Public Art Review issue 54 - 2016 (spring/summer) by forecastpublicart

ART SHANTIES ON ICE | WHEN THE FEDS EMPLOYED ARTISTS | VAUGHN BELL’S PORTABLE WORKS

Public Art Review Issue 54 • Climate Change • Bristol’s Wild Style • Art Shanties • CETA • Curating Conversations

DIGITAL DESIGN – NATURALLY

Public Art Review

Issue 54 • Spring/Summer 2016 • publicartreview.org

Human BIG ISSUES: Scale How artists help us make sense of climate change

CURATING CONVERSATIONS Sara Daleiden’s social practice put to work in Milwaukee

BRISTOL’S WILD STYLE Visionary curators & innovative artists make their mark

WAM Wind Screens Wichita, KS Client: Wichita Art Museum Prime Team: Confluence and PEC Engineering

2015

VICKI SCURI SITEWORKS

vickiscuri.com vicki@vickiscuri.com 206 930 1769

$16.00 USD

Van Gogh float in a Dutch dahlia parade—and many other projects we love (p.13)

Centro Chroma Tower - Bill FitzGibbons, 2016

GlobusphĂ¤re ARBURG GmbH + Co KG LoĂ&#x;burg, Germany

Computerized Interactive Light Sculpture Centro Plaza, San Antonio, Texas

1821 Monticello Rd. | Napa,CA 94558 | 707.255.5954

Bill FitzGibbons

www.billfitzgibbons.com

mail@gordonhuether.com | gordonhuether.com

gordon huether studio art matters

Creating, Fabricating and Installing Large-Scale, Site-Specific Art Since 1987

(any) Body Oddly Propped Â© Doug and Mike Starn, 2015 Princeton University Art Museum, Photo: Ricardo Barros

OF MUNICH

FRANZ MAYER

GLASS MOSAIC

Franz Mayer of Munich |

1-212-661-1694

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

Shan Shan Sheng: Lorain County Community College, Elyria, Ohio - "Wave of Knowledge" acts as inspirational metaphor, suggesting a beautiful educational journey and boundless exploration expressed in a bright gradient of color. "Wave of Knowledge" measures 14 feet high, 100 feet long and 2 inches thick.

Photos by: Scott Pease

Shan Shan Sheng: "Open Door" is an illuminated portal, a door of vivid, colored glass. It is a symbol of a the bright transformation and adventure that begins with creative, innovative education. Measuring 15 feet high, 8 feet across, and 2 feet deep,"Open Door" acts as visual and thematic counterpart to "Wave of Knowledge".

Artist: Shan Shan Sheng - Glass fabrication by:

PETERS STUDIOS Further Information:

www.peters-studios.com

Germany:

United States:

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

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

Public Art Review

Issue 54 • Spring/Summer 2016 • Volume 27 • Number 2

FEATURES 40 Climate Storytelling Art that helps us make sense of climate change

KAREN OLSON

50 Portable Land Art Interview with Seattle eco artist Vaughn Bell

JON SPAYDE

58 Bristol’s Wild Style Visionary curators and innovative artists make their mark 66 Looking for CETA How a federal artist employment program changed the arts landscape

MELISSA CHEMAM

LINDA FRYE BURNHAM + STEVEN DURLAND

ON THE COVER Designed by Robin Jochems, Karel de Hoon, and Robbert Borrias, Van Gogh was part of the Corso Zundert Flower Parade in Zundert, Netherlands. In 2015 the parade, which allows only dahlias, honored the 125th anniversary of Vincent Van Gogh’s death. Learn more on page 20. Photo by Malou Evers. THIS PAGE Set in the Thames River in London, this sculpture is one of four that make up Jason deCaires Taylor’s The Rising Tide, which calls attention to climate change. Learn more on page 40. Photo by Jason deCaires Taylor.

Introducing the Latest Additions to SFOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Unparalleled Collection

sfartscommission.org/pubartcollection CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Ursula von Rydingsvard, Ocean Voices II, 2013; Jim Melcher, Riven / River, 2014; Lordy Rodriguez, Strangerhood, 2014;

Yayoi Kusama, High Heels for Going to Heaven, 2013; Val Britton, Voyage, 2014. Photo credit: Ethan Kaplan

PUBLIC ART REVIEW ISSUE 54 • SPRING/SUMMER 2016 • VOLUME 27 • NUMBER 2

PUBLISHER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jack Becker EXECUTIVE EDITOR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Karen Olson SENIOR EDITORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Hart

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Public Art Review Issue 54 • Spring/Summer 2016 • Volume 27 • Number 2

DEPARTMENTS 10 FORECAST NEWS News from the organization that publishes Public Art Review 13 PUBLISHER’S NOTE Postcard to the Future

JACK BECKER

14 PROJECTS WE LOVE Select recent works JEN DOLEN + MEGAN GUERBER 14 Berlin: Anything to Say? A Monument to Courage

16 Grenoble: Short Story Dispensers

17 Philadelphia: Knotted Grotto

TOP: Photo by Andrea Buccella. MIDDLE: Photo by Melissa Kelly. BOTTOM: Photo courtesy Art Shanty Projects.

18 Boston: Waking the Monster

19 Salt Lake City: Draw at Sugar House

20 Zundert, Netherlands: Corso Zundert Flower Parade

22 London: Heartbeat 23

Hong Kong: Wandering Space

Douglas, Arizona, USA / Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico: Repellent Fence

25 New York City: Funktional Vibrations 26

Duisburg, Germany: Nomanslanding

28 Fortaleza, Brazil: (RE)Prisma 30 IN THE FIELD News, views, and ideas

30 Walking on Water: Christo’s new project in Italy

KAREN GARDINER

32 Project Evaluation as Art: Making it creative

RACHEL ENGH

Where There’s a Will: Innovative funding structures

39 SOAP BOX Damage Control: Caring for outdoor sculptures

JOE HART L. WILLIAM ZAHNER

72 ON LOCATION Global reports

72 The March of the Art Shanties: On Minnesota ice

78 Milwaukee Moves: Daleiden curates conversations 72

MH ROWE JACQUELINE WHITE

85 BOOKS Publications and reviews JEN KRAVA ROSLYE ULTAN JULIA BUNTAINE DAVID SCHIMKE

96 LAST PAGE A Hyper Local Bridge

MEGAN GUERBER

Forecast Public Art

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FORECAST NEWS

FORECAST RECRUITS A NEW E.D. AS FOUNDER JACK BECKER MOVES INTO A NEW ROLE After 38 years, Jack Becker, founding executive director of Forecast Public Art and publisher of Public Art Review, is shifting his role to become the director of Forecast’s Community Services program. This new role recognizes Jack’s decades of service to public art and the increased demand for Forecast’s

Community Services. Forecast offers a strong Community Services team that helps artists and communities plan and bring public art projects to life. Jack will build this team in response to market demand and grow Forecast’s client base, earned revenue, and organizational capacity. “This is perhaps the most exciting development in my thirty-eight years working in the public art field,” he says. “I now have the opportunity to take what I’ve learned and help countless communities and allied professions desiring a foothold in the public art world.” As we go to press, Forecast is recruiting a new executive director to help us strengthen and advance the field of public art. Forecast’s Artist Services program and its magazine, Public Art Review, will continue to serve regional and global communities and advance public art locally, nationally, and internationally. Read more about this exciting news in the publisher’s letter on page 13.

RECENT GRANT RECIPIENTS In December 2015, Forecast awarded grants to 12 Minnesota artists. Forecast’s $50,000 Mid-Career Project Grant went to artist Marcus Young for a new work tentatively titled Open-Hearted Action. Externally, the work will look like wild and joyful dancing in the streets. Internally, it is a civic practice of liberation with the mind, body, and spirit. Like yoga or meditation, this behavioral form will be participatory, and anyone will be able to try it. Because the practice takes place on busy city streets, his work explores themes of protest and civic engagement, and will address the urgent political matters of our day. Ashley Fairbanks and Rory Wakemup were each awarded $8,000 Emerging Artist Project Grants. Malia Burkhart and Andrea Ellen Reed each received a $5,000 Mid-Career Professional Development Grant. Laryssa Husiak, Eric Avery, Mayumi Amada, and a team composed of Yang Mee-Moua Yang, Sao Her, Laichee Yang, and Pa Na

BOTTOM LEFT: Photo courtesy Jack Becker.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 1 | ISSUE 53 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Community Services Projects: Forecast is currently working with the cities of Duluth, Brooklyn Park, St. Paul, Fargo, West Des Moines, and more. Learn more about how Forecast helps communities and its recent projects at forecastpublicart.org/community.

FORECAST NEWS

RICHFIELD ARTIST RESIDENT ENGAGEMENT (RARE) REPORT In 2013, Forecast Public Art embarked on a new public art project in partnership with The Cornerstone Group (TCG), a Minnesota-based, progressive real estate company grounded in sustainable development practices. The Richfield Artist Resident Engagement (RARE) initiative came out of a desire to enhance a future development site in Richfield, Minnesota, with an artist live/work space at the site. Realizing the site wouldn’t be developed for an indeterminate amount of time, the partners embarked on a journey to host an in-depth residency without having a secured physical space for the artists. RARE is funded for a second

year with a new cohort of artists creating a community-designed mosaic amphitheater and performance series. A report highlighting this creative community development work is available at forecastpublicart.org/RARE. PUBLIC ART SCRAMBLER: STADIUMS, BALLPARKS, AND ARTS February’s Public Art Scrambler featured presentations by Cheryl Wilgren Clyne, art director for the St. Paul Saints; Tanya Dreesen, the Minnesota Vikings’ VP of Partnerships Activation & Special Projects; and Greg Nielsen, a member of the newly formed Community Advisory Committee for the Midway soccer stadium and master site plan redevelopment. Each of the presenters shared their unique experience working with the arts in a stadium or ballpark. Attendees learned how art was selected via an open call for the U.S. Bank Stadium and how the collection will evolve and change over the coming years; how a master plan for the Midway soccer stadium is being prepared through a community-engaged process; and how curated creative expressions and upcoming open calls are unfolding at CHS Field. The Public Art Scrambler invites public art professionals to learn and connect with peers at quarterly meetings in the Twin Cities.

TOP LEFT TO RIGHT: Artists at work in Witt Siasoco’s studio as part of his RARE artist residency in Richfield. Aki Shibata dances as part of grantee Marcus Young’s earlier Don’t You Feel It Too? project. Quilt pieces from RARE artists Emily Johnson and Catalyst’s Richfield Stargazing Project (later titled Then a Cunning Voice and a Night We Spend Gazing at the Stars).

About Forecast In addition to publishing Public Art Review, Forecast Public Art: • O ffers a wide range of expertise to communities seeking help with planning public art projects throughout the region. • S upports artists with grants, workshops, and technical assistance as they grow and develop their careers. • B rings public art concepts and processes into classrooms, inspiring and empowering youth by promoting creativity, critical thinking, and the principles of civic engagement. • O ffers many resources for artists, organizations, and community members to learn more about public art.

Connect Stay connected to Public Art Review and Forecast Public Art by visiting our website for new stories and multimedia content, subscribing to our newsletter, and following us on social media. Forecastpublicart.org.

11 FORECAST NEWS

Lor were awarded $2,500 Emerging Artist Research & Development Grants. Mid-career artist grants are funded by the McKnight Foundation and emerging artist grants are funded by Jerome Foundation. Forecast awards grants to both emerging and mid-career artists in Minnesota to support independent projects, leadership development, professional development, risk-taking, multidisciplinary approaches, and collaborative problem-solving in the field of public art. Read more at forecastpublicart. org/2016-grant-recipients.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 1 | ISSUE 53 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: Photo courtesy the artist. Photo by Zoe Prinds-Flash. Photo by Elena Stanton.

What we’re up to

Embodied photo by Tom Leeser. All other photos by Tom Clancey Photography.

EMBODIED: ONLY IN L.A.

Miami Tunnel Murals 10 original artworks 11’ x 45’ each

Artwork by Alison Saar

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Postcard to the Future Publisher Jack Becker pays it forward in his new role at Forecast BY JACK BECKER

from telephone and get things done, make connections and open doors that I the Minneapolis College of Art and never imagined could open. Calling Design in 1976, my goal was to get from City Hall, as it turns out, gets gallery representation, score a museum results! Bureaucracy, I soon learned, show, land a commission, and maybe is like found-object sculpture, an art move to New York City. form that’s all about connecting the While none of these things happened raw materials of the city—people, right away, I chose to stay in the arts mecca of the Twin Cities, hang around places, and things—in new and meaningful ways. MCAD, and continue networking with former classmates. This quickly This basic notion of creative evolved into a club of sorts that met connecting became the core of my weekly in hopes of doing some kind of artistic practice. The CETA experience exhibit project. was my graduate school and led to the At one of our sessions we realized formation, less than a year later, of we shared an interest in postcards: collecting, making, and Forecast Public Art, a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening so on. So we decided to organize a postcard exhibit. We and advancing the field of public art. posted fliers around the school and invited others to join. Thirty-eight years later, it still is. Now, as we go to press, At one of our meetings, a woman none of us knew came into Forecast’s board of directors is conducting a national search the room, sat in the back, and observed our excited discus- for a new executive director so I can shift my job here to sion. After an hour or so she raised her hand, and I called on what I most enjoy: serving communities seeking a foothold her. “Hello,” she said, “my name is Melisande Charles, and I in the public art world. have six thousand postcards.” Of course we were elated, and Most of my time here has been spent responding to the show went forward with renewed energy. requests for help from artists, educators, design profession Little did we know, Melisande was the director of the als, government agencies, developers, planners, and others. Minneapolis Arts Commission and was in the process of I now have the opportunity to take what I’ve learned and securing federal funds to launch the contacts I’ve made around the a CETA program that would hire world and help Forecast increase 60 artists in the region. (More on its impact by focusing my full “The city was my gallery, and I was CETA in our article on page 66.) An attention on consulting and downoutspoken, pioneering artist and loading what I’ve learned over the charged with organizing exhibitions entrepreneur with New York City past 38 years. of CETA artists at places like the hutzpah, Melisande must have seen As I look back and consider the core values that helped Forecast something in me that I was unaware library, the government center, parks, survive and even thrive, it wasn’t of, and she later encouraged me to plazas, and other public venues.” apply for a job in the program. Soon about innovating or artistic bells and after, like some kind of Horatio whistles. It was about foundational Alger fable, thanks to my modest things like connecting, sharing, role in organizing a fun little postcard show in the college channeling energies, and giving artists a chance to follow cafeteria, I was crowned gallery director for City Art Produc- their passion and realize their potential. After all, it was tions, with a desk and phone at City Hall. The city was Melisande who saw something in me and gave me a chance. my gallery, and I was charged with organizing exhibitions I’m just paying it forward. And I’m still collecting postcards. of CETA artists at places like the library, the government center, parks, plazas, and other public venues. JACK BECKER is publisher of Public Art Review. He’s also For a 23-year-old art pup, this was empowering. With transitioning from executive director of Forecast Public Art Melisande as my mentor, I learned how to work the to director of community services.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

13 PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Photo by Bob Becker.

WHEN I GRADUATED AS A SCULPTOR

PROJECTS WE LOVE Select recent works

PROJECTS WE LOVE

Photo by Andrea Buccella.

The works covered in Projects We Love were selected by Public Art Review editorial staff. Research and writing by editorial assistants Jen Dolen and Megan Guerber.

15 PROJECTS WE LOVE

Though inanimate, Anything to Say? A Monument to Courage is anything but passive: This life-sized bronze sculpture conceived by journalist Charles Glass and sculptor Davide Dormino invites viewers to stand up and express themselves—literally on the sculpture itself. The work depicts whistleblowers Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning standing on chairs. A third, empty chair serves as a stage from which audience-participants can speak their own truth. The work was unveiled on May 1, 2015, on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. The project traveled to Dresden (June 1, 2015) and to Tour, France (March 9–15, 2016), followed by Perugia, Italy (April 6–10, 2016); other cities are in the works. Though well received in Berlin, Dormino is aware that responses may vary. “I know that not everyone shares the same view,” he told the Daily Beast, “and I am not asking them to. It’s about starting a conversation and opening the dialogue. Art can do that.”

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

BERLIN ANYTHING TO SAY? A MONUMENT TO COURAGE CHARLES GLASS AND DAVIDE DORMINO

PROJECTS WE LOVE

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

16 PROJECTS WE LOVE

With this project, publisher Short Edition invites commuters in Grenoble, France, to exchange digital distractions, such as their mobile phones, for analog poetry and short stories. The publisher installed eight Short Story Dispensers around the city; each machine provides free stories and poetry printed on a ribbon receipt. With the push of a button, readers select stories based on the length of read time: one, three, or five minutes. Six hundred stories for the dispensers, such as Mon Chat est Mon Chien (My Cat is My Dog), were drawn from more than 60,000 publications on the publisherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s website.

Photos by Olivier Alexandre / Short Edition.

GRENOBLE SHORT STORY DISPENSERS SHORT EDITION

PROJECTS WE LOVE PHILADELPHIA KNOTTED GROTTO MEG SALIGMAN

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Pilgrims jotted prayers, struggles, and dreams on some 150,000 knotted ribbons at Knotted Grotto, a temporary installation at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia. The grotto consisted of a 20-by-13-foot wigwamlike structure where visitors were invited to write down their intention or prayer request and tie it to the structure, then untie someone else’s ribbon and add it to an interior frame—an act symbolizing that “sometimes you can’t undo your own knots.” In a spontaneous visit to the shrine, Pope Francis blessed the thousands of prayer ribbons prior to an open-air Mass on September 27, 2015. Commissioned by homeless advocacy group Project HOME in honor of the Pope’s visit, the work took inspiration from the eighteenth-century German painting Our Lady, Undoer of Knots, a Papal favorite. Artist Meg Saligman explains in Upworthy: “Our contemporary interpretation of this tradition is the knotted grotto of Mary clearing pathways for people to help them with their struggle.” The temporary project has a permanent application: The thousands of ribbons are being used to insulate a housing development for the homeless.

Photos by Melissa Kelly.

PROJECTS WE LOVE

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

18 PROJECTS WE LOVE

Last October, a performance at Fenway Park turned the locally known “Green Monster” into an instrument by using the stadium’s street-facing infrastructure as a drum. The performance featured nine percussionists harnessed to the wall, where they played six original songs interspersed with violin, vocal, and DJ performances. Part of ILLUMINUS, Boston’s annual nocturnal public art event, the work was created by artists Maria Finkelmeier, Ryan Edwards, and Sam Okerstrom-Lang, who animated the wall with light and color synchronized to drum triggers that prompted changes in projection mapping.

Photos by Aram Boghosian, courtesy ILLUMINUS.

BOSTON WAKING THE MONSTER MARIA FINKELMEIER, RYAN EDWARDS, AND SAM OKERSTROM-LANG

PROJECTS WE LOVE

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19 PROJECTS WE LOVE

Photo © Gerrit Goossen.

SALT LAKE CITY DRAW AT SUGAR HOUSE PATRICIA JOHANSON When practicality meets artful invention, whole communities are transformed. Never has this been more clear than with Patricia Johanson’s recent and ongoing project, Draw at Sugar House. Partially opened in June 2015, the project includes a flood control spillway, a pedestrian walkway, a plaza and park, and functional sculpture. The work consists of two main parts, both designed to reflect significant landscape symbols in Utah’s cultural history. The Draw’s “slot canyon” is inspired by Echo Canyon and includes a paved walk as well as retaining walls that are a magnet for children who love to climb. Sego Lily Plaza,

still under construction, is a massive recreational space that incorporates floodwater and transportation infrastructure. Its design is inspired by Utah’s state flower, the sego lily, which is a sacred plant to the region’s indigenous people. For more than 30 years, environmental artist Patricia Johanson has thoughtfully integrated plant, animal, and human populations by combining public art, the natural environment, and urban infrastructure. As she explained in Sculpting with the Environment: A Natural Dialogue, edited by Baile Oakes, regarding the development of her practice, “My art projects became incorporated into daily life, and were interwoven with natural ecosystems. The hallmark of my work became to incorporate everything, and to harm nothing.” The Draw reflects this dedication by incorporating wildlife habitats into its design.

PROJECTS WE LOVE

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

20 PROJECTS WE LOVE

ZUNDERT, NETHERLANDS CORSO ZUNDERT FLOWER PARADE VARIOUS ARTISTS Zundert, Netherlands, birthplace of Vincent Van Gogh, honored the famous painter on the 125th anniversary of his death with a flower parade dedicated to his memory. In a country where more than 25 annual flower parades take place, the city of Zundert hosts the world’s biggest, with 20 hamlets constructing competing floats that can measure up to 65 feet long and 30 feet high; 100,000 visitors attended the parade in 2015. The parade dates back to 1936, and in most years has no theme—except that the region’s signature flower, the dahlia, is the only one allowed. The 2015 parade was, in fact, the third to honor Van Gogh (along with 1990 and 2003). This year, organizers encouraged the float designers to consider not just the painter’s work, but also his life. Van Gogh, right, by Robin Jochems, Karel de Hoon, and Robbert Borrias, represented the hamlet of Klein-Zundertse Heikant and received an audience award. Stuivezand’s entry, Inventaris (Inventory) by Ton van Beek and Gijs Martens, bloomed from the knowledge that the famous painter, who lived to be 37, moved 38 times. The winning creation from Wernhout, Adieu Vincent: Een afscheid in bloemen (Goodbye Vincent: Farewell in Flowers) by Erwin Leenaerts, Mathieu Rombouts, and Ronald Martens, recognizes the artist’s struggles and honors him with a farewell surrounded by nature.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG PROJECTS WE LOVE

Photo by Werner Pellis.

PROJECTS WE LOVE

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG PROJECTS WE LOVE

LONDON HEARTBEAT CHARLES PÉTILLON French artist Charles Pétillon, known for his temporary site-specific balloon installations that overtake cars, houses, basketball courts, and more, proves that there is no invasion more delightful than one of white balloons. Installed under the roof of London’s iconic Market Building in Covent Garden from August 27 to September 27, 2015, Heartbeat was a meandering cloudlike form created from an astonishing 100,000 balloons. Inside the cluster, a pulsing heartbeat of white light simulated the energy and flair of the historic shopping district. Measuring more than 177 feet long and 39 feet wide, the installation was Pétillon’s first public work. A pop-up gallery at the Royal Opera House Arcade accompanied the installation and featured photographs of his other “invasions.”

Photo © Charles Pétillon.

PROJECTS WE LOVE

Photos by Kacey Wong

23 PROJECTS WE LOVE

Hong Kong–based artist and activist Kacey Wong questions the politics of space by reimagining housing and other built structures as mobile units. Inspired by spaceship return capsules and David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity,” Wong’s Wandering Space envisions what is possible within a small, adaptable interior. Originally designed as a traveling stage for renowned singer and activist Denise Ho (HOCC) for use during her 2015 mini-concert Reimagine Hong Kong tour, the mobile shelter is attached to a bike and opens up to reveal a stage that a performer can either sit or stand in. The piece has since been further adapted into first a camper, where the artist recently slept one cold winter night on the old Kai Tak Airport runway. Wong then used it as a mobile hawker stall from which he distributed waffles in support of this Hong Kong tradition that is rapidly disappearing under new strict laws.

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HONG KONG WANDERING SPACE KACEY WONG

PROJECTS WE LOVE

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DOUGLAS, ARIZONA, USA / AGUA PRIETA, SONORA, MEXICO REPELLENT FENCE POSTCOMMODITY This temporary project raised a fence that was designed not to repel, but rather to bridge the gap across borders. Conceived by Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist, artists with indigenous roots who work under the collective name of Postcommodity, the project was funded on Kickstarter, and was eight years in the planning before its installation from October 9 through 12, 2015. The project consisted of 26 tethered balloons, each 10 feet in diameter and emblazoned with an ancient indigenous icon: the “open eye” (which in more recent years has been appropriated for “scare eye” balloons designed to keep birds off fruit trees). Suspended 50 feet aboveground and spanning a two-mile stretch of desert, the monument sutured the wound dividing the U.S./Mexico border. Twist described the moment when the last balloon rose as profound. “There we were, totally lost in the spirit of this moment,” the artist told the LA Times, “hoping that this metaphor which brought us all together would help us better understand who we were now, and where we came from, and why we sacrificed so much to be here.”

TOP: Photo by Michael Lundgren, courtesy Postcommodity. BOTTOM: Photo by David Taylor, courtesy Postcommodity.

PROJECTS WE LOVE NEW YORK CITY FUNKTIONAL VIBRATIONS XENOBIA BAILEY

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Suspended over the main entrance of the new 34th Street Hudson Yards station—New York City’s first new subway station in 25 years—one of Xenobia Bailey’s Funktional Vibrations mosaics glitters in a swirl of color. Located beneath a new urban park and playground, the artwork greets commuters with an energetic interlude to their travels between Times Square and the far west side of Manhattan. Bailey created another hand-crafted Italian glass installation for a recessed dome inside the station. A third mosaic for an adjacent station entrance is under way. The pieces are Bailey’s first public art installations. A fiber artist, Bailey’s design for the sculptural glass ceilings—among the largest artworks in the MTA transit network—began as crochet pieces that were digitized, enlarged, and translated into mosaics by Miotto Mosaic Art Studios.

PROJECTS WE LOVE

Funktional Vibrations (2015) © Xenobia Bailey. Commissioned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts & Design. Photo by Rob Wilson.

PROJECTS WE LOVE

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DUISBURG, GERMANY NOMANSLANDING ROBYN BACKEN, ANDRE DEKKER, GRAHAM EATOUGH, NIGEL HELYER, AND JENNIFER TURPIN

PROJECTS WE LOVE

No Man’s Land was the deadly zone between two opposing lines of trench warfare during World War I, and it serves as the inspiration for Nomanslanding, an ambitious traveling artwork designed by five international artists in answer to a co-commission by three curators based in Australia, Germany, and Scotland. The artists (Robyn Backen, Nigel Helyer, and Jennifer Turpin from Australia, Andre Dekker of the Netherlands, and Graham Eatough of the United Kingdom) were charged with poetically translating a soldier’s experience of combat and conflict. Their answer is this performative space that metaphorically and physically brings people

together for an intimate, shared sensory experience. The poetic installation is formed by two floating halfdomed platforms that glide across a body of water and connect. The sculpture was designed to include an immersive performance. Visitors are guided into the space for a six-part performance of abstract soundscapes and live acoustic singing. Once the two sides of Nomanslanding meet and join in the middle of the waterway, the interior darkens into a womblike space ideal for contemplation. Nomanslanding opened in August 2015 as part of Urbane Künste Ruhr Ruhrtriennale Festival of the Arts in northwestern Germany. It was hosted on the Duisburg-Ruhrort, a harbor that connects the Rhine and Ruhr rivers with the Rhine-Herne canal. This solemn and transformative work has also toured in Sydney and will be installed in Glasglow in summer 2016.

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Photos © Volker Hartmann / Urbane Künste Ruhr.

PROJECTS WE LOVE

FORTALEZA, BRAZIL (RE)PRISMA NARCELIO GRUD

PROJECTS WE LOVE

Photos by Germano de Sousa.

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In the waters just beyond the marina of Fortaleza, Brazil, rests the Mara Hope, a former cargo ship that was stranded during a journey from Texas to Taiwan, where it was scheduled to be scrapped due to intense fire damage it had sustained. The wreck was officially declared unsalvageable in 1985, and has rested half a kilometer off the city’s popular Iracema Beach ever since. When Brazilian graffiti artist Narcelio Grud considered the rusty blot on the local seascape, he decided to reimagine what couldn’t be removed, and to improve the view with public art. Local fishermen helped Grud and some artist collaborators sail to the ship, where, with 300 liters of water-based paint, they daubed the vessel in a rainbow of colors, using brooms and gravity: pushing, pouring, and splattering. Mimicking the effect of light refracted through a prism, a spectrum of colors streams across the deck and down the hull of the Mara Hope, now rechristened (RE)Prisma. The work became part of the project Para Ver O Mar (To See the Sea), a series of urban art interventions along Fortaleza’s coastline. Through these artistic alterations, Grud and his colleagues hope to imbue unsightly areas and objects with refreshed aesthetic appeal.

PROJECTS WE LOVE

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IN THE FIELD News, Views, and Ideas

Walking on Water Christo’s latest project, set for completion this summer in Italy, will be an exercise in “sexy” island-hopping BY KAREN GARDINER

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30 IN THE FIELD

Bulgarian-born artist Christo will install his latest project, The Floating Piers, on Italy’s Lake Iseo, 60 miles east of Milan. Two hundred thousand cubes made of high-density polyethylene, filled with air and covered with soft nylon fabric tinted dahlia-yellow, will create an Oz-like pathway that allows the public to walk on water for almost two miles, from Sulzano on the mainland to the islands of Monte Isola and San Paolo in the middle of the lake. As with all of the artist’s outdoor installations to date, it will be a temporary work, lasting just 16 days before it’s disassembled and all its materials are recycled. Christo’s last public artwork, The Gates (2005), created with his wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude, saw the wintertime walkways of New York’s Central Park basking in the warm glow of 7,500 saffron-colored cloth gates. The intervening period has been marked by the death of Jeanne-Claude and frustrations for Christo, now working alone, in seeing his planned projects come to fruition. Two long-envisioned projects, Over the River in Colorado and The Mastaba in Abu Dhabi, conceived in 1992 and 1977 respectively, remain in the planning stages. Christo is used to waiting. Permission for The Gates took 25 years and the wrapping of Berlin’s Reichstag 24, so The Floating Piers, for which permission was secured within a year, must have seemed a breeze. However, although the 80-year-old artist has spoken of his sense of urgency in seeing his projects realized, Wolfgang Volz, his photographer and The Floating Piers’ project manager, insists that the site was not chosen for ease of permit-granting. “We couldn’t have known that,” he said. “These projects

are built on the basis of everyday life. Everything we do, you would have to do to build something anywhere, so the rules [that we are obliged to follow] are the same rules that everybody else that lives here or wants to do something here would have to face and deal with and solve.” In the spring and summer of 2014, Volz and Christo scouted the lakes of northern Italy before settling on Iseo, where the shimmering dahlia cubes will contrast with the dark colors of the lake and its mountainous backdrop. “We were looking for a lake that has an island in fair shape,” Volz said. Lake Iseo, which has Europe’s highest freshwater island in the center, “is almost perfect. None of the other famous lakes, like Lake Como, Lake Maggiore, or Lake Garda, have quite the right quality. Lake Como was a consideration at one point but didn’t work out because, on the shore side, it was too tight. The traffic would have been horrendous.” Christo has said that he wants visitors to take off their shoes as they traverse the piers, so that they can connect more immediately with the project’s sensory qualities. Interacting with the piers as they respond to the water’s movement will be a “sexy” experience, he says. While The Floating Piers will allow the islanders to walk to the mainland (usually they take ferries), any functionality is secondary to their artistic merit, according to Volz. “We are not trying to provide a practical purpose,” he said. “The Floating Piers are a work of art that has no purpose whatsoever.” KAREN GARDINER is

a Scottish writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the BBC, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere.

IN THE SUMMER OF 2016,

IN THE FIELD

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IN THE FIELD

ABOVE: Christo’s The Floating Piers on Italy’s Lake Iseo will be open to the public from June 18 to July 3, 2016, weather permitting. OPPOSITE LEFT: From left to right, filmmaker Antonio Ferrera, Christo, Vladimir Yavachev, and director of construction Rossen Jeliaskov on Lake Iseo in September 2014. OPPOSITE RIGHT: Christo’s The Floating Piers collage (2014) includes a photograph by Wolfgang Volz, pencil, wax crayon, enamel paint, technical maps, fabric sample and tape. Since the death of his wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude, Christo continues to sell prints of his preparatory studies and early works from the 1950s and 1960s to fund works. He does not accept grants, sponsorships, donated labor, or money for products of any kind.

IN THE FIELD

The “e” word doesn’t have to be scary; these groups make it part of the creative process BY RACHEL ENGH

IN THE FIELD

big, complex words that many people associate with stress, fear, or annoyance. But measuring the impact of your art-related work doesn’t have to be a necessary evil that rears its ugly head when you’re rushing to get grant paperwork out the door. In fact, evaluation can be an integral part of the creative process. Ask Noël Raymond. She’s co-artistic director of Minneapolis’s community-based Pillsbury House + Theatre (PH+T). My company, Metris Arts Consulting, recently collaborated with PH+T to develop fresh, creative, even enjoyable ways to evaluate the impact of their public art programming. According to Raymond, the essence of evaluation is “the rigorous process of asking hard questions and staring them in the face, seldom being able to answer them fully but beginning to see nuanced angles and layers in them that lead to deeper, richer, knottier questions.” She found that the evaluation tactics we developed together were “much like the creative process involved in making theater—I never would have imagined that evaluation practice mirrored creative practice.” Each of the three Minnesota examples in this article infuses evaluation efforts with creativity, and vice versa. As a researcher supporting these projects, I found that there’s no magic one-size-fits-all approach to evaluation. Although it’s challenging, evaluation is well worth doing, and creativity can make it stronger, more engaging, and fun. MEASUREMENT, ASSESSMENT, EVALUATION:

Pillsbury House Theatre: Data Is Art, Art Is Data Two of PH+T’s public art programs, Arts on Chicago and Art Blocks, support neighborhood-based artists who engage in a range of projects, including a stilting club, artistic bike racks, puppet shows, and photographic portraits of neighbors displayed in local businesses. PH+T had seen some of the results of their work and heard stories about its impact— how conversations had been sparked by it, how community members had discovered new resources in their neighborhoods, and more—but they wanted to dig deeper to see if their anecdotal data was substantiated. But how do you measure this? We sifted through data PH+T had already gathered, including information that participating artists provided on all the connections they made during their projects: with community members, other arts professionals, business owners, and so on. Using this data, we worked with a social network analyst, a specialist in graphing and analyzing different kinds of human connectivity, to visually illustrate which artists contributed most to bringing together disparate community members. The Art Blocks artists gather monthly for dinner. At their May 2015 dinner, they pondered our social network analysis and then drew their own personal maps of what a healthy, thriving community looks like. We also integrated participating artist Peter Haakon Thompson’s The A Project into a door-to-door survey. We

Image courtesy Metris Arts Consulting, 2016.

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Project Evaluation as Art

IN THE FIELD

Photo by Rachel Engh, courtesy the City of Minneapolis.

PlaceBase Productions: Stuffing the Ballot Box PlaceBase Productions collects community members’ stories to create theater pieces in rural Minnesota. They also make data collection an integral part of the performances, which has resulted in high survey participation rates and robust data samples. Paddling Theatre: From Granite Falls to Yellow Medicine told the dramatic real-life story of how ruffians from Granite Falls stole the county seat from Yellow Medicine City. Arriving at the final scene, the cast asked audience members to vote on which town they thought should have been granted the county seat. Audience members cast their votes on “ballots” that also included questions about their response to the show and a request for demographic information. The cast read the results of the county-seat vote at the celebration that marked the end of the show. Then, several weeks after the show, PlaceBase gathered the cast to share other results from the ballots. The actors

33 IN THE FIELD

Public Art Program, City of Minneapolis: Through the Looking Glass The City of Minneapolis’s public art program commissions new work and maintains over 60 pieces. Mary Altman, the program’s administrator, recently spiced up a community survey as artists Ben Janssens and Marjorie Pitz designed their bird-inspired sculptures, destined for three locations in Minneapolis. Would the proposed artwork help achieve the public art program’s goals of enhancing the identity of the communities they were in and inspiring good urban design? Interested community members had the opportunity to give feedback on the designs at public meetings. But Altman wanted to harvest pedestrians’ perceptions of how the proposed sculptures would contribute to the environment–– and she came up with a lively and unusual way to do that. Altman asked Janssens to design and fabricate a handheld “looking glass” tool made of wood and clear Plexiglas, with an image of the sculpture on it. Residents could look through the looking glass at the proposed site, “seeing” the sculpture in place. The tool attracted a diverse group of people to the survey in all three locations, and prompted a lot of comment on the design.

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canvassed parts of the four neighborhoods PH+T serves and, following the lines of Thompson’s project, invited the residents who responded to our questions to display a red A in their window if they felt more connected to the neighborhood because of arts offerings (A stands for art). PH+T plans to monitor the percentage of households that display the A and track the variation between blocks with PH+T arts activities and those without.

ABOVE: A survey respondent uses artist Ben Janssens’s “looking glass” to give feedback on siting a proposed public artwork in Minneapolis. OPPOSITE: Data collected by Pillsbury House + Theatre and artists in its public art programs was used to illustrate how artists connect disparate community members.

reflected on the positive audience experiences and felt empowered to keep creating art in their community. From these examples, you can see how creativity can improve evaluation efforts and evaluation can influence the creative process. Although there’s no one magic way to evaluate public artwork, it’s important that you continue to ask the “deeper, richer, knottier questions,” because the answers will make your work better. is a research associate with Metris Arts Consulting, where she provides research and planning support related to all aspects of arts-based community and economic development. She holds a master’s in urban and regional planning from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs and a B.A. in sociology from Grinnell College. RACHEL ENGH

IN THE FIELD

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34 IN THE FIELD

Where There’s a Will Two innovative structural approaches to funding public art may provide models for other communities

in order to flourish. That’s an idea gaining traction among urban planners and other city-makers. But exactly where is that art supposed to come from? The (mostly) dominant model for commissioning urban artworks—especially in cities with a percent-for-art development scheme—involves an administrator in city hall, often in the parks and rec department, collaborating with the public. But in the still-evolving field of public art nothing is, so to speak, written in stone, and some interesting counter-examples are worth exploring, not only for cities without percent-for-art, but also for communities and regions where the public enthusiasm for public art may not be matched in the halls of government. A CITY NEEDS PUBLIC ART

Private Funding for Public Works One such example is Greensboro, North Carolina. There, the commissioning and purchasing of public art falls under the auspices of the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro, a charitable foundation with nearly $200 million

in assets distributed across about 650 individual funds —including one devoted to public art. The fund was launched in 2008 and is maintained and managed by trustees, who are required to contribute cash. Commissioning operates like this: A selection committee, which includes art professionals, with help from a national advisory board, crafts RFPs for specific projects, explores a pool of artists, and narrows the pool to seven or eight semifinalists. “Endowed trustees,” those who contribute $25,000 or more to the fund, vote the seven down to three. Then the full group of donors ($5,000 minimum) chooses the winner. Since the first artwork was installed in 2009 (a sculpture by Greensboro artist Billy Lee), the fund has commissioned a new work each year and hosted smaller, temporary projects as well. The latter have been especially designed to involve the community in what might otherwise be an exclusive club. “We’ve really pushed to engage the broader community with the temporary pieces,” says Dabney Sanders, who chairs the public art endowment steering committee. In particular,

Photo by Lynn Donovan.

BY JOE HART

IN THE FIELD

Photos by Tom Kessler.

ABOVE: Jonathan Borofsky’s Molecule Man (2008) was commissioned by the Iowa West Foundation for its public art collection. LEFT: Mark di Suvero’s Big Mo (2014) stands 75 feet tall and is Iowa West Foundation’s twelfth installation. OPPOSITE: The Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro commissioned Ben Kastner and Toby Keeton to create Inside/Out (2012).

35 IN THE FIELD

Gambling Funds Placemaking Halfway across the country in Council Bluffs, Iowa, a similar program has emerged to create a public art program surprisingly ambitious for a community that, with 62,000 people, is less than a quarter the size of Greensboro.

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she says, folks got on board with a project by Virginia-based artist Charlie Brouwer, who solicits ladders from community members and arranges them in a temporary sculpture that symbolizes civic cooperation. “We had everyone from homeless people to our highest donor donating a ladder,” says Sanders. “It was a real community engagement piece.” The trust faces its largest project to date in the planning and construction of a four-mile downtown greenway, which will include artist-designed features like benches and bike racks, as well as sculptures and other traditional works. Ultimately, Sanders says, the goal is to bring the city, which is the permanent owner of the trust’s commissions, into a deeper partnership in the creation of public works. “It happens like this a lot in our community,” she says. “The private sector will create a program that brings the city along by example. Long-term, the goal is definitely to get a percent-for-art plan, and we’d like to see the city hire someone to oversee its public art collection.”

IN THE FIELD

BELOW: Virginia artist Charlie Brouwer borrowed hundreds of ladders from Greensboro community members to build the temporary sculpture Rise Together Greensboro (2015). RIGHT: Billy Lee’s Guardian II (2009) was the first artwork commissioned by the trustees of the Public Art Endowment, an initiative of the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro, and presented as a gift to the city. The fund has commissioned a new work every year since then.

Photos by Lynn Wooten/The Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro.

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The Iowa West Foundation was formed in 1994. Legally speaking, it’s identical to a private charitable trust. But instead of coming from a wealthy individual, the money supporting Iowa West is contributed by a few local casinos. In 1984, the Iowa West Racing Association was formed to oversee three regional casinos, in compliance with new state laws requiring all gambling to be managed by nonprofit organizations. Three percent of the association’s gross sales go into the Iowa West Foundation’s endowment, which ended last year with more than $380 million. A good chunk of the interest from that endowment is spent on grants to area nonprofits, but in 2013, the foundation branched out into sponsored initiatives in four categories it identified as critical to its primary mission of boosting the economy and quality of life in the Council Bluffs region. These four areas are economic development, healthy families, education, and placemaking.

IN THE FIELD

What About the Public? Taken together, the programs in Greensboro and Council Bluffs suggest interesting avenues for building the public art infrastructure. The former program serves as a kind of reboot of noblesse oblige, in which more fortunate citizens take a lead in city-making; the latter, with its emphasis on economic and community development, makes a strong case for the tangible value of public art—an increasingly important factor in today’s city-making. Purists may quibble with the very notion of private entities choosing and buying artwork for the public. In practice, though, administrators at these two foundations are engaged in a conversation about defining, including, and empowering the public that runs parallel to the discussions among their counterparts in city government. And in both the private and public commissioning models, local governments remain the owners of the works, and as such act as the public’s proxy. At any rate, it’s hard to argue with the successful track record of these two programs: two lively and growing public art collections in cities that previously had none.

JOE HART

is senior editor of Public Art Review.

DAVID LEE BROWN

Fort Lauderdale Airport Sculpture B RO WA R D

C U LT U R A L

Photograph: Tabatha Mudra Dance Company: Jayadevi Arts Director: Denyse Baboolal

“Part of creating a community where families want to live and businesses want to locate includes making it attractive and appealing,” explains Peter Tulipana, chief executive officer of the foundation. “And part of making our communities attractive is creating places where public art and the experience of the streetscape are built into the overall vision of the city.” To that end, the foundation launched a public art master plan process in 2004 to guide the siting and commissioning of works, resulting in a list of about 50 potential places for them. Much as in Greensboro, the foundation committee charged with fulfilling the master plan has brought professional artists on board to help come up with criteria and recruit artists. With recent widespread interest and innovation in the realm of creative placemaking, the foundation has begun to experiment with more creative ways of embedding artists in the process of fulfilling its mission. For instance, the need to replace and update old signs in several local parks has been repositioned as an opportunity for public art. “At these six parks, we had the new signs designed and created by artists,” explains Tulipana. “The artists submitted their creations, and neighborhood groups who live in the areas reviewed and tweaked the designs. We see that project as a beginning toward more integrated placemaking approaches.”

D I V I S I O N

Greenbelt Park, Griffin Road, Dania Beach, FL 33004 Stainless Steel, 1989

publicARTandDESIGN Broward.org/Arts/Publicart

SOAP BOX

Damage Control A little regular care can keep outdoor sculpture from decaying. Why is it so often neglected? BY L. WILLIAM ZAHNER

39 SOAP BOX

Photo courtesy A. Zahner Company.

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to make a proposal on the unabated, will cause irreversible changes to the surface of an engineering and fabrication of a sculpture by a local artist. art piece. You can’t stop the processes altogether, but you can While exploring this city of new billionaires, I couldn’t help slow them way down to extend the life and beauty of the noticing how filthy the automobiles were. Even the Bentleys, piece for generations. Rolls-Royces, and Ferraris were covered with grime and road First, take photos of the work when it’s brand-new, for later dirt. There was no trash on the street, but the most expensive comparison. They can be a big help in identifying surface cars stood out not for their beauty but for their lack of care. deterioration as the years pass. In many of our cities, public art suffers a similar fate. Beau- Then, each spring, spray the art down with clean water. tiful sculpture is often left to the ravages of the environment. (The “shower” can be scheduled for the times when plants Deicing salts, chlorides from seaside environments, and are watered.) Regular washing can remove collected deicing general grime not only mar the appearance of the artworks salts and bird waste. If blemishes appear on metal surfaces or but can permanently damage the outer layers of the metal if under protective coatings, deal with them quickly. Replace they’re allowed to remain. the wax on bronzes when they start to show fading—or better In my work as a restorer, I mostly concentrate on the yet, before they fade. It’s much simpler and vastly cheaper to surface of sculptures, working like a crime-scene inves- replace wax than to repair a patina. When spots first appear tigator to determine what caused the blemish or other on stainless steel surfaces, call in an expert and have the unwelcome surface spots removed before effect. The damage is they become uniform almost always due to and refinishing or more “ When art is acquired, there’s a improper care or—all expensive treatments careful evaluation of the works and too often—no care at are required. all. I usually get called While cleaning, how they’ll be displayed. So why do in when things have crews can log any areas we devote so little time and effort to gone so far that reversof concern for future examination, so you ing the damage is next maintaining the art after it’s in place? ” to impossible. catch developing issues All that the cars in before they become Moscow needed was a permanent problems. periodic trip to the car wash; and as far as public sculp- When art is acquired, there’s a careful evaluation of the ture is concerned, a simple, thorough, periodic cleaning works and how they’ll be displayed—after all, we’re promotregimen can bring the life back to sculpture surfaces for ing enlightenment and enjoyment for the public now and in very little cost. If artworks are left to decay, remediation the future. So why do we devote so little time and effort to costs skyrocket as greater and greater effort and expertise maintaining the art after it’s in place? We all cringe when are needed to restore them. we see ISIS blow up the antiquities of ancient Mesopotamia. Here’s the problem: All metal surfaces want to revert to But is it all that different when we allow the destruction their mineral state. Bronze and copper alloys grow complex of the art of today by negligence? Cleaning the art can and oxides that alter the patinas; dark spots will form on stain- should be a simple procedure when it’s regularly carried out less steel as the chromium is selectively depleted; aluminum from the start. Let’s give our artwork a periodic bath and will develop a gray, spongy oxide. These are all natural keep it looking good for future generations to enjoy. reactions to pollutants in our environment. Even paint has porosity that allows the metal underneath it to undergo L. WILLIAM ZAHNER is the CEO of the A. Zahner Company, changes that fracture the paint layer and draw more mois- a world-class metal engineering and manufacturing firm, ture to the underlying metal. and Metalabs, LLC, which restores and maintains art for conser It’s these natural processes that, if allowed to continue vators and artists. He is the author of two books on metal. A FEW YEARS AGO I WAS IN MOSCOW

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Climate Subtle, elegant, and arresting, public art projects on a human scale help us understand climate change

ONE OF THE GREATEST GIFTS AN ARTIST CAN OFFER is to show us the world as it is. Our sense of what is real is often clouded by our preoccupations, passivity, or politics. But when an artwork removes these filters and allows us to see as the artist sees, we can be changed. Our perspective shifts. Our vision expands. We feel more connected. As a result of this process of revelation, there’s often a fine line—or deep connection —between art and activism. Take the issue of climate change. Many of us have trouble grasping its implications because the news stories we hear are abstract, overwhelming, catastrophic, or utterly hopeless. We don’t know how to process what we hear. That’s why the storytelling of artists, many of whom have been addressing this issue for decades, is now being recognized as more important than ever. Because artists help us understand climate change on a human scale, we’re able to make better sense of it, feel the urgency more, and ultimately change how we act.

Photo by Jason deCaires Taylor.

BY KAREN OLSON

With each high tide, Jason deCaires Taylor’s sculpture The Rising Tide (2015) was slowly submerged under the Thames in London.

Storytelling The growing role of public art in the international dialogue around climate change became obvious last fall in Paris during the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21). Ahead of the talks, a pair of arts nonprofits launched ArtCOP21, an arts festival designed to challenge the climate change tropes repeated in political offices and boardrooms. It succeeded, connecting hundreds of thousands of people to more than 550 cultural events, including installations, exhibitions, performances, and myriad gatherings, all of which creatively addressed climate change across Paris, as well as 54 countries worldwide. While ArtCOP21 had a significant influence before and during the conference, the organizations that started it have been making a difference much longer. Since 2008, the France-based Coalition for Art and Sustainable Development (COAL) has been promoting a new generation of artists who focus on environmental and social issues. Cape Farewell, started in 2001 by artist David Buckland, has

grown into an international nonprofit that brings together creatives, scientists, and informers—including Mel Chin, Amy Balkin, Antony Gormley, David Suzuki, KT Tunstall, and Nick Drake—to shift the climate change conversation to a cultural one. This work is widespread. Around the world, artists are gathering to take on climate change. The second annual Rising Waters Confab, organized by Glenn Weiss and curated by Buster Simpson, recently brought together a multidisciplinary group of artists for a five-week collaborative residency at Robert Rauschenberg’s studio on Florida’s Captiva Island, which will eventually be lost to sea rise. For the next two years, Northern Spark—an all-night light festival held each June in Minneapolis—has the theme of “Climate Chaos | Climate Rising.” At the same time, many artists are working on their own and in communities to offer their unique perspectives on climate change. Here, we look at a handful of recent public art projects that put climate change in the public eye, mind, and heart.

SEEING IS BELIEVING

Photo by Jason deCaires Taylor.

Most of Jason deCaires Taylor’s work in the past 10 years has been in the Caribbean, where his underwater sculptures distract divers from over-visited reefs and serve as the foundation upon which new reefs can grow. With The Rising Tide, Taylor took his message to the heart of London, calling attention to the rising waters associated with climate change and the city’s damaging focus on perpetual work and construction. Commissioned as part of the Totally Thames festival and installed for about a month in September 2015, The Rising Tide featured four suited figures seated on horses whose heads were replaced by oil-well pumps (see previous page). Set on the foreshores of the Thames right next to MI6 headquarters and opposite the Tate Britain, the sculptures —which recall the four horsemen of the Apocalypse—virtually disappeared twice a day when the tide rose and later emerged when the tide fell (pictured on this page). “I quite like the idea that the piece sits in the eye line of the place where many politicians and so many people who are involved in climate change all work and make these damaging deals and policies, yet who are in this state of mad denial,” Taylor told the Guardian when the work was installed.

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Photos courtesy Andrew Bellatti Green.

VISUALIZING WATER Finding a way to let viewers visualize and better understand the changing conditions of our climate was a goal for artist Andrew Bellatti Green and architect Adam Pyrek when creating Cyclical Interplay for the city of Austin, Texas. The kinetic, computer-operated sculpture— inspired by the cyclical nature of climate—rotates for several minutes every evening at dusk. Then the piece changes shape according to two sets of data: rainfall and water usage, the latter determined by water levels in a local reservoir. The vertical sculpture’s outer set of fins indicate rainfall. If it hasn’t rained much in the previous 18 days, the fins contract. If it has rained, the outer fins bow out like a barrel, implying fullness. The sculpture’s inner fins shift according to the levels of Lake Travis and Lake Buchanan, the city’s primary water supplies. This 2014 capital improvement project combined the goals of Austin’s Watershed Protection and Parks and Recreation Departments. Not only is Cyclical Interplay a well-integrated, aesthetically pleasing, moving sculpture in a park alongside a busy roadway, but it also provides public education about the impact of water usage and changing climatic conditions.

MAPPING THE FUTURE and stopped along the way to hear micro-lectures from guests, who stood on a ladder marked in feet to indicate rising water. The speakers—including one from the mayor’s office, another from the harbor association, and a media scholar— talked about how the city will be affected and what is being done to plan ahead. Sutton and D’Ignazio (bottom) also spoke. While the topics were serious, the mood was light. Fun was one of the goals of the artists. “Climate change is so dark,” Sutton says. “So we thought: Let’s bring the rainbows in.”

Photos by Kevin Sweet.

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Like many coastal cities, Boston is planning for the uncertainty of climate change and sea level rise. One scenario, mapped by the Boston Harbor Association, shows the extensive, man-made areas of the city, including entire neighborhoods, submerged by 2100. When artist Catherine D’Ignazio came across the map, she was struck by the fact that the predicted coastline very nearly matches what the coast had been in 1630, and she started thinking about a way people could use their bodies to trace where the water will rise. She also called performance artist Andi Sutton, whose practice attempts to reposition climate change and other environmental issues on a human scale. One of her projects resulted in a series of paint stencils that reflected participants’ fears of “future extinctions,” like polar bears, public funding for the arts, and fresh water, and their hopes for the end of things like fracking, racism, and fear of difference. Together, their ideas felt like a good match. So in June 2015 they held a combined walking event that mapped the future. It was produced in conjunction with the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum’s exhibition Walking Sculpture: 1967–2015. When 30 participants arrived, they were invited to take part in Sutton’s Composing the Future: Extinction/Loss by creating stencils about what they fear—or hope—will go extinct by 2100. They wore the stencils like placards. Participants then started walking the three-quarter-mile route marked by D’Ignazio for Boston Coastline: Future Past, a “walking data visualization” marking the expected water levels in 2100. The group talked about their placards with passersby

“If the water gets too high, I’ll just grow some gills.” —Krisanne Baker

Image courtesy the artist.

A NEW PERSPECTIVE Krisanne Baker has a lifelong love of water. She grew up sailing and swimming off the Atlantic coast. Now a resident of Waldoboro, Maine, Baker is an ecological artist, water art activist, citizen scientist, and educator. She volunteers for two coastal estuary land trusts performing water quality tests. So, naturally, she thinks about the local effects of rapidly rising sea levels and the acidification of the Gulf of Maine. “If the water level rises, what are we going to do about it?” asks Baker, a swimmer who often goes underwater without a mask and swims with her eyes open. Baker, who has always had a fantasy of being a fish, had an imaginative

idea: “If the water gets too high, I’ll just grow some gills.” That thought led her to create Growing Gills, a short-loop video projection bombing designed so drivers and passersby could quickly see the video wherever it appeared. Baker filmed the piece herself underwater near Belfast, Maine. First shown on an outside wall of Waterfall Arts in Belfast in 2013, the film depicts slowly rising waves on the surface of the building. “When a large wave washes up over the entire projection area,” says Baker, “the viewer is underwater and then comes eye to eye with a large fish slowly swimming by.”

Photos by Odell Hussey Photography.

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BIG IMPACT

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Patrick Marold began The Shadow Array as a response to the excavation of a massive valley in order to accommodate a train and platform serving the Denver International Airport (DIA). His concept was simple: cover 10 sloped acres with an array of shadows. The sculpture—which Marold says honors a prolonged sense of time—makes a big visual impact. “It is visible from the train, the passenger platform, from the air, from the adjacent roadways, and the hotel and plaza at the new DIA hotel and transit center,” he says. “It is even visible from satellites.” But the impact is more than aesthetic; Marold’s materials choices are also significant. The Denver-based artist considered steel, concrete, and polymer-based products for the sculpture. But environmental impact is always a key component of his work, so he instead chose to use 236 bare timbers of beetle-killed spruce. The lumber was taken from forests devastated by what is likely the largest insect blight ever to hit North America—a blight enabled by a warming climate. “The fact that these infested forests are going to either decompose, burn in a fire, or be used by the timber industry makes them a far more attractive option,” says Marold. There there’s the economic impact. “The small company that provided the logs, Rocky Mountain Timber Products, was certainly impacted by the order,” says Marold. So were the people hired to strip the logs by hand. Their work meant fewer fossil fuels were used in the process, too. “My approach in general accounts for ecological impact, and I make decisions that typically help the environment rather than hurt it,” Marold says.

Photos courtesy Patrick Marold.

FROM WATERFALL TO FIREBALL

TOP: Photo © Nancy Pierce. BOTTOM: Photo by Ernie McLaney.

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Andrea Polli has been working on the subject of climate change and collaborating with scientists since 2004. One of her artworks, a projection piece called Particle Falls, was commissioned by the city of San Jose, California, for its Zero1 Festival in 2010. Her goal: to show the real-time level of air pollution on-site. “One of the challenges with that piece,” Polli says, “was trying to figure out how to show the problem—particulates that come from burning fossil fuels—and make it beautiful and engaging.” The site for the work, the curved corner façade of a modern AT&T building, evoked for Polli a cliff and waterfall. Through the San Jose project she obtained a nephelometer, which measures particulate matter. To create Particle Falls, Polli and her students at the University of New Mexico took realtime data from the nephelometer, converted it to the visual forms of water and fire, and projected the results onto the wall of the building. If the air is clear, the image projected is of a clear waterfall. If particulate measurements are slightly higher, then there are sparkles over the waterfall (right). “If there are a lot of particles, the waterfall is obliterated by a huge fireball,” Polli says (below). There’s been increased interest in the project in the past few years and it’s been installed in several cities, including Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Charlotte. It was set up at the Bismarck American Center in Paris in connection with COP21.

Photo by Basia Irland.

MELTING AND RESEEDING When Basia Irland was imagining an artwork for Weather Report, a 2007 exhibition and catalogue about climate change curated by Lucy Lippard for Boulder’s Museum of Contemporary Art, she looked to water. Of course. For more than four decades Irland has focused her art on international water issues, especially those involving rivers. She writes a blog about international rivers—from the perspective of the river—for National Geographic. She was the only artist invited to participate in the Foundation for the Future’s International World Water Crisis Forum in 2010. A large percentage of Boulder’s drinking water, Irland discovered, comes from Arapaho Glacier. Because of climate disruption, the glacier is rapidly melting. In response, Irland created Ice Receding/Books Reseeding, a temporary 250-pound sculpture hand-carved out of frozen river water and shaped like a book. She engraved it with a “text” made from the seeds of mountain maple, Colorado blue spruce, and columbine flower, selected with the help of scientists. When the sculpture was set into the current of Boulder

Creek, it provided a way for people to see what was disappearing. The seeds offered a way to reduce the effects of climate change through watershed restoration: the plants that grew from them along the riverbanks help sequester carbon, mitigate floods and drought, slow erosion, and act as filters for pollutants, among other benefits. Since the first such installation in Boulder, Irland has created ice books around the globe, in places like Antwerp, Ottawa, and Shoushtar, Iran. Ranging from pocket size to hundreds of pounds, each is embedded with local seeds. Tome II: Fremont Cottonwood Seeds (Populus fremontii) (2009) on the Rio Grande weighed 300 pounds (pictured). “Closed books have seed patterns on the covers, while open books have rows of seeds forming sentences and paragraphs,” Irland told National Geographic. “These seeds are released as the ice melts in the current. Where the seeds choose to plant themselves is serendipitous, replicating the way seeds get planted in nature.” KAREN OLSON is

executive editor of Public Art Review.

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PORTABLE LAND ART VAUGHN BELL’S PLAYFUL WORKS ARE INSPIRED BY SERIOUS ISSUES OF HUMANKIND AND OUR ENVIRONMENT INTERVIEW BY JON SPAYDE VAUGHN BELL’S WORK brings a quirky, humorous sensibility to a sphere that is often treated with deadly

seriousness: our relationship with the environment. The Seattle-based artist literally “models” human relationships with the natural world by creating offbeat objects like the Portable Personal Biosphere, a terrarium that fits over the head so that the wearer carries a little green “environment” around, smelling the earth and experiencing it in miniature. She’s created miniature mountains that you can take for a walk on a leash, like pet poodles, and “Pocket Biospheres” that she offers for “adoption.” Bell has carried out public projects and performances and has exhibited her sculpture, installations, and video internationally, including commissions for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the Edith Russ Site for New Media Art in Odenburg, Germany.

JON SPAYDE: Vaughn, your work is usually about the “outside,” in the sense of the environment. Naturally, you do pieces outside—but also for galleries. Talk about the relationship between your gallery work and your public art. VAUGHN BELL: I do have those two different modes of working, although I feel like most of my work has a common thread of inquiry running through it. I’ve had a series of projects that move out of an idea and into a body of work— like the Personal Biospheres. Those have been in galleries and museums, but the idea behind them started out as an idea for a public piece. It was this sort of goofy idea that I would make a portable biosphere that you’d wear on your head, like a little helmet. I actually wore it around. I made a little mountain on a leash; you can check it out of the gallery and walk it around outside and then bring it back. That’s another kind of movement from inside to outside. But there’s another way in which the pieces are both indoor and outdoor works. They’re site-specific in the sense

that even if they’re for a gallery, they are usually reflecting the specific place where it’s located. Even if the gallery or museum is in a very artificial urban environment, my piece might be imagining a “what-was-here-before?” scenario, recreating an earlier natural environment. So there’s always a process of site research, for me, whether the piece is an outdoor, public piece or in a gallery. You’ve shot videos of yourself wheeling your shopping carts full of dirt and plants around Seattle and other places. Why was it important to go around the city with them? I realized that as soon as I started making objects that had plants growing in them, I had created something that required care. I realized the shopping cart project was a survival thing, an absurd survival thing. It was like I was saying: Let’s test this. How hard is it to keep the plants alive as I go around the city with them? It turns out it’s not easy. And that struggle, which was kind of pathetic and humorous, was really interesting to me.

Photo by Tim Bell.

Photos courtesy the artist.

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PREVIOUS PAGE: Vaughn Bell performs Landscape for Walking (2009), which includes an acrylic walking stick containing soil and plants. It was commissioned by Edith Russ Site for New Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany. RIGHT: A participant in Surrogate Mountain (2010) in Seattle listens to recordings Bell made on Mt. Rainier. BELOW: Bell pushes Personal Lawn (2003) through Boston during her month-long, Portable Environments performance project.

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Vaughn Bell with Village Green (2008), an interactive installation. She explains: “Viewers experience the landscape at eye-level by placing their heads within the terrarium-like structures. The experience is multi-sensory and immersive, with muffled sounds and smells of earth and moss. Viewers find themselves in intimate proximity to soil, plants, and each other, sharing the same air.”

Photo by Tim Bell.

It implied the question of how we encounter larger ecological issues. Dealing with the environment can seem like an insurmountable struggle. Approaching it with a spirit of playful tenacity seemed appropriate to me. All of these works reduce the environment to a scale that’s playful, and also playfully manageable. Yes, they do that, in one sense. But there’s another aspect: the absurdity of our sense of control. You go to an exhibition of bonsai, miniaturized Japanese trees, and think, here’s something natural that’s more or less within an individual’s care or control. But that points to the absurdity of the general human proposition that we can somehow control the environment. Of course we impact everything, but we really don’t have a rational handle on it. It’s still so much bigger than us. I think that paradox is pretty interesting.

How do you get ideas and develop them? Usually I do a lot of research and walking and taking pictures, pictures not necessarily related to specific sites. All of the ideas come out of just being out in the world. You know, I keep this big list of vague ideas, most of which I never pursue! When it’s a specific public commission, a few of which I’ve had the opportunity to do recently, I go to the site—and have no idea. I try to stay in that realm of having no idea for as long as possible. I’m trying not to force it, trying not to jump on the first thing that comes up, which might send me down a path that’s not successful. I do a lot of sketching and taking photographs. Because I work in such diverse media, I usually have a phase in which I’m asking, okay, how am I going to do this? Who am I going to work with? Who can help me figure this out?

What are some of your influences and inspirations? This work owes so much to the generation of land artists. In the ’60s and ’70s, with Robert Smithson and others, there was this gesture of moving out into the landscape. This work is kind of the reverse of that, bringing the landscape back! But another really important influence on my thinking is feminist performance art, art that looks at the activities

of daily life. Mierle Ukeles and the actions of sanitation and maintenance—that’s a huge informer to this work. That framing of performance as an activity that’s kind of ritualized but also calls attention to everyday relationships. Speaking of Ukeles and social practice, you were “embedded” with the Seattle Department of Transportation. I was hired to work there as an artist, but also as a kind of insider, trying to inform the process by which they handled the one-percent-for-the-arts requirement. So it was like an artist-in-residence position. I’m doing another project, one that just started a couple of weeks ago, with Seattle Public Utilities, closer to the heart of what I’m interested in. I’m working in drainage and wastewater, storm water, looking at water quality and integrating artists into the work of Seattle Public Utilities.

BELOW: Since 2004, people have been adopting tiny biospheres from Bell through her ongoing project Pocket Biospheres for Adoption. OPPOSITE: Visitors at a Pocket Biospheres for Adoption site in 2013 in Chicago, where thousands of biopheres were available.

Photo © Ivar Kvaal.

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On a project in Portland last year, I worked with a moth expert from the University of Washington. She took me on some moth identification walks, where we went 50 feet into the woods and saw 30 species of moth. I get all this information, but I don’t know where it’s going. I try to be a kind of sponge during that process. And then I refine.

Photos courtesy the artist.

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Talk more about Seattle as an environment for your work. I moved out here sight unseen, in 2004, with my husband, who went to graduate school at the University of Washington. It’s a great place for someone doing the kind of work I do. Seattle’s a really progressive city and there’s a lot of support for public arts. But there’s also this amazing natural environment. I was coming from a very urban neighborhood, South Boston. I had been making this work that was about the need for contact with living things when you’re in a gritty city. Even though Seattle is a city, it felt so green. And that was a bit of a shock to me. But now I love it that northern Washington is such an ecologically unique and rich space. And there’s attention here to these issues that I care about. There’s agreement, too, with the idea of artists being part of the fabric. But at the same time there are always questions when it comes to public art. How do we fund it? How do we get it out there? And can it be responsive to the times and to the place? I think those questions are even more important here than they would be in a town in which the main issue was just how to get some money into some kind of public art. Here there’s a chance to really be reflective about what we’re doing.

Photos courtesy the artist..

JON SPAYDE

is a frequent contributor to Public Art Review.

ABOVE: Froth Rinse Reflect Send (2013) was a participatory public project. People visiting the Brightwater Environmental Education and Community Center at the Brightwater Wastewater Treatment Plant in Woodinville, Washington, learned about where their soap entered the wastewater stream and took home one of 600 bars of custom-made glycerin soap. LEFT: Each bar of soap contained a hand-made ceramic “stone” imprinted with lines from a poem written for the project by Janet Norman Knox. As participants used their soap, they eventually received the stone, a reminder of their connection to the massive wastewater system. OPPOSITE: At Brightwater, visitors could use stickers to mark where their soap entered the wastewater stream.

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This is a long tradition in Seattle, having artists embedded in the public utility, including some big names. Buster Simpson was a resident at SPU back in the ’90s. There’s a big potential in the project for doing temporary or participatory or performance-based public art, which is not always the norm in a percent-for-art program. We’re going to find ways to do that, ways that are really engaging for people.

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BRISTOL’S

WILD STYLE Powered by visionary curators, innovative local artists, a vibrant music scene—and Banksy—public art in the capital of England’s west country is making a mark BY MELISSA CHEMAM

THE CAPITAL OF ENGLAND’S WEST COUNTRY, Bristol, is a

very visual place. Houses are painted in bright colors and the city center is dominated by the graceful shapes of the sailing ships on the Floating Harbour, which faces the blue Bristol Channel and the Irish Sea. Bristol is also very visual in another sense: For more than three decades it’s been a special hotbed for public art. Sculpture, performance, and street art started blooming in its streets during the bleak years of the 1970s recession and under Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s. With the turn of the century, the economic recovery and the efforts of a talented group of artists and curators propelled the city into one of the world capitals of public art. Right at the center of Bristol, on the Floating Harbour, is Pero’s Bridge, a pedestrian footbridge named in honor of Pero Jones, who came to live in the city in 1784 as the slave of a famous Bristolian merchant. The bridge, designed by Irish artist Eilis O’Connell, opened in 1999 as part of an effort to shed more light on the role of the slave trade in Bristol’s history. It’s one of the many examples of public art that make the city special to this day. Banksy’s 2015 Dismaland was an unauthorized, month-long, popup public art project that brought together 58 artists, including Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps, who created The Shove, a billboard featuring British Prime Minister David Cameron.

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Photo by Kent Wang / flickr / Creative Commons.

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Another is The Black Cloud, an imposing wooden pavilion designed by international artists Heather and Ivan Morison in association with architect Sash Reading, which stood for four months in 2009 in Victoria Park in South Bristol. At one end of Pero’s Bridge, on Narrow Quay, is the Arnolfini Gallery, one of the key places where new reflections on the purpose of public art started in the mid-1990s, thanks to Caroline Collier, its director until 2005, now at the Tate in London. Caroline was a mentor to Claire Doherty, curator and founding director of Situations UK, a group based at the Spike Island Gallery, a short walk away along the River Avon. The Situations group paved the way for a new form of public art in the early 2000s. Talking with Doherty in the Spike Island Café, it’s not hard to see how this dynamic, elegant, charismatic, and open-minded arts professional succeeded in bringing major changes to the slightly outdated world of British public art circa 2000. With the help of the University of the West of England, and thanks to some financing from the Bristol City Council, she set up Situations UK as an independent two-year program whose goal was to think about the role of public art and its social context. Doherty’s main idea was to think through the whole process of creating public artworks “from the studios to situations,” as she told me. Beginning in 2003, she organized

ABOVE: Commissioned by the Bristol Chamber of Commerce, Pero’s Bridge (1999) by Eilis O’Connell was created to shed light on Bristol’s connections to the slave trade. OPPOSITE TOP: Theaster Gates set up Sanctum (2015) within the bombed-out shell of fourteenth-century Temple Church. OPPOSITE BOTTOM: For 24 days last fall, Sanctum hosted performances open to the public 24 hours per day. More than 1,000 performers participated.

ABOVE: Photo by Andrew Skudder / flickr / Creative Commons. OPPOSITE: Photos © Max McClure.

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lecture programs, inviting some of the key figures in the public art sector, such as the French sculptor Daniel Buren. In 2009, Situations received an award and a £30,000 grant. It became an independent charity in 2012 and set up some new principles for public art when Doherty published the booklet The New Rules of Public Art in 2013. Her “Rule no. 01” states that “it doesn’t have to look like public art. The days of bronze heroes and roundabout baubles are numbered. Public art can take any form or mode of encounter—from a floating Arctic island to a boat oven—be prepared to be surprised, delighted, even unnerved.” Rule no. 02: “It’s not forever.” Other rules encourage artists to go for the unplanned, create links inside the community, embrace provocation, and remain open to outside people and ideas. “Our new independence allowed us to become an organization with an artistic vision,” says Doherty. “And that also comes from the fact that Bristol has the perfect size, unlike London, to be able to quickly, as a new actor, contribute to its scene on a large level. We then felt we had a purpose and a role.”

LOOKING FOR RENEWAL Beginning in 2014, Situations UK launched events that quickly brought about a turning point. The Art Weekenders, three-day marathons of artist talks, studio visits, performances, crossgenre installations, and other events across the city, highlighted pieces by Marcus Jefferies and Colin Higginson, among others. Then came 2015, a special year for public art in Bristol. In July, English sculptor and land artist Richard Long, born in Bristol in 1945 and trained at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, was commissioned to develop a temporary public artwork for the Bristol Downs public parklands as part of his solo exhibition, Richard Long: Time and Space, at the Arnolfini Gallery. The artistic year culminated in November 2015, when the brilliant Chicago-born artist Theaster Gates staged his first UK public project in Bristol, as part of the cultural program for Bristol 2015 European Green Capital. Entitled Sanctum, it set up, with the support of Situations, a temporary structure within the shell of the fourteenth-century Temple Church, using discarded materials from various

ABOVE: The Black Cloud (2009), by artists Heather and Ivan Morison and architect Sash Reading, was installed in Victoria Park with the help of cooperative labor, in the Amish communal building tradition. OPPOSITE TOP: A sneak peak at the installation Hollow, by Katie Paterson, which, at press time, was set to debut at the University of Bristol’s Royal Fort Gardens in May. OPPOSITE BOTTOM: At The Kiosk Project, celebrating a forgotten part of central Bristol, Marcus Jefferies and Colin Higginson offered free souvenirs during Art Weekender Bristol and Bath 2015.

Photo courtesy the artists.

places across the city. Gates invited musicians and performers to sustain a continuous offering of sound and spoken words in the structure, 24 hours a day for 24 straight days. Among the performing artists who participated in Sanctum were the Bristol Reggae Orchestra, the Dead Astronauts, William The Conquered, banjo player Béla Fleck, and a gospel choir, as well as local playwright Edson Burton and poet Miles Chambers. The aim was to foster a space for collaboration and new encounters. More than 1,000 performers took part. “Theaster is very generous, and in every artwork he does he brings in other great talents,” says Claire Doherty. “I went to meet him personally in Chicago and I was delighted to discover he knew about Situations and he knew about Bristol, mainly thanks to its fantastic music scene! He is a fan of Massive Attack and Portishead. When he arrived in Bristol, he immediately picked up on its aesthetics.” For Doherty, the value of such a performance doesn’t lie in its duration but in “how it lives on, unlike official statues! Part of the beauty comes from the fact that it’s going away. It is difficult to commission, but it’s what we aim to do: value the experience, attract people, and increase their well-being.”

TOP: Photo courtesy Katie Paterson and Zeller & Moye. BOTTOM: Photo by Richard Broomhall.

A CITY OF DIFFERENT PARTS Bristol is a special place for the arts in the UK because, according to Doherty, “it is a city made of lots of different parts that don’t often get to speak to each other.” For her, one of the roles of public art is to bring about a dialogue among all these parts. Bristol’s diversity has been key to its cultural bloom since the 1980s. That diversity was first reflected in its underground music scene, in which some of the city’s brightest youth started mixing strains of punk rock with reggae and nascent hip-hop. The mix grew popular in the mainly Jamaican communities in Saint Pauls, Knowle West, Barton Hill, and elsewhere. In 1983, a young artist with the pseudonym 3D started painting graffiti in different areas of Bristol, inspired by New York graffitists such as Futura 2000. 3D’s pieces melded wording, can-made art, and figurative decorations. Born Robert Del Naja in 1965, 3D soon became the main artist working with the DJ collective The Wild Bunch. His art enlivened the walls of places such as The Dug Out nightclub, the Special K café, and the Hamilton House community center in Stokes Croft, a street that links the Saint Pauls area with the city center. The movement started to explode when, in July 1985, the Arnolfini organized the first graffiti exhibition in a British gallery, Graffiti Art, with the 20-year-old 3D at the center of events, along with local artists, New Yorkers, and Birmingham-based Goldie. After that, and thanks to the influence of American photographers Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s book Subway Art and Charlie Ahearn’s film Wild Style,

Photo by bettyx1138 / flickr / Creative Commons.

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Photo by laura burns / flickr / Creative Commons.

ABOVE: One of Banksy’s earliest works of wall art, The Mild, Mild West attracts thousands of visitors per month to Hamilton House, a cultural center. OPPOSITE: Two oil trucks in a delicate balance in Big Rig Jig by Mike Ross at Dismaland in 2015. The sculpture debuted at Burning Man in 2007.

graffiti evolved in Bristol as a very special form of street art. Influenced by 3D, well-known artists Nick Walker and Inkie emerged in the late 1980s. “Lots of young artists were linked by then and kept in touch,” says Inkie, aka Tom Bingle, born in 1970. “At the Barton Hill Youth Club, [youth worker] John Nation started to have a whole library of photographs from our murals and some space always available to paint. There were so many connections between us that Bristol rapidly became an epicenter for graffiti.” Also a lyricist and rapper, 3D became a founding member of the band Massive Attack in 1988. Ten years later, also inspired by 3D’s murals, and with the help of John Nation, the man who would become the most renowned street artist in the world appeared in Bristol: Banksy. To this day, Banksy’s 1998 mural The Mild Mild West still adorns the wall of Hamilton House, attracting thousands of visitors every month.

A whole new generation followed, with artists such as Cheo, Cheba, Cosmo Sarson, Angus, and Conor Harrington leaving their mark on the city. And in 2015, Bansky made a spectacular return to his home region by opening a “bemusement park,” baptised Dismaland, in Weston-super-Mare, a few miles from Bristol. Few unauthorized public art projects of such daring have been set up with such success. Bristol’s official public art is thriving, but it’s the celebrated outlaw Banksy who now epitomizes how much the city has to offer in terms of art beyond gallery walls.

Freelance journalist MELISSA CHEMAM has been covering news and culture for 13 years. Born in Paris, she has lived in Prague, Miami, London, Nairobi, and elsewhere. She’s writing a nonfiction book about Bristol.

Looking for Tracking the impact of the 1970s

federal program that employed artists BY LINDA FRYE BURNHAM AND STEVEN DURLAND THERE ARE SO MANY REASONS TO CELEBRATE what the

Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) did for the arts in the 1970s, but it’s difficult because the evidence is practically invisible. CETA was a federal jobs program that, like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) before it, funneled many hundreds of millions of dollars to visual and performing artists. But unlike the WPA, CETA was decentralized, administered from 1974 to 1981 by local city and county agencies all over the country, so the records are scattered and hard to find. And because it was a jobs program, CETA funded positions in community organizations, which produced skills but not many long-lasting artworks. CETA is so invisible it is almost ahistorical. The WPA and other New Deal arts programs of the 1930s left behind a large number of artworks in schools, libraries, train depots, hospitals, community centers, and other public agencies: some 1,400 murals, 50,000 paintings, 90,000 prints, 3,700 sculptures, 975 large dioramas and

CETA

models, 40,000 maps and diagrams, 15,000 lantern slides, 52,000 arts and crafts objects, nearly 500,000 photos, and 850,000 poster reproductions, according to art historian Francis O’Connor. In comparison, CETA left behind relatively few surviving artworks, like the tile murals in the Clark Street subway arcade in New York City, some of the murals created for the Baltimore Mural Program, and a few collections of sculptures, paintings, and other artworks in select cities across the country. More often, however, artists were put to work in public service projects that left no visual record, though they left a mark on their communities. CETA’s direct benefits to artists included not only training and financial support, but also abundant experience working in schools, hospitals, libraries, community centers, even on city buses. Indeed, CETA “helped establish artists working within labor unions, impoverished inner city neighborhoods, prisons, geriatric facilities, and other non-art settings,” explains arts writer Gregory Sholette.

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Photos by James Voshell, courtesy James Voshell, the family of Pontella Mason, and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts.

RIGHT: Pontella Mason and Avon Martin originally painted what was then known as the Wall of Respect between 1976 and 1977 as part of the Beautiful Walls for Baltimore program. ABOVE RIGHT: The mural depicted African-American heroes and sheroes among the clouds. TOP: The mural was restored and reimagined in the early 1990s by Pontella Mason as The Wall of Pride: Africa East to West and was dedicated by former president Jimmy Carter. The mural has since fallen into disrepair and the Baltimore Mural Program is working with Masonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s widow to have it restored.

The Checker Players, top, was designed in 1975 by James Voshell and painted by Voshell and Pontella Mason as part of the Baltimore Mural Program. Voshell based the design on a photo he took of life in the city, above. The Checker Players is no longer in existence as the building on which it was sited was demolished.

Photos by James Voshell, courtesy James Voshell, the family of Pontella Mason, and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts.

The Federal Artist, a film by Emilio Murillo (1979, Blowback Productions), documents the New York Artists Project, in which more than 600 artists were employed in public service through CETA. The program focused on teaching, performance, and other programming specifically aimed at “the poor, the sick, the institutionalized—people for whom art is usually inaccessible.” Among the projects depicted in the film are Johan Sellenraad’s redesign of a city subway station, street tap dancing from Charles Cook and Jane Goldberg, and other projects staged in prisons, preschools, hospitals, and senior citizen centers. Many CETA artists went on to collaborate with their own communities later in their careers. “There is scarcely a U.S. community artist who was around in the mid-1970s who did not either hold a CETA job or work directly with someone who did,” writes arts administrator Arlene Goldbard. Even more interesting, CETA provided training for thousands of people not only in art-making, but also in administration and technical support to the arts. CETA coincided with the artist-run “alternative arts organization” movement of the 1970s, and many of those organizations hired their first paid staff with CETA money. Such undertakings were often small but ambitious, and many are still in existence today.

TOP: Photo courtesy Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. MIDDLE and BOTTOM: Photos courtesy Regional Arts & Culture Council.

William Peter Sildar sculpted Queue VI (1975) with funding from CETA. It is housed at the Seattle Center Armory.

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The Painted Bride Art Center, for instance, began in Philadelphia in 1969 as a cooperative gallery of painters. It was located in a former bridal salon on South Street, between the affluent Society Hill section and the struggling Black community. But it wasn’t until 1977 that the Bride was able, with the award of a CETA contract, to hire its first paid staff, with six employees taking responsibility for administration, theater management, promotion, fundraising, and maintenance. Today the Painted Bride is still going strong and bills itself as “the primary venue for the emerging, independent visual and performing arts in the greater Philadelphia region.” Jack Becker, director of Forecast Public Art in St. Paul (which publishes Public Art Review), credits CETA funding for the foundation of Forecast. Becker was hired as a CETA artist in 1977 by the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce and the Minneapolis Arts Commission (MAC). Melisande Charles, director of MAC, “got CETA money for an artists’ jobs program,” Becker told MN Artists in 2007, “and she hired me to be the ‘gallery director.’ But I didn’t have a gallery. I had a desk and a phone at City Hall. We paid artists—they spent half-time in the studio, and half-time in the community. There were poets on the bus, artists in day-care centers, art in storefronts.” After CETA funding ended, some of those artists decided to continue working together and they started the nonprofit organization that became Forecast. Becker’s is only one of many similar stories of CETA spawning new organizations. CETA also ignited unique partnerships between municipal agencies and nonprofit organizations. When CETA money passed from the federal government to local city agencies and commissions, they were able to contract with local organizations. In Baltimore, for instance, CETA funded a project through the city’s Metropolitan Manpower Consortium and the Mayor’s Office of Manpower Resources, organizations that contracted with the Baltimore Theatre Project to hire artists to gather Baltimore’s oral history and present it onstage. Artists associated with the Theatre Project reported developing a “particularly successful working relationship with its prime sponsor, who initiated and encouraged several of their collaborative projects,” according to one CETA assessment. The Baltimore Theatre Project is alive and well today, with ongoing, sustaining support from the Mayor’s Office and the City Council. While most CETA records are scattered in archives across the country, there does exist a report evaluating CETA, prepared in 1981 for the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) by Morgan Management Systems, Inc., in Columbia, Maryland. “The CETA Arts and Humanities Experience” created detailed case studies on 15 CETA projects. (These were edited and published online as a set of e-books in 2011 by Steven Durland and me, and are available from the Amazon Kindle Store.)

CETA provided funding to Bruce West to create BW1 (1978). It is now part of the City of Portland Public Art Collection.

Evelyn Franz created Triad with funding from CETA in 1980. The sculpture was remade in 2003. Installed in Laurelhurst Park, it is part of the City of Portland Public Art Collection.

included economic and cultural development, an increasing understanding of culture as industry, mutual respect among participants, and the transfer of cultural skills to other occupational areas. At its height, the CETA federal jobs training program funneled some $200 million a year ($800 million a year in today’s dollars) into the pockets of individual artists, arts organizations, and their community partners. In 1981, the year the study made that financial estimate, the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts was just under $159 million; in 2016 the NEA budget is just under $149 million. In some ways, CETA was the largest government arts funding program in history—and its legacy is even bigger.

and STEVEN DURLAND are the editors and publishers of CETA and the Arts, a two-volume e-book available from the Amazon Kindle Store. Burnham and Durland were the editors of High Performance magazine, the executive officers of the 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica, California, and the founders of Art in the Public Interest and the Community Arts Network. Their latest project is the Woodland Banners Poetry Walk on their own property in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. LINDA FRYE BURNHAM

Painter/designer Alan Samalin, painter Johann Sellenraad, and ceramic artist Joe Stallone created this ceramic mural (1980) in New York City’s Clark Street subway station in Brooklyn Heights.

Photo courtesy Alan Samalin.

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This study cites the fact that CETA was not specifically designed to support the arts. It was a jobs program, designed to provide training for the unemployed and underemployed. It took an arts administrator, John Kreidler, to discover in 1974 a way to channel some of CETA’s millions to the arts. “Kreidler worked with the Neighborhood Arts Program [San Francisco] for five months, and played a key advocacy role for the CETA funding of artists’ positions within NAP and in other agencies in the city,” the study explains. “He consequently authored proposals for funding such positions, and the San Francisco CETA prime sponsor, impressed with the organization and intent of the proposal, soon gave its formal approval for funding.” Kreidler’s initiative spread quickly across the arts community, and arts organizations learned how to decipher CETA and other government programs, obtain grants, administer them, and reap their benefits. The skills acquired during this process have contributed to the stability of many key artists’ organizations. CETA’s most important impact, according to the DOL study, was on existing cultural programming across the U.S. The program helped to solidify existing links between various local organizations and political departments like parks and recreation, housing authorities, and so on, while also spreading the adoption of proven formulas like the Artists in Schools programs. Other positive impacts

ON LOCATION Global Reports

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The March of the Art Shanties On a frozen Minnesota lake, strange and wonderful structures initiate visitors into the secrets of winter BY MH ROWE WITH THE DOOR OF THE SMALL SHANTY CLOSED,

the only light comes from under your boots: the ghostly blue-white of ice 16 inches thick. The water below that layer of ice is another 15 or so feet deep. Whatever sunlight diffuses through the surrounding water and ice gives the shanty a glow that is just bright enough to illuminate eight piano wires suspended from ceiling to floor at the center of the hexagonal hut. It’s like standing in the dark on the surface of a faintly glowing breath mint—except there are sharp cracks and pops and quick, high-pitched pulses playing on an overhead speaker, which is hooked to a hydrophone plunged into a hole in the ice just beyond the shanty’s thin walls. You can pluck the piano wires, which resonate in bass tones that reverberate through the entire structure. If a car drives by on the ice, as indeed happens, the speaker registers deep, groaning pops

while someone plays the wires with a violin bow, which snaps in half later that day due to the cold. “You are standing inside a musical instrument right now,” Jonathan Loyche tells guests gathered in a circle around the resonating wires. Jonathan and his wife, Rebecca, erected their Under the Lake / Sonic Shanty as a way to “fish for sounds,” Jonathan says. Their musical instrument imagines what it might be like to dwell underwater, immersed in the ambient transmissions of water, ice, wind, and snow. A GALLERY ON ICE

The Loyches’ Sonic Shanty is one of 19 that make up the 2016 Art Shanty Projects’ On-Ice Program on White Bear Lake, about 20 miles northeast of Minneapolis. Every weekend in February,

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Photo courtesy Art Shanty Projects.

Every weekend in February, visitors walk across the ice of White Bear Lake to experience the art shanties, performances, and other fantastical delights.

visitors are free to march out onto the ice—overcoming whatever fears they might have—and, as Monica Sheets, chair of the Art Shanty Projects’ board of directors, explains, “explore art in a relatively unregulated public space.” Perish the thought that the surface of a frozen lake in Minnesota is a strange locale for an art show. For where there’s Minnesota, there’s winter, and for some people winter in Minnesota means ice fishing in a little shed on a frozen lake. Inside, you keep a space heater or stove to defend yourself from the chill. From there, it’s really only a hop, a skip, and a jump to the ice shanty as art installation. Started in 2004, the Art Shanty Project has grown into one of the region’s most curious and intriguing public art spectacles. Each shanty is a winterized cabinet of curiosities, jury-selected to showcase what both professional and

amateur artists can do with a $1,500 stipend to bring their lake-top vision to life. From the loud music and never-ending dance party of the Dance Shanty to the pipe-fitting demonstrations of the Boiler Room Shanty and the Minnesota-native teas available in the Botanical ShanTea, the art shanties represent a “uniquely Minnesotan festival” indeed, as a map provided to visitors on the ice says. In 2014, 11,350 people visited the shanty village on White Bear Lake. After taking a break in 2015 to become a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the festival is back in force. Organizers emphasize that the most important aspect of the project is to support their artists. This year’s stipend is a 30 percent increase over 2014. Provided the shanties continue to secure funding from organizations like ArtPlace America, Monica Sheets says, stipends will increase again

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Six artists created the Dance Shanty, where visitors could listen to loud music from many eras and dance with a crew encouraging all forms of movement.

Willing participants asked a question, then jumped on the Ouijatotter Shanty—created by artists Paul Owen, Jeff Berg, and Derek Ahlberg—to solicit an answer.

ON LOCATION SHANTIES AND OTHER DEVICES

While project organizers emphasize support for artists, the artists themselves tend to emphasize their audience. At the Ouijatotter Shanty, there’s a little shanty to warm up in, but the real attraction is outside, where Paul Owen, Jeff Berg, and Derek Ahlberg have constructed a set of three connected teeter-totters. As visitors teeter up and down, they turn driveshafts connected to belts and bicycle wheels that, in turn, spin a large plate marked with alternating YESes and NOs. If you scrawl a question on a chalkboard attached to the nearby shanty, the Ouijatotter will give you your answer in true Rube Goldberg fashion. But people tend to use the teeter-totters without worrying about answers. According to Randy Lewandowski, who helps operate the Ouijatotter, audience response is

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next year. Moreover, keeping the event to around 20 shanties will maintain the program’s intimate feel. Still, it’s hard to avoid the thought that simply hosting an art show on a windswept, icebound lake is the real point of the project. As Sheets says, “Being on the ice facilitates unusual interactions” between artist and audience. It’s not quite an art gallery and not quite a carnival, so people have neither the usual quiet distance from an artist’s work nor the anonymous ease of paying for a ride and getting off when it’s over. Plus, it’s damn cold. Visitors and artists alike have to endure a minor ordeal of wind and snow just to arrive at the door of each exhibit. Meaning that the Art Shanty Projects is interactive art primed for the hardy and the sporting. Here there is no such thing as a winter that can’t be relished with the help of eccentric contraptions.

Photos courtesy Art Shanty Projects.

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The structures created for the 2016 Art Shanty Projects resemble ice fishing houses that dot Minnesota lakes in winter.

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76 ON LOCATION An aerial view of the art shanties in early February 2016. Due to unusually warm weather, the shanties were moved to land for the second half of the month.

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The draw of such ingenious contraptions is obvious. But if organizers focus on artists and artists focus on their audience, it’s reasonable to wonder who fixates on the art itself. There should be something besides diversion and fun— although those are, admittedly, no small things. It is places like the Loyches’ Sonic Shanty—with its powerful pull on the senses—that most readily answer such questions. Or take Julie Benda, Kelsey Bosch, and Kathryn Miller’s Sound + Vision Shanty, where a hole in the ice displays the greenish, frigid half-world of the lake bottom while a hydrophone pipes in the noise of shifting ice. Though it’s tempting to think that such shanties create an unearthly experience for visitors, they’re also deliberately and oddly prosaic. It’s just ice, water, and earthy noise. Both shanties recall composer John Luther Adams’s installation The Place You Go to Listen, in which seismic, meteorological, and geomagnetic data are fed through a computer program that translates them into sound and light. It turns out that there is an art to being on the ice, and it requires unaccustomed forms of attention and a willingness to feel out of place. The most challenging shanties show us that ice is an alien world of finely tuned temperatures and pressures. To get a sense for its intricacy, you need antennae only an art shanty can give you. lives and writes in Minneapolis. His fiction has appeared in Black Warrior Review and Columbia Journal (online), among other places. He has also written for Utne Reader, Popular Mechanics, The Awl, and MinnPost. Find him online at annotations.tumblr.com. MH ROWE

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Photo courtesy Art Shanty Projects.

PLAYING THE ICE

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the most important thing. And, he says, “I’m hearing a lot of laughter.” The Matoska Tonka Pedal Bear is making its second Art Shanty appearance. Matoska Tonka means “big white bear,” and you can see why immediately: Built on a Volkswagen chassis, it’s 12 feet high and 20 feet long. Visitors sit inside and pedal as a group while a pilot at the front steers the giant creature on a route that weaves between shanties. There’s also a series of strings and weights inside. If you pull in the right way, you can move the bear’s head, open and close its mouth, and wiggle its tail. It’s a machine for recalling the mythic stories of White Bear Lake, a place rich with Dakota history.

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In Creational Trails, Sara Daleiden’s role as artist involves curating and crafting conversations BY JACQUELINE WHITE

and what most likely comes observes Evelyn Patricia Terry, who was named an artist of to mind is the dramatic visual spectacle of the Santiago the year by the Milwaukee Arts Board in 2014. Instead, Terry Calatrava addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum set on the says, Daleiden “produces community.” shore of Lake Michigan. The architectural landmark features winglike structures that extend twice daily as if to take flight BICOASTAL EXPERIENCE across the lake. But no matter how innovative a vision this Officially, Daleiden is a consultant to the Creative Placekinetic architectural sculpture offers, it’s still tied to a tradi- making Committee of the Greater Milwaukee Committee (GMC), an organization of top Milwaukee leaders from the tional aesthetic based on appreciating an object. Enter artist Sara Daleiden, who grew up in nearby for- and nonprofit sectors that received a two-year $724,500 creative placemaking grant Waukesha and now divides from the Kresge Foundation her time between Milwaukee in 2014, as well as a $350,000 and Los Angeles. A lecturer grant from ArtPlace America in public practice at Otis “As an artist, the way I use in 2013. The focus of the College of Art and Design in language, the way I understand funding is on “Creational Los Angeles, she is helping Trails” that seek to reimagine lead Milwaukee in embracing what’s possible, influences the how Milwaukeeans move a more expansive view of conversation.” —Sara Daleiden through their city. public art. Given that Milwaukee sits “She’s moving away from on the “Third Coast” of the public art as producing objects,” THINK “ART” AND “MILWAUKEE”

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Milwaukee Moves

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ON LOCATION ABOVE: Local artists activate the Beerline Recreational Trail Extension, which connects the Riverwest neighborhood near the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee with the Harambee neighborhood, for the ARTery. OPPOSITE: Sara Daleiden (second from left) with Beerline Trail Neighborhood Development Project collaborators Mikal Floyd-Pruitt, Ellie Jackson, and Bridney Chappel at Company Brewing in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood.

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TRAIL MAKING THROUGH A DIVIDED CITY

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One “trail” reinvigorated by the GMC efforts is downtown Milwaukee’s main drag, Wisconsin Avenue. On selected summer nights, NEWaukee Night Markets turn a parking lot into a participatory art-making mecca complete with live music and food trucks. In one project, Terry helped Milwaukeeans decorate tree stumps with mosaics made from such objects as buttons, seashells, and Scrabble tiles. The resulting “LUV Downtown StreetSeats” then graced bus stops on Wisconsin Avenue, offering city dwellers a visual treat, as well as a place to rest. A second effort extends and converts the Beerline Trail, a rail corridor once used by the Blatz, Pabst, and Schlitz breweries, into a walking/biking path and community gathering place. The Beerline Trail connects the Riverwest neighborhood near the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee, one of the most racially diverse in the city, with the Harambee neighborhood, which is predominately African-American. But to create a linear park in Milwaukee that invites residents to travel between neighborhoods involves more than just laying down asphalt and landscaping green space. In a city once dubbed the “Selma of the North” with its own equivalent of the iconic Edmund Pettus Bridge, there’s persistent history to confront: In the 1960s, when Milwaukee marchers seeking an open housing ordinance attempted to cross the Sixteenth Street Viaduct from the redlined central city to the predominantly Polish South Side, they were met by hostile, violent crowds. Although federal law and Milwaukee ordinance now officially prohibit discrimination in housing, the city topped Salon’s 2011 list of the 10 most segregated urban areas in America.

Potluck at the Community Table on the Beerline Recreational Trail Extension in Milwaukee’s Harambee neighborhood.

An Artist’s Conversations Relating with people is an important part of the life of a socially engaged artist. Sara Daleiden of MKE<->LAX started to keep a list of who she had talked to in Milwaukee in one week. By Wednesday, she had engaged with… an affordable-housing real estate developer a neighborhood development corporation director a special assistant to the mayor a Department of Public Works traffic engineer a tow truck driver a spoken word performer a CEO nonprofit president [clarifying with Sara] a coworking-space founder a stand-up comic a public school system administrator a dean of a university’s school of public health a trail landscape designer a neighborhood church pastor a restorative justice facilitator a local food caterer an urban beekeeper a poetry bookstore owner a foundation program officer a teenage journalist Excerpted from a presentation Sara Daleiden gave at the Americans for the Arts 2015 Public Art Network Pre-Conference along with artist Lauren Woods.

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Great Lakes, one can say Daleiden brings bicoastal experience to this effort. She developed an abiding appreciation for the pedestrian experience as a child, walking to school in what was then small-town Waukesha (now consumed by Milwaukee-area sprawl)—an appreciation she subsequently brought to her post as a senior ranger with the LA Urban Rangers, an artist-inspired effort (complete with campfire talks!) she co-founded to encourage Los Angelenos to creatively engage with and hike through their city. Though she saw Milwaukee as the artistic mecca of her childhood, Daleiden felt that in order to make a living as an independent artist, she needed to stay in Los Angeles after she earned a master’s degree in public art studies at the University of Southern California. Still, her excitement about the Milwaukee art scene, along with a deep commitment to artists there, eventually led her to set up an artist residency exchange program, MKE<->LAX, and to divide her time between the two cities whose airport codes lend their names to the program.

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ON LOCATION TOP: Local artists Ina Onilu Drum and Dance Ensemble perform for the first season of the ARTery in the Harambee neighborhood. BOTTOM: Neighborhood artist Vedale Hill takes a shot with his Hoop Dreams art installation on the Beerline Recreational Trail Extension. The project was a collaboration with other local artists Mikal Floyd-Pruitt of I Am Milwaukee and Fondé Bridges of Healthy Words.

ON LOCATION “CURATING” CONVERSATION

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Against that backdrop, investing in new trails in Milwaukee can be loaded—especially when they connect to areas like Harambee, where, Daleiden observes, “there’s been disinvestment.” She describes her initial role in the Beerline Trail project as “curating” a conversation, a task that involved something that doesn’t happen very often in the city— convening an intergenerational mixed-race group of neighborhood leaders. This two-day gathering of 60 residents became an opportunity, she says, for participants to “revisit what it means to participate in a community process—how people feel their voice.” She includes this conversation in her placemaking work because art, she contends, is “about amplifying voice.” In this case, “creating a platform where voices are very audible to government staff.” The obvious question is: How can people who live in proximity to a new park have a say in what that park will look like? But the conversation did not confine itself to explicitly aesthetic concerns. The most trenchant issue raised was basic safety. Although every person was able to say they cared about having healthy green spaces where people could gather, Daleiden says that statement would then be linked to a concern about safety. In particular, Daleiden, who is white, says African Americans were able to speak to their

Good Questions According to Sara Daleiden, the following questions can guide conversations between artists and the neighbors they engage: • What does active listening feel like to you? • How do you want to express your understanding of our discussion? • How can I support you in caring for yourself? • What helps you find time to relate with your neighbors? • Where do you spend quality time in the neighborhood? • What work do you perform that I can learn to appreciate? • What cultures do you want to represent in our relationship? • How can we offer feedback to each other rhythmically? • What power do you have to produce change here? • How can we grow the existing efforts of other neighborhood leaders? • What is a difference between us that you enjoy? • What would a respectful exchange between us look like to you? • How can we take turns facilitating our experience together?

COUNCIL BLUFFS, IOWA WHERE ART LIVES

Mark di Suvero, Big Mo

Meet the latest addition to the Iowa West Public Art collection. Big Mo is a 75-foot tall, spacetime orange sculpture designed by Mark di Suvero. It’s located along the bank of the Missouri River on the Iowa side of the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge that connects Council Bluffs to Omaha. Come see it for yourself in conjunction with Loessfest, a free, week-long celebration of our community beginning May 28. FREE CELL PHONE TOURS (712) 212-9088

iowawestpublicart.org

ON LOCATION concerns that they might face harassment in public spaces in Milwaukee. The conversation was necessary, Daleiden says, because “even if the city made a new public park investment, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to get used.” The question, she adds, then becomes, “What else do we need to be building at the same time that we’re building the park?” Participants raised economic issues like how to attract business development to employ people who live near the park. PERFORMANCE ART FOR CEOS

For Daleiden, who finds herself working closely with the CEOs of a city recently ranked (after Detroit) as the second poorest in the nation, there is a shared understanding that any efforts to strengthen the cultural base of the city need to be closely tied to buttressing its economic vitality. Once an industrial powerhouse, the city known for beer, brats, and the Brewers was hit hard by the collapse of heavy industry. Rebranded a “legacy city,” Milwaukee is among a handful of municipalities that now has priority access to federal funds for advanced manufacturing. But to successfully make that transition, attracting and maintaining talent will be key. As Daleiden points out, “We have major corporations like Harley-Davidson and Miller Brewing that struggle to bring people in and keep them.” And the kind of people needed to revitalize the city can’t be business-as-usual folks. They will need to be able to innovate—to think, in other words, like artists. To make the case that a vibrant culture will be key in revitalizing the city, Daleiden has learned to speak to Milwaukee CEOs in language they understand, such as “market outcomes—that we’ll be able to affect the tax base in the neighborhood or the city, or increase the number of jobs.” To that end, identifying local creative entrepreneurs and businesses has also been persuasive. Although her official role with GMC may be public art consultant, Daleiden sees her work more along the lines of performance: “I get compensated for my body to literally be present in all kinds of settings, such as meetings,” she explains. “As an artist, the way I use language, the way I understand what’s possible, influences the conversation.” To shape public dialogue, artists have traditionally used teaching as a vehicle. But Daleiden sees “crafting” the kinds of conversations she’s led in Milwaukee as how she contributes artistically. This involves fundamentally rethinking what the role of the artist is. “We need really expansive definitions,” Daleiden contends, “of what artists can do.”

is a Minneapolis writer who grew up in suburban Milwaukee. JACQUELINE WHITE

Metro congratulates artists for contributions to the award-winning Through the Eyes of Artists poster series. Metro Neighborhood Poster Series (4 of 38 total) Artist posters convey the distinctive character and vitality of neighborhoods and destinations served by the Metro network and are displayed throughout the bus fleet and rail system. A;rming that art can make the transit experience more inviting and meaningful for public life, Metro commissions artists for a wide array of projects throughout Los Angeles County. To >nd out more or to add your name to our database for new art opportunities, call 213.922.4art or visit metro.net/art.

16-1885jp ÂŠ2016 lacmta

Left to right, top to bottom: Iris Yirei Hu, Brooks Salzwedel, Kajsa Sjodin, Emi Motokawa

BOOKS Publications and Reviews

Inspirational Landscapes A collection of landscape architecture projects reveals connections to public art BY JEN KRAVA

MIDDLE RIGHT: Photo by Yusuke Komatsu. BOTTOM: Photo by Jordi Surroca.

public art and landscape architecture are the same: to create healthy, livable communities that both enhance our experience with our surroundings and evoke a sense of meaning and identity within the public domain. Moreover, these two multidisciplinary professions use landscape as a medium and site context as an important informant. In 30:30 Landscape Architecture, Meaghan Kombol walks us through 60 artfully crafted

of all sorts to understand how experience of a place and quality of life are enhanced and influenced by stimulating, contextually harmonious means. Filled with beautiful photographs, hand drawings, and graphics, 30:30 is a snapshot into both the current conditions and the future possibilities of art and design in the public domain. JEN KRAVA is a community services associ-

ate at Forecast Public Art, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, and an artist whose work investigates the body’s place within the fields of public art and landscape architecture.

MIDDLE RIGHT: Each circle is used as a parking bay in Eiki Danzuka’s motorcycle and moped parking garage (2013) in the southern part of Tokyo, Japan. BOTTOM: The aim of Enric Batlle’s restoration project was to integrate Garraf Waste Landfill into the Garraf Natural Park in Bergues, Spain.

85 BOOKS

THE UNDERLYING INTENTIONS and goals of

landscape architecture projects, many of which embrace the fundamental motives of both public art and landscape architecture. Thirty projects come from internationally distinguished landscape architects, and 30 more from the best of the next generation of practitioners (chosen by the former). The projects span the globe, covering more than 20 countries, and offer insight into the design process, influences, and inspiration of the landscape architects. Highlights include Toru Mitani’s poetic interpretation of the landscape and ability to design opportunities for chance; Chloe Humphreys’s watercolor paintings, which use minimal color and focus on shading and shadow to relay user site experiences; Martha Schwartz’s conceptual approach to site through color and materiality; Claude Cormier’s ability to challenge perceptions of landscape and nature using artificial objects; Walter Hood’s artistic interventions that incorporate historical narrative to inflect meaning and identity in public space; Sacha Coles’s temporary interruptions in public spaces to encourage users to interact with the spaces and one another; Martin Knuijt’s extended infusion of history, modern materials, and sensory experience; and Kongjian Yu’s quick, colorful hand sketches that help us understand spatial formation and user intentions. 30:30 Landscape Architecture is a resource for landscape architects, public artists, designers, planners, urbanistas, and creators

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

30:30 Landscape Architecture Meaghan Kombol London: Phaidon, 2015, phaidon.com

BOOKS

Dancing Places into Being A poetic urbanist from Australia lays out a placemaking vision steeped in historical consciousness, storytelling—and choreography. BY ROSLYE ULTAN

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Places Made After Their Stories: Design and the Art of Choreotopography Paul Carter Perth: University of Western Australia, 2015

86 BOOKS AUSTRALIAN URBAN DESIGNER, artist, and

theorist Paul Carter’s latest book embodies his progressive, collaborative, and creative approach to research and design, an approach aimed at coming to terms with the diversity in contemporary culture and the deep history of places. Carter, professor of design (urbanism) in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University in Melbourne, also directs the Material Thinking design studio (founded in 2007) in that city, where he lives and works.

In this complex, commanding, and eloquently poetic book, he proposes that readers join in the dance of defining and exploring a new interdisciplinary field of study, choreotopography—a fusion of choreography and topography, of dance, drama, storytelling, and the sense of place. Carter has developed the concept as a way to theorize and encourage spontaneous, free-flowing interactions between groups of people and the designed environment in which they move. In Places Made After Their Stories, Carter draws on ideas developed in his Material Thinking studio and in his 2005 book of that name, speculating about what constitutes contemporary public spaces and how they can be revisioned. Key to his thinking are the power of collaboration and the synergies that result from the interaction of artists, city planners, material factors (including the physical specifics of the site), and nonmaterial ones (individual and collective histories and spiritual traditions), along with the economic and political issues involved. In his interdisciplinary research method, he recommends a form of nonlinear thought that allows creative design systems to be open-ended spiritually and ethically, embodying a freedom both innovative and evolving. Carter asserts that it is essential that the design process include research into the multilayered histories of places and integrate these findings with contemporary stories and poetic concepts to create vital, “choreographed” places. Carter’s account of this type of engaged placemaking unfolds in seven sections, each divided into multiple chapters whose titles sug-

ART IN THE MAKING

gest some of the cardinal points of his vision: they include “Designer as Dramaturg,” “The Strategy of Ambience,” “Bicultural Senses of Place,” and “Interweaving Bodies into Place.” The text is illuminated by 38 beautiful drawings and prints from the Material Thinking studio. The reader is escorted through accounts of several projects in which Carter took part. One is the Red Ways: Alice Springs Central Business District Revitalization project, in which Aboriginal traditions and white settler histories, charged with emotional meaning, become integral elements in the creation of a public space for meeting and reconciliation between the two communities. Another artwork Carter explores is Golden Grove, installed as part of the redesign of a public area on the University of Sydney’s Darlington campus. Ground patterning, dispersed lighting, and stenciled poetry make up a complex work that weaves Greek mythology, ritual acts of renewal, and folk stories into a choreotopographic dance of light and movement. Golden Grove, he writes, expresses the qualities of a quintessential meeting place, keeping alive “the prospect of unimaginable futures and the inheritance of vanquished visions.” In Golden Grove, as in this book as a whole, Carter fulfills his mission to fuse history, tradition, poetry, and storytelling into a spatially sublime experience. ROSLYE ULTAN, an art historian and visual

culture specialist, teaches at the University of Minnesota in the Master of Liberal Studies program.

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A new publication from ORO Editions Public Art / Public Space chronicles the work of Barbara Grygutis, a pioneering public artist whose large-scale sculptural environments enhance the built environment, enable civic interaction, and reveal unspoken relationships. “To journey into the public sculptural environments of Barbara Grygutis is to awaken to an experience of joy, wonder, and beauty. These are living spaces designed to nurture the land and the soul.” —Linda Bolton, University of Iowa Public Art / Public Space is published by ORO Editions, an international publishing house based out of San Francisco, with offices in Shenzhen, is dedicated to creating world-class bespoke architecture, art, and design books that celebrate creativity and a unique design spirit.

Purchase the book online from

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New York, Buenos Aires, and Singapore. ORO

BOOKS

A Gallery in the Air This definitive guide to the art on New York City’s High Line shows how the walkway is challenging traditional notions of public art BY JULIA BUNTAINE

BOOKS

WINDING JUST ABOVE STREET LEVEL in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, the High Line is a former elevated-railway route converted into a pedestrian walkway that provides New Yorkers and tourists alike with a charmfilled directional experience. But the High Line is not just a walkway; it’s also the largest pedestal for art in the world, offering installation sculptures, performances, and film screenings all along its 21-block span. High Art: Public Art on the High Line presents us with a contextualized history of the public art that has been on display since the High Line’s art program began in 2009. Showcasing a variety of programming and rotating exhibitions, the book offers plenty of reasons for newcomers or frequent visitors to travel to the west end of Manhattan and take in the latest of what contemporary artists have to offer. The four sections of the book—Commissions, Billboard, Channels, and Performances—portray the breadth of the High Line’s art program and showcase how public art is being redefined thanks to the unique plat-

forms the High Line provides. With its constantly rotating exhibitions, the 21-block outdoor space functions like an indoor gallery, breaking with the tradition of public artworks as permanent commissions. A case in point is the always-changing Billboard program, in which major artists use a 25by 75-foot billboard adjacent to the walkway as a canvas. Maurizio Cattelan, John Baldessari, and Louise Lawler are among those who have taken over and transformed the huge rectangle. In the thoroughness of its cataloging and the quality of discussion its contributors provide, the book presents unequivocal answers to questions about public art’s importance and purpose. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the current state of public art. JULIA BUNTAINE is a visual artist, writer,

critic, and curator. Buntaine is the founder of SciArt Center and SciArt in America. Her writing appears in SciArt in America and Bio Art: Altered Realities. She currently lives in New York City.

Carol Bove’s Celeste (2013) was part of Caterpillar, a show organized by High Line art curator and director Cecilia Alemani.

Photo by Steven Severinghaus.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

High Art: Public Art on the High Line Cecilia Alemani New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2015

DONALD BAECHLER Walking Figure 2014, Aluminum 30 ' h x 23 ' w x 3.5 ' d Gabreski Airport, Westhampton, New York Courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York Photo by Brian Buckley

DIGITAL STUDIO / CASTING / FABRICATION / PROJECT MANAGEMENT / INSTALLATION bollingeratelier.com

BOOKS

Monumental Problems A public-art historian argues that “victim memorials” obscure the causes and contexts of our national ills BY DAVID SCHIMKE PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 Harriet F. Senie New York: Oxford University Press, 2016

BOOKS

DESIGNED BY ARCHITECT Maya Ying Lin in 1981, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) on the National Mall is, according to author Harriet F. Senie, the “most visited and copied memorial in American history.” At first blush, this seems a positive phenomenon, if only because the tapered wall’s uncomplicated design contrasts so starkly with many of the hulking, theatrical war monuments that predate it. The 140 polished black granite panels, inscribed with the names of more than 58,000 fallen or missing soldiers, create a meditative experience that is reflective in a special sense: the mirrorlike surfaces superimpose images of the monument’s visitors on the names of the fallen. Unfortunately, writes City College of New York art historian Senie in her provocative, scrupulously researched book, Memorials to Shattered Myths, the VVM “evokes a giant tombstone, thus conflating the function of cemeteries with the purpose of memorials, focusing on the private losses of individuals while excluding any reference to the larger national significance of [a] traumatic war.” This consciously apolitical approach, concludes Senie, cofounder of Public Art Dialogue, has become the new status quo,

“which is an abdication of professional responsibility of the most egregious kind, obviating any possibility of approaching an accurate history or a usable past.” To make her case, Senie traces the fascinating origins and quasi-religious undertones of the monuments constructed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1994, the shooting rampage at Columbine High School in 1999, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In each case, the violent events’ complex causalities—not to mention their perpetrators—are ultimately ignored. Instead, the goal is to memorialize a tragic moment in time, and then mine that tragedy for heroism and healing, which Senie worries will encourage citizens to conflate victimhood with martyrdom and avoid complex conversations about causes (U.S. foreign policy, rural rage) and preventive measures (mental health care, gun control). This trend, the author believes, is both shortsighted and decidedly un-American. After all, she writes, the “foundation of democracy…rests on the premise of an informed citizenry, not an emotionally wounded one.” Independent journalist DAVID SCHIMKE lives and writes in Minneapolis.

Responder

BLESSING HANCOCK 31’ L x 10’ W x 15’ H Coming Spring 2018

Stainless Steel, Programmed LED Lighting Joint Communication Center City of Charlotte

CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA

BOOKS HUNGARIAN CUBES: Subversive Ornaments in Socialism Katharina Roters Zürich: Park Books, 2014

Launched in 2012, The New School’s Vera List Center Prize for Arts and Politics honors exemplary work by artists in the field of social practice. This accompanying Field Guide offers a wealth of information on current scholarship in the field. About a third of the text is dedicated to the prize’s first winner, Theaster Gates, while the rest supplies photographs, recent projects, and conversations with artists throughout the world. A thorough and useful handbook.

This volume chronicles how Hungarians uprooted the uniformity of standardized housing, which flourished in the postwar communist era, by painting abstract ornamentation on the facades of their homes. While many of these cubed homes—or Magyar Kocka—are currently being demolished or refurbished, artist Katharina Roters’s camera preserves a rich history of quiet opposition and reminds us of the power of paint.

URBAN ART LEGENDS KET London: LOM ART, an imprint of Michael O’Mara, 2015, and Chicago: Trafalgar Square, 2016 Urban Art Legends studies 38 influential personalities—from early giants like Tracy 168, Blade, and Futura to contemporary disrupters like Os Gêmeos, Shepard Fairey, and Banksy—as seen through the eyes of acclaimed scholar and graffiti artist KET. Large, colorful images and brief, accessible text paint a picture of the evolution of street art from early low-stakes tagging to the nuanced, socially conscious movement it has become today.

For the past 30 years, French artist OX has used signs and billboards as canvases, creating shortlived works that linger solely via photographic documentation. A comprehensive monograph, OX: Public Posters tracks his prolific career from 2000 to 2014 in French, German, and English. While a brief introduction and interview with the artist offer insight into his practice, it is primarily through the images themselves that one can really get to know his work.

SKULPTUR: Contemporary Sculpture from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden Royal British Society of Sculptors, ed. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2015 A recent exhibition of contemporary Nordic sculpture, skulptur presented a broad spectrum of Scandinavian sculptural practice that transcends tradition. Performance, sound, and video installations as well as object-based works created an eclectic overview of current Nordic trends. This elegant catalog’s colorful, full-page photographs are enhanced by essays about sculpture from the five countries that made up the exhibition. Artists, both established and emerging, include Elmgreen & Dragset, Sigurður Guðjónsson, and Michael Johansson.

History repeats itself due to our short memories. Artist and activist Ruth Sergel strives to change this by using art to preserve the lessons of past tragedies and strengthen our collective memory. In her book See You in the Streets, she writes about Manhattan’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, one of history’s deadliest workplace tragedies, and the participatory public artwork she organized in response. Sergel’s story is not only a history lesson but also a lively account of the trials and tribulations of social art practice, one that provides unique insight into the process of building civic projects from the ground up.

91 BOOKS

OX: Public Posters Andreas Ullrich, ed. Berlin: Gestalten, 2015

SEE YOU IN THE STREETS: Art, Action, and Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Ruth Sergel Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2016

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

ENTRY POINTS: The Vera List Center Field Guide on Art and Social Justice, No. 1 Carin Kuoni and Chelsea Haines, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015

BOOKS REMOTE AVANT-GARDE: Aboriginal Art under Occupation Jennifer Loureide Biddle Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Jennifer Loureide Biddle studies new and emergent art from the central and western deserts of Australia, an aesthetic she describes as the “remote avant-garde.” Though many of these works are gallery bound, the collaborative processes behind them and the crucial role that indigenous-led community art centers play in their creation make this book a useful read for those invested in community-driven art. The works featured in this book combine tradition with contemporary culture and include stop-motion animation, acrylic painting, and performance, among other mediums.

In Mural XXL, Claudia Walde investigates the involved processes behind extra-extra-large murals of recent years. Short texts introduce a selection of international artists, whose work ranges from abstract to representational, expressionistic to naturalistic. A world map highlights noteworthy murals, while 275 color photos show murals both close-up and in their larger contexts.

25TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE

Issue 50 • Spring/Summer 2014 • publicartreview.org

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

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

Public Art Review

Barbara Grygutis Kansas City, Missouri

Issue 52 • Spring/Summer Firefighters Memorial 2015 • publicartreview.org Kansas City, Missouri

Public Art Review

Aluminum, native limestone, integrated lighting Commissioned by: KCMO Park Planning and Design and Municipal Art Commission Kansas City, Missouri

T: 520.882.5572 M: 520.907.9443 barbara@barbaragrygutis.com barbaragrygutis.com

THE SKY’S THE LIMIT

CULTURE IN MOTION Anish Kapoor’s inflatable concert hall CITY AS STAGE Performance art in Cape Town

JANET ECHELMAN DISCOVERS THE UNKNOWN

WHERE PEOPLE GATHER The Confluence Project: Maya Lin at the Columbia River

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

Fabrication: TROCO Photography: John Mutrux

ARTIST AS LEADER

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

Iowa State University celebrates its heritage and grounds with Campus Beautiful. A voluminous coffee table book brimming with colorful photographs and detailed essays that explore the development of the University’s aesthetic since 1858, Campus Beautiful is a good read for Iowa State alumni, landscape architects, and public art enthusiasts alike. A foldout map tucked in the back provides a useful guide for viewing selections from the Art on Campus Collection, landscape features, and memorial groves. UNSPOKEN SPACES Studio Olafur Eliasson New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016

MURAL XXL Claudia Walde New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015

CAMPUS BEAUTIFUL: Shaping the Aesthetic Identity of Iowa State University Jodi O’Donnell, ed. Ames, IA: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2015

Olafur Eliasson is known for designing largescale public artworks that blend art with architecture and play with human perception. Unspoken Spaces, his first monograph in more than ten years, features such projects as the Cirkelbroen pedestrian bridge in Copenhagen and the crystalline facade for Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre in Reykjavik, Iceland. Eliasson’s own words as well as indepth descriptions accompany photographs of each project, while essays by renowned geologists, historians, architects, artists, and philosophers enrich our understanding of his multifaceted practice.

Issue 53 • Fall/Winter 2015 • publicartreview.org

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

IN SEARCH OF

PETER FISCHLI DAVID WEISS: How to Work Better Nancy Spector and Nat Trotman, eds. New York: Prestel Publishing, 2016

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Fischli and Weiss’s How to Work Better mural currently covers a building in Lower Manhattan. A list of ten simple actions to improve productivity, the work provides a pithy approach to everyday life in a complex world. Appropriated by the artists 25 years ago from a sign in a Thai ceramic factory, the mural accompanies a retrospective of the same name at the Guggenheim and embodies Fischli and Weiss’s artistic collaboration of more than three decades. This gorgeous and extensive catalogue includes 700 color plates as well as scholarly essays that explore the artists’ playful and profound body of work.

public art review.org Two issues per year available worldwide to individuals & institutions

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26th International Sculpture Conference Sculpture in Context: Tradition and Innovation Pittsburgh, PA October 15-18, 2016 Registration

Featuring:

Registration Opens July 2016

• •

Optional Trips Coming Soon!

Don't forget to save time for optional trips! Pre- and post-conference tours, activities, and hands-on workshops will be held on Friday, October 14th and Wednesday, October 19th. Additional fees apply. More information coming soon.

Book a Hotel Early The Omni William Penn is the official conference hotel. Book your stay early! For more information or to receive the special conference rate, visit www.sculpture.org/pittsburgh2016.

• • • • • • • • •

For More Information:

Annual ISC littleSCULPTURE Show ARTSlams & Mentor Sessions Carnegie Museum of Art Engaging Panel Discussions Evening Parties Hands-On Workshops at Carnegie Mellon University, TechShop, Pittsburgh Glass Center, and more Keynote Address Mattress Factory Open Studios & Gallery Hops Optional Art & Culture Trips to the Andy Warhol Museum and Carrie Furnaces, among others Public Art Tours and Visits to Nearby Sculpture Sites And more!

Visit www.sculpture.org/pittsburgh2016 for conference updates and to join the mailing list for this event.

Questions: Contact events@sculpture.org or (609) 689-1051 x302.

Join the Conversation @IntSculptureCtr @IntSculptureCtr /pittsburgh2016 #sculptureconpitt

photo credit: James O'Toole, Steelworkers Monument, 2001. Image courtesy of Charles FG Beal via flickr.com

All information true at time of printing.

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A Hyper Local Bridge to walk across, PaperBridge was designed and assembled by artist Steve Messam in Grisedale Valley in Patterdale, Cumbria, England. On site from May 8 to 18, 2015, the Lake District bridge comprised 22,000 sheets of vibrant red paper that snugly formed an arch weighing just under five tons. Framed by two piles of found stones, the arch relied on compression alone for its strength, drawing the local approach to drystone wall and bridge building. The artist sourced environmentally-friendly paper from James Cropper at the local Burneside Mill, where it was returned and recycled into new paper following the close of the installation. Stunning trails marked by signposts led viewers to the work, which was set at the top of scenic Grisedale Valley and accessible only by foot. The remote setting was intentional, requiring the audience to experience the beauty of the environment. Environmental work, the artist told Wired, is “not like a painting where you’re just looking at the surface of how it looks. It’s about exploring the landscape.” —Megan Guerber

STRONG ENOUGH

Centro Chroma Tower - Bill FitzGibbons, 2016

GlobusphĂ¤re ARBURG GmbH + Co KG LoĂ&#x;burg, Germany

Computerized Interactive Light Sculpture Centro Plaza, San Antonio, Texas

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gordon huether studio art matters

Creating, Fabricating and Installing Large-Scale, Site-Specific Art Since 1987

ART SHANTIES ON ICE | WHEN THE FEDS EMPLOYED ARTISTS | VAUGHN BELL’S PORTABLE WORKS

Public Art Review Issue 54 • Climate Change • Bristol’s Wild Style • Art Shanties • CETA • Curating Conversations

DIGITAL DESIGN – NATURALLY

Public Art Review

Issue 54 • Spring/Summer 2016 • publicartreview.org

Human BIG ISSUES: Scale How artists help us make sense of climate change

CURATING CONVERSATIONS Sara Daleiden’s social practice put to work in Milwaukee

BRISTOL’S WILD STYLE Visionary curators & innovative artists make their mark

WAM Wind Screens Wichita, KS Client: Wichita Art Museum Prime Team: Confluence and PEC Engineering

2015

VICKI SCURI SITEWORKS

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Van Gogh float in a Dutch dahlia parade—and many other projects we love (p.13)