Public Art Review issue 47 - 2012 (fall/winter)

T h e I nt e r nat i o nal Awar d f o r P ub li c A r t : M e e t t h e F inali s t s

issue 47 • fall/winter 2012 • publicartreview.org

Issue 47 • About Place

ABOUT

PLACE

Putting art at the heart of placemaking

Cambodia’s vibrant public art scene Washington D.C.’s new 5x5 festival Mixing past and present at the Golden Gate Charles Landry on city making $16.00 USD

Light Channels - Bill FitzGibbons, 2006

Computerized LED light installation sculpture, Commerce Street at Hwy 281, Downtown San Antonio, Texas.

Photo by Bryan Rindfuss

We’ve been saving ideas since the beginning.

Dare to be brilliant.

The freeze continues at devilishlybrilliant.tv 1.866.701.6603

Bill FitzGibbons

www.billfitzgibbons.com

Metro congratulates the following artists for their public art contributions to our transit system: Lisa Adams A Glimpse of Stoney Point Park Porcelain enamel, stone and glass mosaic Metro Orange Line Chatsworth Station Sam Erenberg Liquid Light Flowing into the Future Porcelain enamel, stone and glass mosaic Metro Orange Line Roscoe Station

Measure R commits a projected $40 billion to traÂŞc relief and transportation upgrades throughout Los Angeles County over the next 30 years. Artwork enhancements are a result of this bold funding initiative.

13-0432ps Š2012 lacmta

Metro commissions artists for a wide array of projects throughout Los Angeles County. To find out more information or to add your name to our database for new artist opportunities, visit metro.net/art.

Seat Suite, 2012

public art printing special projects artorg editions ArtOrg, P.O. Box 2, Northfield, MN 55057 USA www.artorg.info

Carved block with hard-shell coating Judy Onofrio, Kari Alberg, Mary GrandPrĂŠ.

Northfield Day of the Day Steamroller Prints, 2006

Photo, Tom Roster. Baseball player, Bill Nelson.

art org

Thirteen 48 x 96 inch relief prints on fabric Anselmo Cornejo, Betto Limon, Claudia Billy Baca, Cristina Perez, Douglas Padilla, Gustavo Lira, Juan Jose Palacios, Kari Alberg, Maria Cristina Tavera, Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas, Rick Swearer, Steven Nuno NuĂąez, Xavier Tavera.

Twenty Views of Dundas, 2008 Twenty-one 15 x 20 inch handmade prints on paper Alexander Hage, Carol Van Sickle, Carolyn Swiszcz, David Burt, Diane Schrader, Fred Hagstrom, Fred Somers, Gaylord Schanilec, Hope Cook, James Boyd-Brent, John Saurer, Kari Alberg, Lilla Johnson, Mac Gimse, Marty Harris, Meg Ojala, Pat Lampe, Ray Jacobson, Scott King, Scott West, Sharol Nau, Xavier Tavera.

issue 47 • fall/winter 2012 • volume 24 • number 1

ABOUT

PLACE features 22 Public Art and Placemaking The role of art in making meaningful places Jon Spayde

26 Placemakers Conversations with five artists Joseph Hart

34 The Power of Impermanence Temporary places and repurposed spaces JEFF HUEBNER

38 An Arts Funding Revolution Creative placemaking is booming michael fallon

42 Spanning the Globe The International Award for Public Art jack becker

Candy Chang first installed Before I Die, a wall on which neighbors can share their hopes and dreams, in her New Orleans neighborhood. Since then, Before I Die walls have been put up in cities around the world. Read our interview with Chang on page 26. Photo by Civic Center.

North Ohio Gateway, Salina, KS 2008 Sponsor: City of Salina

IDENTITY Rock Creek Pedestrian Bridge, Aspen Hills, MD 2011 Sponsor: Montgomery County Parks & Planning & Public Art Trust

COMMUNITY La Cholla Walls Project, Tucson, AZ 2002 Sponsor: Pima County DOT & Tucson Pima Arts Council

PLACE D Street Bridge, Tacoma, WA 2007 Sponsor: City of Tacoma

VICKI SCURI SITEWORKS

vickiscuri.com vicki@vickiscuri.com 206 930 1769

issue 47 • fall/winter 2012 • volume 24 • number 1

ABOUT PLACE

departments

13

11

Publisher’s Note

13

Shop Talk: News, views, and ideas

Social Media as Art: Incorporating new technology

Reimagining Abandoned Sites: Claiming neglected places for art • jeff huebner • 15

Artists Go Public: Learning the ropes in Tacoma • joseph hart • 16

19

Soap Box: The City as a Living Work of Art

51

On Location: Reports from the field

• joseph hart • 13

• charles landry

Expanded coverage of people, places, and projects from around the globe.

51

Capital as Context: Washington, DC

Past and Present: Celebrating the Golden Gate in San Francisco

Healing Arts: Exploring public art in Cambodia • jane ingram allen • 59

• Ronit eisenbach and welmoed laanstra • • Terri cohn •

54

63 Books: Publications and reviews joseph Hart, capper nichols, and Amelia Foster

68

U.S. Recent Projects

72

International Recent Projects

77

Forecast News: What we’re up to

78

Last Page: Wendell Berry on imagination and place

72

www.PublicArtReview.org

ON THE COVER Tomoaki Suzuki’s Carson is part of the High Line Commissions group exhibition Lilliput, which is on view in New York until April 14, 2013. The High Line is one of six projects nominated for the International Award for Public Art. See story on page 42. Photo by Austin Kennedy, courtesy of Friends of the High Line.

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FORECAST PUBLIC ART

2012 Grant Program

www.ForecastPublicArt.org

This year, over $100,000 in grant funding was awarded to public artists and organizations across Minnesota.

Congrats to all the grantees and thanks to our generous funders for their continued support!

ABOUT PLACE

issue 47 • fall/winter 2012 • vol. 24 no. 1

PUBLISHER

Jack Becker

MANAGING EDITOR

Karen Olson

ART DIRECTORS

Outside the Box Designs

MID-CAREER

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Joseph Hart

PUBLIC ARTIST GRANTS

COPY EDITOR

Loma Huh

Funded by The McKnight Foundation

Project Grant Randy Walker

Professional Development Harriet Bart Tamsie Ringler

EMERGING

Art in Odd Places ArtOrg Arts and Science Council Bill FitzGibbons LLC Broward County Cultural Division

CultureNOW Electroland LLC

ADVERTISING SALES Karen Griffiths

Franz Mayer of Munich

Heavy Industries Kansas City Municipal Art Commission

ADVISORS David Allen

PUBLIC ARTIST GRANTS

Arlington Public Art

City of Ashville, NC

Project Grants Sean Kelley-Pegg Janaki Ranpura

Funded by East Central Regional Arts Council

Americans for the Arts

PRODUCTION ASSISTANCE Shauna Dee

Funded by Jerome Foundation

REGIONAL

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EDITORIAL ASSISTANCE Amelia Foster

Amy Fox

PUBLIC ARTIST GRANTS

Planning Grants Pritika Chowdhry Sean Elmquist Janet Groenert Sara Hanson Lucas Koski Cecilia Schiller

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© 2012 Public Art Review (ISSN: 1040-211x) is published twice annually by Forecast Public Art. Annual individual subscription rates are $30 for USA, $36 for Canada/Mexico, and $42 for overseas. Annual institutional subscription rates are $60 for USA, $72 for Canada/Mexico, and $84 for overseas. Public Art Review is not responsible for unsolicited material. Opinions expressed and validity of information herein are the responsibility of the author, not Forecast, and Forecast disclaims any claims made by advertisers and for images reproduced by advertisers. Index and ARTbibliographies Modern. This issue is available on EBSCOhost databases.

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CLIENTS and PARTNERS ArtStart The Bakken Museum Center for Energy and Environment The City of Hopkins The City of St. Paul College of Fine Arts, University of Shanghai Nancy Ann Coyne Hennepin County Hennepin County Libraries Hennepin Theatre Trust HR Green Learning Dreams MCAD DesignWorks Ramsey County Human Resources Red Wing Housing & Redevelopment Authority University of Minnesota Libraries

AiOP 2011: RITUAL, Katie Urban, Processional Walkway

Presenting visual and performance art in unexpected public spaces artinoddplaces.org

PUBLISHER’S NOTE “A place is a space with a unique identity and a special story to tell. Usually it has many stories to share.”

Public Art Review—at last!—enters the digital world helped invest in our expansion online.

We are also very fortunate to have the help of partners in this effort. Our new site was created by DesignWorks Studio at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, with help from Arlene Birt, Brent Meyers, and Hervey Evans. Our new digital archive of back issues was produced by and is housed at the University of Minnesota Library, with help from Kris Kiesling, Arvid Nelsen, and Jason Roy. We are especially indebted to Nichole Goodwell, whose creative vision and steadfast integrity helped us reach this new level.

Public art is a dialogue, and we want to encourage you to share with us your thoughts, ideas, concerns, and suggestions for how we can improve Public Art Review to better serve you and support your role in this expanding field. We need you in this place to enrich the story.

JACK BECKER is the executive director of Forecast Public Art­, publisher of Public Art Review­, a nonprofit based in St. Paul.

Public Art Review online! www.publicartreview.org

What we’re up to

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Learn more about Forecast’s consulting work and K-12 educational initiative on the new Forecast News page.

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PAGE

For Northern Spark, an overnight public art festival in Minneapolis, Forecast’s own Molly Balcom Raleigh created FEED/FEED. Read more about it in U.S. Recent Projects.

FORECAST NEWS PAGE

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PAGE

BOTTOM LEFT: Photo by TJ Turner. BOTTOM RIGHT: Photo courtesy the artist.

FORECAST PUBLIC ART: IN THIS ISSUE

Forecast announces its 2012 grant recipients including Randy Walker, who was awarded the first $50,000 McKnight mid-career project grant.

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PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The character and identity of a place are not fixed in time, but rather are in a constant state of change. A place is a space with a unique identity and a special story to tell. Usually it has many stories to share.

For the past 23 years, Public Art Review has been telling the stories of the dynamic relationship between art and the public realm. We’ve looked at it from many angles and from multiple perspectives, analyzed its health and impact, examined it over time, and imagined its future. Indeed, these pages have been at the center of the public art conversation.

Today, much of that conversation has moved online.

That’s why today I’m delighted to announce the long-awaited launch of our Web-based companion to Public Art Review, www.publicartreview.org, a new place in which we hope to engage with you and an ever-growing, cross-sector audience hungry for public art ideas and information.

In addition to timely and more frequent content, our new site offers access to the digital archives of back issues of Public Art Review, with stories dating back to 1989! We hope the site also becomes a place where conversations occur, connecting visitors to resources around the world and all over the Web. We are extremely grateful to our funding partners, including the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the McKnight Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as our many advertisers, subscribers, and individual donors who help us maintain the publication and

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

A New Place for Public Art

Arlington

Public ART

Arlington, Virginia congratulates Linn Meyers on the completion of Untitled, a series of etched glass panels for Courthouse Plaza’s public conference rooms.

Meyers’ hand-drawn compositions of rhythmic, repeating lines were scanned, enlarged, and etched into glass, creating unique installations that decrease distractions for users of the rooms and add a special sense of place to Arlington’s government center.

For more about public art in Arlington: arlingtonarts.org/public-art For more about the artist: linnmeyers.com

AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS

PUBLIC ART NETWORK AMERICANSFORTHEARTS.ORG/PAN

S AV E T H E D AT E P U B L I C A R T N E T W O R K C O N F E R E N C E J U N E 1 3 - 1 4 , 2 0 1 3 , P I T T S B U R G H

THE PLACE FOR PLACEMAKING INFORMATION RESOURCES | PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT | TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE

Year in Review Awardee 2011: Sources: River of Light

by Laurent Louyer, City of Calgary Public Art Program.

SHOP TALK

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

TECHNOLOGY

News, views, and ideas

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SHOP TALK

Social Media as Art Mobile technologies define works—and users transform them

by JOSEPH HART

TOP: Photo by James Ewing. BOTTOM RIGHT: Photo courtesy the artist.

The world of social media offers interesting territory for artists to explore. The emergent values of the medium— most centrally an anarchic, user-created information experience—lend themselves especially to social practice works, where social media can serve as an important connector.

But two recent projects show how artists are using the new medium in other ways.

For his 2012 Open Air project in Philadelphia, MexicanCanadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer programmed 24 powerful searchlights to respond to voice intonations and inflections on messages recorded via a free mobile app. If a participant was standing on Benjamin Franklin Parkway when his or her message was played—on the app, a website, and public speakers at the project’s information center—the lights geolocated the user and projected the light patterns over that person’s head. Messages from participants who were not present were played if they were rated highly on the project’s website by other participants. Inspired by Philadelphia’s ties to free speech, the project, commissioned by the Association for Public Art, includes an archive of the messages, including rants, shout-outs, marriage proposals, and songs (openairphilly.net).

Conrad Gleber, director of the Digital Arts and Multimedia

Design Program at Philadelphia’s La Salle University, and Gail Rubini, a professor of art and design at Florida State University, advocate for a holistic approach to incorporating social media into artworks. They recently collaborated on the Anchorage,

ABOVE: My Alaska, Too by Conrad Gleber and Gail Rubini scans Flickr for images.

TOP: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer used a mobile app to collect messages for Open Air.

SHOP TALK AWARDS

(continued from previous page)

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 24 NO. 1 • ISSUE 47 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

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SHOP TALK

Alaska, piece My Alaska, Too, which illustrates some of the complexities in launching such works.

A 27-foot-long installation in an office complex, My Alaska, Too consists of several glass screens overlaying a Google-maps image of the state. One screen is printed with overheard snatches of description about Alaska, a second with poetry written by local poets. A third screen uses social media to project a random, constantly updated stream of photographs skimmed from the photo-sharing site, Flickr. Six Apple computers scan the public-domain website for photos—family portraits, tourist snapshots, fishing excursions, or anything else tagged with the word “Alaska”—and link them into the ongoing slideshow.

The result, says Gleber, is an ever-changing snapshot of how people view the state. “It’s not as extreme as voyeurism,” he says, “but you begin to see the humanity in the selections that people are making.” The repurposed photographs from Flickr, he explains, give a candid, unscripted, and honest portrait of the state—one uniquely captured by the social media aspect of the piece.

The technical challenges of creating the piece ranged from logistical issues, like ensuring that the building IT department was trained in managing the six computers and their tasks, to the absurd, like preventing pornographic pictures from entering the feed. But this deep embedding of technology also proved to be My Alaska, Too’s most critical artistic challenge, says Gleber.

It’s not enough, Gleber argues, for a piece to simply respond to social media or incorporate new media for its geewhiz factor. Instead, the technology should demonstrate “a sensuous engagement with the work.” In My Alaska, Too, the Flickr stream is so deeply integrated that not only are people viewing the piece connected to the social media, but the media itself is transformed and recontextualized by the artwork.

“We’re emphasizing relationships over a ‘thing,’” Gleber says.

Joseph Hart is associate editor of Public Art Review.

Mel Chin and Penny Balkin Bach Recipients of public art awards To honor his innovative contributions to, and exemplary commitment and leadership in, the field of public art, the 2012 Public Art Network Award was given to Mel Chin. Admired internationally for continually finding new ways to approach public art, Chin is perhaps best known for Revival Field in St. Paul, and for Operation Paydirt and the Fundred Dollar Bill Project, which raise awareness about lead contamination in New Orleans.

“Mel Chin has helped define contemporary and conceptual public art in America,” said Robert L. Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts, home to the Public Art Network program. “He is an accomplished artist and an exemplary leader in community arts.”

In recognition of her long-standing and continuing contributions to the field of public art, Penny Balkin Bach has been awarded the 2013 PAD Award, which is given annually by Public Art Dialogue (PAD), an affiliate of the College Art Association.

Bach is the executive director of Philadelphia’s Association for Public Art, the nation’s first private nonprofit public art organization. She serves on the national Americans for the Arts Public Art Network Council and on the Mayor’s Cultural Advisory Council in Philadelphia. She is the author of Public Art in Philadelphia (Temple University Press).

ONLINE RESOURCES New Tools for Public Artists Several new online tools have emerged in recent months to assist public artists and administrators in their work.

Publicartist.org, the brainchild of artist Ansen Seale, connects artists to projects. Artists can load CVs and samples to the site; administrators can post RFPs. Applications are standardized through the online process.

A broader, social focus is captured in the new art-world social networking site, my-artmap (www.myartmap.de).

Modeled on Facebook, the site offers the familiar features of a news feed, social groups, photo galleries, and events, but through a screen of the art world—from artists, to consumers, to auction houses.

Meanwhile, Fractured Atlas, the well-established service organization for artists and arts groups, expanded its online offerings this year to include crowdsourcing options. The organization has long provided a financial receivership service—which offers the benefits of 501(c)3 status to small

organizations. With the new services, offered in partnership with Indiegogo and RocketHub, artists and groups can raise funding for projects through the power of social media.

SHOP TALK Reimagining Abandoned Sites Artists in Europe claim neglected places as settings for art

TOP: Photos by Lucht. BOTTOM: Photo courtesy Mad4brutalism/Wikimedia Commons. OPPOSITE PAGE TOP LEFT: Photo courtesy Mel Chin Studio. TOP RIGHT: Photo courtesy Penny Balkin Bach.

destruction elsewhere. (Wendover AFB, anyone?)

The Kulturpark Plänterwald amusement park, located in Berlin’s Treptow Park forest, was built by communist East German authorities in 1969, a site of Soviet-era leisure. After the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years later, it was privatized and reborn as Spreepark, but dwindling attendance led to the park’s closure in 2001. And there it sat, its plastic dinosaurs, pirate ship, and UFO-shaped Futuro House fenced off and reclaimed by feral nature, visited mainly by urban adventurers. In 2007, on a trip to Berlin, George Scheer and Stephanie Sherman, directors of Elsewhere in North Carolina (see story on page 34), “rediscovered” the park. Soon, aided by a grant from the Art Matters Foundation and abetted by curators Anthony Spinello and Agustina Woodgate as well as partners Dieta Sixt and Christina Lanzl, the Kulturpark research project was launched.

In June, the group invited 20 Berlin-based artists to create site-specific works inspired by the park’s attractions (a Ferris wheel light show, etc.). That was followed by a 10-day “think tank” in which dozens of participants from the United States and Germany investigated and discussed the site’s artistic, architectural, and environmental possibilities. The park is still family-owned and mired in debt, and it’s uncertain when—or how—it will reopen, according to Scheer. Still, the group plans by the end of the year to produce online and print publications featuring concepts and proposals.

Jeff Huebner is a Chicago-based arts writer and journalist.

Scotland’s Focus on Placemaking

Chris Fremantle, co-producer of Public Art Scotland, told Public Art Review about the increasing importance of placemaking in that country, following the government’s initiation of a “Policy on Architecture and Placemaking,” and the work of Creative Scotland (formerly the Scottish Arts Council). In particular, Fremantle points to Glasgow’s master plan for arts and culture, VeloCity: Art for a Changing City, which was devised in connection with the Commonwealth Games. More than a public art plan, VeloCity encompasses a variety of human needs, including green space and transportation, and provides a collaborative framework for managing the cultural capital of the city.

A second important placemaking project is the proposed renovation of the abandoned St. Peter’s Seminary on the outskirts of Glasgow.

NVA, the Scottish equivalent of an arts nonprofit, envisions transforming the structure—which has been called one of the greatest late-modernist buildings in Europe—into a collaborative research center and public art landscape called The Invisible College (www.theinvisiblecollege.org.uk). “Their proposal is focused on the ‘place’ rather than the ‘building,’” explains Fremantle, “and imagines the reuse of the site whilst accepting that the building can only be dealt with as a ‘ruin.’”

St. Peter’s Seminary is being transformed into The Invisible College with a public art landscape.

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SHOP TALK

In Europe, two ambitious placemaking projects are unfolding on a vast, long-term scale in unconventional cultural landscapes: a disused military park outside Amsterdam and an abandoned amusement park in East Berlin.

Both are recent ruins of collapsed political systems, “forbidden zones” whose past uses are still visible, and whose futures are being explored by teams of artists, planners, architects, and officials as sites for public art, cultural reclamation, and other events.

The Vijfhuizen Fort was built in the late nineteenth century as part of the Defense Line of Amsterdam. Dozens of armed forts ringing the city were designed so the surrounding land could be flooded if enemies invaded. No fighting ever occurred, however, and in 1996 the military complex was made a Unesco World Heritage site. In 2008, the site reopened as the 20-acre Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen (Art Fortress at Vijfhuizen), intended for “peaceful cultural reuse” as a contemporary arts center with a sculpture park and massive concrete casemates used for exhibit spaces and studios. “The fortress is a kind of time tunnel back to the future,” director Holger Nickisch wrote me, adding that they’ve recently discovered two secret bunkers.

Kunstfort has organized many exhibits that explore its unique site. Beginning next spring, “water and landscape” will be the exhibition theme. “Most of [Holland is] below sea level, which is a constant threat, especially in the future with the rising of the sea level,” says Nickisch. The fort is also a designated Dutch “green” site, where trees are being planted to offset their

Amsterdam’s Vijfhuizen Fort, designed for defense, is now an arts center with a sculpture park.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

PLACE

by Jeff Huebner

SHOP TALK Artists Go Public A city offers hands-on public art training

SHOP TALK

laborated in teams on creating temporary works, like those along Tacoma’s Prairie Line Trail (learn more on page 34). Finally, the group competed for the budgeted public art projects—receiving extensive feedback on their applications, whether shortlisted or not.

“I’m not a teacher,” says McBride, “so being in this role where you see change and improvement and growth—it’s amazing. It gives me shivers.”

While the program was tailored to meet the needs of Tacoma, its basic contours could be applied anywhere, according to McBride. The success of the program rests on several principles that McBride stresses in adapting it to other locales: that it unfold over a period of time and include a variety of learning opportunities; that it include a cohort of artists who can engage with and learn from one another; and that it include practical, hands-on experience. —Joseph Hart

Elizabeth Conner (top photo, middle) developed the curriculum for PA:ID, a program in which artists learn public art processes. Here, students create temporary works for the Prairie Trail Line.

TOP: Photo by Lisa Kinoshita. BOTTOM LEFT: Photo by Amy Ryken. BOTTOM RIGHT: Photo by Amy McBride.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 24 NO. 1 • ISSUE 47 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

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is the site of a unique project to train artists in the processes associated with creating public art.

The Public Art: In Depth (PA:ID) program, which is wrapping up its first year, combines traditional workshop training with a unique series of opportunities that culminates in a real-life competition for real-life projects with real-life budgets.

“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” says Amy McBride, Tacoma’s arts administrator, whose undergraduate work focused on effective professional development strategies. “I strongly believe in the practical experience piece. By getting to know what it takes in real life, that’s how you learn. And I also needed to build a base of local artists who could compete not only in Tacoma, but on a wider stage.”

The opportunity to launch PA:ID came when a city bonding project provided a budget for public art with a bit more flexibility in spending than most. That allowed McBride to hire public artist Elizabeth Conner to help develop the curriculum and devise the program, and still retain stipends for five competitive public art projects.

McBride recruited 23 Tacoma-based artists, all of them with established studio reputations and a few with some public art commissions behind them. Conner led the students in six full-day workshops that included information from engineers and planners, as well as more theoretical discussions of site specificity and placemaking. The students also col-

EDUCATION

Tacoma, Washington,

SHOP TALK Student Art in the Park New York’s Model to Monument program completes its second year

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Model to Monument (M2M), a collaboration between the Art Students League of New York and the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, was featured in Public Art Review’s fall/ winter 2011 issue as a new form of public artist training. In the first year of its five-year commitment, the program saw seven sculptures developed and placed in area public spaces. All seven have since been purchased for permanent placement.

This year, seven more sculptures have been taken from model to monument, including Damien Armando Vera’s Cope and Sequoyah Aono’s Watching Upon the Present. The theme of this year’s program is “flux,” a reflection of the changing nature of the Hudson riverfront, where the sculptures are situated.

As a training ground, the program has unique strengths worth noting. By taking the work out of the classroom and into the public realm, students gain real-world experience in the often-complicated process of site selection, public engagement, and materials handling.

EVALUATION Proving Public Art’s Worth The field explores models for evaluation

Photos courtesy the Art Students League of New York.

State and local governments have been hit especially

to begin to form models for evaluation. In the class, students worked in teams to evaluate current and ongoing projects hard by the failing economy of the past five years; however fast within the public art department of Arlington County. the recovery, it will likely be some time before budgets ease to “The conversation was very rich,” says Angela Adams, pre-recession levels. Given these fiscal realities, there’s a growArlington’s public art administrator. “The class came up with ing urgency in the field of public art to quantify the value of some very good ideas for keeping the public engaged and expenditures on particular projects and programs. involved.” For example, one recommendation was to include “A lot of public art agencies are being asked to justify the return on investment in their public art programming,” a temporary public art project on the site of a permanent work that was slow in getting completed. explains Liesel Fenner, the program manager for public art Such efforts to maximize engagement, says Adams, at Americans for the Arts. That organization’s landmark Arts help public art programs like hers “get out ahead of budget & Economic Prosperity IV study provides some data on the talks,” rather than react to annual budget reviews. “The arts economic value of arts spending in general, but public art have always been in a position of defending themselves and isn’t specifically addressed in that research, she adds. “Public art projects have not only an economic value, but a social, explaining what we do. Effective evaluation is just the latest version of this effort. It’s important to be able to communicate cultural, and an intrinsic value,” she says. “That makes this why public art is a valuable part of local government that adds a daunting challenge.” quality to the variety of services offered.”

However, it’s a challenge that a growing number of According to Fenner, the most promising models come administrators in public art are addressing. Americans for from architecture and urban design, and include measurement the Arts’ Public Art Network (PAN) has launched a series of of increased real estate value, as well as surveys. Additionally, conversations, including an August 2012 webinar, intended newly launched digital tools have the potential to contribute to help the field move toward some model for evaluation. A to evaluation strategies, she says. For instance, artworks using presentation and workshop at the next PAN Preconference will a digital interface (a cell phone number, for example) instead continue the discussion. of a traditional plaque capture quantifiable data about the As a part of PAN’s efforts, educators, administrators, and students at Virginia Tech collaborated on a classroom effort “users” of a particular work. —Joseph Hart

17

SHOP TALK

ABOVE: Damien Armando Vera’s Cope, an M2M project in New York.

LEFT: A reception for Sequoyah Aono’s Watching Upon the Present.

issue 44 • spring/summer 2011

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Realism Representation

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PARKS

Recreation

and

Ai Weiwei Janet Zweig Mel Bochner Donald Lipski Stephen Korns Jason deCaires Taylor Fred Kent and Cynthia Nikitin Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam Christo and Jeanne-Claude Andy Goldsworthy Cathey Billian Lauren Bon Carolyn Law Ben Garthus

SOAP BOX

The City as a Living Work of Art Artistic imagination and the revival of “civic urbanity”

By CHARLES LANDRY

and predictability. Their worldview is summed up by these words: goal, objective, focus, strategy, outcome, calculation, measurable, quantifiable, logical, solution, efficient, effective, economic sense, profitable, rational, linear. At its best, artistic creativity involves a journey, not knowing where it will lead or who will arrive; it involves truth-searching and embodies a quest for the profound; it has no calculated purpose; it is not goal-oriented, nor measurable in easy ways, nor fully explicable rationally; it denies instant gratification; and it accepts ambiguity, uncertainty, and paradox.

Good art aims to create work that enters the common space of humanity. It champions originality and authenticity

3

SOAP BOX

I believe the greatest contribution artists can make to city making is in

the way they think, rather than any specific piece of public art, however

good, they produce.

Photo courtesy Charles Landry.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

I feel ambivalent about public art. On occasion I am uplifted, and that, thankfully, is happening more frequently. At other times I simply see material white noise— stuff. Often this happens when I see an abstract red sculpture placed in front of a glassy corporate structure that from a sensory perspective is a no building. You cannot communicate with such a setting.

I am a simple person, and I divide the physical environment of cities into yes and no spaces. Places that emotionally say yes engender the virtues we call urbanity. Places that say no are lifeless, relentless in their dullness, and often ugly.

They fragment and divide us from each other. Many environments lie somewhere in between.

I always look at a city as a total environment and as a potential creative ecology. This is a setting that creates the preconditions for all its citizens to think, plan, and act with imagination, and where the public ethos encourages individuals to feel they can be shapers, makers, and co-creators of their evolving place. This happens rarely.

Cities are complex organisms. They are a mix of their “hardware” foundations and the social energy and activities, or “software,” blended into them. Cities are shaped primarily by a culture of engineering since it is chiefly the hardware folks who determine how places look and feel. But their insights are limited.

Too often they do not understand how the emotional flow of the city works—something that artists appreciate. We need the combined insights and intellectual artistry of many players to make a city work, from cultural historians, engineers, social activists, planners, businesspeople, and psychologists, to ordinary citizens, philosophers, artists, and many more.

When they work well together they create urbanity, one of our greatest achievements.

Each discipline has its special contribution to make, and ideally in city making each of us grasps the essence of what the others offer. I believe the greatest contribution artists can make to city making is in the way they think, rather than any specific piece of public art, however good, they produce.

At the same time, involvement with the artistic can create problems for typical urban managers because the values and attributes that dominate the modern world are almost diametrically opposed to the values promoted by artistic creativity. Urban managers prefer certainty

and opposes vanity, and it generates openness to new ideas and new ways of doing. Good art is also transgressive and disruptive of the existing order, and it is often uncomfortable.

SOAP BOX Again, these are attributes that urban decision makers can find worrying.

This links us back to urbanity. It was urbanity that liberated us from the shackles of a feudal world, starting with the Italian city-states and later the Hanseatic League. Here the idea of the responsible, engaged citizen developed strongly, but so did the freedom to explore, to challenge the accepted canon, and to innovate, just like artists do. However, the concept of being urbane became degraded over time and was equated with being too individualistic and self-referential: watching the world go by, as a flâneur, rather than being engaged with it.

I am trying to reconceive these urban virtues through what I call the six threads of “civic urbanity,” and to me it is clear that artistic imagination or arts projects are embedded in each of its components.

The first of these threads is the idea of the intercultural city, where we focus on what we share across our differences rather than what divides us. Great cities thrive on good diversity, and artistic initiatives encourage crossing the divides. Second, fostering eco-consciousness and cradle-to-cradle thinking helps heal the world. Showing our eco-intentions requires a new aesthetic for buildings to foster behavioral change. Third, practical urban planning that allows for navigating the city in ordinary ways makes us healthy rather than needing to go to the gym. Part of being healthy is sensory satisfaction, which is also a priority for the artistic imagination, and walkable cities

give us time and space to experience the city in a visceral way. Fourth and connected is a demand for a shared commons, spaces and places from parks to libraries that are free and noncommercial.

Then there is, fifth, the aesthetic imperative. This reminds us that every physical structure has an aesthetic responsibility to the environment in which it sits. Remember, the pinpricks of ugliness spilling out from horrible buildings throughout their lives have great psychological impact. And while we can argue about ugliness and beauty, there is usually more alignment on what works and what doesn’t.

Finally, there is the notion of creative city making, which is a form of planning places that encourages imagination and inventiveness in solving urban problems and grasping opportunities. When all these elements work well together, we can create the lived experience of the city as a living work of art.

CHARLES LANDRY works worldwide and helps cities assess their potential so they build resilience, increase their wealth creation prospects, and get onto the global radar screen as places of verve and vitality. He has written many books including The Art of City Making and The Creative City. (www.charleslandry.com)

FRAGMENTA STUDIO OSMAN AKAN copyright 2012 21’ x 27’ x 75’

www.osmanakan.com

Commissioned by Alaska Council on the Arts for Alaska State Crime Detection Laboratory

MitChELL KEaRnEy

PubliC

Joann SiEbuRG-baKER

Art

CharlotteMecklenburg, NC

Ed Carpenter, Ascendus / Cliff Garten, Levine Lanterns Living Lenses, Sight Unseen / Erwin Redl, Passing Through Light

CAlls to Artists: www.ArtsAndScience.org 704.333.2272

Welcome to the intersection of art and place, a space public artists call home. This intersection is also key to creative placemaking, an economic

and

community

development

concept that has recently exploded into an international movement. In this issue, we report on the relationship between public art and placemaking and talk with artists who think deeply about place.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 24 NO. 1 • ISSUE 47

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We’re also delighted to introduce you to the International Award for Public Art and the finalists being honored for excellence in placemaking.

We hope you’ll find plenty of inspiration in these pages.

—The Editors

The Tiuna el Fuerte Cultural Park in Caracas, Venezuela, is one of six finalists for the International Award for Public Art. Photo by Eleanna Cadalso Vera. See story on page 42.

The role of art in making meaningful places.

T

he question “What is the role of public art in placemaking?” is slipperier than it looks. To ask it is not simply to invite ideas about how to make the cityscape prettier; it is to grapple with the definitions, nuances, and implications of the question’s two big terms. Neither placemaking nor public art possesses a settled definition, as both are increasingly invoked, discussed, and argued about as city officials turn to creative people and creative industries to help revitalize urban and smalltown neighborhoods.

The public aspect of public art has been, is, and will continue to be one of the most contentious conundrums in the discipline, as artists work out how to be both conscientious embodiers of public concerns—from neighborhood identity to global warming—and also creative art-makers with individual visions. And it looks like “placemaking” has emerged as the newest arena in which this conundrum is being worked out.

Attempting Definitions We might start with a succinct definition of placemaking—if one existed. Fred and Ethan Kent, from the New York–based Project for Public Spaces (PPS), one of the leading placemaking consultancies, offer the following: “Placemaking is the art and science of developing public spaces such as parks, libraries, and public buildings that attract people, build community by bringing people together, and create local identity. It is the creation of a built environment that creates community, stimulates interaction, encourages entrepreneurship, fosters innovation, and nurtures humanity.”

by JON SPAYDE

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Public Art and Place making

23

This recipe, with its emphasis on creating spaces that interest and connect people, clearly leaves room for art, even if it doesn’t specify a role for it. But another current term, creative placemaking—coined by economist Ann Markusen— defines an urbanism that absolutely requires the presence of art and artists. In her influential National Endowment for the Arts white paper, “Creative Placemaking” (2007), Markusen emphasizes the economic benefits of placemaking and makes a documented case for fostering art and other creative disciplines as engines of growth. “Our research finds,” she writes, “that through creative placemaking, arts and culture

People discovered that it wasn’t enough to put a thing in a plaza and call it good—because the plaza was a wreck!

—Jack Mackie, artist

make substantial contributions to local economic development, livability, and cultural industry competitiveness.”

In this particular vision of placemaking, artists matter as entrepreneurs, business owners, and wealth creators as well as makers of aesthetic objects or experiences; all artistic activity and its support, from the creation of galleries and

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 24 NO. 1 • ISSUE 47 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

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live-work spaces to the staging of music festivals, has a public role.

Markusen goes on to define a role for art in partnership with public policy: “[P]oliticians, policymakers, and agency heads see the potential for arts and cultural activities to improve the effectiveness of their missions in transportation, housing, workforce development, health care, environmental remediation, and education,” she writes.

Here a role for public art is implicit, and it becomes explicit in some of her case studies. Among them, for example, is the Phoenix Public Art Program, known for integrating art and infrastructure at public places like water treatment plants, bridges, and transit corridors. Public artists in many disciplines have, of course, been working in these sorts of placemaking partnerships for a while now.

Cautions and Concerns Markusen and others are cautious, however, about public artists’ role, warning that public art that ignores the history, values, and needs of the community in which it’s placed is failed public art. It’s a familiar anxiety, one that has accompanied public art for a long time, and we might title it “Tilted Arc Fear” (based on Richard Serra’s controversial placement of the sculpture in front of New York’s Jacob Javits Federal Building). It pivots on the fundamental and paradoxical question: Can the artist, committed to an individual vision, also serve the public?

This concern surfaced when artists first sought to represent communities to which they were not native, and its current

and Urban Design. Fleming suggests that this inquiry should be done by the community before the artist is brought in.

“Artists may be so consumed with their own ideas of what they want to do or have always done that they won’t think about the space in particular,” he says.

Concern about the artist’s ability to reflect community values—what has become a kind of distrust of the artist—is echoed by the Kents of PPS in more positive terms: “Insofar as the artworks are created through a design process that seeks to translate into physical form the needs, values, desires, dreams, and passion of the people in that place, then artworks can contribute meaningfully to our experience of place.” Such caution is neatly summarized in Place and Placelessness, by Edward Relph, who writes that public art should be “characterised by a lack of theoretical or aesthetic pretension, a working with site and climate, a respect for other people and their buildings, and hence for the complete environment, both man-made and natural.”

The Backstory

Although these caveats embody placemakers’ worry that public artists are more interested in their own artwork than in the creation of a vibrant space, public artists such as Mary Miss and Alice Adams have, for decades, been incorporating the very placemaking concerns that Fleming and the Kents espouse. As place-conscious Seattle artist Jack Mackie puts it, “People [like Miss] discovered that it wasn’t enough to put a thing in a plaza and call it good—because the plaza was a wreck!” In the 1970s and ’80s, Sandra Percival in Oregon worked with urban planners and architects, while training younger artists to do the same.

Still, Mackie concedes that placemakers’ fear of public art can be founded on realities.

Artists may be so consumed “My criticism of public art in the last fifteen years has been the exclusive attention on the with their own ideas of what they piece,” he says. His explanation, however, is the timidity of most public art programs. want to do or have always done “They’re afraid of being canceled, so the easiest thing is to wait until everything is set, that they won’t think about the then come in with their one percent and put up a thing.” space in particular.

Mackie’s compelling call to get beyond the single-piece problem (and Tilted Arc Fear) is part of an intriguing four-stage mini-history of —Ronald Lee Fleming, Townscape Institute public art that he uses to engage these issues.

It’s a mini-history—and, since all four stages can be seen in current work, also a typology— in which placemaking plays a pivotal role. version is connected with the placemaking issue. If placemaking First, he says, was the Art in Public Places stage, in which is fundamentally about creating places that people enjoy and art that was, in his words, “too big for the museum” was where people want to be, then the public art intended for such places should respect the space and should not alienate the “plopped” into an outdoor setting. Then, as the inadequacy of this model became evident, attention shifted to what Mackie people—it should, in fact, reflect their lives and concerns. considers Public Art proper—artworks made in consultation/ This sort of healthy relationship between placemaking collaboration with communities, or at the very least with and public art begins with a thorough investigation of the community values, history, and issues a major element in the place to be “made”: the cultural history of the space, how artist’s plan. it is used, and its physical constraints, according to Ronald “The discussion then moved,” Mackie says, “to The Art Lee Fleming, founder of the Townscape Institute and author of Making Places Public”—artists crafting benches, working of many books, the most recent of which is The Art of with, or as, landscape architects—creating places that don’t Placemaking: Interpreting Community Through Public Art

also shows that people care about a place.”

Zabel doesn’t believe, however, that the art-inspired engagement that supports placemaking has to be based only on sweetness and light. “Attachment to a place can be about wanting to make it better,” she says, “and art can support that desire as well.”

It’s one thing to advocate for improving a place. But what about artists who wish to challenge place-users or take them out of their comfort zone? Lajos Héder, who is trained as an urban planner and works with his partner, Mags Harries, suggests that all good public art should in fact “put someone in a place where they can see things differently.” Challenging

Artists eat, breathe, and sleep meaning. It’s the way we process the world and it’s what placemaking is about…. Placemaking is like homemaking.

—Clark Wiegman, artist

that makes for civic life” by taking positions on boards and commissions with real decision-making power over public art and other elements of urbanism.

Making Meaning If the ideal of citizen-artist, as expressed in the latter stages of Mackie’s schema, is a clear rejoinder to Tilted Arc Fear, the question remains: What do artists—as artists—bring to placemaking? Whether their place-based work is civic, corporate, nonprofit, educational, or artist-led, what artists bring is not only a keen sense of aesthetics—like other design professionals—but also attention to meaning.

“Artists eat, breathe, and sleep meaning. It’s the way we process the world and it’s what placemaking is about,” says Clark Wiegman, another Seattle-based artist. “Having layers of meaning in a place leads to slowing down, perceiving, exploring memory, and memory as it relates to history. It’s about appreciating and making a home. Placemaking is like homemaking.”

Laura Zabel, who runs Springboard for the Arts in St. Paul, Minnesota (and also directs the Irrigate public art/ placemaking initiative; see p. 40), suggests that artists are uniquely placed to facilitate engagement and attachment, so critical in successful placemaking. “Artists are skilled in the art of engagement, in practical terms—they create events, their work attracts people. But a deeper contribution they make is by affecting how people feel about a place, consciously or subconsciously. A mural, for example, adds beauty, but it

viewers is somewhere on this continuum, he maintains. “It’s a little bit hard in public art to deal with the challenge factor, because if the challenge is in any way uncomfortable, it’s a hard sell. People will say, ‘That makes me feel weird.’ But that kind of thing might be some of the strongest stuff you can do.”

This ideal of placemaking, then, can be so inclusive as to court disturbance. Mackie points to a Daniel Martinez project in Seattle in which two-sided banners questioned the class divisions of that city. “On one side of one of them it said, ‘Do you have a beach house?’ and on the other, ‘Where will I sleep tonight?’ On one side another one said, ‘What shall I have for lunch?’ and on the other, ‘What will I eat today?’”

Mackie explains. “Inclusiveness involves revealing who is not often included.”

One dynamic of the artist as placemaker is the shift from object maker to maker of experiences. Artists can deepen not only the conversation about placemaking at the design table, but also ultimately the experience of people visiting a place.

But can there be a “deep placemaking” that aids in economic and community development, attracts young, affluent “creative class” professionals, and creates beauty—all current goals of the placemaking movement—while welcoming others too, and reminding those who are enjoying the placeas-made of the darker, stranger, perhaps sadder realities that make the place what it is? Sounds like a job for a citizen artist.

Jon Spayde is a contributing editor to Public Art Review.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

contain artworks but are intended to be holistic artworks themselves, ones that serve the public in an immediate way. (“A local art critic once asked my collaborator Buster Simpson and me, ‘When are you guys going to stop making chairs and start making art again?’” says Mackie with a laugh.

“I said, ‘If you don’t think the chair is art you can’t sit on it!’”)

It’s easy to see this stage as artistic placemaking: creating spaces that, in the Kents’ words, “attract people, build community by bringing people together, and create local identity.”

Mackie’s fourth stage is still emerging. He calls it Civic Arts: “It’s artists getting involved with civic policy,” he says. “Artists trying to illuminate and improve everything

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DE I R DR E O’MAHONY

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 24 NO. 1 • ISSUE 47 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

C A N DY CHANG

PL ACE Conversations with five artists who think deeply about how public art can shape our experience of place C A N DY C H A N G :

Making Cities Comfortable New Orleans–based Candy Chang creates simple, analog messaging systems that allow strangers to share— anonymously and in public—their thoughts, memories, and dreams. Before I Die featured a fill-in-the-blank chalkboard affixed to an abandoned house—an invitation to passers-by to chalk in their bucket list; I Wish This Was used removable vinyl stickers to collect suggested uses for abandoned storefronts in New Orleans. The spirit of these anonymous commentaries may mirror the loose anonymity of Web-based communities, but the similarity stops there. Their physicality makes them a site-specific, collaborative intervention.

Public Art Review: What’s your working definition of placemaking?

Candy Chang: I think it’s a fancy word for a place that is cared for and is caring.

How do you personally go about the process of placemaking?

What tools and techniques do you use?

There are a lot of ways the people around us can help improve our lives. We don’t bump into every neighbor, so a lot of wisdom never gets passed on, but we do share the same public spaces. So over the past few years I’ve tried out ways to share more with the people around me in public space, using simple tools like stickers, stencils, and chalk. They’re accessible to anyone walking by and they’re not very expensive, which puts you in an open-minded mood to keep learning, questioning, and experimenting, with low pressure.

Some of my small interventions have led to betterinformed big ones. I Wish This Was became a prototype for Neighborland, a hybrid online/offline tool to help people join forces, build on ideas, and improve their communities together.

Photos by Civic Center. OPPOSITE PAGE: Photo by Shake Shack.

26

H E R B E RT DR E I S E ITL

SARA DALE I DE N

Interviews by Joseph Hart

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

JEFRE MAN U E L

MAKERS

ARTISTS’ PHOTOS (from left to right): Photo by Randal Ford for Fast Company; photo courtesy the artist; photo courtesy Studio JEFRË; photo by Mark Escribano; photo by Nicolai Rismann.

27

ABOVE: Chang’s Before I Die walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, and Argentina. Each wall reflects what’s important to people in that place.

OPPOSITE PAGE: Neighborhood residents used the removable vinyl stickers of Candy Chang’s I Wish This Was project to suggest uses for abandoned storefronts in New Orleans.

What are some of the challenges of orchestrating these public exchanges?

Public spaces are for everyone, and it’s important to try and respect all the other people who care for them, too. Depending on the project, I either partner with local organizations or I’ve asked for permission from the people who I think would care.

For the Before I Die project, I wanted to make it on an abandoned house in my neighborhood. I talked about it with my neighborhood association’s blight committee, who were supportive and put me in contact with the property owner. I talked about it with the property owner and the residents on the block, who were supportive, too. When I found out I had to get a permit, I went and got a permit from the city government.

The processes to improve things in public space are often not very clear. If they were easier, it would enable more people to try things out in creative and productive ways. It’s good to start with who you think would care and to see if they think anyone else would care.

Has your thinking about place changed over the years?

I used to think of sharing with my neighbors for very practical reasons, but it’s changed into something much more personal.

The projects I make come from questions I have. They started out quite practical: How much are my neighbors paying for their apartments? How can we lend and borrow more things without knocking on each other’s doors at a bad time? How can

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DE I R DR E O’MAHONY:

Acknowledging Rural Complexity

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Artist Deirdre O’Mahony explores the complicated intersection of public space, civic life, history, and art. In one piece, for example, she reopened an abandoned rural post office as X-PO, a public meeting place that hosted events, installations, lectures, and art exhibits. A key to X-PO—and to O’Mahony’s concept of placemaking—is providing a platform for spontaneous collaboration. “I really wanted to allow space where people could share different kinds of knowledge, because it has always been my experience that where different forms of knowledge come together, interesting things happen.”

ABOVE: Chang’s Looking for Love Again was commissioned by the Alaska Design Forum.

TOP: People writing their memories of and hopes for Fairbanks’ vacant Polaris Building.

we share more of our ideas for our vacant storefronts?

They’ve become more emotional as I’ve become consumed with personal well-being and what it means to lead a fulfilling life. And this has made me look at my neighbors differently.

We’re not just neighbors in a place, but we’re also neighbors in making sense of our lives. How can we share more of our hopes, fears, and stories? We struggle with a lot of the same issues. How can we help each other see we are not alone?

In an environment where taping a flyer to a lamppost is illegal while businesses can shout about products on an increasing number of surfaces, we need to consider how our public spaces can be better designed so they’re not just reserved for the highest bidder. With more ways for residents to share with one another, the people around us can not only help us make better places, they can help us lead better lives.

How does that manifest in the places you’ve worked?

Well, you must understand that in Ireland we have a complicated relationship with the land that plays out in recurring conflicts around landscape and land use. These conflicts engender compulsive and passionate responses to particular—and not necessarily picturesque—places: fields, bogs, and so on. These irrational passions are so deeply felt that the Irish playwright John B. Keane wrote a powerful play about them called The Field, and the term “Field Syndrome” is sometimes used to describe them.

I live in a very beautiful region called the Burren, in the west of Ireland. When I came here in 1991, I was shocked by an environmental conflict about the construction of an interpretative center. The plan, and the controversy surrounding it, had a profound effect on local relations and raised all sorts of issues.

The central question concerned the power relations that governed who drove the representations, cultivation, preservation, and interpretation of place.

Photos by Civic Center.

Public Art Review: Do you have a working definition of placemaking as you approach your work?

Deirdre O’Mahony: For me, placemaking is about actively engaging with the matrix of human, natural histories and practices that shape a place and its context. Placemaking makes these connections visible; it acknowledges the complexity of the social, environmental, cultural, and economic dimensions that affect place.

Observing this controversy forced me to try to identify a contemporary place-based practice that could begin to address the fragmented and fluid nature of rural society today. Since then, my version of placemaking has tried to complicate perceptions of rural life. I want to make visible some of the more complicated reasons behind recurring conflicts about environmental regulation, changes in land use, and the effect of these changes on individual and collective subjectivities.

This was the abandoned rural post office that you turned into a meeting place.

That’s right. In Kilnaboy, in North Clare, I had finished a temporary public art project called Cross Land in 2007, and it left me with a lot of unanswered questions about the sustainability of a very beautiful landscape—and one that has been shaped by more than 5,000 years of farming. The question for me became how best to engage different stakeholders in an extended pro-

So you kind of turned the space over to these folks, right?

What were some of the projects that emerged?

I curated the space for just eight months, and since then, local users of the space have taken over managing and funding it.

Among the events was an exhibit of archival photographs of the parish, which graphically demonstrated the rapidity of

BELOW: Deirdre O’Mahony’s X-PO is housed in a former post office. BOTTOM LEFT: X-PO hosts community events and art exhibits. BOTTOM RIGHT: A portrait of a postman who lived in the building.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

So does your work specifically attempt to challenge these perceptions? If so, how?

I’m interested in how this mix of expectations plays out in the social unconscious in rural areas. As a result, my projects explore an expanded idea of the relationship between arts practice and cultural activism. X-PO is a good example of this.

cess of collective reflection on a sustainable future.

As a public art project, it created a space for the many different “publics” in the locality to meet—much as the old post office had done until it shut in 2002. I really wanted to allow space where people could share different kinds of knowledge, because it has always been my experience that where different forms of knowledge come together, interesting things happen.

I used a mix of processes from installations, talks, curated exhibitions, and events, in order to animate a conversation on what people felt was important in their place. Various groups started to meet regularly. Understandings—of each other and our various skills and practices—developed.

Opinions and ideas on the future for the place differed widely. Some participants had a deep knowledge going back centuries; others had limited knowledge but a lot of enthusiasm. Connections were made, friendships were made, and discoveries were made.

TOP: Photo by Peter Rees. BOTTOM LEFT and RIGHT: Photos by Ben Geoghegan.

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change in the landscape. One group used the space to present their version of the story of their family and community who had been the subject of the Harvard Irish Survey in the 1930s.

A mapping group spent five years charting every house, new and old, going back to the earliest parish records of 1847.

Is there a common thread among these projects?

X-PO lays no claim to be representative. It is, rather, the act of participation that is at the core of the project. This, for me is the essence of placemaking—an ontology of place experienced in a moment of “being-with,” as Jean-Luc Nancy proposes.

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So would you say it’s “neutral” ground?

That’s not quite right. X-PO means accepting difference and disagreement. By its very existence, X-PO has challenged some local organizations and provoked opposition. It is very public—it performs a kind of coming together that is based on the here and now, not on a priori relations or inherited standing in the community. Interestingly, for the purposes of public artists, while X-PO was run under the banner of “art” it was largely unquestioned, even as it questioned some of the fundamental power relationships and assumptions of its rural location.

Only after it was taken over by the regular users of the space did it become contested. Still, it survives well and continues to function despite, or possibly because, it is “in dissent” with some local hierarchies.

J E FRË:

Creating Places, Not Objects

Artist Jefre Manuel, who works under the name JEFRË, is a relative newcomer to public art. Three years ago, at the age of 35, the practicing designer had a heart attack and triple bypass. The experience convinced him to retire from architecture/landscape architecture and return to his artistic practice (among other places, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago). Today, he’s won a number of large competitions, thanks in large part to his approach to placemaking.

“Because of my background in public space and architecture, I’ve never been interested in creating objects; I create places,” he says. “It’s not about a single element, it’s about a collection of elements that make a place.”

30 Construction on JEFRË’s planned cube for Kissimmee, Florida’s new Lakefront Park, rendered here, begins in January 2013. In addition to being a sculpture, it will serve as a performance and civic space.

Public Art Review: Can you describe your approach to placemaking?

JEFRË: For me, it’s the literal definition of the word place. Millennium Park is a place not only because it has iconic sculptures. It also has great civic parks, architecture, and restaurants. And people.

If you think about great cities, when I ask you, “What is your favorite place and why?” you’re not going to say the Sears Tower or the Empire State Building. You’re going to say Central Park or Millennium Park. Those are places. No one single

sculpture or building or landscape will make a place. It’s all those elements combined—plus the people who use it.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

So how does this approach translate into your practice?

Because of my background, I don’t really have a certain medium or style. I give you one specific thing related to context and history and I don’t repeat it again. As a result, my work is very site specific. I’m not someone who has to find a place to plop a piece. I’m also very careful to be sure that 80 percent of my materials and work is all done with local folks, so the tax money is going back into the community. Programming is also very important—the idea that you’re not creating things that are static. The most successful public art pieces are interactive.

How do you achieve that with a single sculpture as opposed to, for example, Central Park?

You create an opportunity to be inside it or walk through it, like the Eiffel Tower. For example, I recently won the competition for a sculpture in Kissimmee’s new Lakefront Park. Their waterfront is located near Disney, which is their competition.

And they understood that they have an opportunity to create an icon for the city—something that would identify the waterfront not only as a destination, but as an icon that could compete on a national scale.

The sculpture is a cube of water that represents a common form seen in the local Indian tribe. By day it acts as a civic fountain, by night it transforms itself into a cultural performance space, and on the weekends it becomes a civic venue for celebrations like weddings. It’s more than a sculpture; it’s a blank space and people make it art.

SARA DALE I DE N:

ABOVE: Photo by Nate Page. BELOW: Photo by Christina Edwards. OPPOSITE PAGE: Rendering courtesy Studio JEFRË.

Encouraging Public Intimacy

Raised in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Sara Daleiden now lives in Los Angeles, where she takes an interventionist and activist approach to redefining the public spaces of her adopted city.

Much of her work is rooted in the tradition of the flâneur, who experiences urban space through directionless walking. Transplant this concept to car-crazy L.A., and the badge of pedestrianism takes on a radical hue.

Public Art Review: How would you define placemaking?

Sara Daleiden: I think of it in terms of how we use public space.

It all boils down to how we socialize and how we function in a location. Everything comes down to power dynamics and how we interact socially. By looking at public spaces and how we inhabit them, we can begin to understand those power dynamics.

I’m inspired by the work of William Whyte and The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. It raises interesting questions about public space. Where do people want to go? What are their behaviors when they get there? What do they need? What’s the human behavior? What’s the stereotype of how you think people will act? What do their bodies physically need in public spaces?

How do these questions inform your practice?

One of my projects is the Los Angeles Urban Rangers. The idea behind it is to use the National Park Ranger system to guide people through the urban landscapes of Los Angeles. It’s a huge megalopolis, right? We treat it like a national park with hikes, maps, guides, and field kits, and we’re a friendly guide,

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Sara Daleiden’s projects encourage exploration: Being Pedestrian (above) involves walking training exercises and The Los Angeles Urban Rangers (below) serve as city guides.

like a park ranger. Our goal is to empower people to get out into the landscape and experience it in interesting ways.

The Rangers is a multidisciplinary group. My background is as a visual artist, and we also have historians, geographers, architects, and other disciplines.

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Why do you take the multidisciplinary approach?

In general my work is less discipline-specific. If the question is “How do we make L.A. a better place to live,” the answer can come from planners, artists, architects, geographers. It’s all collaborative. These projects are almost designed to question authorship. We’re serving a community, or cultural function, but we’re doing it with a real consciousness of metaphor—and a geographer has just as much ability to read metaphor in a given place as I do.

What are some examples of that reading from your work with the Rangers?

Los Angeles is such a privatized city. With the Rangers, sometimes we look at confusing spaces, like a private plaza that looks like a public plaza. Or we’ll play games designed to make people alert to their surroundings in new ways. Are they comfortable in a space? Why not? What do they notice? How

many surveillance cameras can they count? What makes them feel they can sit here and why?

On another project, Being Pedestrian, I collaborate with a dancer and we do walking training exercises, because nobody walks in LA. For example, we’ll ask people to link arms and walk in pairs, with one person walking backward. It’s a sensitizing gesture. We think of the project as training in wandering, teaching people to slow down and be curious. It’s encouraging an environmental experience.

So your goal is to take people out of their routines so they experience place in a different way?

Sort of. But it’s also a question of routines being enforced by public spaces and of reshaping these spaces. We need more creative thought, because we’re creating parks and plazas and they’re not being used.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of public intimacy. That’s a difficult term, because it can be construed as sexual, but I use it to mean that feeling of being bonded or connected to your tribes. It’s very human to want to be able to move fluidly between different collective experiences— and private experiences, too. Public space can either foster or diminish public intimacy.

BELOW: Herbert Dreiseitl’s “recycle hill,” which overlooks a restored meandering river system, is topped by local Singapore sculptor Kelvin Lim Fun Kit’s An Enclosure for a Swing.

OPPOSITE PAGE: Dreiseitl’s award-winning design for Portland, Oregon’s Tanner Springs Park includes stormwater management and an art wall made from recycled historic rail tracks.

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H E R B E RT DR E I S E ITL:

Redesigning the Urban Experience

Photo © GreenWorks PC. OPPOSITE PAGE: Photo © Atelier Dreiseitl.

From his studio in Germany, Herbert Dreiseitl designs public spaces that explore “the interaction of the individual with his surroundings.” Dreiseitl says he was first inspired to explore placemaking by his work with heroin-addicted youth. “I figured out that the way to reach young people is through their surroundings. The key question to social life is how you feel at home in a place.”

Public Art Review: In your practice, where do you place emphasis when it comes to creative placemaking?

Herbert Dreiseitl: A lot of our public places in cities are dominated by ugliness and constructed by engineers who only look for how to get traffic from A to B as fast as possible. There’s no social awareness about what people really need.

I’m interested in creating a space where people are getting in contact with each other, and also the environment. That’s why we focus on water, because water has an amazing ability to be in a permanent process of transition, and it’s the opposite of the hard, harsh environment we have in our modern cities.

Water seems like a therapeutic or healing influence.

Is there a “language” of placemaking? Or a set of principles that set it apart from mere engineering?

I would say rather that placemaking is always an impression of our culture, of what we think has value. You can see this in different cities. In every city, there are fantastic places. You go there and you immediately take it in—such an incredible atmosphere. This atmosphere was certainly not driven by traffic or logical engineering. It is more like a cultural event. Places like that are a living room for society.

Yet your work also has a strong environmental focus.

Yes. It’s another component: a celebration of air, light, water— the environment. It’s a question of getting in contact with something that is lost. Our cities are a totally artificial environment—that’s a fact. As a result, we have a strong desire to sit outside and feel air and light, to feel the temperature change from day to night. People are longing for that.

Do you bring the public into your process?

Placemaking is never accomplished by one person. It’s a social process where you bring in people with multiple fields of expertise. That’s so important to make it a vibrant place.

I like to work on public engagement, though in the United States, it’s very different from here. It can be much more complicated in the U.S. because people are very opinionated and it can be hard to get people to think outside of their opinion. But it’s absolutely essential to have that dialogue with the local people.

During that dialogue, I’m trying to look behind what people say, what’s the message, which is often the unspoken. What is the real intention? It’s very important for artists to listen to that. It’s almost a spiritual dimension.

What about your team? How much work do you do with other professionals?

I like to work with teams—my office team is a mixture of architects, landscape architects, engineers, and professionals in urban design and planning. We also work with many other professionals on projects. More and more, we in the field of art have to connect. We have to create a network. That’s what placemaking really is.

Joseph Hart is associate editor of Public Art Review.

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With funding for permanent works on the decline, temporary public art installations and creative reuse efforts are on the rise —and they’re making a difference

by Jeff Huebner

THIS PAGE: Michelle Acuff’s Surrogate is one of many works that have been installed in empty storefronts through the Tacoma Arts Commission’s Spaceworks program.

OPPOSITE PAGE: Havel Ruck Projects turned a decrepit Houston house into Fifth Ward Jam.

n late 2010, movers transported a small,

THIS PAGE: Photo courtesy Ed Schipul photostream / flickr.com. OPPOSITE PAGE: Photo courtesy Gexydaf’s photostream / flickr.com.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

While the newly developed park is permanent and continues to be improved, the house is a temporary project that decrepit house from one part of Houston’s Fifth will be decommissioned in the fall of 2013. Yet although the Ward district to another, setting the condemned structure itself will disappear, its impact will remain. “What started out as a temporary art installation has created this new, domicile onto an open lot on Lyons Ave. By the wonderful gathering spot for the community, where we lack destinations,” says Fifth Ward CRC president Kathy Payton. following summer, Houston-based artists Dan Havel “It’s created a sense of destination and place.”

There’s no question that public art can help revitalize citand Dean Ruck were hard at work, reconstructing—or ies and communities as well as enrich lives. But temporary rather deconstructing—the humble pink abode into projects, in distilling the characteristics and histories of spewhat Ruck calls a temporary “performative sculpture” cific places, spaces, and landscapes, can also continue to have spiritual and economic impact after they’re gone, perhaps that, among other things, mined the musical legacy effecting permanent change.

With placemaking projects, “there is productive thinking of its historically African-American and increasingly in terms of acknowledging that culture has a role in the fabric Latino neighborhood, seat of famed chitlin’ circuit pro- of cities,” says Nato Thompson, chief curator of the New York– based nonprofit Creative Time, which produces temporary, sitemoter Don Robey’s empire in the 1940s and ’50s. specific public art projects. But, he cautioned, works shouldn’t be driven by economic or “passive entertainment” interests.

The artist duo, also called Havel Ruck Projects, used the “Is it possible that a project is super-interesting and good for house’s siding as well as scavenged and recycled building the neighborhood, that negatively impacts the economy? I say, materials—along with their “improvisational cutting” tech- sure! Not all good things have a good effect on the economy.” nique—to repurpose the structure into a veritable shingle factory explosion with a front-porch stage, where blues gui- Activating the City tar great Texas Johnny Brown and other musicians performed “I don’t think temporary work is so much the be-all and end-all of defining place, but it’s a fantastic way to start to get people when the house reopened in October 2011. to pay attention to otherwise ignored space,” says Tacoma But there’s a deeper level to Fifth Ward Jam, a project of (Wash.) Arts Administrator Amy McBride, who’s gained a the Houston Arts Alliance and the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation, giving it a more poetic dimension. national reputation for her innovative approaches to placeThe recontextualized home calls up the low-income communi- based public art in this city of 200,000.

McBride has launched popular Tacoma Arts Commission ty’s housing struggles and successes, its cycles of decline and initiatives like Spaceworks, in which artists “activate” empty renewal—a metaphor for how local history and community are continually erased and remade. The architectural intervention, storefronts and other unused spaces with installations; and fall 2011’s Temporal Terminus, an exhibit of eight works along Ruck told me, was “an act of community activism, a hopeful the still-evolving downtown Prairie Line Trail, a half-milespark to a potential flame in a neighborhood that badly needs it long pedestrian/bicycle path that was the western terminus of due to decades of neglect and economic stagnation.”

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Northern Pacific’s 1873 transcontinental railroad. The exhibit was the kickoff to an NEA-funded public-art plan by urban designer Todd Bressi and Thoughtbarn (Lucy Begg and Robert Gay) that will include curated temporary and site-specific permanent art. Its signature piece, sited on Tacoma’s University of Washington campus, was the Austin-based Thoughtbarn’s Ghost Prairie, a 25-foot-long patch of glow-in-the-dark grasslands, a reference to the trail’s past and future landscaped use.

Another advantage of place-based installations, says Thompson, is that works can be timely in a way that more permanent installations cannot. “You can be topical,” he says. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be political, but things that are on people’s minds.” An example of this is the Creative Time–produced annual 9/11 World Trade Center remembrance Tribute in Light. “It also gives you some freedom in terms of controversial content. With temporary—it’s gone!”

Budget concerns may drive the need for temporary work, McBride acknowledges, but there can be positive outcomes.

Like other public art administrators and placemakers, she realizes that one of the hallmarks of creating a vital community place is that not everything may work the first time, and tem-

porary public art functions as a “testing ground.” It allows artists and administrators “to work out some bugs” while working with partners, she says.

Moreover, while temporary works may be ephemeral, their placemaking impact can be long-term. “You have a memory of that place in a different way than you ever would’ve because of the art work that was there,” McBride explains.

This shift in perception is a central outcome of Art in Odd Places, which has organized an annual thematic public art event along the length of Fourteenth Street in Manhattan (from Avenue C to the Hudson River) since 2005, proving that ephemeral interventions can also activate a streetscape’s special character. Begun by Ed Woodham and a group of artists at the 1996 Cultural Olympiad in Atlanta, AiOP presents an annual festival of visual and performance art in, well, odd and unexpected places along the vital crosstown corridor. The idea is to get passers-by to think about and see their familiar surroundings in a fresh way, a reminder that a truly civic space depends on chance happenings, a diverse cultural mix, and social interaction as well as free and creative expression.

Last year’s festival—the largest yet—took place the first 10 days in October, a couple weeks after the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street protests, tying in the poetic with the political. With the theme of “Ritual,” the artistic occupation’s guest curators, Kalia Brooks of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts and Trinidad Fombella of El Museo del Barrio, selected over 60 international projects involving acts of sacred and secular ceremony. This included group foot cleansings, randomly placed ceramic deities, rose petal walkways, and Tree Kisses, in which Brooklyn-based Mary Ivy Martin applied heavy lipstick and kissed selected trees (a few times a day) along the street, leaving red traces—an act of nature communion in the dense urban jungle.

ABOVE: Photo courtesy Elsewhere Artist Collaborative photostream / flickr.com. LEFT: Photo by Robert Gay.

ABOVE: Visitors enjoying Elsewhere, a “living museum” in Greensboro, North Carolina.

LEFT: Jeremy Gregory, Diane Hansen, and Ed Kroupa’s Envision and Thoughtbarn’s Ghost Prairie mark the Prairie Line Trail, a defunct rail line in Tacoma being turned into a park .

A novel and sustainable way of creating temporary work—and community—that contributes to a distinctive sense of place has brought international artists to a block in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, transforming a three-story former thrift store into a center of creative reuse culture. Elsewhere, as it’s called, is a “living museum,” an experimental studio, a life-sized curiosity cabinet and object installation, as well as an ongoing art collaborative, which has helped revitalize this city of 275,000.

Opened as a furniture store in 1939, the Carolina Sales Company morphed into an army and fabric surplus store, and then a sprawling, two-storefront second-hand shop, reflecting the tastes of its owner, Sylvia Gray. (Greensboro was once a center of furniture and textile production.) Over time, Gray became more of a hoarder than a seller, and her stores’ goods developed into an idiosyncratic collection, a kind of archive of twentieth-century material excess—a cluttered wonderland of stuff.

Sylvia died in 1997, leaving the store boarded up. But in 2003 her grandson George Scheer and collaborator Stephanie Sherman, recent graduates of the University of Pennsylvania, along with two friends from Michigan, moved to Greensboro, began excavating the decades of amassed bric-a-brac, and created the nonprofit Elsewhere, a place where nothing was for sale and nothing could leave the store. In a residency program started in 2005, artists are invited to come for three- to fiveweek periods and create public pieces using (or responding to) the collection, bringing new meaning to the environment every time its works are re-created.

“Instead of selling it all and clearing it out,” says Scheer, “we used it as a way of building networks and relationships among artists across the country, around the world, and at the same time to produce this space that has a real economic and cultural value to the town.”

In Chicago, artist Theaster Gates and his nonprofit Rebuild Foundation are also making creative use of disused buildings and giving back to the community through cultural redevelopment. Gates bought several abandoned properties in 2009, and used recycled building materials to transform them into a local gathering place for discussions, performances, and communal eating as well as other activities. On the July day I visited the Dorchester Project, a rehabbed home/studio located in two neighboring buildings on the South Side of Chicago, part of it was being used as a day care center. In 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, a project in dis-place- and re-place-making, Gates extended the gesture to Europe.

Last year, Gates worked with a team of newly trained unemployed African-American men in Chicago to dismantle the interior of another decrepit house he’d bought across the street from Dorchester. The gutted property was renovated into the Black Cinema House. But the salvaged materials were shipped to Kassel, Germany, where another team of unemployed workers used them to restore the abandoned Huguenot House, itself built by migrant laborers in the 1820s. The building became a talk, performance, and video venue during this year’s dOCUMENTA (13).

The fate of the Kassel house is uncertain. Most of its materials are being shipped back to the United States where they

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

ABOVE: Photo courtesy Kavi Gupta Gallery. BELOW: Photo by Tanja Jurgensen.

The Art of Creative Reuse

37 ABOVE: In 2009 Theaster Gates bought several Chicago properties and created the Dorchester Project. BELOW: The Black Monks of Mississippi at Gates’s 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, made from salvaged Chicago materials for dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany.

will create a new environment at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago next spring, and then perhaps be reinvented in other places. As Gates recently said in an interview with dOCUMENTA’s artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “Can an artist or an art project amplify the value of these buildings so that people want to take care of them again?” Good question.

As with all temporary work, we’ll have to wait and see.

Jeff Huebner is a Chicago-based art writer and journalist who writes frequently on public art. He is co-author, with Olivia Gude, of Urban Art Chicago: A Guide to Community Murals, Mosaics, and Sculptures.

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What people are saying about

T

By Michael Fallon

he evolutionary progression of a trend from insightful idea to mature realization is not always easy to retrace. Our current national movement

toward

supporting

“creative

placemaking”—or a multifaceted, art-heavy

design and planning process for creating pleasurable, attractive,

and interesting city spaces—may have had any number of launching pads: the imagined garden-cities of Ebenezer

Howard ca. 1890; the City Beautiful movement of Charles Mulford Robinson in the early 1900s; the community-based urban planning approach of Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch in the early 1960s; the development of the public art concept of placemaking in the 1970s. In order to understand creative placemaking today, however, it may be best to look at two key events of the past decade.

The first direct step toward the development of our current understanding of creative placemaking came with the publication, in 2002, of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class. In this book, Florida, then a professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University, connected the nation’s most economically vibrant places to, essentially, the size and diversity of its pool of “creative workers.” In a time of dot-com billionaires and charismatic e-entrepreneurs, the idea struck a nerve among civic officials around the country. A New York Times review published a few months after the book’s publication mentioned that Florida had already been hired to consult with a number of cities—Providence, Rhode Island; Memphis; Indianapolis; Phoenix; and Bellevue, Washington—to attract creatives and entrepreneurs who could transform these places.

revolution There is a palpable interest today by arts organizations and artists in finding new ways to connect with their communities, and imagine new futures for the neighborhoods in which they live and work.

Photo courtesy Tim Halbur.

—Tim Halbur | ArtPlace

It is tempting to suggest that the next stage of the evolution of creative placemaking came with the spring 2010 publication, by the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, of Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa’s white paper, “Creative Placemaking,” and followup developmental work spearheaded by National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) director Rocco Landesman. But, according to Jason Schupbach, the NEA’s Director of Design, that would be an oversimplification.

“In reality,” says Schupbach, this work built on a “pattern in what was happening organically in communities all across this country.” Markusen, Gadwa, and Landesman’s efforts brought national attention to the fact that places all across America were increasingly using the arts to help shape their social, physical, and economic characters and that funders like The Reinvestment Fund and Knight Foundation were researching and fund-

ing projects that used creative activities to drive civic vibrancy and community attachment. In other words, the seeds planted

by Richard Florida had spread like weeds to all cultural corners of the country.

Launch of a Grantmaking Revolution By 2011, two major new initiatives began throwing significant dollars at creative placemaking projects. The NEA’s Our Town (www.nea.gov) announced in July it was distributing $6.5 million in grant money to 51 projects in 34 states that involved partnerships between arts and design organizations and local governments. These projects were chosen based on their proposed ability to contribute toward the “livability of communities” by transforming them into “lively, beautiful, and sustainable places with the arts at their core.”

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the creative placemaking boom

39

—Randy Rollison | Intersection for the Arts’

Innovation Studio

Questions and Concerns from Two Sides

Following close on the heels of the first Our Town grants, in September 2011 another initiative announced its investment of $11.5 million to support 34 creative placemaking projects.

Called ArtPlace (www.artplaceamerica.org), the project was sparked by the NEA in tandem with Ford Foundation president Luis Ubiñas and a number of other funding partners— including the Bloomberg Philanthropies and the James Irvine, Knight, Kresge, McKnight, Andrew W. Mellon, Rasmuson, Robina, and Rockefeller Foundations—and an array of federal agencies that would act as policy advisors. The projects supported by ArtPlace were selected for their ability to help towns and cities thrive by “strategically integrating artists and arts organizations into key local developments in transportation, housing, community development, job creation and more.”

Today, after two annual rounds of grantmaking, Our Town and ArtPlace have distributed a total $38.4 million in support of 212 individual projects around the country. While this amount is a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of billions of cumulative dollars that flow through the nation’s arts economy, the buzz around these programs has been widely influential, leading a number of other agencies—such as the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development and several charitable foundations—to investigate establishing their own creative placemaking initiatives.

The organizations and artists involved in these projects have been deeply appreciative of the support.

“We were excited particularly by the idea of not plan-

Despite the buzz around creative placemaking, two groups have raised questions and concerns about these programs.

First, many policy makers and researchers are concerned that they lack a feedback loop. “The problem with the grant programs so far,” says Ian David Moss, a researcher at Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit organization that supports artists and arts organizations, “is that there is currently no way to accurately judge their effectiveness. While both Our Town and ArtPlace are in the process of setting up broad indicator systems to track progress, this approach provides few tools for analyzing whether projects work or don’t and glosses over the complexity of how artists fit into economic ecosystems. Because of this, we won’t know when a grant really made a difference in a community or when it just got to ride on the coattails of other changes already taking place.”

Furthermore, the programs have riled some of the key people they were meant to benefit—the creative workers themselves. With its focus on large-scale community outcomes, rather than on creative expression, artists often feel intimidated or diminished by the creative placemaking process. Artists also often find problematic the community interaction necessary in these projects. “[Artistic] practice within the public sphere comes with inherent risks,” said Sanjit Sethi, co-director of the California College of the Arts’ Center for Art and Public Life, at a recent public panel on placemaking and the role of artists in the community. “Community is a very loaded term, and so are issues like placemaking and collaboration and all of these

Photo by Joan Osato.

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The ideas keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and the possibilities seem more and more endless. But the risk is we burn ourselves out on the possibilities.

ning but doing, and of building connections between artists and the community that last,” says Laura Zabel, director of Springboard for the Arts, who helped develop an ArtPlace-funded project called Irrigate, which has created dozens of public art projects along a corridor of St. Paul, Minnesota, during the construction of a new light-rail line. Similar sentiments have been expressed by arts organizations and civic leaders all over the country.

We were excited particularly by the idea of not planning but doing, and of building connections between artists and the community that last.

—Laura Zabel | Springboard for the Arts

Creative Placemaking Moves Forward

TOP: Photo by Zoe Prinds-Flash Photography. BOTTOM: Photo by Dianne Debicella.

Despite the range of concerns, interest in creative placemaking is growing quickly. ArtPlace reports that it received almost

2,200 applications for its second round of creative placemaking grants in 2012 (in the end they offered just 47 grant awards, or just 2 percent of those submitted). “There is a palpable interest today by arts organizations and artists in finding new ways to connect with their communities, and imagine new futures for the neighborhoods in which they live and work,” says Tim Halbur, director of communications for ArtPlace.

The artists who have most embraced creative placemaking are those most interested in leading conversations about how we integrate place, art, and the community. “We as artists, and arts organizations, are the most creative people in the world,” says John Michael Schert, executive director of the Trey McIntyre Project, an ArtPlace-supported dance company. “So why look to business or government or education to champion innovative ideas?”

With so much at stake, and an increasing amount of resources and attention being utilized to transform communities toward creative placemaking, this may be the only answer for artists: Lead the transformation of your community, or get out of the way.

Michael Fallon is a writer, editor, and nonprofit administrator based in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Art in America, American Craft, Art Papers, Fiberarts, Utne.com, Public Art Review, and many other publications.

Whereas funders think that they are going to bring more money into the arts, some artists view this as a zero-sum game, with creative placemaking taking away from the already modest amount of money that goes directly to working artists and art for art’s sake.

—Ian David Moss | Fractured Atlas

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other concepts that seem kind of convenient and fitting but are also incredibly problematic.”

Randy Rollison, program director of Intersection for the Arts’ Innovation Studio, concurred while speaking on the same panel. “The risk is enormous,” said Rollison of a major ArtPlace-funded placemaking project in San Francisco called 5M. “There’s risk in perception. There’s risk in mission drift.

The ideas keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and the possibilities seem more and more endless. But the risk is we burn ourselves out on the possibilities.”

Even considering the new possibilities created by these grants, a number of artists worry that a focus on creative placemaking will actually limit their opportunities to do what they do. “There’s a strong undercurrent of skepticism,” says Ian David Moss. “I think the disconnect comes from the fact that whereas funders think that they are going to bring more money into the arts by convincing all sorts of people working in business, community development, and government of the power of art to transform communities, some artists view this as a zero-sum game, with creative placemaking taking away from the already modest amount of money that goes directly to working artists and art for art’s sake.”

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NORTH AMERICA

AFRICA

ASIA

SPANNING

By JACK BECKER

P

ublic art today is a rapidly growing and evolving field. Each project embodies a unique convergence of time and place, artist and community, style and approach,

vision and actualization. Yet public art lacks evaluative studies, in-depth research, and comparative data to serve the expanding field worldwide. Likewise, information about high-caliber projects in different cities and countries is not broadly accessible across borderlines, nor from continent to continent. There are many

great examples of new work most of us never hear about, until now.

In May 2011, Shanghai University’s Fine Arts College—publisher of Public Art (China)—hosted a weeklong think tank to explore the feasibility of establishing an international award for public art. Among the participants were Lewis Biggs, for-

mer artistic director and chief executive of the Liverpool Biennial; John McCormack, former director of the Arts Development Unit, Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand; Wang Dawei, dean and professor of Fine Arts College, Shanghai University, and chief editor of Public Art magazine; and myself, Jack Becker, artist, critic, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Forecast Public Art, and publisher of Public Art Review. The group agreed to undertake the creation of the award. Given the growing interest in placemaking internationally and the need for information about best practices, the group agreed to focus on these realms in the award’s initial year.

The task of recognizing excellence in the vast and expanding field of contemporary public art on a global scale was daunting and unprecedented. What makes good public art? How can we compare projects from different cultures that responded to different criteria? How do we find eligible projects in developing countries that don’t even use the term public art? How can we judge placemaking projects that have just been completed, without the perspective of time (plantings, in particular, often require years to achieve their potential)? While these and other questions presented challenges, the group recognized the potential of the initiative to broaden awareness and increase the perception of value for the amaz-

LEFT TO RIGHT: Photo by Austin Kennedy, courtesy Friends of the High Line. Photo courtesy the artist. Photo courtesy Pan Li and Shanghai University.

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The International Award for Public Art recognizes six finalists for excellence in placemaking

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ing work of thousands of creative professionals collaborating to improve communities and people’s lives.

With subsequent support from Shanghai University, a steering committee was formed and Forecast began the research phase, which involved more than a dozen researchers who scoured the globe for information about projects completed within the past six years. The projects could be realized anywhere, and artists could be of any nationality.

Researchers examined a total of 139 temporary and permanent projects from around the world. These projects were selected for the centrality of the artist’s role, effectiveness in placemaking, professionalism, innovative design, and quality of technical construction. The cultural expression in modern life around the world is reflected in the projects’ variety of forms, including murals, sculptural installations, community transformation projects, space conversion, and art events, among others.

Most of these projects were concerned not only with the spatial environment, but with the cultural and historical context of place, and different views concerning daily life, both urban and rural. They may have initiated community development or been an integral part of it, or they may have been central to the reconstruction and remodeling of a place. In some cases, the artist’s contribution may have been to highlight the ecological significance of a place.

One year after the initial meeting in Shanghai, Biggs, Becker, and Dawei were joined by three additional jurors who are experts in international contemporary public art: Katia Canton, an art critic, curator, and academic in Brazil, professor at the University of Sâo Paulo, and curator of the Museum

of Contemporary Art; Fulya Erdemci, artistic director of Istanbul International Biennial 2013, director of SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain, Amsterdam, and curator of the Turkish Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Art Biennial, 2011; and Yuko Hasegawa, a contemporary art critic, chief curator of the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, art professor at Tama Art University, and a member of the Asian Art Council at the Guggenheim Museum.

The six jurors reviewed all 139 cases and selected six outstanding finalists, one from each continent. One of those finalists will receive the first International Award for Public Art, which will be announced at a forum and award ceremony in Shanghai in March 2013. A new website created for the purpose of sharing the research will feature the winner, finalists, and other top-rated projects from around the world. It will also debut in March. Plans call for establishing a nonprofit to carry on the research and to invite partners to assist in the effort to collect and share the best work in the field.

Public Art and Public Art Review are hereby pleased to share with you six projects that reflect excellence in public art and placemaking. All of us at Public Art Review are excited to be a part of this global effort!

JACK BECKER is the executive director of Forecast Public Art­, publisher of Public Art Review­, a nonprofit based in St. Paul.

The six finalist projects were originally researched by Meena Mangalvedhekar, Giusy Checola, Pan Li, Kelly Carmichael, Vera Tollman, and Peter Morales.

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LEFT TO RIGHT: Photo by Gregor Schneider. Photo by Gert Jan van Rooij. Photo by Eleanna Cadalso Vera.

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The High Line

TOP: The Eyeballing film series curated by Lisa Oppenheim and Mike Sperlinger.

ABOVE: Developing Tray #2 by Anne Collier. BOTTOM LEFT: Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari’s Toilet Paper, Untitled. BOTTOM RIGHT: Thomas Houseago’s Lying Figure.

When you walk the High Line in New York and take in its many public art projects, you’re floating about 25 feet above the streets.

Located on Manhattan’s West Side, the High Line is an innovative public park built on a historic elevated freight rail line.

Founded in 1999 by Friends of the High Line, a group of community residents who fought for the rail line’s preservation and transformation at a time when the historic structure was under the threat of demolition, the park opened in June 2009.

It has been one of the city’s major tourist attractions since then, and yet it is just as much a neighborhood park.

A repurposed piece of industrial infrastructure and a public green space, the High Line also contains viewing platforms, a sundeck, and gathering areas to be used for performances, art exhibitions, and educational programs. Today a nonprofit conservancy coordinates with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation to ensure the High Line is maintained as an extraordinary public space, one that offers a hopeful model for industrial reuse in cities around the world.

TOP, BOTTOM LEFT and RIGHT: Photos by Austin Kennedy. All photos courtesy Friends of the High Line.

New York, New York Creators: Creative Time, James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Piet Oudolf

AFRICA PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Niger Buildings

Agadez, Niger Artist: Not Vital

TOP: Photo by Florio Puenter. MIDDLE and BOTTOM: Photos courtesy the artist.

In 2000, Swiss-born sculptor Not Vital moved to Agadez, Niger, where he bought land among the local, nomadic Tuareg people and began to make sculptural adobe buildings. Each of Vital’s buildings emphasizes social and cultural functions in addition to adding sculptural beauty to the community. The first building was a house called the Mekafoni. He later built the Makaranta, a school in the form of a step pyramid, where 450 local children sit on the steps during class rather than going to an indoor classroom.

Working in the tradition of land art, Vital continued to create sculptural structures in the Agadez desert around the Aladab Oasis until 2007, collaborating with local craftsmen on the construction of his projects, each dedicated to one single purpose. These include The House Against Heat and Sandstorms, The House to Watch the Moon, The House to Watch the Sunset, The House for 8 Brothers, and The 10th House. All of the buildings were financed by the artist himself.

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TOP: Mekafoni, a house. ABOVE: The House to Watch the Moon. BOTTOM: Makaranta, a school.

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Sichuan Academy of Art

The Sichuan Academy of Art’s 165-acre campus was built without any excavation or landfill.

Hao Dapeng’s design of the Sichuan Academy of Art’s Huxi Campus supports the continuity of traditional culture and natural geography and exemplifies a humanistic approach to campus planning and construction.

Using the existing landscape as a basic context for site design, Hao Dapeng designed the campus, located on a 165acre section of China’s Chongqing University Town, to leave the region’s natural topography undisturbed. The campus was constructed throughout the area’s sloping hills without any excavation or landfill.

As the Southwest region’s only professional academy of art, the campus has a strong connection to the natural and cultural context of the surrounding area. Fine forms rendered in rough materials echo the spirit of the rugged landscape. Weathered surfaces recall the industrial legacy of Chongqing. Ivy-covered walls, small valleys of lily, and rice in the wetlands create quiet, natural landscapes. Many of the buildings have the feeling of a spacious creative studio.

Also preserved, largely in their original condition, are several old farmhouses, canals, and other structures of the original settlement. Farmers continue to carry out their activities as usual—herding sheep, planting, harvesting—connecting the campus with the past. In retaining the architectural features of the agricultural landscape, the designer paid tribute to an influential school of painting from the 1980s from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, which emphasized that leaving things as they are is not only a tradition, but a way of acquiring knowledge of prior generations.

The campus succeeds in affirming the academy’s own cultural character through a combination of art and technology, while also indicating possible new directions for urban construction for China as a whole in its period of rapid modernization.

THIS PAGE: Photos courtesy Pan Li and Shanghai University. OPPOSITE PAGE: Photos by Gregor Schneider.

Chongqing, China Artist: Hao Dapeng

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21 Beach Cells Sydney, Australia Artist: Gregor Schneider

When Gregor Schneider’s installation 21 Beach Cells appeared at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, the contrast between Australia’s iconic tourist destination and the network of cage-like enclosures was striking. For one month in 2007 the artist transformed a section of the beach into a space that echoed a military zone with 4x4-meter cells, each furnished with a blue air mattress, beach umbrella, and disconcerting black plastic rubbish bag.

While transparent from the outside, the cells functioned as an interlocking maze.

When beach-goers stepped inside the enclosure, the installation undermined their notions of the beach as an enjoyable, relaxed, egalitarian space open to all. The cell’s visitors were caught between security and surveillance, privacy and exposure, inside and outside. Evoking the political atmosphere in Australia at the time—refugees detained in foreign transit stations, race riots erupting on the beaches of nearby Cronulla, and the government’s unashamedly tough stance on immigration and refugees—21 Beach Cells blended pleasure and trepidation in a disquieting, participatory, and very public art work.

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Gregor Schneider’s 21 Beach Cells was sited on Sydney’s popular Bondi Beach.

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Amsterdam, the Netherlands Artists: Marjetica Potrčč and the Wilde Westen group

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Residents took part in a public art project and now manage a vibrant community commons.

The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife, and Their Neighbor combines visual art and social architecture to redefine the village green.

Working with residents of the multicultural Geuzenveld-Slotermeer district in Amsterdam’s Nieuw West, Slovene artist and architect Marjetica Potrč and Wilde Westen—a group of young designers, architects, and cultural producers—created community vegetable gardens as a tool for reclaiming ownership of the neighborhood at a time when demolition and redevelopment are causing many to feel uprooted.

The project celebrates a return to local food production.

Here, farming and cooking are viewed as a way for people to share knowledge and traditions, and a means for the cultural renewal and rebirth of the neighborhood. During the year in which the project developed, the residents themselves became the most important people involved, and in September 2009, they took over its management. A committee of eight is now responsible for keeping the garden and the kitchen open for food production and cooking. The space also serves as a location for workshops and cultural programming for the neighborhood.

Because of this project, public space has been permanently transformed from a corporate-controlled, semi-private space into a vibrant community commons. The project provides a center around which the community can engage in the process of “building a place”—a much-needed ritual in a climate where many families experience continual resettlement. It has empowered residents of the neighborhood, who have carried the project forward, and other communities who hope to replicate the results in their neighborhoods.

TOP TO BOTTOM: Photo by Gert Jan van Rooij. Photo by Lucia Babina. Photo by Gert Jan van Rooij. Photo by Reinder Bakker, Hester van Dijk. Photo by Gert Jan van Rooij.

The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife, and Their Neighbor

SOUTH AMERICA Caracas, Venezuela Artists: Alejandro Haiek Coll and Eleanna Cadalso Vera

THIS PAGE: Photos by Eleanna Cadalso Vera.

In 2006 Alejandro Haiek Coll and Eleanna Cadalso Vera of LAB. PRO.FAB teamed up with other collectives to occupy an abandoned parking lot in Caracas, Venezuela, and create a model of what they call microurbanism. The result, Tiuna el Fuerte Cultural Park, comprises a complex of offices, classrooms, dining spaces, green spaces, sports areas, and open-air auditoriums.

Programming in the park promotes arts and sciences through workshops and events.

By occupying underused land within the city, Tiuna el Fuerte simultaneously addresses Caracas’s lack of green space and fulfills a need for youth programming. Every day, more than 500 children and adolescents participate in the park’s cultural and artistic events, which range from a hip-hop collective to a mobile community radio show.

The park’s physical infrastructure was built with alternative construction techniques to control costs and manage energy.

Here, recycled shipping containers can be organized and reconfigured for various uses and have been useful in responding to the park’s continued growth.

Tiuna el Fuerte currently occupies 7,500 square meters in the outskirts of Caracas and its master plan calls for it to grow to 20,000 square meters. Through laws of communal appropriation, the Tiuna el Fuerte Foundation will receive ownership of the land after a total of 20 years of occupation.

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Tiuna el Fuerte Cultural Park

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Two of five stages for developing the Tiuna el Fuerte Cultural Park have been completed.

Doug Young: “Waikui“ - Hawaii State Museum - Sculpture Garden, Honolulu, HI - Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts Technique: Airbrush on three laminated layer of safety glass

Carol Bennett:“Trigger Picasso Energy“ - Hawai‘i State Art Museum Sculpture Garden - Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts Technique: Airbrush painting with gold leaf combined with photovoltaic

Artists: Carol Bennett & Doug Young - 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

ON LOCATION Reports from the field

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Capital as Context 5x5, a new curator-driven public art festival for Washington, D.C.

by RONIT EISENBACH and WELMOED LAANSTRA

ABOVE: Photo by Bree Gant. BELOW: Photo by Steve Rowell.

As the nation’s capital,

Washington, D.C., combines instantly recognizable symbols of national and international significance with an urban environment that is rich, diverse, and complex. But, like many other U.S. cities, aspects of the District of Columbia’s urban realm have been ignored and forsaken. And although Washington is a nexus of public debate, protests, and policy decisions, it also symbolizes disenfranchisement: Washingtonians, unable to vote for full-fledged congressional legislators, are excluded from complete participation in the political process. These disparities make the District of Columbia, as one of the 5x5 curators, Steve Rowell, argues, “the ultimate site for research focused on questions of political power and place.”

Launched in March 2012, 5x5 was an ambitious D.C.-wide festival of contemporary, ephemeral art designed to explore new perspectives on the city and to encourage tourists and residents to travel beyond the monumental core of the nation’s capital and visit the city’s diverse neighborhoods. It follows the international trend of urban temporary art festivals, such as Glow in Santa Monica and Nuits Blanches in Europe, that are designed

ABOVE: For Henry “Box” Brown: FOREVER, Wilmer Wilson IV covered himself in stamps.

BELOW: KUNSTrePUBLIK’s mobile Fountains of D.C. is a replica of the Temperance Fountain.

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to promote cultural tourism and bolster the creative image of urban areas. A component of the DC Creates! 2009 Public Art Program Master Plan, 5x5 was developed and funded by the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities (DCCAH). The initiative was timed to coincide with the centennial anniversary of the National Cherry Blossom Festival, which annually commemorates Japan’s historic gift of 3,000 cherry trees to the residents of Washington, D.C. “Five by Five could be the single most important program that the DCCAH could do to increase its visibility and importance,” says Liesel Fenner, public art program manager for Americans for the Arts. “The goal was to put D.C. on the national and international map of temporary exhibitions.” The festival was also curatorially ambitious.

Putting the Festival Together To develop the program, DCCAH in the summer of 2011 launched an open international call for five curators. Of the hundred plus curators who responded, ten were shortlisted during the first week of October. They were given a bus tour to show them the wide-ranging character of D.C. neighborhoods. Once chosen, each curator would be asked to select five artists to yield a total of 25 new works to be sited throughout the city. On December 7, each curator presented a proposal outlining his or her approach and identifying the artists they would recruit. The next day, curators Richard Hollinshead, Amy Lipton, Laura Roulet, Steve Rowell, and Justine Topfer were notified of their selection.

These five curators became the festival “drivers,” working closely with their chosen artists. The curator-driven structure, offers Justine Topfer, created the opportunity for “works that incurred more risk, which is an important part of temporary public art.” Noting that community engagement can be a lengthy process, she says that this project’s emphasis on spontaneity led to a more streamlined process.

When the festival opened in March, the curatorial approach allowed for different perspectives from each curator and resulted in a wide range of diverse and, overall, interesting installations and performances. Mary Beth Brown, DCCAH Public Art Coordinator, noted that not all installations worked out as intended, due to the time constraints and city-wide focus, but the overall diversity of the resulting 25 projects was “worth that risk.”

British curator Richard Hollinshead encouraged his UKbased group to consider the duality of distance and proximity

and the sensation of slippage “between the symbolic D.C. of the worldwide public imagination and the ‘domestic’ human D.C. with its complex histories and communities.” Artist Jo Ray’s Spoken For appropriated text fragments from demolished buildings, suggesting the unheard voices of disenfranchised and displaced citizens. Her strategically placed billboards framed the Washington monument, placing the work into a larger context. Calling attention to homelessness, injustice, and the ways in which our institutions fall short of our ideals, Wolfgang Weileder’s Res Publica consisted of cardboard models of the Supreme Court placed around D.C. On a street corner in view of the Court, a custom-made vending machine dispensed free construction manuals enabling any citizen to build one of the models. Profits from the auction of the artist’s prints will benefit homeless citizens.

Amy Lipton, whose general curatorial focus centers on “contemporary art and its relationship to the natural world,” selected four artists and one collective for BiodiverCITY. They concentrated on “address[ing] biodiversity in scientific and cultural terms” in urban settings. Natalie Jeremijenko’s Butterfly Bridge, installed over a busy street at the border with Maryland, sought to reimagine urban infrastructure to account for the diverse species that share space and resources. Brandon Ballengée selected the Smithsonian National Zoo as the site for his luminescent Love Motel for Insects. The ultraviolet light attracted nocturnal insects, enabling viewers to interact with them.

Guided by a conviction that “public means people, not place,” and that “public art can be a social practice,” curator Laura Roulet titled her proposal Activate => Participate.

She selected artists who share her interest in activating space through public participation. In Finding a Line, Ben Ashworth and Workingman Collective worked with a neighborhood institution, the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop (CHAW), local kids, skateboarders, and “whoever else was in the area” to transform an underpass into a skate park and in the process became environmental stewards. Wilmer Wilson IV’s performance Henry “Box” Brown: FOREVER, in which he covered himself with stamps and walked to a nearby post office, asking to be mailed to freedom, was based on the historic figure of Henry “Box” Brown, a slave who mailed himself to the North. Both artists created works that required people to activate or complete them.

Steve Rowell’s Suspension of Disbelief projects sought to “investigate the rich legacy of Washington, D.C., as a place of

LEFT: Photo by Amy Lipton. RIGHT: Photo by Vincent Gallegos.

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LEFT: The ultraviolet light in Brandon Ballengée’s Love Motel for Insects attracts bugs at the Smithsonian Zoo. RIGHT: Reko Rennie’s Remember Me pays homage to the original inhabitants of the land.

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Photo by Jo Ray.

concentrated, symbolic meaning” and call “attention to historical inaccuracies, misinterpretations, and spatial practices.”

Approaching art-making as a form of research, Rowell selected five artists and artist teams interested in unearthing and creating opportunities for the public to experience the political.

Deborah Stratman and Steven Badgett’s Polygonal Address (PA) System, “a solar-powered spinning pentagonal raft,” broadcasted sound recordings from historic public addresses and protests that took place in the District. To provoke community dialogue and inspire social gathering, the German artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIK created Fountains of DC, a mobile replica of the Temperance Fountain.

For Betwixt & Between, curator Justine Topfer invited the artists in her group “to consider and expose the hidden assumptions and shared meanings embedded in the everyday experience of the built world” and enable viewers to regain access to the complexity of that urban environment. Australian artist Reko Rennie inserted his large neon billboard Remember Me directly into the existing built environment to reference the original inhabitants of the land. Monica Canilao and her loose artist collective mined the built environment for materials in their journey across the country to D.C. These discarded possessions were remade into Home Mender, which was built within and on top of the old police evidence warehouse in Anacostia.

Responding to Time and Place

artists countered and framed political or social ideals. Others questioned the status quo of the built and natural environment. A few artists celebrated creativity and aimed to enhance a sense of community, while others encouraged viewers to reenvision the public realm, worked with neighborhood institutions to stimulate active public participation, placed objects to provoke consideration of the invisible forces in the District, or addressed the Cherry Blossom anniversary. For instance, Cath Campbell created Marathon, a working scale-model of the cable car at Mt. Hiei, home to the original 3,000 cherry trees. The Office of Experiments’ 1x1 raised funds for Japan’s tsunami victims through the sale of prints and commemorated the disaster through the display of 1,000 vials “symbolic of Japanese tears.”

These works were all part of the art community’s larger effort to engage in Washington’s ongoing discussions with the public. Not all of the installations and performances drew large crowds; still, this first attempt established a foundation for future efforts. The 5x5 project augmented the city’s diverse cultural atmosphere and demonstrated the potential for ephemeral works to stimulate further public discourse in the nation’s capital. If repeated, 5x5 has the potential to become a new kind of D.C. art institution, one that, as Provisions Library Executive Director Don Russell says, “builds on the city’s underground history of temporary public art interventions and opens the potential for this type of art practice to become a hallmark of the city’s creative profile internationally.”

Temporary art festivals can bring art to larger and more diverse audiences in spontaneous, experimental ways. The nimble and flexible artworks they enable can be uniquely responsive to a particular place and time. Such projects stimulate public dialogue and underscore the relevance of art and design to people’s lives.

The works produced for 5x5 were wide-ranging. Certain

Ronit Eisenbach is an artist, architect, University of Maryland faculty member, and Kibel Gallery curator. She coauthored Installations by Architects: Experiments in Building and Design. WELMOED LAANSTRA is an independent curator and consultant in Washington, D.C. She is the cofounder and cocurator of Street Scenes: Projects for DC.

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Sited to frame the Washington Monument, Jo Ray’s Spoken For includes text from demolished buildings, such as “Out of Order,” “Our Crabs Have No Sand,” “Push for Help,” and “Decamp.”

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Past and Present Artists respond to two iconic historic sites in San Francisco

by TERRI COHN

This year, San Francisco celebrated the 75th anni-

she wanted to “capture the imagination of a wide variety of visitors, not just art-world people.” Her choice of Fort Point versary of the Golden Gate Bridge with International Orange, a allowed her to “create a broad timeline that would include hismajor exhibition and public art project. One of the 16 artists involved in the exhibition was Andy Freeberg. For his pho- torical material through the contemporary moment.”

Haines said that the minute she entered the space, she tographic installation called Gatekeepers, Freeberg created a knew it was a rich environment, not only for its “architectural series of images of the bridge’s numerous personnel, including toll takers, highway patrols, painters, gardeners, and mainte- excellence,” but also for its philosophical relationship to the bridge. Joseph Strauss, designer of the bridge, insisted on keepnance crews. His project, a representation of the bridge as a workplace, was so exciting for the bridge community that dur- ing the fort “because the architecture was so sublime,” going so far as to design a bridge arc that spans Fort Point to preserve ing the exhibition’s opening weekend, workers drove down to it. “I love the fact that one architect would respect the work Fort Point in their trucks and ran in to see their portraits. of another so entirely,” said Haines. “It’s a rare phenomenon.”

International Orange was directed and curated by Cheryl One of the most significant aspects of International Orange, Haines and was housed inside the historic Fort Point, which sponsored by the FOR-SITE Foundation in partnership with the sits just under the south end of the bridge. The exhibit Golden Gate National Parks Coninitiated a subtle conversaservancy and the National Park tion between past and present, Service, was the way in which nature and the built environthe 16 featured artists addressed ment, and the various groups of space—whether perceptually, humans who have inhabited the locationally, or mathematically site. Its subtlety was an achievedefined. Spaces receive their ment, especially considering our essence from locations, uses, and romance with the iconic site.

—Cheryl Haines, curator histories, and the works created In part, that subtlety resulted for International Orange were from Haines’s close contact with responsive to and informed by the bridge and its environment. the site’s proximity to the Golden Gate Bridge, which had a “I’ve spent months out here now, and it’s alive!” said Haines in constant visual and aural presence throughout the complex. an interview in June. “It’s an entire community: it’s the people who work there, it’s the tourists that visit, it’s the traffic beneath Space and Sound it—the ships, the sailboats, the sea life, the surfers—it’s an For International Orange, the sounds of the wind, the sea, the extraordinary environment!” bridge, and the birds were augmented by the auditory addiThe decision of where to locate International Orange in tions of various artists: Doug Hall’s Chrysopylae, a wonderful the first place was a complex challenge for Haines, who said

The site is alive!

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BOTH PAGES: Photos courtesy the artists and FOR-SITE Foundation.

Cheryl Haines described the unique power of International Orange as being “not just for the place, but also of the place.”

She believes that “one of the mistakes that can occur in creating art in the public realm is to not carefully consider what is, and to impose something that is not really in tune with the site…. It takes a very specific understanding of place to draw forth the quiet references that exist.” A number of artists successfully incorporated those subtle site references into their works. One example was Cornelia Parker’s Reveille, a pair of suspended bugles, one intact and one flattened, that cast shadows in an open corridor and emphasized the fact that Fort Point was never called into action.

Other projects responded to the natural environment and fluctuating ecosystem that surround the bridge and fort. These projects, which were largely object based rather than site responsive, succeeded with mixed results compared to those that seamlessly interwove with the historical installations. Pae White’s muhf-uhl—a large tonal tapestry, stretched across its

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Evocations and Ecologies

ABOVE: Seven dresses for seven California bridges in Fiesta Queens by Anandamayi Arnold.

MIDDLE: Stephanie Syjuco’s mock retail: The International Orange Commememorative Store.

BOTTOM: Cornelia Parker’s Reveille, a reminder that Fort Point was never called to action.

OPPOSITE PAGE: Portaits of Golden Gate Bridge workers in Gatekeepers by Andy Freeberg.

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video portrait of the bridge’s manmade and natural ecosystem, featured a haunting score by Joan Jeanrenaud and Jim McKee; Bill Fontana’s Acoustical Visions of the Golden Gate Bridge was permeated with echoes of the bridge’s expansion joints and vibrating cables, as well as the sounds of foghorns and cars; and Jeannene Przyblyski’s retro installation K-Bridge housed a virtual radio station that played a program of stories, sounds, and ideas suggested by the bridge. While Hall’s work transported viewers through the “window” of the screen to the exterior environment with lengthy footage of container ships passing through the Golden Gate, and Fontana’s acoustically brought the bridge to them, Przyblyski’s K-Bridge radio drew its listeners into the living space of the fort, where soldiers cooked, ate, and slept, and the lighthouse keepers and their families worked, read, and played.

In such ways, these projects and others transposed, or translocated, the various spaces of this historic location, while leaving Fort Point intact and untouched (a mandate of the National Park Service). The artworks situated the fort as a formal element, which was modified or distorted by the spatial elements and objects introduced into it. The seamless juxtaposition of historical rooms and artists’ installations encouraged a close reading of the sometimes diverse elements in these galleries. While the introduction of the new activated the old, both were transformed by physical nearness. A good example of this transformation was the proximity of a period dining table, set for noncommissioned officers, with Courtney Lain’s Sea Vision TV. Lain’s TV featured archival footage of the bridge, including its 1937 opening festivities, accompanied by a musical score composed by the artist, creating psychological, social, emotional, and historical reverberations.

Anandamayi Arnold blurred this divide with her seven colorful crepe paper gowns, fashioned in the style of the Fiesta Queens who had been part of the opening ceremonies for the bridge. Displayed on mannequins, Arnold’s period-referential costumes represented the bridge and the six counties (San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, and Del Norte) that supported its construction, paying tribute to those individuals who recognized the value of building this connecting span for the region. The text in an adjacent historical installation discussed how some people even mortgaged their homes to acquire the funds they contributed for the realization of the bridge, underscoring the worth understood since its genesis.

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they could have been abandoned at the fort. Installed in oldfashioned exhibition vitrines, their work of “fantastical archaeology” was successful in ways that the others were not because, as pointed out in the exhibition text describing Encrustations, “These ordinary objects become hybrids of the natural and the human-made, marvelous artifacts of the historical imagination.”

Rounding out these installations were projects that replicated and commented on tourism’s classic elements: free copies of a special edition of Kate Pocrass’s magazine Average; Allison Smith’s celebratory Fort Point Bunting, which adorned the Fort’s courtyard and greeted visitors as they entered the site; and Stephanie Syjuco’s The International Orange Commemorative Store, a parody of the ever-present souvenir shop, which in Syjuco’s case had nothing for sale and couldn’t be entered most of the time. gallery like a rusted Richard Serra sculpture—suggested the fogshrouded ambient atmosphere of the Golden Gate but did not interface with the site. Abelardo Morell’s camera obscura photographs of the bridge and Vertigo installation were aesthetically pleasing but flirted closely with the existing myriad touristintended memorabilia of the bridge. David Liittschwager’s One Cubic Foot: Life Under the Golden Gate Bridge—a promising series of photographic cubes populated by magnified images of organisms found in sea water—was thwarted by its clunky display on steel stands. Camille Utterback’s Span, a didactic series of video monitors that presented animated flow patterns and shifts in the Bay’s shoreline, had little presence in its remote upstairs location. It might have been better appreciated as an entryway educational installation. In contrast, Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood fabricated a series of artifacts that looked like

Reflections It is challenging to liberate historic sites from their embedded histories, which keep them rooted in the past, often unable to speak in the present. In traditional public art practices, the past is not handed over to a new generation for interpretation, but rather codified as alienated and decontextualized objects or locales.

At Fort Point, however, Haines offered an innovative method of liberating historical artifacts and sites by creatively working with the details, ambience, and qualities of places in ways that merged past and present, allowing both to communicate.

Terri Cohn is a writer, curator, and art historian. She was a contributing editor to Artweek magazine for two decades, has contributed to numerous books and journals, and serves as Interdisciplinary Studies faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Photos courtesy the artist and FOR-SITE Foundation.

ON LOCATION

ABOVE: Fabricated archaeological artifacts in Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood’s Encrustations.

BELOW: Photographs of sea water organisms in One Cubic Foot by David Liittschwager.

VISUAL ARTS AT

WAVE HILL ART INSPIRED BY Wave Hill Bronx, NY

www.wavehill.org

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A WORLD-CLASS LANDSCAPE Nova Jiang, Landscape Abbreviated, 2012

Norfolk, Virginia

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Art is up, down and everywhere in Lexington, Kentucky.

From rooftops to subterranean creeks, uniquely creative public art abounds in the Bluegrass thanks to area arts council and united arts fund, LexArts.

In addition to Concordia, LexArts created an innovative partnership with the Department of Environmental Quality to produce inventive and educational installations: Surface Reflections – a real-time transmission of sounds from a creek below the city.

Made You Look – a project that used local artists to decorate storm drains along sidewalks.

Concordia, 2012

by DeWitt Godfrey

To learn about the expanding art scene in the Horse Capital of the World visit LexArts.org.

Downtown Arts Center Main Street Lexington Kentucky

ArtsPlace – 161 North Mill Street Lexington KY 859.255.2951

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ON LOCATION

TOP: Photo courtesy Fleur Smith. BOTTOM: Photo by Kong Vellak, courtesy Dana Langlois, JavaArts.

During a slow-moving ride

through traffic in a tuktuk—a motorcycle taxi with an attached open cart for passengers—one has ample opportunity to survey the bland and decorative public art of Cambodia’s cities. It’s the kind of art that can be seen in most cities anywhere on the globe. Cambodia’s tends toward realistic and easy-to-read images of animals or humans. Some pieces are religious in nature, and others are similar to the Communist-era propaganda art seen in China and other parts of the former Soviet bloc.

But Cambodia, perhaps best known to tourists as the place to explore the ancient Khmer temples of Angkor Wat, is also an up-and-coming land of burgeoning contemporary art. Much of it has a connection to social work—rehabilitating street youth, helping underprivileged kids, and ameliorating results of the Khmer Rouge era, exemplified in the horrors of the “killing fields.” For example, the art projects and gallery at the Hotel de la Paix in Siem Reap, a smaller gateway city for the Angkor Wat temples, provide young Cambodian artists opportunities to exhibit their works and to be employed as art teachers and mentors for disadvantaged youth and victims of land mines.

Phare Ponleu Selpak, a famous art school in Battambang Province, trains street kids in performing and visual arts.

I found during my January 2012 trip to this developing country that exciting and innovative public art projects are also happening there in spite of the country’s troubled political past, recurring natural disasters, chronically poor economy, government corruption, and general lack of a market for contemporary art. In fact, many recent public art projects address the nation’s challenges directly.

cling, The Rubbish Project was started by artists Seckon Leang and Fleur Smith in 2006. This multimedia initiative, which was launched in Siem Reap and recently did work in Japan, involves the artists working with communities and volunteers to do large-scale public art productions created from garbage.

For World Water Day in 2008, The Rubbish Project created a monumental public sculpture called Naga, or great serpent, which is 255 meters long and 1.8 meters in diameter. Volunteers spent eight days hand-tying together its rattan “bones,” obtained from the World Wildlife Federation’s Sustainable Rattan Harvesting Project, with 10 kilometers of nylon and covering them in more than 100,000 hand-cut pieces of recycled plastic. Intended to bring attention to the need to keep waterways clean and use less plastic, Naga was installed and

Environmental Concerns Conceived as an environmental awareness campaign to bring attention to the problems of plastic waste and to promote recy-

TOP: Naga, a 255-meter long sculpture created by The Rubbish Project in Siem Reap.

BOTTOM: Don’t Forget About Art, a banner at Phnom Penh’s Our City Festival, 2011.

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ON LOCATION

by JANE INGRAM ALLEN

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Healing Arts In spite—or because—of its troubled past and uncertain future, Cambodia boasts a burgeoning public art scene

ON LOCATION

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 24 NO. 1 • ISSUE 47 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

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exhibited for over a month in the Siem Reap River and it will travel to Nepal for the Kathmandu International Art Festival, which opens November 25, 2012. The Rubbish Project also held fashion shows recently, featuring garments made from recycled plastic and other waste materials.

Encouraging Peace Peace Art Project Cambodia (PAPC) is another project that turns used materials—this time decommissioned arms—into art. Supervised by artist and curator Sasha Constable (who also curates the Hotel de la Paix program with assistant Savann Oun), the project, launched in 2004, aims to promote peace and remove weapons from society. Working with the Japan Assistance Team for Small Arms Management in Cambodia in cooperation with the government of Cambodia and with technical support from the Development Technology Workshop, the Peace Art Project has created several monuments.

Bird of Peace (2004), by Cambodian artists Sophon Samkhan and Chhay Bunna, was commissioned by the Australian Embassy and now stands in Sanderson Park in Phnom Penh.

World of Peace (2007), installed in a public “children’s park” in the town of Kampong Thom, was created by Sophon Samkhan, Choup Sopheak, Khem Sambo, Tan Vanno, Yen Entareak, and Vong Daravy. Dedicated in 2008, Naga for Peace and Development by Toun Thorneakea, Ou Vanndy, Ouk Chim Vichet, and Kim Samdy stands in a public park in Battambang City. In 2010, a peace monument called De-Miner was commissioned by the Japanese Rotary International District 2580 to commemorate the clearing of land mines by HALO Trust. It is now permanently sited in Siem Reap, and Sasha Constable, who supervised these projects, believes it is the last in this series of peace monuments.

ABOVE: Photo courtesy Dana Langlois, JavaArts, Phnom Phenh. MIDDLE: Photo by neighborhood resident Chhon Pisal. BOTTOM: Photo by Khvay Samnang.

ON LOCATION

ABOVE: ArtXprojects moved Mobile Gardens around Phnom Penh at the Our City Festival.

MIDDLE: The White Building project was launched in 2012 in this apartment building.

BOTTOM: Residents of the White Building collaborated to produce works in this exhibition.

ON LOCATION

Jane Ingram Allen is an independent artist, curator, and arts writer. After eight years living in Taiwan and traveling throughout Asia, she is now based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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ABOVE: Naga for Peace and Development was made out of decommissioned weapons.

BELOW: Like the work above, World of Peace is also part of the Peace Art Project Cambodia.

ON LOCATION

Some of the most exciting contemporary public art projects in Cambodia are happening in the capital of Phnom Penh. One of these, the White Building project, was intended to enliven the community and initiate dialogue about urban renewal and unbridled commercial development that displaces economically deprived residents. Set in a historic decaying apartment complex, the White Building project was launched in 2012 by Sa Sa Art Projects (the community art program of Sa Sa Bassac Gallery, founded and directed by curator Erin Gleeson) and Incidental, an artists’ collaborative. Over an eight-week period, photographer and installation artist Lyno Vuth and sound artist David Gunn offered an art workshop, discussions, and handson art activities in visual and audio media to the residents of the building, who were then encouraged to collaborate with other residents of the neighborhood to produce works about local issues and culture. The project culminated with an opening event called “The White Night,” as well as performances and exhibitions in February 2012.

Our City Festival is another dynamic public art project in Phnom Penh that brings together artists, art galleries, and organizations connected to visual arts, architecture, music, and performance. With an independent, participative, and collaborative approach, its aim is to celebrate life in the city and to encourage people to think about its challenges. Begun in 2008, Our City Festival expanded to a full festival program in 2011.

Festival events are held across the city in galleries, nonprofit spaces, and public places. Some of the art in 2011 even moved around the city to different public spaces. Mobile Gardens by ArtXprojects consisted of small carts filled with living plants and flowers that volunteers pushed around the city, stopping in different places to form a sort of instant public park and bring plants and flowers to urban dwellers. For Don’t Forget About Art, artists Meas Sokhorn and Kong Vollak designed huge banners and installed them temporarily in public places all over Phnom Penh as a contrast to the city’s busy visual stimuli, which includes advertising banners, flashing lights, graffiti, and other signage.

The festival expanded in 2012 to other cities in Cambodia, including Battambang and Siem Reap, says festival coordinator and founder Dana Langlois, owner of JavaArts in Phnom Penh. “The 2012 Our City Festival, with the theme of Urban Currents, takes as its point of departure the movements within the urban environment: the flows between the people, resources, environment, and landscape of the city within the context of urbanization and the impact on greater Cambodia.”

The festival now appears to be well-established and a good model for participatory public art activities in urban environments. It gives emerging artists and professionals—and even non-artists and ordinary urban dwellers—an opportunity to participate in contemporary art and promotes a public dialogue about life in the city.

With these examples of independent and grassroots public art projects, Cambodia is at the forefront of contemporary public art that engages ordinary people with art in new and creative ways. It is amazing that so much innovative public art is being done against all odds with minimal financial resources in a developing country, but it is possible with committed and dedicated artists and arts organizers.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Photos courtesy Sasha Constable.

Coping with Urbanization

JUAN WILLIAM CHÁVEZ

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BOOKS Publications and reviews

The Politics of Engagement New books examine public art and social experimentation

by Joseph Hart

THE KNOT: An Experiment on Collaborative Art in Public Urban Spaces

Nato Thompson, ed.

New York and Cambridge: Creative Time Books and MIT Press, 2012 280 pages, $39.95 (hardcover)

Markus Bader, Oliver Baurhenn, Kuba Szreder, Raluca Voinea, Katharina Koch, eds.

Berlin: Jovis, 2012 208 pages, $40 (paperback)

There’s a growing sense of urgency, in the world of public art, or outright hostility toward the notion of an engaged public. For to answer some fundamental questions about “public practice.” them, spectacle and amusement are far more palatable goals for What is it? What separates it from activism? Can emergent prin- public art. That being the case, is there a divide among artists between public art that seeks public engagement and that which ciples be defined? How to measure its success? seeks to amuse? Where are the points of overlap?

In part this urgency stems from mounting interest in social To take these queries out of the theoretical realm, browse experimentation on the part of public artists at precisely the moment when the field at large is entering a tentative adulthood. the pages of Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991– With legitimization comes scrutiny: of funding streams, the quan- 2011, which highlights 106 social art projects and groups tification of outcomes, degree-granting public art educational ini- from around the world. This mosaic of miniature case studies provides an interesting portrait of the breadth of this emerging tiatives, and the relationship between public art and members of form: a pirate radio station in Berlin broadcasting for May Day the public at large, as well as their government representatives. demonstrations; Paul Chan’s community-minded production of At the same time, this discussion takes place against the backdrop of enormous geopolitical shifts driven, at least in part, Waiting for Godot in post-Katrina New Orleans; an info-sharing juice bar based in Luxembourg. If these disparate projects share by new forms of grassroots rebellion (e.g., Arab Spring, Occupy) that have creatively shifted the world of activism from mori- anything, it’s a creative, tactical approach to local conditions and communities in the sites where each takes place. For a more bund tactics that have delivered virtually no results since the exhaustive, yet whimsical, case study, try The Knot, a book and Civil Rights Movement. A handful of recent titles take up these CD cataloguing a touring art project by the same name. In several questions and provide, if not answers, some general direction European capitals, the project set up a mobile and completely for the conversation, as well as a great deal of food for thought.

Political theorist Diana Boros makes an important con- democratic lecture/music/meeting/playground and documented the “performances” that everyday citizens enacted in the space. tribution in Creative Rebellion for the Twenty-First Century: Indeed, outreach, collaboration, and inclusion—and the The Importance of Public and Interactive Art to Political Life willingness to let these methods inform, or even define, the artin America. Her theory-dense, yet quite readable, book rests work—emerge as a common impulse. The artwork itself funcon a fairly simple premise: that in an atomized, individualistic America, public art—specifically socially minded public prac- tions as a tool to “reinvigorate collectivity and connectivity,” as Carol Becker puts it in one of seven critical essays in Living as tice—will “foster the desire to participate in public life on the Form. She calls this work the construction of “microutopias.” basis of new relationships both to the self and to the public.”

In this sense, interventionist art projects are “experiments” that This premise, of course, raises more questions. Is public engagement a primary goal or merely one among many outcomes “attempt to create physical manifestations of an ideal ‘humanity’ in an inhumane world.” It’s as good a general principle as I have of social practice? Different artists would surely argue different heard for describing the aims of social practice. sides to the question. Moreover, the goal of fostering engagement opens the world of publicly funded and sponsored art to attack, since in many countries, powerful forces exhibit ambivalence joseph Hart is associate editor of Public Art Review.

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BOOKS

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 222 pages, $85 (hardcover)

LIVING AS FORM: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

CREATIVE REBELLION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: The Importance of Public and Interactive Art to Political Life in America Diana Boros

BOOKS Earth Art Expanded Two books suggest the evolution of a genre

by Capper Nichols

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 24 NO. 1 • ISSUE 47 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

In Ends of the Earth Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon expand the conventional scope of “land art” of the 1960s and 1970s.

They give less attention to the greatest hits—the monumental and geographically remote works of Heizer, De Maria, and Smithson—and more to performative, ephemeral work like that of Jean Tinguely and Richard Long. While this gambit succeeds as art history, it’s less convincing as genre revision. But if we look to the past two decades, as does The New Earthwork, edited by Twylene Moyer and Glenn Harper, we find work that has indeed changed the genre—earth art that is often more explicitly local, functional, activist, and environmentally remedial.

Ends of the Earth is the companion book to “the first large-scale museum exhibition of land art.” The show opened at MOCA in L.A. in the summer of 2012, and moved to Munich for the

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BOOKS

fall. In addition to a wealth of images, the handsome largeformat volume includes five scholarly essays, six reminiscences by gallerists/critics, and an annotated checklist of the exhibition. Seeking to dispel some of the “myths associated with land art,” Kaiser and Kwon claim that it was international, engaged urban grounds, did not escape the art system, and was a media practice as much as a sculptural one.

The New Earthwork is a collection of 63 short pieces culled from Sculpture and “extensively updated.” Typically, an article or interview opens with a brief discussion of an idea, say fountains and “the concept of water flows,” before focusing on the work of one or more artists. The result can be a bit of a tease, when analysis quickly gives way to description. To be fair, though, the intent seems to be to introduce an artist rather than fully cover a subject. Moyer contributes 11 essays, and these are consistently the most satisfying, in particular pieces on Vaughn Bell and Buster Simpson.

These two books are complementary, showing what land art was and what earthworks have become.

While land art was a move out of the gallery and into direct contact with the earth, earthworks often promote direct action, as a means of engaging with questions of how to live on and with the planet.

ENDS OF THE EARTH: Land Art to 1974

THE NEW EARTHWORK: Art, Action, Agency

Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon New York: Prestel, 2012 264 pages, $60 (hardcover)

Twylene Moyer and Glenn Harper, eds.

Hamilton, NJ: ISC Press, 2012 320 pages, $29.95 (paperback)

Capper nichols lives in St. Paul, Minnesota and Borrego Springs, California.

COMMUNITY TESTIFY! The Consequences of Architecture Lukas Feireiss, ed.

Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2011 240 pages, $39.95 (paperback) The approachable essays and case studies in this book take a broad look at how intentionally built environments can positively affect our lives.

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE Kate Crehan New York: Berg Publishers, 2011 224 pages, $34.95 (paperback) A scholarly volume that examines community arts and the anthropology of art history through the lens of the UK’s Free Form Arts Trust, an organization that played a major part in the 1970s struggle to connect the art world to working-class people.

BOOKS PEOPLE

DENNIS OPPENHEIM Lóránd Hegyi, Alberto Fiz Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2012 136 pages, $30 (paperback) Published in conjunction with three exhibitions in France, this monograph celebrates the works of a recently departed public art giant.

CLAES OLDENBURG: The Sixties Achim Hochdörfer New York: Prestel, 2012 320 pages, $60 (hardcover) A fresh look at Oldenburg’s early works, including landmark installations The Street and The Store.

BUILDING COMMUNITIES, NOT AUDIENCES: The Future of the Arts in the United States Doug Borwick Winston-Salem, NC: ArtsEngaged, 2012 370 pages, $24.99 (paperback) How can arts infrastructure survive today’s social, economic, and political environments? A must-read for arts administrators working to engage broader segments of the population.

ABSTRACT GRAFFITI Cedar Lewisohn New York: Merrell, 2011 176 pages, $29.95 (hardcover)

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You’re not likely to find two artists who agree on the definition of street art, let alone its origins. Yet in Abstract Graffiti, a thorough overview of the field, Cedar Lewisohn is sure to expand your understanding of art happening outside the traditional gallery. He pays careful homage to graffiti’s early practitioners while keeping an eye to the increasingly globalized, mediahyped evolution of the genre. Site-specific interventions, folk surrealism, yarn bombing—none are exempt from Lewisohn’s wide-reaching compendium. The book is broken into photorich chapters featuring artist interviews such as Barbara Kruger on her 1980s billboard paste-ups and Steve Powers’s Love Letter, commissioned by Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program.

Also included is a brief “counterpoint” from the Honorable Judge Hardy. Particularly fascinating is an interview with Lottie Child, whose performative, site-specific “street trainings” reclaim urban space for play. While her work exists at the fringe of graffiti, it undoubtedly reconfigures our understanding of the city as canvas. —Amelia Foster

LEVERAGE: Strengthening Neighborhoods Through Design Beth Miller, Todd Woodward, eds.

Philadelphia: Community Design Collaborative, 2011 128 pages, $24.95 (paperback) A catalogue of pro bono design services provided by the Community Design Collaborative, Philadelphiabased proponents of design activism.

BOOKS

RÚRÍ Christian Schoen, ed.

Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011 208 pages, $60 (hardcover) An introduction to Icelandic artist Rúrí, whose actions, performances, and public art projects deal with themes of cultural identity, ethnicity, and society in turmoil.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

JEREMY DELLER: Joy In People Ralph Rugoff, Jeremy Deller, Stuart Hall London: Hayward Publishing, 2012 214 pages, $40 (hardcover) Expand your definition of collaborative art and social practice through the career of Jeremy Deller. Here you’ll find 20 years’ worth of innovative public projects, from a reenactment of a labor strike to slapstick interventions.

Graffiti Explosion Street art from its earliest forms to its recent explorations

BOOKS MISC

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THE MYTHIC MODERN: Architectural Expeditions into the Spirit of Place Travis Price Novato, CA: ORO Editions, 2011 208 pages, $65 (hardcover) Chronicling the work of students in his architectural and cultural Spirit of Place/ Spirit of Design program, Price takes us on a journey around the world and into the heart of an architecture informed by ecology, mythology, and spirit.

URBAN CONSTELLATIONS Matthew Gandy, ed.

Berlin: Jovis, 2012 208 pages, $35 (paperback) Forty-two very short essays emphasizing art, power, and infrastructure make this book an interesting tool for the creative process of public artists.

CORN PALACES AND BUTTER QUEENS: A History of Crop Art and Dairy Sculpture Pamela H. Simpson Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012 264 pages, $29.95 (paperback) Humorous novelties or serious art? This book traces the history of folk art created from America’s bread basket, from humble beginnings at regional fairs to international exhibitions.

BOOKS

OPEN! ART, CULTURE AND THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: Key Texts 2004–2012 Jorinde Seijdel, Liesbeth Melis, eds.

Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2012 256 pages, $30 (paperback) Following eight years of publication by the Netherlands’ SKOR, Open: Cahier on Art and the Public Domain is ceasing its publication. This anthology includes highlights from their interdisciplinary critique of work in the public sphere.

EXTRA/ORDINARY: Craft and Contemporary Art Maria Elena Buszek, ed.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011 320 pages, $24.95 (paperback) This anthology provides an introduction to the “craft culture” increasingly referenced by the contemporary art world. It also contextualizes the role of craft media in fine-art institutions as well as the DIY movement and “craftivism.”

FRANZ MAYER OF MUNICH: Architecture, Glass, Art Gottfried Knapp and Bernhard Graf Munich and Chicago: Verlag and University of Chicago Press, 2012 360 pages, $39.95 (hardcover) An overview of one of the world’s foremost studios working in art glass and mosaics.

PROJECTS WOMEN ARE HEROES: A Global Project by JR JR, text by Marco Berrebi New York: Abrams, 2012 360 pages, $40 (hardcover) Street artist JR traveled the world collecting portraits and stories of women in environments of social conflict. He pasted mural-size portraits in vast outdoor “exhibitions” raising questions of freedom and identity.

OSRAM SEVEN SCREENS Christian Schoen, ed.

Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011 176 pages, $55 (hardcover) Seven Screens is a rotating platform for new technology public art projects in Munich. This publication profiles nine internationally renowned artists’ sitespecific light and video installations.

TIGER & TURTLE—MAGIC MOUNTAIN: A Landmark in Duisburg by Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth Peter Greulich, Karl Janssen, Söke Dinkla, eds.

Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012 224 pages, $35 (hardcover) The German city of Duisburg has a massive, twisting new landmark called Tiger & Turtle—Magic Mountain.

Referencing a classic roller coaster, this large-scale sculpture was a prizewinning design from an international competition. Also included: submissions from Rita McBride, Michael Sailstorfer, and Stephen Craig.

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Kansas City, Missouri Municipal Art Commission www.kcmo.org/Art

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U.S.

PROJECTS Selected recent works

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 24 NO. 1 • ISSUE 47 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

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U.S. RECENT PROJECTS

At first glance, FALLEN STAR looks like a house deposited onto a building by a tornado, Wizard of Oz–style. Except San Diego is not known for its violent storms. In fact, it is a sculpture installation by Do Ho Suh on the roof of Jacobs Hall on the University of California–San Diego campus. Fallen Star, unveiled on June 7, is the latest permanent sculpture commissioned by the Stuart Collection of UCSD. Suh, a native of South Korea, explores concepts of displacement in much of his work, and Fallen Star is no exception. It is a 15-by-

18-foot home, fully furnished and complete with a garden. Suh modeled the house after one in his former neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island, and while it looks cozy and serene, it is seven stories up and tilts by about five degrees. So while visitors experience comforting reminders of home, they are physically unsettled by the tilt and by the drop that exists right outside. This dichotomy results in one of Suh’s intentions—to startle us into thinking more deeply about our surroundings. Photos by Philipp Scholz Rittermann.

VENUE, a traveling project by Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG and Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography, is several things at once: a media rig, an interview studio, an event platform,

and a landscape research base—all of which is broadcast on an online platform. The project launched in June of this year in Reno, Nevada, and will traverse the country until fall 2013.

Venue is an open collaboration designed to generate a comprehensive sample of today’s North American landscape, with elements that are practical, poetic, or both. Plans for the project include interviews with experts from wide-ranging disciplines, surveys of natural sites with high-tech and analog instruments (Venue’s toolbox and survey devices were created with help from designers), documentation, performances, film screenings, and discussions, with spontaneous collaboration encouraged along the route. The sites are carefully chosen as places in nature that are often overlooked by the general public but which fascinate creative thinkers, innovators, designers, and trendsetters. It is not surprising, then, that there is a tie-in with the Aspen Ideas Festival, where Venue made a stop in summer 2012. Photos courtesy Jamie Kingham.

U.S. RECENT PROJECTS

embossed dots of Braille type and the dots on music box cylinders. When an observer moves the piece, the music created by the Braille poem can be heard. Sighted visitors who can’t read Braille can’t experience the full meaning of the art, but they can ask for the assistance of others. In this way, the relationship with the artwork becomes more intimate for those who are visually impaired, effectively turning the traditional experience of visual art

on its head. The Arts and Science Council’s public art department is working with visually impaired groups to bring people out to experience the artwork.

Wang and Bertelsen, also known as Living Lenses, are based in Berkeley, California.

They were selected by the Public Art Commission and the artwork was paid for by Mecklenburg County’s percent-for-art ordinance.

Photos by Ryan Deal and Living Lenses.

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U.S. RECENT PROJECTS

In April 2012, Po Shu Wang and Louise Bertelsen installed SIGHT UNSEEN, a work of public art geared toward the visually impaired, in Charlotte, North Carolina, at Midtown Park on the Little Sugar Creek Greenway. The artwork consists of five stainless steel spheres, each containing a modified and disguised music box that “plays” Braille letters to spell out a poem. The concept arose from the artists’ observation of the similarity between the

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

From dusk on June 9 to dawn on June 10, Minneapolis, Minnesota, was host to the overnight public art festival Northern Spark for the second year. The festival included more than 100 works in five different zones around

the city. A popular project was Molly Balcom Raleigh’s FEED/FEED, which invited people to enjoy dessert, coffee, and conversation.

Half of those at the round table were at the festival in Minneapolis, and the other half, projected onto a screen (a “commensal portal”), were at a private residence in West St. Paul. Known for her creative investigations into food and culture, Balcom Raleigh (who is also staff member at Forecast Public Art, publisher of Public Art Review) brought strangers together to eat in a half-real, halfvirtual setting to get participants thinking about food, friendship, and community connections. Photos by Tj Turner.

Another Northern Spark work, located in a skyway at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), was SWING HALL, SWING ALL by MCAD alumna Keetra Dean Dixon.

The participatory installation had attendees swinging in sync, single file—or attempting to. The design changed the normally solitary feeling of swinging into a group effort. In sync, swingers would achieve a full, even swing, but off pace they would playfully collide.

Pedestrians could view the spectacle from the sidewalk below. According to her website, Dean Dixon, also known as FromKeetra, likes to examine “the fallibility of communication and social exchange” with her art and takes advantage of “forced happy accidents” to explore the topic. Photos courtesy Patrick Kelly. © 2012. pk-worldwide.com.

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The recently restored Hoboken Ferry Terminal received a new permanent installation this year. For the terminal, Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, known for large-scale public art collaborations, created a site-specific piece that integrates the context and architecture of the location to enhance the public’s sense of place. FLUENT, dedicated on May 29, 2012, articulates these unseen dynamics as stainless steel discs and weather vanes that hang from the ceiling and respond to wind and tidal fluctuations. The artists linked the elements of the living river, the dynamics of the wind currents, and the flow of commuters with visually striking animated sculptures suspended over the water in each ferry slip.

Almost 60,000 people use the Hoboken Transportation Terminal daily, which offers commuter rail, light rail, bus, PATH, and ferry

Spurse’s EAT YOUR SIDEWALK in Detroit, Michigan, was billed as an urban festival. It challenged people to recognize that the world around them is abundant. For seven days in August, participants honed their “locavore skills”—foraging for food, bartering, tool making, and mapping—while blogging their adventures. People helped each other through the week, building collective skills of resourcefulness. The festival (which has also been held in other places) culminated in a foraging/cooking competition called “Sidewalk Showdown,” in which participants put their newfound skills to the test. Photo by Cole Caswell.

service. Its ferry terminal underwent an extensive restoration beginning in April 2004 and reopened to the public in 2011. Fluent was commissioned by the New Jersey Transit Corporation, Transit Arts Program with assistance from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Photos by Andrew Ginzel.

Lexington, Kentucky, has a new permanent public art sculpture that reflects the role of the city’s arts center in strengthening its community. CONCORDIA, by DeWitt Godfrey, was installed on July 1, 2012, as the first of five public artworks the city has commissioned in response to public polling.

Local citizens chose Godfrey’s work out of hundreds of submissions and 14 finalists.

The work comprises 15 giant, Cor-Ten steel cylinders stacked surprisingly on the roof of Lexington’s Downtown Arts Center on East Main Street. The side of the sculpture seems to lean against the wall of the adjacent building, or as Godfrey, a professor at Colgate University, puts it, “it shoulders the structure as art supports community.” It took 14 hours to install the 14,000-pound sculpture atop the art deco building. The project is the result of the Creative Cities Summit in 2010 and was made possible by the partnership between LexArts and Leadership Lexington Class of 2010.

Photo by Richard Wireman.

COMMON ROOM, by Andy Sturdevant and Sergio Vucci, started as a series of gatherings at Minneapolis’s Soap Factory art space and evolved into artist-guided tours of the city. The soul of the project is social—exploring the city is secondary to the conversations among participants. The tours are the catalysts for social interactions and new discoveries. Vucci believes that if a work of this sort is honest and relevant, people will get behind it, as has been the case with the tours hosted so far. Guest speakers have jumped at the artists’ invitation to participate, and large crowds have come to walk, bike, or ride public transportation with them. Photos by Peter Haakon Thompson and Sergio Vucci.

U.S. RECENT PROJECTS

channel video projection pairs the Cronkite transcripts with closed-caption transcripts of live television news, distinguishable by different typefaces. The Cronkite selections move slowly across the façade, making them legible, while the live news flows quickly and becomes overwhelming, representing the oversaturation of contemporary media.

Cronkite received his degree from UT–Austin, so it is fitting that the campus would feature a prominent tribute to the man, particularly on the CMA building (which happens also to face the newly dedicated Walter Cronkite Plaza).

Photo by Paul Bardagjy.

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On an April evening this year, New York artist Ben Rubin began projecting news transcripts onto the front wall of the Communications A (CMA) building at the University of Texas, Austin. But this was no Times Square ticker.

AND THAT’S THE WAY IT IS intertwines historic transcripts from legendary journalist Walter Cronkite with contemporary news across the grid-style facade. UT’s public art program, Landmarks, commissioned Rubin’s work, the campus’s first permanent electronic artwork, to coincide with construction of the College of Communication’s Belo Center for New Media. A digital interface for the six-

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Artists Bill and Mary Buchen created new work for Cleveland Square Park in El Paso, Texas, this year. Unveiled on March 22, SOMBRAS Y LUZ (Shadows and Light) includes a sculpture that serves as a shade structure, a drum set for kids to play on, and a series of colorful fences modeled after traditional Mexican papel picado, or paper cut-outs. The artists clearly took into consideration the ways in which the public might use the park, which is located between the library and the history museum, two major centers of learning. The panels of the fences depict aspects of El Paso’s history, culture, and environment.

One of the reasons El Paso chose the Buchens was for their experience with parks and interactive artworks; the city wanted the space to be inviting for gatherings and to have more recreational opportunities. The Buchens used their work both to reflect the culture of the area and to provide an enjoyable public space. Photos courtesy Bill Buchen.

Seattle marked this year’s 50th anniversary of the 1962 World’s Fair with a temporary public art project by Stacy Levy, located in the Seattle Center near the Space Needle. STRAW GARDEN was a functional and intriguing landscape project installed for the duration of the anniversary celebration, April 21 to October 21. Viewed from the Space Needle or monorail, the formal, baroque layout of the work was highlighted. Up close, however, viewers learned that the garden was composed of modern landscape restoration materials including biodegradable wattles made of straw and coconut fiber and designed to prevent erosion, as well as native shrubs, perennials, and annuals.

The installation will have a second life after the six-month celebration. Sections of the wattles will be used around the city to restore landscapes and increase native plant diversity.

Levy was clearly looking forward, as the Seattle Center was, to “The Next Fifty.” Photos courtesy Stacy Levy; © 2012.

Int’l.

PROJECTS Selected recent works

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Fifty years ago on August 5, apartheid police captured Nelson Mandela and charged him with treason, setting in motion events that changed South Africa forever. The site of that arrest near Howick, in the KwaZuluNatal Midlands, 90 kilometers south of Durban, is now marked by a monumental sculpture

Stonehenge made an appearance in Glasgow, Scotland, in April—in the form of a bouncy castle. Jeremy Deller created the inflatable sculpture SACRILEGE for his first major public project in Scotland during the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. Sacrilege features the standing stones at full scale, ringing a large green surface suited for jumping around. As Deller explained, “A lot of my work deals with history, and Sacrilege is no exception. This is a way to get reacquainted with ancient Britain with your shoes off.” Sacrilege toured the United Kingdom, making several stops in London during the 2012 Olympics.

The Mayor of London and the London 2012 Festival presented a series of artworks called Surprises, which featured Sacrilege and other works that would appear unannounced at different locations around the city. Photo courtesy Jeremy Deller; © 2012 Jeremy Deller.

by Marco Cianfanelli. The sculpture consists of 50 steel bars between 5 and 10 meters tall that together form a portrait of NELSON MANDELA, while representing the prison where he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life. Cianfanelli remarked that Mandela’s imprisonment had the opposite effect of what

the apartheid government had intended: “it helped to grow and galvanize the movement” against apartheid. A tree-lined path leading to the sculpture, designed by architect Jeremy Rose, includes text designed to inspire traits like courage and leadership associated with Mandela. Photo courtesy Jonathan Burton.

INTERNATIONAL RECENT PROJECTS

set up below the piece, allowing shadows to play off of the ceiling of the terminal as the sculpture moves.

ART+COM developed the piece, commissioned by the Changi Airport Group, to be a calming source of reflection for passengers amidst the bustling transportation center.

The work is also meant to reflect Singapore’s identity: Singapore is known for its incessant rain. Photos © ART+COM.

topography of the shore on which it rests. The tides occasionally immerse parts of the sculpture, while small perforations in the steel allow a wave-like LED pattern to pulse after dusk. The overall effect is the intriguing appearance of the sculpture being in motion, like a silver cloth hovering above the landscape. Photos courtesy 60°N 05°E/© Thorsten Goldberg).

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Titled for its location in Bergen, Norway, 60ºN 05ºE (ENCASED WATERSIDE) is a permanent sculpture by Thorsten Goldberg on the city’s newly constructed light rail system. Located on an inner-city fjord by the Florida light rail station, Goldberg’s work is a composite of stainless steel triangles that make up a reflective rectangular sheet, which mimics accurately the

PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2012 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

Singapore’s Changi Airport can boast of housing the world’s largest moving sculpture, KINETIC RAIN, an installation by ART+COM, in collaboration with Joachim Sauter, Jussi Ängeslevä, and other designers. Unveiled on July 18, the work features 1,216 bronze droplets hanging from thin steel ropes that are computer-programmed to form, in 15-minute intervals, various shapes—such as an airplane or a hot-air balloon. A light source is

On May 26, a dramatic landscape intervention was unveiled on a beach in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Consisting of 75 tons of red sand, RODUIN, by HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen), transformed the site into what seemed to some observers like a Martian landscape. The beach, known as Maasvlakte 2, was not natural to begin with, though it looked the part. The controversial Maasvlakte 2 is a recently developed reclamation project near Rotterdam’s industrial port, which is Europe’s largest. Local residents expressed serious concerns about pollution from the project’s traffic, air, noise, and lighting. The art/design duo HeHe, based in the United Kingdom, were asked to reflect on such issues and to base their work on the experience of local residents.

The project was a part of Portscapes 2, a curated collection of permanent and semipermanent artworks developed in response to the construction of Maasvlakte 2. The Port of Rotterdam Authority collaborated with SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain.

“Beaches normally look like natural creations, and it is we, the visitors, who feel unnatural,” explained HeHe about their installation. “Perhaps this work will turn these feelings on their heads.” Photo by HeHe / Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen.

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May saw the start of a major installation at the Grand Palais in Paris for the 2012 Monumenta. Consistent with other Monumenta installations (for example, last year’s Leviathan

by Anish Kapoor), it is on a very large scale.

It must be, as the Grand Palais is immense.

But EXCENTRIQUE(S), by the French artist Daniel Buren, does not merely take up space; it changes viewers’ perception of it with color and mirrors that invite them to explore the Grand Palais building in new ways. Visitors

An exceptional memorial in Nantes is one of several local and international initiatives designed to confront and come to terms with the city’s dark history as a major center of France’s slave trade. Unveiled in April, the

MEMORIAL TO THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY, by artist Krzysztof Wodiczko and architect Julian Bonder, is located on the Quai de la Fosse dock, a former port hub symbolic of Nantes’s slave trade, now rehabilitated with an esplanade for pedestrians. The memorial

enter the Grand Palais by the side entrance, which has never been done for Monumenta before. Excentrique(s) washes the Grand Palais in rainbow colors with translucent colored film stretched over 377 large steel rings situated above viewers, atop poles, like a surreal forest.

Additionally, mirrors located at the central nave reflect the domed glass roof of the building, where the changing outside weather conditions ensure a unique experience for repeat visitors.

Photo by Yann Caradec/Flickr.

was designed with two perspectives, one facing the city and the Loire estuary, the other linked to the sea. Changing tides are incorporated into the work. There are multiple ways to experience the memorial, which features both a commemorative path and a meditative path, but the goal is that each visitor will develop an awareness of the scale of the tragedy of slave trading and a respect for human rights.

Photo by Philippe Ruault; © Krzysztof Wodiczko and Julian Bonder.

Mexico City’s weeklong ALL CITY CANVAS project invited street artists from around the world to display their work—on a very large scale—on prominent downtown buildings from April 30 to May 5. The project took 11 months of preparation, including acquiring permissions from building owners and city officials, as well as corporate sponsorships.

Mexico has a rich history in mural art, and one purpose of the project was to enable Mexican artists to see international works otherwise available only as photos. In this way artists can learn about different styles and compare techniques. An organizer of the project, Roberto Shimizu of MUJAM, noted that each day thousands of young Mexicans would gather to watch the artists at work, gaining an understanding of their process.

The festival also featured lectures on the urban art movement.

MUJAM, a museum in Mexico City, along with ARTO (Art Beyond Museums) and MAMUTT, a creative collective, headed the project. Participating artists were Interesni Kazki (Ukraine), El Mac (USA), Saner (Mexico), Sego (Mexico), Roa (Belgium), Herakut (Germany), Vhils (Portugal), and Escif (Spain). Top photo by Elbarbon. Bottom photo © All City Canvas.

INTERNATIONAL RECENT PROJECTS

cannot read or write. Community members in the region developed the concept not only to provide access to books, but also to offer bookmaking classes, creative writing workshops, and other programs.

At its core, Bibliobandido is a literary project, but it is also performance art. Artist Marisa Jahn, co-founder of REV, brought El Bibliobandido to the Studio Museum of

Sculpture International Rotterdam has been commissioning works of art for the area, including It’s Never Too Late to Say Sorry, inviting artists to explore the past, present, and future of the Coolsingel.

Elmgreen and Dragset are known internationally for upending museum conventions and for making defiant statements about art institutions, power and wealth, and the art market. This project, which has traveled to other locations, coincided with a retrospective of their work in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Photo by Jannis Linders, courtesy artists and Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong & Paris.

Harlem in 2012 between June 14 and October 21 as part of a group exhibition entitled Caribbean: Crossroads of the World. REV has been accepting stories submitted by writers of all ages for an anthology to be published in winter 2012. Proceeds from the book will go toward supporting book-making and storywriting classes in northwest Honduras (near La Ceiba). Photos courtesy Marisa Jahn.

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In El Pital, Honduras, a masked rider rides through the town on a burro, frightening (and amusing) the little children until they write something for him. His name is El Bibliobandido, and he is hungry for stories.

BIBLIOBANDIDO is a rural bookmobile and library designed to promote literacy in the Cangrejal Valley region of Northern Honduras, a country where a quarter of the population

Scandinavian artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset challenged art-world conventions with IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO SAY SORRY. They constructed a glass display case and placed it near a busy Rotterdam street. Inside was a stainless steel megaphone. At noon every day for a year a man opened the door, took out the megaphone, and proclaimed to passersby, “It’s never too late to say sorry.”

The piece was located near the former main post office and City Hall, on the Coolsingel axis—an area home to most of the city’s collection of modern artwork, a backdrop that augmented the work’s subtle rebelliousness.

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In August this year, doors on a pub, a gallery, a YMCA building, a library, and other key structures in the Waltham Forest borough of East London shared a common distinguishing feature: giant mirror-ball doorknobs, constructed

by Turkish artist Can Altay for the London 2012 Festival, a public art series that coincided with the 2012 Olympics. With the playful and pleasing DISTRIBUTED, Altay explores the relationship between individuals and their urban environment. People who live and work in Waltham Forest were encouraged to touch and use the unusual doorknobs as they went about their days. Pamphlets were distributed exploring topics like the relationship between public art and public service, and reactions to the art were recorded and discussed through a series of workshops and talks.

Distributed was one of several works that Frieze Projects East, a commission of the London 2012 Festival, created with the intention of engaging local residents with high-quality international art, as Olympic tourists descended upon their neighborhoods. Photo by Polly Braden.

Metro congratulates the following artists for their public art contributions to our transit system: Samuel Rodriguez Urban Dualities Hand cut ceramic mosaic (20 panels) Metro Rail Je¤erson/USC Station

Tom La Duke Unknowable Origins Glass mosaic (8 panels) Metro Rail Culver City Station

Daniel Gonzalez Engraved in Memory Hand cut ceramic mosaic (8 panels) Metro Rail La Cienega/Je¤erson Station

Christopher C. Dierdor¤ The Intimacy of Place Porcelain enamel steel (12 panels) Metro Rail 23rd Street Station

Willie Middlebrook Wanderers Glass mosaic (24 panels) Metro Rail Expo/Crenshaw Station

Measure R, commits a projected $40 billion to traªc relief and transportation upgrades throughout Los Angeles County over the next 30 years. Artwork enhancements are a result of this bold funding initiative.

13-0217ps ©2012 lacmta

Metro commissions artists for a wide array of projects throughout Los Angeles County. To find out more information or to add your name to our database for new artist opportunities, visit metro.net/art.

FORECAST NEWS What we’re up to

Thirteen Minnesota artists and two community organizations are the recipients of Forecast Public Art’s 2012 grants, supported in part by the Jerome and McKnight Foundations and the East Central Regional Arts Council (ECRAC). Randy Walker was the first recipient of the new $50,000 McKnight mid-career project grant, the largest of its kind in the country. McKnight mid-career public artist professional development grants were awarded to Harriet Bart and Tamsie Ringler; Jerome project grants for emerging artists went to Janaki Ranpura and Sean Kelley-Pegg; Jerome planning grants were given to Pritika Chowdhry, Sean Elmquist, Janet Groenert, Sara Hanson, Lucas Koski, and Cecilia Schiller; ECRAC project grants

went to Keith Raivo and Pine Center for the Arts; and ECRAC planning grants were awarded to Charles King and Braham Community Rose Garden.

These grants range from $2,000 to $50,000 and support risk-taking, interdisciplinary approaches, and collaborative problem solving. They also offer training, technical assistance, career advice, networking opportunities, documentation, insurance certificates, and promotion.

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GRANTS

Emerging and Mid-Career Grants Awarded

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CONSULTING The animated film in Janaki Ranpura’s The Peloton, launched at Minneapolis’ Northern Spark, is powered by participants pedaling bicycles.

EDUCATION

TOP LEFT: Photo by Bruce Silcox. TOP RIGHT: Photo courtesy the artist.

Public Art in the Schools Forecast Public Art views education as a critical investment in the next generation of citizens and artists engaged in creating their own meaningful places. Public art learning empowers young people to make and care for their own places, and in turn invest in their communities with pride and a sense of identity.

Right now, Forecast is midway through a public art educational project that will reach eight schools and more than 150 students. The Public Art in the Schools initiative delivers public art learning resources and guidance to teachers and teaching artists so that they may successfully activate public art in K-12 classrooms. The goal is to foster a collaborative approach to public art residencies—in which teacher and teaching artist work together not only to design content but also to link residency activities to other curriculum in the classroom, as well as to the larger community through a work of public art.

The outcome, beyond student learning and the creation of public art, will be a Public Art for Educators Toolkit based upon case studies, designed to offer tools, resources, and best practices for bringing public art concepts into educational settings. Forecast will make the toolkit available on Forecast’s website (forecastpublicart.org) in 2013.

Green Energy Art Garden and the Dreamcycle This summer, Forecast Public Art organized a public art project and exhibit for Hennepin County. We commissioned a new group, Learning Dreams, to create a mobile outpost that toured the Twin Cities. This “Dreamcycle” asked community members what they wished to learn, then hooked them up with neighborhood resources to help make their wishes come true.

Forecast, which has provided consulting to national and regional clients for 20 years, also recently curated a rooftop Green Energy Art Garden for the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis, featuring kinetic works powered by sun or wind. The organization is currently helping with a new artist-designed gathering place on the campus of Minnesota State University–Moorhead; a series of bus benches and bike racks installed in a St. Paul neighborhood; a new mural gracing the lobby of the Wilder Center in St. Paul; and a public art strategy integrated into Minneapolis’s Hennepin Cultural District plan.

About Forecast Forecast Public Art, the publisher of Public Art Review, is based in St. Paul, Minnesota. A nonprofit arts organization, Forecast strengthens and advances the field of public art locally, nationally, and internationally by assisting communities, supporting artists, and providing resources that inform audiences and expand participation.

Learn more at forecastpublicart.org.

FORECAST NEWS

This model shows Randy Walker’s planned sculpture—which has both permanent and ephemeral elements—for the Kulture Klub Collaborative, a youth program in Minneapolis.

LAST PAGE

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I

will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have

a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place,

to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it.

By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

— Wendell Berry

This quote is excerpted from Wendell Berry’s 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Light Channels - Bill FitzGibbons, 2006

Computerized LED light installation sculpture, Commerce Street at Hwy 281, Downtown San Antonio, Texas.

Photo by Bryan Rindfuss

We’ve been saving ideas since the beginning.

Dare to be brilliant.

The freeze continues at devilishlybrilliant.tv 1.866.701.6603

Bill FitzGibbons

www.billfitzgibbons.com

T h e I nt e r nat i o nal Awar d f o r P ub li c A r t : M e e t t h e F inali s t s

issue 47 • fall/winter 2012 • publicartreview.org

Issue 47 • About Place

ABOUT

PLACE

Putting art at the heart of placemaking

Cambodia’s vibrant public art scene Washington D.C.’s new public art festival Mixing past and present at the Golden Gate Charles Landry on city making $13.00 USD