOUS PAGE: A section of Peter von Tiesenhausen’s Lifeline fence on his property in Alberta, Canada. The artist adds eight feet to the fence each year. He began constructing it 25 years ago.

Photo courtesy Peter von Tiesenhausen.

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Photo by Brandy Dahrouge.

TO UNDERSTAND WHY ALBERTA ARTIST PETER VON TIESENHAUSEN

copyrighted the land that he and his wife own, it helps to look with his eyes out the window of the studio he built himself on their remote 800 acres northwest of Grande Prairie. The copyright was a novel legal maneuver to prevent the intrusion of a gas pipeline: The view provides the compelling rationale. Von Tiesenhausen looks across fields his father cleared as a homesteader in order to receive the title to the land—fields he spent his childhood riding through on horseback to check the family’s cattle for pink eye and hoof rot.

His eyes alight on the fence he began building 25 years ago when he decided to become an artist. After constructing the first eight feet of picket fence, he felt an internal shift. He’d made a commitment: “This would be something I would be doing for the rest of my life.”

The rule he set for himself is simple: each year he is alive, the same materials—two-by-fours, one-by-fours, nails, a treated fence post, some white paint. Another eight feet.

“It’s this incredible shackle,” von Tiesenhausen acknowledges. He is tied to his land. But he also observes that at some point “a sense of stewardship kicked in.” He became even more keenly protective of the acres he has lived on since he was six years old.

So, in 1996, when the land negotiator and “some major dude” from Alliance Pipeline stopped by to discuss laying pipe to carry highly toxic gas through his property, von Tiesenhausen took them on a tour, pointing out objects he’d made and strategically placed, such as nests from willow branches perched in the trees. “This is not just a field or a forest,” he told them. “It’s an artwork. These things I’ve made are not isolated from the environment.”

The Lifeline fence is a prime example. The most recently completed end evokes the crisp white picket fence ideal of contented domesticity, but looking down the fence line, the paint begins to peel, the wood weathers, and finally the aspen trees push their way through, splitting the one-by-fours. “It’s very clear,” von Tiesenhausen says, “that that fence will not be there in one hundred years.”

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The fence, which does not actually fence anything in, is a powerful artistic statement about, among other things, the futility of ownership, a theme that resonates in the artist’s family history. Baltic Germans who settled in Estonia during the Crusades, von Tiesenhausen’s ancestors lost ownership of their land 700 years later during the Russian Revolution, and then had two weeks to vacate in the early days of World War II when the “nonaggression” pact between Hitler and Stalin assigned Estonia to the Soviet sphere of influence.

For von Tiesenhausen, whose first language was German and who wore lederhosen as a young Canadian lad, “the idea of being displaced people was always in my consciousness.” Despite understanding in a primal way how tenuous—even “ludicrous”—land ownership actually is, he nonetheless felt a strong urge to lay claim to the Alberta soil he’d grown up on, buying his first acres from his father when he was just 19. Or, to be precise, what he actually purchased, according to Canadian law, was the top six inches of the soil, to the depth of a plow.

“How can you own the sky?” von Tiesenhausen asks, with a nod to ancient cultures that found such a concept incomprehensible. Likewise, to copyright land, he acknowledges, is “absurd.” And yet he became willing to deal in such absurdities: If agribusinesscan copyright a seed, von Tiesenhausen figured he could copyright his acreage.

To the two pipeline ambassadors, he explained that altering the top six inches of his soil in any way—for example, by digging a trench to lay pipe—would constitute copyright infringement. They

responded in the numerical language they knew, naming a really big number, ten times what they were offering other landowners in the area.

Von Tiesenhausen turned them down. Having a big pile of money on the table—and making the decision to walk away—was, he says, “one of the biggest blessings I’ve ever had in my life: I know where I stand and what I truly believe in. I’ve been tested.”

He also credits his renewed confidence in his own integrity with kicking his career up a notch. Within a year and a half, he claims to have brought in the same amount from new sales and commissions that the pipeline reps had offered. And if another oil or gas company representative attempted an offer, he charged $500 an hour to evaluate the proposal, keeping any meetings blissfully short.

THE SPACE BETWEEN HUMAN AND LAND

Originally a landscape painter trying to “describe the land,” von Tiesenhausen’s career evolved as he began making things in the land, which then led to trying to have “a relationship with any land I find myself in.” These days, that might mean going to an exhibition ten days beforehand with just his ax to make a work on-site or perhaps creating from detritus found nearby.

That focus—on exploring the relationship between human beings and the land—crystallized in the work for which he is most widely known, The Watchers, five eight-foot-tall figures he carved from spruce and then charred with fire. From 1997 to 2002, von Tiesenhausen transported these haunting iconic figures in the back of his Ford pickup on what became a 30,000-kilometer journey

Photo courtesy Peter von Tiesenhausen.

FUTILITY OF “OWNERSHIP”

across Canada, the itinerary determined by lecture and commission invitations. The Watchers even traversed the Northwest Passage on a Coast Guard icebreaker, their impassive presence overlooking the frozen scenery from aboard the uppermost deck.

To drive along with “five charred guys in a truck” gave von Tiesenhausen a heightened appreciation for how he is being perceived—how, in other words, he fits into his environment. And photos documenting The Watchers’ placement in urban and rural landscapes presents them as . . . well, watching, or perhaps watching over. Their forms raise questions about the human presence on the planet, which, paradoxically, photos of actual humans don’t necessarily evoke.

Photo courtesy Peter von Tiesenhausen.

LAND UNDER ASSAULT

Being closely aligned with the land also brings with it a heightened awareness of environmental threats, and on von Tiesenhausen’s northwestern Alberta property, those threats continue to loom large.

The majestic grove of pine trees, under which he built his family’s house, was felled by the pine beetle scourge that is devastating pine forests across Alberta and neighboring British Columbia. The reason for the infestation? Many more of the tiny beetles survive the milder winters caused by global warming.

The need to use the timber before it rotted, the desire to revitalize the hamlet of 15 families where he lives, and the prospect of Canadian stimulus funding led von Tiesenhausen to take a four-year hiatus from formal art-making. Still, he describes the problems—the beetle-killed trees, rural decline, and economic collapse—in artistic terms, “as if they’re a palette with pigments.” The painting he hoped to create would be “the most sustainable community center anyone has ever seen”—and right in the middle of oil country no less, with giant tar sand pits just miles away and a natural-gas hot spot underfoot.

Initially turned down in no uncertain terms for stimulus funds, von Tiesenhausen eventually won over the government bureaucrats with a persistent email campaign showcasing bucolic photos

of horses harvesting the beetle-kill pines. The Demmitt Community Centre opened in 2011 with a concert that packed 300 people (and turned another couple hundred away) into a timber frame hall constructed with straw bales, a recycled gym floor, and wood with the telltale blue tinge of pine beetle infestation.

The elegant building is eloquent testimony to von Tiesenhausen’s take on an artist’s job description—“making everything you do be part of that poetry of being alive.” That poetry has resonated with some unlikely converts, including the government workers who’d initially refused and then relented on the stimulus funding.

They sent von Tiesenhausen a photo from their holiday party, their table centerpiece a gingerbread house replica of the sustainable community hall.

And then there’s the unsuccessful land negotiator from Alliance Pipeline. Von Tiesenhausen did eventually take some of his money. Even though the guy claimed not to even particularly like von Tiesenhausen’s work, he still had to have a piece of it. He forked over four figures for a mixed-media drawing that used the earth from von Tiesenhausen’s copyrighted land as pigment.

JACQUELINE WHITE is a Minneapolis writer. She is the daughter of the sculptor Nancy Metz White, whose monumental welded tree forms grace two Milwaukee parks.

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LEFT: The Demmitt Community Centre was built in 2011 out of wood salvaged from trees infested with pine beetle. ABOVE: The Watchers traveled 30,000 km across Canada.

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Photo courtesy www.jr-art.net.

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French artist JR talks about boundaries, questions, finding out what’s possible, and his latest work on Ellis Island.

by George Slade

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SEEING PEOPLE

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ABOVE and OPPOSITE: JR used archival photos for his new installation Unframed—Ellis Island.

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Photos courtesy www.jr-art.net.

Born in 1983 in France, JR began his career surreptitiously tagging around Paris. In the last decade he has reached audiences all around the globe, carrying out public projects focusing on the human face and its symbolic power.

After he won significant financial support in the form of the 2011 TED Prize, JR created the Inside Out project. A documentary by the same name follows JR around the world as he encourages communities to define their most important causes through powerful and giant black and white portraits pasted in the street.

JR’s most recent project, Unframed—Ellis Island, recently opened to the public. George Slade spoke with him by mobile phone while he was working on the installation on a late morning in August.

George Slade: So where are you?

JR: I’m taking the boat to go to Ellis Island. I’m working on Ellis Island. It was the port of entry for immigration a hundred years ago.

They open half of the island for tourists, which is what millions of visitors visit every year. But other parts have never been seen by the public since they closed it. So you have half of the island, which is completely abandoned, with hospital facilities, offices—everything is completely closed. We are working there, placing artwork there.

The visitor will be able to walk through and see it on a guided tour. It’s a really special project for me because it’s the first time that on such a site I’ll be able to do an exhibition that will actually be visible to the public, instead of doing artwork in this kind of place and then later showing the photo in the gallery. This time, people will really be able to go in this historical place to see the work, and I love that.

This is a project commissioned by the Ellis Island Museum. Will it be somewhat more permanently installed, or will it be wheat paste and paper?

The pieces should be semi-permanent. They are going to open on the first of October, and our contract says that we need to re-paste

in case it gets damaged. It’s going to be the first time they show this place, and if things go well, they’re going to keep it running all the time, and those artworks will be there for good. So, for me, it’s fascinating to suddenly work jointly with a national monument or museum to leave something that generations can see.

Why had this part of the island not been open before? Because it was dangerous or unimproved?

First they thought they would have the financing to restore and reopen it, but it’s massive, and it’s been decaying over the years.

The structures are not holding up that well. So they realize that they would never have the money. Then Hurricane Sandy damaged the structure, and they were like, okay, before we completely lose it, we better find a way to open it. They’re going to be able to take groups of 10. So it’s pretty controlled because it’s a really dangerous area.

Who are you using as collaborators in this project? Who have you gotten to be faces for you?

The photos come from the archive of Ellis Island.

When else have you used archives, faces of people who aren’t living anymore?

I did a project in 2010 named Unframed, and that project was about archive images that are not mine. It was also a way to show that I’m not only a photographer, that most of what I do is reinterpreting and using the walls or the open landscape. Basically, photography is just a medium for me, so it doesn’t matter if I take the photo or not. It’s where I place it and how I place it that matters. Those photos only make sense in this time and in this way on those doors, on those places where they actually were taken and belong to. I thought that I would only be able to do it and then people would see it in the book or a gallery, and I was really surprised when they told me that they’ve managed to secure a perimeter so that the public can actually see it.

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Inside Out New York City (2013) in Times Square (left) and AuPanthéon (2014) at the Pantheon in Paris (right) are part of JR’s Inside Out project.

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I think photography is really just a vehicle for you, a way to convey the really important information, which is something about presence and the public.

Yeah, it’s definitely that, and it’s also definitely about connecting people and creating interactions—all kinds of interactions. In a project like Inside Out, it’s about physical interaction. I don’t take the photos, so I don’t even care how good they are because what I’m looking for is how the people will actually connect and how the people will actually paste together and have a little chat about what they’re sharing with me and the world. That’s what we’re trying to create with that project: interaction.

On a project like Ellis Island, I’m working with my team, and with the medium there, and the inspiration, and then—boom, it’s open to the public. So it’s a more classical way of working, even if on a nonclassical place, but the interaction will be more historical. It will be more what message it conveys to people, especially in this time when immigration is such a strong subject. How you put in place what happened a hundred years ago here and how we were welcoming people onto the land, how history can actually connect with the youth of today and how they can see the parallel in their own eyes.

What other projects have you done in the United States?

I’ve done a few projects here: The Wrinkles of the City in Los Angeles, the Inside Out project in Times Square. The New York City Ballet project was quite a big project—we adapted a ballet there; that was a whole experience for me. But let’s say that this is a one-of-a-kind, first project in the United States just because it would actually be a “forever” project on a place that is so important to the United States, and I’m really blessed and honored to be able to work on this one.

This brings up a question about boundaries. Can you talk a little bit about how your artistic practice crosses boundaries? Not just the accomplishment of pasting images on both sides of the Israel-Palestine wall, but more conceptual boundaries like private ideas to public realization, or illegal to permitted, or from stereotype to unique character. You’ve made a pretty fascinating transition from anonymous street artist to renowned anonymous street artist.

I think boundaries are the whole line of my work, the whole direction of my work. It’s always searching for boundaries. All my earliest projects until now basically speak about how the limits are never what we think they are. And I’m not saying I know where they are. I’m just looking for them, and the journey to look for them is the artwork. It’s not necessarily the final piece, but the journey—literally, to go in Israel, to go in Palestine. To try to paste there because everyone said it would be impossible, and then it happens to be really possible. And then I think, okay, maybe I have the wrong vision about a place.

So what I’m trying to do is raise questions, not give answers.

I guess that’s always what I am looking for. I was always really surprised how much more open people were than I thought. So I’ve always questioned myself. I’d be like, whoa, I thought that would be impossible, and actually, people are helping me to do it.

Well, it seems like you’ve expanded boundaries, or at least moved them.

Exactly. Most of the time, it’s the boundaries people have in their head that are not real ones, and those are the most dangerous ones.

I love being surprised, and only art can create that surprise.

Because real surprise can scare people, and that’s why they don’t take risks. But I think real artists should always look for real surprise;

Photos courtesy www.jr-art.net.

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it can be sometimes good and sometimes bad, but that’s why, as an artist, you have to take risks.

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In the Face2Face project, the one where you asked people to make funny faces, or unusual faces, or do something uncharacteristic—that was a great use of surprise.

Definitely. I asked them to do those faces because I wanted them to play the caricature of themselves, how they’re seen through the media by “the other.” So they were actually playing their own caricature, and then I always told them that they would be pasted next to an Israeli or a Palestinian, depending on the site, but always the two of them. What’s extraordinary is I thought that no one would let me paste, but people let me paste. Then I thought, when I tell them who was on the photo, they would not let the project happen. But then they actually helped paste it, even though they knew that in one of those two photos was one of their supposed enemies.

People helped so much on that project. It completely changed my vision about the place. It’s hard to believe that when you see it through the media. But when you actually experience it, then the art becomes the proof, and the journey becomes the proof. And that’s what I love working on, is those kind of projects where the journey is more interesting than the final artwork.

It was very interesting, in one of the TED Prize videos, to see the pictures of you working on the roof, working on a chimney way, way above the ground. I like the sense that gives of working in a very surreptitious way at a distance, but also establishing perspective for the newer works, the really big works.

Exactly. It’s always been about trying to have another vision from the same place. So when I was doing Paris it would be from rooftop antennae. Then in another country it would be from how I approached people and how I pasted them. But it has never been about doing illegal stuff to do illegal stuff. It was more that in some countries that was the only way of working because, especially in Israel and Palestine, we couldn’t have any authorization. Also, it wouldn’t have made sense to have authorization because, you know, suddenly, the project by government wouldn’t have the same power there as if it was brought by people.

But when I can—like here, for example, on Ellis Island—we do everything by the book because it’s another kind of project. It’s another approach, and I adapt to it. Working with institutions can still have as much impact as not working with an institution.

That reminds me of the idea of trying to make art by committee.

Death by committee, you know? Your art represents the success of anti-committee art-making.

Most of the time people say, “Oh, yeah, but that was only with authorization.” The truth is that when you do something in the neighborhood and you ask everyone there if they want it and you do it with them, for me, it’s like doing a mini referendum, and so, technically, you actually have your authorization, but not legally. That’s what I like about it. When you don’t have authorization, you actually need more permission than when you do—you see? It’s because the people feel much more content because they’re going to decide and vote on the spot. So when I do works like that, everyone in the street comes, and asks questions, and interacts, and it better sound right to them because they’re going to decide if this should be up, because no one else will give you a permit; they are giving you the permit.

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These three images are from JR’s Women Are Heroes (2008) project in Favela Morro da Providência, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Women Are Heroes, which had iterations in several countries, is part of JR's 28 Millimeters series, which also includes Face2Face (2007) in Palestine and Israel and Portrait of a Generation (2004–2006) in Paris.

In the favela, if you had had police permission, you wouldn’t have been able to do that project.

Exactly. So it had to make sense to the people or the traffickers or whoever is really in control there. If not, they would have never let a project like that happen. And the police—you know, I couldn’t interact with them because they don’t have the power there. They’re the external force power, but they’re in conflict with the locals, and so there’s no harmony there, you can’t actually have a normal conversation. So you have to only have them with the people.

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Do you feel in league with urban explorers?

I do. I love it, but the only thing that maybe separates me from the urban explorer is that I sometimes leave a trace behind, where they don’t. But the way I do it is that it doesn’t damage the wall. It doesn’t leave a mark that will damage the historical site. So, like here at Ellis Island, we use a special glue that can stay forever, but when you take it down, there will be no trace. The urban explorer, they’re really about discovering places no one went to, which I love and admire a lot.

But also, to give you an example, here at Ellis Island, this abandoned half will disappear slowly if they don’t have the money to renovate it. I’m pasting in some rooms that won’t be able to receive visitors for very long. They’re on the upper floor and maybe in 10 or 15 years the structure won’t be strong enough for anyone to go up there. Maybe in 25 years the building will fall and no one will have ever seen that piece of artwork. But the photo of it will actually be all that remains, and that’s a way to convey the story.

So, for the last 70 or 80 years, no one has been able to walk in that part, and no one has ever seen it. Now, today it’s going to be possible with those art walks, through those guided tours, and it’s going to re-attract interest about the site. And for me, also, the power of art is to basically talk to a younger generation, people that wouldn’t get interested in going to a museum, people that have never been to an exhibit. [It’s] the same way that I’ve done it at New York City Ballet, by re-interesting a public that normally would never go to ballet because they think it’s boring.

I want to bring the youth because maybe some of them think, “Oh, it’s cool. There’s going to be art in there. I want to go and see it.” By going and seeing this art, they can actually learn about their own history and maybe find another angle onto whatever question is raised right now about immigration.

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GEORGE SLADE is a photography writer, curator, and visual arts consultant based in Traverse City, Michigan. In 2007 he was the guest editor for issue 36 of Public Art Review, which had a special focus on photography.

JR at work pasting images on a building wall.

Photo courtesy www.jr-art.net.

You are, in a sense, updating the archeology of the space. You’re contributing to the history.

You know, I’d like to think that. I see the responsibility I have when I get places like that, how I approach every room, every pasting.

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A French Revival

The city of Nantes devotes 15 to 20 percent of its budget to public art—with big returns

Photo © Bernard Renoux, courtesy Le Voyage à Nantes.

BY JON SPAYDE

“LA VILLE BIZARRE.” That’s what local tourism promoters proudly call the port city of Nantes, on the river Loire, about 240 miles southwest of Paris. The bizarrerie comes courtesy of the public art that’s been installed in Nantes and its environs since 2007: a whole lot of challenging, generally uncompromising public work by major artists from Asia, Europe, and the Americas—work assembled thanks to one of the most wholehearted civic commitments to public art (15 to 20 percent of the municipal budget) anywhere in the world.

It’s been money well spent. Despite some of the usual initial public resistance, the decision by Socialist mayor (and later prime minister of France) Jean-Marc Ayrault to make Nantes and the Loire estuary an open-air museum of ambitious art has been wildly successful in giving a new profile to the once-fading industrial city, which had been crippled by the closure of its shipyards. In fact, the public art program has been the single most important

factor in luring new businesses to Nantes and turning it into the second most sought-after place to live—after Paris—for young French professionals.

In the city center, for example, there’s a canal upon whose surface floats a green-hued projection of the face of Laetitia Casta, a supermodel who’s become a symbol of twenty-first-century French chic. There’s Villa Ocupada (Occupied Villa) on Rue DésiréColombe, a former insurance building now covered floor to ceiling with murals and graffiti art by some 20 artists from France, Spain, and Latin America. A gleaming silver Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery (Nantes got rich on slave shipping in the eighteenth century) was co-designed by Krzysztof Wodiczko.

On the Île de Nantes, an island in the center of the city that once housed the shipyard that built the Queen Mary 2, the art is particularly thick on the ground. Mètre à Ruban, a gigantic yellow replica of a tape measure by Lilian Bourgeat, rests in folds and

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twists behind the Palais de Justice. Daniel Buren and Patrick Bouchain’s Les Anneaux (The Rings) is a series of 18 huge colored circles at the edge of the water that light up at night. Le Corbusier associate Jean Prouvé’s 1960s-vintage Station Prouvé, a cylindrical gas station designed to be moved to different locations depending on traffic conditions, has found a permanent home in the island’s Parc des Chantiers.

And the art makes its way westward along the Loire estuary all the way to the Atlantic-coast city of Saint-Nazaire. One of the most iconic works on, or rather in, the river is La Maison dans le Loire (The House in the Loire) by artist and puppet-theater director JeanLuc Courcoult—a full-size stone edifice half-submerged and tilting at a peculiarly expressive, magical-realist angle. Nearer SaintNazaire, at the point where the Loire meets the ocean, is Huang

Yong Ping’s Serpent d’Océan (Ocean Serpent), a long, curving sea-monster skeleton that is mostly submerged but is totally revealed as the tide shifts.

All of this art-making got going in 1989 when the newly elected Ayrault forged a close working relationship with Jean Blaise, a producer-director of artistic and cultural events. The pair worked with Jean-Luc Courcoult, whose company Royal de Luxe created vibrant street theater with enormous puppets. Other performance events enlivened the city too, even as Blaise and company began to turn their attention toward public art.

In 2000, the Île de Nantes shipyards were retooled into art spaces, an urban renewal project that was unprecedented in France and garnered Europe-wide publicity. Blaise opened Le Lieu Unique, a contemporary art center and nightclub, on the island. In 2007

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LEFT: Photo © Jean-Dominique Billaud, courtesy Nautilus/Le Voyage à Nantes.

RIGHT: Photo by Falcon® Photography / Flickr Creative Commons license.

ABOVE and LEFT: Les Anneaux (The Rings) (2007) by Daniel Buren and Patrick Bouchain.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Mètre à Ruban (Measuring Tape) (2013) by Lilian Bourgeat.

“For every euro spent on art and culture, the community gained between three and six euros in value. In Nantes, money for art is not money thrown out the window.”

—David Moinard, Le Voyage artistic director

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Photo © Bernard Renoux, courtesy Le Voyage à Nantes.

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ABOVE: La Maison dans la Loire (The House in the Loire) (2007 and 2012) by Jean-Luc Courcoult. OPPOSITE TOP: Serpent d’Océan (Ocean Snake) (2012) by Huang Yong Ping. BOTTOM LEFT: Le Grand Éléphant (The Great Elephant). BOTTOM RIGHT: Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage (The Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery) (2012) by Krzysztof Wodiczko.

came the first of three public art festivals under the umbrella title Estuaire (Estuary) for which permanent pieces were commissioned and temporary ones sought too.

The same year saw the launching, on the island, of the city’s most popular (and populist) art project, Les Machines de l’Île (The Island Machines), created in the spirit of the visionary novelist Jules Verne, a native son of Nantes. Designers and streettheater producers François Delarozière and Pierre Orefice crafted a clutch of mechanical gizmos, including a carousel and a giant, steampunkish mechanical elephant that is hands down the most photographed of Nantes’s public artworks.

Two more Estuaire events followed, in 2009 and 2012, by which time Nantes’s permanent public art inventory had reached 30 pieces, with many more temporary ones cropping up from festival to festival—and the city had become famous. Financial support for these ventures came from a cluster of public and private entities, including the cities of Nantes and Saint-Nazaire and communities in between them, oil and gas giant Total, and the real estate developers Groupe Giboire.

Ayrault and Blaise decided to form Le Voyage à Nantes (The Voyage to Nantes), an organization within the municipal tourist authority, to highlight Nantes as a “destination art” city. Le Voyage’s summer promotion period (late June through August) has replaced the Estuaire festivals, and traditional local tourist stops,

such as the Castle of the Dukes of Brittany, have been folded in to Le Voyage’s lists of attractions. “But,” says Le Voyage artistic director David Moinard, “the artistic element leads the touristic, not the other way around.”

To that end, Moinard keeps the art fresh. During the most recent Le Voyage season, for example, Japanese sound-and-light artist Ryoji Ikeda brought a new installation to Le Lieu Unique.

Supersymmetry was an intricate vision of subatomic space, a response to Ikeda’s residency at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Nantes’s success story with public art has real bottom-line appeal. “At the last Estuaire event,” says Moinard, “Ayrault revealed that for every euro spent on art and culture, the community gained between three and six euros in value. In Nantes, money for art is not money thrown out the window.” But success has not tempted him or his associates to lower their artistic standards. In fact, it’s an article of faith with him that the highestquality art, however challenging, will be popular. “We want generous projects that will speak to everybody,” he says. “And we believe that the very best artists are the most generous.”

JON SPAYDE is a frequent contributor to Public Art Review.

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TOP: Photo © Martin Argyroglo, courtesy Le Voyage à Nantes. BOTTOM LEFT: Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra / Flickr Creative Commons license. RIGHT: Photo © Jean-Dominique Billaud, courtesy Nautilus/Le Voyage à Nantes.

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A history of the Mural Arts Program

and what it can teach other cities about public art

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

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

Available online and at your favorite retailer

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

$35.00 paper

www.temple.edu/tempress

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Cultural Landscapes

A temporary installation by Ai Weiwei and Bert Benally explores culture and collaboration

Photos by Robert Schwan.

BY CAITLIN OLSEN IN LATE JUNE, beneath a blanket of stars in remote Coyote Canyon on the Navajo Nation, I stood at the edge of a cliff with a small group and watched as the center of Bert Benally’s sand art piece ignited and sent flames radiating outward to slowly reveal the intricate designs placed at the four cardinal points of the perimeter. The flickering light illuminated the white porcelain pottery shards of the neighboring piece, a complex, symmetrical pattern with a repeating bicycle motif designed by Ai Weiwei.

A recording of ambient sounds captured in the region filled the cavernous space.

I was one of the few to witness Pull of the Moon, a temporary, site-specific land art installation which is part of Temporary Installations Made for the Environment (TIME), a partnership between New Mexico Arts, Navajo Nation Museum, and the International Land-Sensitive Art Foundation. Pull of the Moon was a collaboration between Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and Navajo artist Bert Benally. The project not only broadens the typical perception of what constitutes public art, but also

posed the challenge of creating a work of art rooted in the Navajo tradition and presented in an innovative way.

SHARING THE TEMPORAL

The temporal nature of Pull of the Moon is aligned with Navajo aesthetics. “The Navajo embrace the idea that art is more about the process than the finished product,” explains Benally. Shortly after the installation, nature cleared any trace of its occurrence.

This impermanence, coupled with the work’s remote location, inspired a multifaceted approach to sharing it with the public.

A documentary film entitled Bert & Weiwei: TIME 2014, by Daniel Hyde and Blackhorse Lowe, focused on the collaborative exchange between Benally and Ai, who is forbidden to travel outside of China. It premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe on July 16, 2014. The opening also featured a live performance by German sound artist Robert Henke and Benally based on sounds captured at Coyote Canyon.

Another approach to documenting the work came from xRez

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Studios, which captured the installation and surrounding area to reconfigure it as a 3D digital landscape film. Audiences had the unique experience of being fully immersed in Pull of the Moon when this film was projected onto a mobile geodesic dome (one of only three in existence) at Museum Hill in Santa Fe in July 2014. A tour is planned for the dome and film in an effort to share Pull of the Moon with as many people as possible.

According to Chuck Zimmer, deputy director and public art manager of New Mexico Arts, this traveling experience is a new approach to sharing public art with broader audiences. “The dome can virtually re-create the installations anywhere,” he says. “That ability is changing the landscape of public art.”

INNOVATION ROOTED IN TRADITION

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Benally’s starting point in the creative process is always the Navajo people. While working on Pull of the Moon, he wrestled with trying to create an installation that would be appreciated

by Navajos, while also presenting the material in a completely different manner from what had previously been seen. He felt that as long as he maintained that firm foundation, he could incorporate modern technology.

Sand paintings are one of the traditional Navajo art forms.

Benally’s installation also drew on the concept of the medicine wheel, with a large earthen vase at the center representing prejudice, and four images illustrating Navajo culture on the periphery. Four blue and red troughs connected them and were meant to portray rainbows. The central vase was first to be lit on fire. As it burned, taking the symbolic prejudice with it, a cornstalk sculpture—sacred to the Navajo and viewed as their essence—was revealed.

Pottery shards from past projects were ground down to a fine powder and used to mark the outline of the bicycle pattern in Ai’s installation. The dark brown surrounding sand, which was brought in from another part of Coyote Canyon, contrasted sharply with the bright white shards. The bicycle motif is one that Ai has used in other recent pieces—but one that gains

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“The Navajo embrace the idea that art is more about the process than the finished product.” —Bert Benally

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Photos by Robert Schwan.

An audience stands in Coyote Canyon, observing Pull of the Moon by Ai Weiwei and Bert Benally, a collaborative piece created with NavajoTIME. ABOVE: Workers install Ai Weiwei's (foreground) and Bert Benally’s pieces in Coyote Canyon. PREVIOUS PAGE: Artist Ai Weiwei (left) in China and Bert Bennally (right) in New Mexico.

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Photos by Robert Schwan.

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Photo by Vortex Immersion.

ABOVE: XRez Studios created the 3D digital landscape projections of Pull of the Moon that will appear on the geodesic dome created by Vortex. OPPOSITE TOP: From left to right, Bert Benally and Ai Weiwei’s pieces, installed at Coyote Canyon, awaiting the evening performance. BOTTOM: Bert Benally’s artwork, left, lights up Ai Weiwei’s work.

resonance from its use in a Navajo context. “The bike form is a modern cultural symbol. At the same time, it is abstract in comparison to the Navajo’s original practice of drawing or mark making to express their own spiritual needs,” he explains in the documentary. “For me to combine these two aspects, to use a new language, involves reinterpretation of both conditions: culture and spirituality in relation to modern industrial motifs.

The shards were intentionally placed there as evidence of the powder’s origin. We can only see ourselves, our past, through material evidence such as these shards.”

This strong sense of cultural heritage was also a key element in site selection, according to Navajo Nation Museum Director Manuelito Wheeler. “One of the objectives of this project is to connect art with cultural landscape,” he explains. Coyote Canyon has a rich cultural history for the Navajo; the temporary installation drew on those cultural resonances, and “when it travels to different locations it will carry the power of the initial place with it,” says Wheeler.

Zimmer echoes this aim. “From the beginning our intention has been that the land itself be the starting point, a blank canvas for artists to transform through their creative process into something larger, something that can bring healing and harmony to the land and to the community,” he says.

There were valuable lessons learned during this process that will guide the future stages of presenting Pull of the Moon. The temporary installation was not open to the public due to its remote location and lack of facilities; in hindsight, it would have been possible to issue limited access on a first come, first serve basis as was done with members of the media. Additionally, being present at the temporary installation in Coyote Canyon or at the dome was a moving experience for many. It would have been interesting to have an online discussion forum set up for people to share their thoughts on Pull of the Moon.

Notable not only for its cultural significance but also for its innovation, the project expands the concept of how public art is created, where it is displayed, and how it is shared with audiences. Beginning with the stunning landscape of Coyote Canyon and through an international collaboration, both artists embraced the temporal nature of the project. Great effort was taken to honor the Navajo tradition while incorporating new techniques. Innovative technology was used to capture the installation and then share it with the public in a unique way.

CAITLIN OLSEN is the media communications coordinator and event planner for New Mexico Arts, the state arts agency and division of the Department of Cultural Affairs. She lives in Santa Fe.

BOOKS BOOKS & MEDIA Publications and reviews

Fiery Passion

Why do 70,000 people trek into the desert for Burning Man? It’s the art.

BY SHAUNA DEE BURNING MAN: ART ON FIRE

BOOKS

Much of the focus of Burning Man coverage in the media of late has been the influx of highend trailers with extravagant catered meals for the Silicon Valley elite. But the art at Burning Man, still the focal point of the weeklong annual festival, deserves documentation in a hardcover art book filled with large, beautiful photos and compelling stories.

Burning Man: Art on Fire, by Jennifer Raiser, is just that book.

Covering more than 200 works of art created by Burners in one of the most inhospitable of locations in the United States, the book provides an experience second only to being there. Through interviews, stories, and photography, readers will witness the effort it takes to create work in this singular setting and gain a greater understanding of artists’ motivations.

In a sense, the art at Burning Man is the very essence of the festival, where individual works are pieces of the whole. The context of each piece is a pop-up city in the middle of Black Rock Desert in Nevada, a city with a gift economy and utopian ideals, which fosters collaboration and true participatory art. There is no clear distinction between audience and artwork here. In September 2013, the year Raiser wrote about in her book, 68,000 people attended the festival, each one a participant in the grand creation, and ultimate destruction, of the Burning Man. Whether you are one of the 68,000 or not, you will appreciate the illuminating perspectives presented in Burning Man: Art on Fire.

Also included in the book is an artist’s perspective from Leo Villareal, an introduction from Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, and a forward by Will Chase.

SHAUNA DEE is the information and communications coordinator at Forecast Public Art. TOP: Duane Flatmo’s El Pulpo Mecanico (2011) was a crowd favorite. Ingeniously fashioned from reclaimed scrap metal and salvaged items, this charming cephalopod spewed 200 gallons of propane flame—on a good night—from its eight articulated trashcan tentacles. MIDDLE: The UK–based architectural design collective Warmbaby created The Wet Dream (2011) to bring a whimsical representation of cooling English rain to heat-soaked Black Rock City. The structure housed a canopy of umbrellas to protect from the heat of the sun during the day and a 24-hour background audio of thunder and lightning, illuminated at night with LED rope lights. BOTTOM: Over 40 feet tall and made from powder-coated steel and steel cable, Kate Raudenbush’s vision for Star Seed (2012) came almost fully formed. “I imagined it falling from the sky and taking root, or as little rockets, filled with Burners.”

All photos by Scott London.

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Jennifer Raiser Photography by Sidney Erthal and Scott London Introduction by Larry Harvey New York: Race Point Publishing, September 2014

BOOKS

That ’70s Art

A glimpse into the world of Los Angeles art and artists during a turbulent decade

BY CATHY MADISON CREATING THE FUTURE: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s

TOP: At Burning Man, the suits Dadara’s “bankers” wore for the installation Transformoney Tree (2012) gradually shifted from dark blue pinstripe into painter’s overalls. BOTTOM: The Flaming Lotus Girls’ Serpent Mother (2006) was a 168-foot-long sculpture of a skeletal dragon-like serpent coiled around her steel egg, creating a protective circle inside which 100 people could gather.

Most of Serpent Mother’s 50 vertebrae spouted six-foot-high propane-fueled jets of flame that could be activated in various patterns by participants at four separate locations, or activated at once by the artists using the “Wow” button.

CATHY MADISON is a writer who lives in Minneapolis and Los Angeles.

87 BOOKS

Seldom does a book about art so fully capture not only the ways in which history, culture, geography, and personality intersect to create art, but also insight into how art both defines and influences our society. In this well-researched, deftly told story of a single decade in a singular city, Michael Fallon reflects on far more than what happened in Los Angeles in the 1970s.

He sets the stage—the ebullient ’60s, when the sunny promise of the California Dream colored an era of modernism, pop art, and abstract expressionism—then escorts us through the turbulence of the next decade, scarred by events such as the Manson murders, the Kent State shootings, and Watergate, but enhanced by revolutionary art that presages the future.

Los Angeles, long considered a remote art outpost by New York insiders, “had a penchant for merging and connecting diverse culture influences” and became “home to advancing pockets of cultural activity, many of which were connected to the churning local streets and its indigenous street-based cultures,” Fallon writes.

Highway underpasses and bridge pylons inspired Chicano artists to embrace their muralist forebears. Women united in the feminist art movement. Happenings and performance art made news. Desolate industrial stretches became art parks; graffiti, surfboards, and hot rods became art.

Fallon depicts the scene by profiling its artists, most of whom came from somewhere else. We see how their art sprang not only from their diverse backgrounds, but also from the unique, sprawling amalgam of L.A. itself. Time and place can’t be divorced from their art; neither can their art be overlooked as a significant influence on both.

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Michael Fallon Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, September 2014

BOOKS

Painting the Town

A Brazilian film explores street-art conflicts in São Paolo GREY CITY (CIDADE CINZA) Sala12 Filmes Directed by Marcelo Mesquita and Guilherme Valiengo

Photos © Marcelo Mesquita and Guilherme Valiengo.

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In São Paulo, Brazil, large-scale murals have a formidable presence around the city, where thousands of artists display their artistic talent in public spaces. Grey City gives viewers a close-up look at one influential street-art crew (including OSGEMEOS, Nunca, Nina, Ise, Finok, and Zefix) as they worked in 2007 to re-create a large work that had been painted over by the city. The Clean City Law was in effect, with a small team deployed to determine which graffiti works were aesthetically pleasing and to paint over the rest with grey.

The film succeeds in addressing the tension that exists in cities with active street-art scenes about who determines what is art, and what should be erased, while exhibiting the process of immensely talented artists following their passion of creating art for their community.

—Shauna Dee

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TOP LEFT: DVD cover of Grey City. BOTTOM LEFT: Scene from the movie. ABOVE: Scene from the movie.

PUBLIC ART thrives in

KANSAS CITY, Mo. WWW. K C M O. G OV/ generalservices/ municipal-artcommission

EGAWA + ZBRYK,

HOLUP,

HUETHER,

ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC.,

HARRIES + HEDER,

Barnacles

The River

Ambit

Prairie Logic

Terpsichore for Kansas City

BOOKS

Crossing Boundaries

Though the artist is forbidden to leave China, Ai Weiwei’s works transcend international (and artistic) lines

BY JESSICA FIALA AI WEIWEI, SPATIAL MATTERS: Art, Architecture, and Activism Ai Weiwei and Anthony Pins, eds.

Photos © Ai Weiwei Studio.

89 BOOKS

Ai Weiwei, Spatial Matters: Art, Architecture, and Activism approaches the work of contemporary artist Ai Weiwei through broadening levels of scale. The essays begin by investigating single gallery installations, then expand outward to explore Ai’s architectural projects, video works that document and map Beijing, and the global reach of his Internet-based activism.

As the scope of projects grows, the collection becomes increasingly intimate, resting finally in the online comingling of personal and public.

Ai has become known internationally for ambitious projects and defiant gestures—installing 100 million handcrafted porcelain sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern, dipping Neolithic vases in vibrant industrial paint, and photographing himself flipping the bird at monuments around the world. He has designed dozens of architecture projects and consulted on the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympic Games. Since 2006, Ai has cultivated a considerable online following, drawing the attention of the Chinese government, who shut down his blog in 2009 and imprisoned him for 81 days in 2011. Although restricted from leaving the country, his reach continues to expand online and through exhibitions organized remotely. His current exhibition, for example, which is not included in the book, is @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, which runs through April 2015.

This collection is not a standard chronology or overview, but rather collages, with interviews, photographs, essays, and republished blog entries—a portrait of the artist, his work, and his ongoing struggles with surveillance and censorship. Akin to a spatial encounter, the essays lean in, back up, retrace steps, and forge new paths, with the range of Ai’s work emerging and unfolding en route.

The primary focus is material and spatial, emphasizing, for instance, Ai’s incorporation of handcrafted materials and techniques into his projects. But the human element arises as well, especially the personal component of Ai’s activism which emerges through actions such has his compiling of the names of school children who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, or his call for his Twitter followers to announce their real names. Time also intersects the spatial. Antique materials are reworked into new installations while Ai’s recently built Shanghai studio is torn down by the Chinese government.

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Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014

TOP: Ai Weiwei’s Red No. 1 Art Galleries (2008).

BOTTOM: Ai Weiwei’s Study of Perspective—Tiananmen Square (1995).

The story told is one of emergence in public spheres from architecture to online communities, and simultaneous government attempts to silence and restrict the amorphous strategies of a contemporary artist. Viewed through a public art lens, the collection offers a range of vignettes featuring distinct modes of working in the public realm, while also getting at the impetus for such work—“the search to satisfy the demands of human survival and…the desire to transform people’s conditions of existence.”

JESSICA FIALA is a company member of Ragamala Dance and a program and project associate at Forecast Public Art.

BOOKS PEOPLE

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ARCHITECTURE ELMGREEN & DRAGSET: Biography

ROCK THE SHACK: The Architecture of Cabins, Cocoons and Hide-Outs

Edited by Studio Elmgreen & Dragset Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2014

Sven Ehmann, Robert Klanten, and Sofia Borges, eds.

Berlin: Gestalten, 2014

An artistic duo for nearly 20 years, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset invite audiences into their history and private life with this 600-page visual diary. Each full-page photograph tells the artists’ collaborative story since 1995. Previously unpublished pictures share behind-thescenes views of artworks, as well as portraits of Danish-Norwegian artists and colleagues.

PROJECTS

Embracing the appeal of peace through minimalism, Rock the Shack offers refuge for the individual burdened by too much space. Covering structures built in as few as 12 days—some handmade, some inspired by sixteenth-century Japanese teahouses, others built with renewable and local materials, still more featuring surrealist influences, and most built with careful attention to landscape, light, and sky—this collection soothes with clean design and large color photographs.

TSCHUMI PARC DE LA VILLETTE

NICK CAVE: Epitome Andrew Bolton, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and Nato Thompson New York: Prestel, 2014

BOOKS

Nick Cave: Epitome compiles the artist’s famous Soundsuits with his sculptures and related performances. From the first suit—an array of twigs forming body armor in response to racial unrest—to the most recent, his works are captured in arresting photographs, essays, and quotes. Cave’s evolution along the intersection of public and private, constraints and escape, is described in his own words: “I’m working toward what I’m leaving behind.”

THOMAS HIRSCHHORN: Deleuze Monument Anna Dezeuze London: Afterall, 2014

Anna Dezeuze’s book examines Thomas Hirschhorn’s Deleuze Monument (2000), a sculpture, altar, and library dedicated to philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Designed as an artwork that never closes to visitors, the controversial monument was vandalized and dismantled early. The author examines the project’s timeline and reveals its vulnerabilities, along with larger, related artistic theory and practices.

Bernard Tschumi, with texts by Jacques Derrida and Anthony Vidler London: Artifice books on architecture, 2014

Bernard Tschumi’s first project, The Parc de la Villette in Paris (1982–1998)—an “urban park for the twenty-first century”—is presented with nearly 4,000 archival drawings, as well as photographs, models, and other project documentation. These, along with essays by Jacques Derrida, Anthony Vidler, and Tschumi, provide the reader of Tschumi Parc de la Villette with a solid, broad understanding of the project throughout its developmental stages.

VACANCY STUDIES: Experiments and Strategic Interventions in Architecture Ronald Rietveld and Erik Rietveld, eds.

Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2014

Churches, castles, hospitals, airports, prisons, post offices—empty buildings are everywhere.

Vacancy Studies views these lonely sites and structures from an optimistic angle: as rich resources with potential for innovation and temporary reuse. The Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances (RAAAF) studio mines the intersection of architecture, art, and science to articulate possibilities within the international phenomenon of empty spaces.

WILLI DORNER: Bodies in Urban Spaces Willi Dorner Germany: Hatje Cantze, 2014

Dorner’s colorful, locally cast dancers twist, move, pose, and repose around courses through dozens of cities worldwide. Strong photographs by Lisa Rastl, an appendix of participant names, maps, and “codes” of positions (flying, chimney, chaos bench, steps to heaven, and more) illustrate the story of these body-sculpture interventions.

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BOOKS ENVIRONMENTS

MISCELLANY ART & ECOLOGY NOW Andrew Brown New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014

ECOLOGIES, ENVIRONMENTS, AND ENERGY SYSTEMS IN ART OF THE 1960s AND 1970s James Nisbet Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014

Exhibition Histories

EXHIBITION AS SOCIAL INTERVENTION: ‘Culture in Action’ 1993 Joshua Decter, Helmut Draxler, and other authors London: Afterall, 2014

Begun in the early 1990s and developed with community residents, eight projects formed Chicago’s “Culture in Action,” a collective challenge to the conventional understanding of public art and disengaged plop art. From the Exhibition Histories series, which explores contemporary art that shapes the way art is perceived, Exhibition as Social Intervention documents and critically assesses “Culture in Action”; a new introduction and recent interviews are complemented by archived and contemporary texts.

NETWORKS: Documents of Contemporary Art Lars Bang Larsen, ed.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014

The latest installment in the Documents of Contemporary Art series on contemporary art issues, Networks aims at art and network theory from the 1960s forward. This volume unravels creative threads before the origins of the Internet and reaches beyond the Net’s current central status as dominant social connector.

91 BOOKS

More than an overview of earthworks, James Nisbet’s book explores the connections of ecology and art in the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on land art, minimalism, and interconnected energies, Nisbet features a reconceptualization of environmental art with work by artists such as Allan Kaprow, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Robert Barry, Simone Forti, and Walter De Maria.

Joshua Decter, Helmut Draxler and other authors

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2014 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Through thoughtful prose and placement of more than 300 powerful color illustrations, Art & Ecology Now describes the expanding trend of artists to explore nature and climate change.

The featured art offers a wide range of responses that include documentation, reflection, activism, and the use of the environment as raw material.

Nearly 100 artists and collectives are included, all confronting current social, political, economic, scientific, technological, and ethical issues.

Exhibition as Social Intervention ‘Culture in Action’ 1993

SCALE BIG ART / SMALL ART Tristan Manco New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014.

Maintaining a sense of wonder and a wide aesthetic, this survey reveals a meaningful exploration of art ranging from monumental to tiny. After an opening essay devoted to scale and separate introductions, half the volume is dedicated to grand works, while the other focuses on diminutive pieces. With each section organized alphabetically by artist, clever and whimsical pieces are presented via 288 illustrations and extensive text.

XXL ART: When Artists Think Big

XXL Art: When Artists Think Big shares stunning visuals and texts on almost 50 artists whose work embraces the adage “Go big or go home.” Featured artists include well-known names like Robert Smithson, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Serra, and James Turrell, as well as emerging artists like Mehmet Ali Uysal, Florentijn Hofman, Aram Bartholl, JR, and OSGEMEOS. All tackle size and scale across countrysides and cityscapes with spectacular, boundary-pushing results.

Photo by Alain Fletias

Elea Baucheron, Diane Routex New York: Prestel, 2014

V is for Veterans by Stephanie Jaffe Werner Town Hall of Miami Lakes, Florida mosaic and concrete 10' 7"h x 5'w www.stephaniejaffewerner.com

BOOKS

Totally Plugged In REVIEW BY PETER PLAGENS Originally published in Art in America, September 2014, pp. 71–73. Courtesy BMP Media Holdings, LLC. YOUR EVERYDAY ART WORLD Lane Relyea Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013 PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 26 | NO. 1 | ISSUE 51 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

92 BOOKS

In the “everyday art world,” artists are always on the move, disdaining not only art objects but any kind of artistic finality whatsoever, making putative works out of mere schmoozing, and turning the art world into a string of floating cocktail parties disguised as seminars (and vice versa). This EAW (as I’ll call it for short) has been creeping up on us for the last 20 years or so. Now, according to Lane Relyea, an associate professor of art theory and practice at Northwestern University, it’s here in its full networking glory.

Once, most artists made art objects in their individual studios and sold them through retail shops known as galleries. More recently, many executed commissions for created-on-site physical works (with re-creation licenses that could still be sold by dealers). But today a large number of key figures—Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tobias Rehberger et al.—perform cloyingly mundane public services as, in the current argot, their artistic practice. French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, in his 1998 book Relational Aesthetics, essentially wrote the script for a thousand—for a hundred thousand—social exchanges rechristened as artworks. “Artists cook and serve meals or re-create bars and lounges in galleries and museums,” Relyea writes, “in an effort to conjure an environment without marked-off frames or stages, only diffuse conviviality and atmosphere.” The work of others, such as Jorge Pardo and the late Martin Kippenberger, tends to envelop viewers in installations so pervasive as to be indistinguishable from “everyday” nonart experience.

A possible first, proto-EAW salvo against the old, product oriented, hierarchical, “fine arts” paradigm may have been inadvertently fired—Relyea cites Thierry de Duve as noting—by the Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 show “Sixteen Americans,” which included several of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings along with work

by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and others. That exhibition gave artists the go-ahead to start thinking in terms of a show as a kind of meta-artwork. The next dominoes to tilt, if not fall—slowly, over a couple of decades—were such “totalizing stereotypes” as Finish Fetish and Light and Space in Los Angeles. Identifiable movements of this sort gave way, as the semi-closed system of the art world frayed into open, porous networks of itinerant artists cobbling together ad hoc events as works of art. And while the nearly universal white cube (artists’ studios, commercial galleries

and modern museum rooms) wasn’t entirely destroyed, big cracks started to run through it. For example, Relyea cites a 1997 exhibition by Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens and Frances Stark as a kind of mutual help arrangement that boosted the international mobility of all three.

With the advent of global networks, a different cultural role— that of the glamorous slacker, akin to conventional showbiz celebrities slumming on reality TV—began to appeal to some artists. At the behest of organizers Maurizio Cattelan and Jens Hoffmann, for instance, Elizabeth Peyton, Olafur Eliasson, Pipilotti Rist and other well-known artists famously sent up the convention of the big international invitational show by turning the tongue-in-cheek 6th Caribbean Biennial (1999) into a group vacation on St. Kitts. Critic, curator and now gallerist Carl Freedman (one of Relyea’s many quotees) wrote of a similar but more straight-faced event called “Traffic”: Pleasure and enjoyment were not to be found in the exhibition itself but in the week-long gathering of the 30 artists involved.

Under the auspices of an “exchange of ideas,” the artists talked, drank, dined and danced together whilst creating, preparing and installing their different works. . . . The gathering was central to [Bourriaud’s] theme, awkwardly formulated as “the interhuman space of relationality.”

Such intellectual and touristic indulgence is part and parcel of the EAW, often (wishfully) conceived as liberation from—even opposition to—old-fashioned cultural institutions and hierarchies.

Travel and talk, Relyea says, are replacing rooted, isolated artmaking, as artists use the pub and the street (in both their literal and figurative senses) to construct “platforms” from which they “offer up their projects or shows as participatory architecture for other artists to operate within.” Whatever solitary creative musing artists still require can be got in transit: “Travel provides sanctuary, a prolonged interval to collect one’s thoughts, summarize, piece together an overview,” Relyea says. (To tweak the great photography curator John Szarkowski’s remark about lectures, this would have been a better work of art had it been a longer flight.)

Traveling in the EAW is even more useful for networking. An EAW participant must have not only someplace to go, but someone to see when he or she gets there—preferably someone who can help with career advancement by connecting the participant with other people who can help with . . . and so on, into the night. That, in turn, nudges the EAW toward the kind of faculty/former-student old-boy cohorts informally operated by Ivy League law schools, and turns the primary purpose of graduate school into mapping out

BOOKS

These days, an MFA degree might as well stand for “My Fat Address-Book.”

But an art world in which “to go where the action is means to be always on the go” turns out to be just as economically demanding as one based on staying put in spacious studios, slick galleries and pristine museum offices. Simply put, travel costs money. Another guest expert—Marc Bousquet, the Emory University writing professor and crusader for academe’s exploited part-timers—describes the unsalutary life of the poor adjunct faculty member:

Such, too, Relyea implies, is the predicament of a struggling, peripatetic neophyte in the Everyday Art World.

The consolation prize for the EAW’s frenetically nomadic artists is a revived romanticism, centered on the idea of just what, or who, artists are: “No longer did their specialness need to be named as such, declared out loud and up front. . . . It could just be, accepted as some incontestable fact or mystery, a divine gift with which only a lucky few are endowed.” No wonder, then, that at the art schools where Relyea is invited to give critiques, “the painting students, all of them, across the board, don’t say they’re painters.” Moreover, “they also don’t call themselves artists. ‘I do stuff’ is the most frequent response. Or, ‘I make stuff.’ . . . All open-ended adaptability and responsiveness, no set vocation.” Artists still make objects, of course, tons of them—some selling for startling prices. But there are also, more and more, signs and markers of conceptual projects, or tokens of unfolding careers, rather than visual treasures that one would want to live with and value, in and of themselves.

But only piecemeal, and seemingly reluctantly, does Relyea declare how smoothly—yea, creepily—the EAW fits into an entrepreneurial world stuffed with social media, smartphone apps, digital startups, on-demand streaming entertainment, blogs and MOOCs (massive open online courses), yet populated by Dilbertish office workers who sift through endless streams of business data, as they labor without unions, without job security, without pensions and without bargaining power. Granted, right up front on page nine, Relyea writes, “The [Everyday Art World] network begins to appear less like defiance and more like the latest answer to capital-

Today’s claims of romantic defiance too often look past the fact that our sense of expanded agency has been purchased largely through an aggressive shattering and collapse of the larger social structure. Falling progressively into ruin, this is a scene that belongs not to romance but to tragedy.

He said it. I didn’t.

PETER PLAGENS is a painter and writer living in New York.

93 BOOKS

The network or flex-timer is in constant motion, driving from workplace to workplace, from training seminar to daycare, grocery store and gym, maintaining an ever more strenuous existence in order to present the working body required by capital: healthy, childless, trained and alert, displaying an affect of pride in representing zero drain on the corporation’s resources.

ism’s constant need to overcome and reinvent itself.” But he then sheaths his sword and proceeds to speak of his disinterested interest in “how [post-studio art procedures] align with and articulate new social and organizational norms and positions.”

As chair of a prestigious art department with “theory” in its name, Relyea is understandably careful to avoid a blanket condemnation of the new EAW. Although he seems to want to make a felony case concerning the ravages the EAW has wrought on the contemporary art scene, he writes—like a doubting medieval philosopher in a kingdom of belief—for two very different audiences.

One group comprises academic colleagues and younger artists who might like to see an art world of finished products (whether objects in inventory or custom-built for exhibition) largely deconstructed, perhaps even replaced with an anybody-can-be-everything, DIY network. For those readers, Relyea provides a narrative thread running from MoMA’s “Sixteen Americans” and 1971 Mel Bochner “Projects” exhibitions through the evolution of the big biennials into avant-garde versions of old TV variety shows, Andrea Fraser’s videotaped sex with a collector, talky artists’ cooperatives in Glasgow, L.A. and Cologne, and the “new bricolage” of such artists as Lara Schnitger and Rachel Harrison (where, ironically, a ramshackle physicality might be turning things back just a bit toward objets d’art).

Relyea’s second audience consists of skeptics like me (and, maybe, the author of Your Everyday Art World himself). For them, Relyea occasionally shines a prosecutorial floodlight on the wider consequences of the advent of the EAW:

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2014 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

potential networks. These days, an MFA degree might as well stand for “My Fat Address-Book.”

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FORECAST NEWS

ABOUT FORECAST

A still from Nick Clausen’s film adaptation of Robert Daugherty’s poem I Am Gone, shown at Todd Boss and Motiopoem’s Arrivals & Departures at St. Paul’s Union Depot.

CONSULTING

Photo courtesy Motionpoems.

ARTIST SERVICES Forecast’s Artist Services program is nearing the end of our current grant round and offering several professional development opportunities for our grantees.

The topics include navigating government bureaucracy, financial planning, and cross-sector collaborations.

Over the summer, this year’s grantees met with Chris Kallmyer of the visiting Los Angeles–based Machine Project to learn about their work. This fall, grantees met with Minnesota-based Carrie Christensen and Anna Metcalfe to talk about cross-sector collaborations and with Dan Schlesinger of RBC Wealth Management who focused on budgeting and financial planning.

In October, artist Todd Boss and his organization Motionpoems presented Arrivals & Departures at St. Paul’s Union Depot, a colossal 3D poetry film installation that transformed the facade of Union Depot, one of St. Paul’s landmark buildings. Motionpoems selected four original poems by Minnesotans with the theme “Arrivals & Departures,” then commissioned Minnesota film

EDUCATION Over the last three years, Forecast’s arts education program has engaged more than 900 young people in public art education residencies and workshops, and facilitated more than 20 gatherings of public art professionals and artists.

This past year Forecast supported public art residencies in seven Minnesota schools. We are excited to announce that the Connections Gallery, a collaboration between Forecast, artist Randy Walker, and Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, has launched as a programmable outdoor learning sculpture. We’re pleased to share a newly created case study of this project —and the process involved—on our website in the Education section. More case studies, from other residencies, are also available. These illustrations include lesson plans, images, videos, and meeting notes, highlighting the experiential curriculum.

Our ongoing community events series, Open Space/Open Bar and the Public Art Scrambler, continue to bring our community together to talk about issues, ideas, and questions related to public art. In July, we convened at the Walker Art Center’s Open Field to talk about access and inclusion through the lens of public art, and this fall, state and municipal public art administrators gave presentations illustrating the different processes they employ, giving special attention to how community members can get involved in the public art process. At our last Open Space forum in November, we dug into the everexpanding definition of public art, a topic that never gets stale.

97 FORECAST NEWS

Forecast’s consulting program has expanded in the last few months with several new local and global projects. The consulting team has grown to include Jack Becker, Bob Lunning, Carrie Christensen, and Kirstin Wiegmann.

We’ve also begun partnering with Tom Borrup and his Creative Community Builders agency on a comprehensive arts and culture plan for the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Forecast is joining forces with leaders in New London, Minnesota, to revitalize the areas of land along the river’s edge. Supported by an ArtPlace grant, a “Train the Trainer” program led by Kirstin Wiegmann will help build the skills of individuals from the area interested in public art. “The experience that Forecast brings to us will help plant the seeds of public art projects for years to come,” said Kristin Allen, founding member of the New London Arts Alliance.

Jack Becker recently returned from an exciting trip to China where he helped facilitate the selection process for the second International Award for Public Art, a partnership program between Forecast and Shanghai University.

The jury consisted of talented arts professionals from seven different regions in the world, including Jay Pather, Chelsea Haines, Ute Meta Bauer, Rhana Devenport, Wang Dawei, Pooja Sood, and Bill Kelley. Over a two-day period they reviewed the 125 case studies that Forecast prepared over the past year and selected 32 to highlight as part of the 2015 award event and forum, which will be held in Auckland, New Zealand, next June, hosted by the University of Auckland.

teams to turn the poems into short films to fit digitally mapped 3D templates of the building. Boss received a 2013 McKnight Professional Development grant from Forecast to begin work on this project. “If Forecast Public Art had not supported this project with a McKnight Foundation R&D grant, it would never have happened, more than 30 artists would not be able to add it to their portfolios, and 3500 people would not have been touched by it,” says Boss, who credits the launch of his career as a public artist to the support he has received from Forecast.

In January, a new group of artists will enter into the grant cycle. Through a variety of planning, professional development, and project grants, Forecast will again be able to support Minnesota artists at distinct phases of their careers and practices. Earlier this fall, a panel of public art professionals from around the country selected five finalists (Anna Metcalfe, Greta McLain, Karl Unnasch, Keith Christensen, and Seitu Jones) for the McKnight $50,000 Project Grant for Midcareer Artists, each of whom will receive a $1,000 stipend for proposal development. The panel returned to Forecast in December to select the finalists in all grant categories (to be announced in late December 2014).

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2014 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Forecast Public Art, the publisher of Public Art Review, is based in St. Paul, Minnesota. A nonprofit arts organization, Forecast strengthens and advances the field of publicart—locally, nationally and internationally—by assisting communities, supporting artists, and providing resources that inform audiences and expand participation. Learn more at ForecastPublicArt.org.

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TOP and BOTTOM RIGHT: Photos by Thierry Bal. BOTTOM LEFT: Photo by Allison Dilnutt.

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“Earth Peace.” These two words—juxtaposed without further explication on billboards, a stone slab, a flag, and a Morse code light projection —make up Yoko Ono’s latest public work, on display at the Folkestone (UK) Triennial. The message is unambiguous, and comes as no surprise from the Japanese-born avant-gardist, former Fluxus participant, and widow of John Lennon, given her lifelong dedication to peace. In addition to her famous late-sixties “bed-in” protests against the Vietnam War, Ono inaugurated a $50,000 prize for peace and recently founded an anti-fracking group. —Joe Hart

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YOKO ONO’S EARTH PEACE | MAPPING | BERT BENALLY AND AI WEIWEI IN THE DESERT ART VS. OIL | MARY JANE JACOB ON CURATION | LEXINGTON TATTOOS ITSELF

Public Art Review

Public Art Review Issue 51 • Fall/Winter 2014 • publicartreview.org

Barbara Grygutis

Issue 51 • JR’s Big Vision • Art vs. Oil • Artists & Fabricators • Nantes • Mapping

South Park Bridge Entry Monuments and Pedestrian Railing Seattle, Washington Repurposed steel rocker arms from the historic 1930 drawbridge flank the approach.

3200 ft. of artist-designed railing is inset with original gears and other salvaged components.

Commissioned by 4Culture, King County Public Art Collection Fabrication: Jesse Engineering, Tacoma, WA Photo:Spike Mafford

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BIG VISION JR talks about boundaries, limits, seeing people, and being bold