Public Art Review issue 46 - 2012 (spring/summer)

e culturebackin agriculture

J l

inners,economics,andaesthetics

JI

Threeexplorations of foodandplace

JON SPAYDE

NICOLE J. CARUTH

JOSEPH HART

JEFF HUEBNER

JULES ROCHIELLE

KAREN OLSON

FORECAST PUBLIC ART 2012 Grant

Program

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!

MID-C_AREER

PUBLIC ARTIST GRANTS

Funded by The McKnight Foundation

Project Grant

Randy Walker

Professional Development

Harriet Bart

Tamsie Ringler

EMERGING

PUBLIC ARTIST GRANTS

Funded by Jerome Foundation

Project Grants

Sean Kelley-Pegg

Janaki Ranpura

Planning Grants

Pritika Chowdhry

Sean Elmquist

Janet Groenert

Sara Hanson

Lucas Koski

Cecilia Schiller

REGIONAL

PUBLIC ARTIST GRANTS

Funded by East Central Regional Arts Council

Project Grants

Pine Center for the Arts

Keith Raivo

Planning Grants

Braham Community Garden Club

Charles King

PublicArtReview

PUBLISHER Jack Becker

MANAGING EDITOR Karen Olson

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Nichole Goodwell

ART DIRECTORS Outside the Box Designs

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Joseph Hart

COPY EDITOR Loma Huh

EDITORIAL ASSISTANCE

Amelia Foster

PRODUCTION ASSISTANCE

Suzanne Lindgren

ADVISORS

David Allen

Jerry Allen

Penny Balkin Bach

Tom Bannister

Ricardo Barreto

Cathey Hillian

Fuller Cowles

Wang Dawei

Susan Doerr

Greg Esser

Thomas Fisher

Gretchen Freeman

Glenn Harper

EDITORIAL INQUIRIES

Mary Jane Jacob

Mark Johnstone

Stephen Knapp

Suzanne Lacy

Jack Mackie

Jill Manton

Jennifer McGregor

Patricia Phillips

Philip Pregill

Joyce Pomeroy

Schwartz

Shelly Willis

editor@ForecastPublicArt.org

SUBSCRIPTION/ ORDER INQUIRIES

info@ForecastPublicArt.org

consulting· grants· publications

ADVERTISERS

Americans for the Arts

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Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs

Electroland, LLC

Fort Worth Public Art

Franz Mayer of Munich, Inc.

Heavy Industries

Joternational Sculpture Center

Janet Echelman, Inc.

Kansas City Municipal Art Commission

Laumeier Sculpture Park

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Peters Studios

Public Art Dialogue

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Walker Art Center

Western States Arts Federation

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© 2012 Public Art Review (ISSN: 1040-211 x) is published twice annually by Forecast Public Art. Annual individual subscription rates are $24 for USA, $31 for Canada/Mexico, and $37 for Overseas. Annual institutional subscription rates are $48 for USA, $62 for Canada/Mexico, and $74 for Overseas. Public Art Review is not responsible for unsolicited material. Opinions expressed and validityof informationherein 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.

Both the paper manufacturer and the printer of this issue of Public Art Review are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council"'. The issue is printed on Starbrite Opaque paper, made from 100/opost-consumer fiber. The vegetable oil-based inks used are free of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and do not require solvents to cure.

FORECAST PUBLIC ART

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St.Paul,MN 55114-1880

TEL 651.641.1128

FAX 651.641.1983

OUR MISSION Forecast Public Art is a 501(c}3 nonprofit organization that stmngthens and advances the field of public art-locally, nationally and internationally-by expanding participation, supporting artists, informing audiences and assisting communities.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Frank Fitzgerald (chair)

Susan Adams Loyd

Kinji Akagawa

Peter V. Brabson

Joseph Colletti

Jay Coogan

Kurt Gough

Margaret Kelly

Meena Mangalvedhekar

Caroline Mehlhop

Richard Ruvelson

Joseph Stanley

Michael Watkins

Diane Willow

FORECAST STAFF

Jack Becker

Executive Director+ Publisher

Stacey Holland

Associate Director

Melinda Childs

Directorof Artist Services

Nichole Goodwell

Creative Director

Kirstin Wiegmann

Education + Community Engagement

Molly Balcom Raleigh Development Officer

Morgan Zehner Marketing Officer

Amelia Foster

Program+ Administrative Associate

Jessica Fiala

Artist Services Program Assistant

CLIENTS and PARTNERS

The Bakken Museum

Clear Channel Outdoor

College of Fine Arts, Univ. of Shanghai

East Central Regional Arts Council

Nancy Ann Coyne

Hennepin County, Minnesota

Hennepin Theatre Trust

Jeff Lohaus

Learning Dreams

Southwest Arts & Humanities Council

Thank you to the following supporters, from November 1, 2011 to May 1, 2012:

MAJOR FUNDERS

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

ArtsLab Partners:

Bush Foundation

F.R. Bigelow Foundation

Mardag Foundation

The McKnight Foundation

The Saint Paul Foundation

Arts Learning Exchange

F.R. Bigelow Foundation

Jerome Foundation

Knight Foundation

The McKnight Foundation

Minnesota State Arts Board

National Endowment for the Arts

St. Paul's Cultural STAR Program

The Saint Paul Foundation

Travelers Foundation

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS

DONORS of $100 and above

Anonymous (4)

Jerry Allen

Anne Al well & Tullio Alessi

Mayumi Amada

Vickie & Herb Baca!

Peter Bachman

Bader Development

Tom Bannister

Harriet Bart

Dr. & Mrs. William L. Becker

Robert D. Becker

Bernard & Mary Becker

Catherine Behrend

Pamela Belding

Lawrence Blau

Karen Bowen

Lucile Brink

Tom Brymer

Dr. Cameron Cartiere

Candy Chang

Elizabeth Childs & Todd Larson

Pegi Christiansen

Malcolm Cochran

Joseph Colletti

Jay Coogan

Cabeth Cornelius

Joanna Cortright

John & Sage Cowles

Barbara Cox

Carol Daly

Kevin & Diane Daly

Shauna Dee

Richard Deutsch

Konstantin & Adele Dimopoulos

Nancy Elliott

Frank Fitzgerald

Ronald Lee Fleming

Kyle Fokken

Vickie & Anthony Foster

Charles Fuller & Constance Mayeron Cowles

Cameron Keith Gainer

Matthew Geller

Lynn Goodpasture

Kurt & Christina Gough

Tim Griffin

Jane Hallett

Victoria Hamilton

Margaret Harries

Ron Harvey

Bob Hawbaker

HGA Architects and Engineers

Alison Hildreth

Jim Hirschfield

Dean Holzman

Jason Inskeep

Sharon Irish

Brad Jirka

David Johnson

Seitu Jones

Ann MCM Kenney

Bob Kost

Chris Krumm & Margaret Kelly

Larry La Bonte & Kathryn Shaw

Suzanne Lacy

Kathleen Lindblad

Rob Lorenson

Jennifer Lundblad

Jill Manton

Geoff Martin

Jennifer McGregor

Caroline & Scott Mehlhop

Herman Milligan

Richard Moylan

Museum Services

Stuart Nielsen

Margaret O'Connor

Paul Petersen

Patricia C. Phillips

Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz

Ron & Susan Rapp

Gary & Susan Rappaport

Tom & Shirley Reynolds

Sharon Rodning Bash

Julius Rosenwald III

Margaret Ross

Sara Rothholz Weiner

Jim Rustad & Kay Thomas

Richard Ruvelson

Eleanor Savage

Kent Scheer

Marcia Schekel

Sarah Schultz

Scottsdale Public Art

Bruce Shapiro

Ben Shardlow

Shapco Printing

Schuler Shook

Janice Sigmund

Robert Smart

Rich Sorich

Mark Spitzer

Lynne E. Stanley

Joe Stanley & Lori Zook-Stanley

Chris Stevens

Denise S. Tennen

Mark Thistlethwaite

Kubda Tukkett

Alexander Tylevich

Olga Vise

Thomas von Sternberg & Eve Parker

Jill Weese & Steve Vincent

Roseann Weiss

Phyllis Welter

Wet Paint

Tom Whitlock

Foster Willey Jr.

·Forecast

Public Art+ University o£Shanghai announce the first-ever

About the Award

The International Award for Excellence in Public Art is an educational partnership between Public Art Review (published by Forecast Public Art/ USA) and Public Art magazine (published by the University of Shanghai/ China).

Research undertaken to collect data on public art projects across six continents from the past six years (January 2006 to September 201 l) has now been finalized. More than 140 projects were nominated by professionals in the field worldwide.

The Award will recognize the highest achievement in public art in any country, and focuses in the first year on placemaking. Its goal is developmental-to stimulate dialogue amongst artists and allied professionals, as well as decisionmakers in urban planning and design.

Panel of Judges

• Jack Becker - USA

Director of Forecast Public Art and Publisher, Public Art Review

• Lewis Biggs -UK

Independent Curator and former Director of Liverpool Biennial and Tate Liverpool, and Chair of the Organizing Committee

• Katia Canton -Brazil

Associate Professor of Art and Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Sao Paulo

• Fulya Erdemci -Netherlands Director of SKOR, Foundation for Art and Public Domain

• Yuko Hasegawa -Japan

Chief Curator at Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art

• Wang Dawei -China

Dean of the College of Fine Arts at University of Shanghai and Publisher, Public Art

Criteria + Significance

The qualifying criteria for both temporary and permanent nominated projects are:

Demonstrates excellence in artistled placemaking public art;

• Reflective of best practices, innovative design, and highquality execution;

• Demonstrates positive long-term impact (or potential impact) on the area in which it's sited.

As Chair of the Organizing Committee of the Award, Lewis Biggs stated, "The Award is the most ambitious attempt yet undertaken to pool knowledge across the world and tell the success stories for the benefit of the field as a whole. In addition to a valuable archive accessible to all, the process will create a new and more diverse network for the support of people with a professional interest in public art."

FORECAST

consulting• grants• publications

"Like

a big meal, some art takes time to fully digest. We consume our art and develop our tastes. We are what we eat:'

What's for Dinner?

Confessions of a public art foodie

One of my favorite documentaries of all time is the Maysles brothers' beautiful 1978 film about Christo and JeanneClaude's Running Fence. When seeking permission to install their project-a 24.5-mile fabric fence running through two California counties and into the Pacific Ocean-the artists were challenged to explain why a temporary project should be considered significant art. At a public hearing to decide if a permit should be awarded, a homemaker from the community testified in defense of temporary projects. "Some of the meals I prepare aren't much-the rest of all of you can say that, too-but sometimes I go to a lot of work to prepare a meal that I think is art. It's a masterpiece! And what happens? It gets eaten up and disappears and everybody forgets about it!"

Like a fabulous meal, temporary public art projects, even the quick, ephemeral ones, often require a great deal of workmore than most would imagine. Like a theatrical event, they require considerable planning and production, collaboration and timing.

Food is an apt metaphor for public art in general. There's junk food. There's organic, homegrown nourishment. Then there are the strange-looking surprises on our plate. We don't know what they are-yet we try them. (Hey, someone had to try the first oyster.) Like a big meal, some art takes time to fully digest. We consume our art and develop our tastes. We are what we eat.

I confess that I'm a public art foodie. My appetite is insatiable. Publishing this magazine is like being the proverbial kid in a candy store, and there's a constant stream of new items put on display. I often wonder where all the ideas come from. How do all these projects begin? What kind of brilliant spark started it all? What word led to the conversation that led to the realization of another amazing, compelling public art project? Was there a recipe? A menu? Was taste a consideration?

One person who influenced my early thinking about food and public art is Mary Jane Jacob, curator, author, professor, and director of exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her groundbreaking "Culture in Action" program for Sculpture Chicago (1991-1993) featured artists working in partnership with community members to explore the changing nature of public art, its relationship to social issues, and an expansion of the audience from spectator to participant. There was a storefront hydroponic vegetable garden and an artist-

designed candy bar, as well as communal events in which food played a critical role.

This theme was continued in 1996 during Jacob's Atlanta program series, "Conversations at the Castle." Among the offerings were Italian artists Federica Thiene and Stefania Mantovani presenting Chow, a series of artful meals. Guests were invited to work in an industrial kitchen to prepare a colorful meal under the guidance of a master chef, and then joined with a larger gathering to consume the meal and engage in fruitful conversation. As a participant myself, I can tell you that the experience was transcendent.

Artists, like chefs, create experiences. No wonder artists are intrigued by food-an equalizer and a conversation starter, a bridge to common ground. And since all of us eat, food is also a point of entry into any community.

This issue of Public Art Review honors the many ways artists explore food and celebrates the artistic morsels that have contributed to conversation, community, and culture.

Speaking of conversation-especially face-to-face dialogue in real places-it bears remembering how important is its contribution to art. Consider how many great ideas evolved from people sitting around a table talking-usually aided by food and drink.

Like food, public art is often a means to an end, not an end in itself. Food sustains our bodies; art sustains our minds. While I have nothing against art for art's sake-or food that is purely decorative-I value the empowering nature of public art and admire art that, like food, sustains us on multiple levels. Even if the only outcome of a public art project is a h·ru1sformative conversation, that can be fulfilling.

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

P.S.You'll find a few changes to Public Art Review in this issue. In front, there is a new Shop Talk department that replaces our former News section. In the back, there's a livelier Books department. The editorial and art staff are working hard to keep Public Art Reviewuseful, relevant, and beautiful for you. We'd love your feedback. Enjoy!

Afterthe2012OlympicGames,artistAnishKapoor'sArce/orMiaalOrbitisexpectedtogenerateupto$3million inannualrevenue-whichwilldirectlybenefitthelocalcommunity-andcreateupto50newjobs.

Bread and Circuses

In spite of its massive budget-and notable exceptions-London's Olympic arts programming fails to make a lasting impact

by JEREMY HUNT

Arts and culture have always struggled for status in the Olympic milieu of alpha-ego architecture and globally televised sporting events. The London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, an arts and education program that extends from 2008 to 2014, proves the point yet again.

The total 2012 Olympic budget is currently estimated at £9.3 billion ($14.6 billion). The budget for the Cultural Olympiad's 2,500 projects is £77 million ($120 million)-a few million short of what it will cost for fireworks, dancers, and acrobats at the opening and closing ceremonies.

The intention of the Cultural Olympiad is "to provide a long-lasting legacy for the people of east London and the wider UK" through a process focused on the "values of active participation, collaboration, and sustainability." In practice, however, the program has emphasized temporary art and spectacle, and while it may have achieved its short-term aims for visibility and participation, it is essentially a temporary windfall-a massive economic blip on the art monitor.

For example, the UK Arts Council's 12 regional projects, each with a budget of £500,000, consisted of tempor.ary postImperial spectacles that have been widely criticized for their banality. These projects included a 30-foot-high carnival puppet of Lady Godiva powered by 50 cyclists; a performance involving 2,000 dancers, actors, aerialists, musicians, pyrotechnists, and carnival entertainers; three lions with handcrocheted coats, symbol of British sovereignty and lackluster soccer team; and a cloud column in Liverpool that rises 6 miles high and is visible from 60 miles away.

In the Olympic Park, in London's economically disadvantaged East End, the high-visibility Art in the Park program commands a budget of about £33 million ($52 million), which has resulted in 36 commissions, including sculpture, film, and artworks by UK and international artists. Its centerpiece is the 380-foot-high ArcelorMittal Orbit sculpture by Anish Kapoor. This is not only a prominent art legacy, but a visitor attraction projected to contribute about £2 million ($3 million) each year

SHOPTALK

FollyforaFlyover(2011)wasanartist-ledtemporaryconstructionthatcritiquedthecorporate ethosoftheOlympics. It hostedcinema,performances,plays,boattours,andworkshops.

to a cultural budget to benefit the local community (making it one of the few projects that help the Olympiad meet its longterm goals). In addition, London 2012 will host a marathon cultural program of international, corporate, and local-authority festivals taking place in prestigious pavilions and art spaces all over London, including a collaborative Pan-African village in Hyde Park.

After the games have ended, the major benefit for the five Olympic boroughs will have been to transform a 500-acre inner-city industrial site into a new community. Olympic Park will be developed and renamed the Queen Elizabeth

AWARDS

Three Cheers!

Recent prize winners-and a new award underway

Public Art Dialogue (PAD) Award

Winner Ben Rubin, based in New York, produces works that combine a keen aesthetic with a strong sociopolitical message and an innovative approach to mining and presenting information from the data-cloud.

His piece The Language of Diplomacy (2010-2011), for instance, extracts and projects linguistic patterns from the Wikileaks diplomatic cables. Rubin, who accepted the prize at PAD's gathering during the College Art Association Conference, was a particularly apt choice, given the tenor of discussion during the conference. The main session explored public art in the "virtual sphere"-a key element in Ben Rubin's work.

Forecast Public Art Mid-Career Project Grant

Randy Walker, a Minneapolis-based sculptor who uses fiber to weave connections between space and structure, will use a Forecast Public Art grant to install a permanent sculpture that will be continually renewed with temporary elements developed by participants in the Kulture Klub Collaborative. Part of the Minneapolis program Youth Link, Kulture Klub offers art opportunities for youth experiencing hom,elessness.

International Award for Excellence in Public Art

Excitement is building around this first-ever award, organized by Forecast Public Art, publisher Public Art Review, and by the University of Shanghai, publisher of Public Art magazine. More than 140 nominations are currently being reviewed by an international panel of judges. Be sure to read the Fall 2012 issue of Public Art Review to learn about the winners.

Olympic Park with some of the stadiums replaced by new housing, an arts academy, and a business park, with Art in the Park as an Olympic memorial within the development. While the Olympic art events pursued a policy of public involvement to broaden the audience for culture, there are strong concerns that inflated property values will hurt existing artistic communities.

There has been provocative dissent to the corporate ethos of sport and property interests. Some unofficial artist-led fringe activities emerged in areas with established artist communities adjoining Olympic Park. One of these, Folly for a Flyover, was a temporary construction and creative focus for East London with cafes, cinemas, and performances. Artist Richard DeDomenici's Culturail proposed a new underground line linking arts venues, funded through the cancellation of the 2012 London Olympics. Hilary Powell's 15-minute film The Games staged an alternative Olympics with highlights including hubcap discus throwing and mattress trampolining; and a publication, Salon des Refuses, offered alternative thinking on the Olympics.

In spite of these voices of dissent, the London 2012 Olympics leaves only a modest visual legacy and fails to contribute to the long-term development of any form of national infrastructure for the arts. As a result, it is a tragedy to see so little lasting value within the 2,500 projects of the Cultural Olympiad when the creative potential and budgets were available.

JEREMY HUNT is the director of Art & Architecture Journal/ Press. His last story for Public Art Review was about Inhotim, a sculpture park in Brazil (Spring/Summer 2011, page 52).

Brendan Gill Prize

John Morse took home this accolade for his strikingly beautiful-and laugh-out-loud-signage (above). The warnings were placed at New York City traffic hotspots and featured graphics that riffed on DOT-meets-WPA aesthetic. Warnings were communicated in haiku. See stardogstudio.com.

Selling Public Art? A failed bill in Washington State

would have sold off its public art collection

With budgets tight at every level of government, line items for public art are under threat. But the State of Washington recently went a step further by proposing to sell off the state's public art collection.

The bill, introduced to the state legislature in February 2012 by Democrat Karen Keiser, would require tlie state to auction artworks every two years. Revenue would be split, with 60 percent going to fund tuition breaks for college students and the remainder going back into the fund for the Washington State Arts Commission.

Kris Tucker, executive director of the commission, says the bill, which died in committee, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of public art. "Ours is an art collection in that it is collectively owned by the people of the Washington state," she says, "but it's not like a museum collection that can be bought and sold."

Much of the work, for example, consists of percent-forart projects that fund artworks at rural public schools. Other works include sculptural projects that could not reasonably be moved.

Moreover, like many public art bodies, the Washington State Arts Commission has no experience or organizational process for selling artworks in the public realm. "We haven't gone there as a field," says Lies el Fenner, the program manager

Revenue Roundup

New ideas for funding public art

With public art budgets shrinking virtually everywhere, administrators and artists are turning to creative new approaches for funding projects. Over the years, Forecast Public Art executive director and Public Art Reviewpublisher Jack Becker has gathered this laundry list of the innovative and creative ways communities across the country have successfully raised money to support public art:

• Billboard tax (Toronto)

• License plate fees (California)

• Hotel/ motel tax

• Gambling proceeds (Council Bluffs, Iowa)

• Tax return check box

• Postage stamps

• Micro grants (such as Kickstarter)

• Re-granting programs (supported by foundations)

for public art at Americans for the Arts. "It's permanent work. Year after year, new works come into municipal collections. That's very different than a museum-curated collection."

Even as simple a matter as assessing the value of a public artwork is fraught with complication. That's because the cultural value of public art exceeds its monetary value, according to Ruri Yampolsky, director of Seattle's public art program, which is independent from the state's and thus would not have been affected by the legislation.

"We see the artworks as part of the cultural heritage of the city, including its artistic community," she says. "The value is in the enjoyment and their historic value. On paper it might have a market value, but it's not a cash cow for the government." -Joseph Hart

• Auctions-on line and in person

• Percent from private development (Los Angeles and others)

• Pooled funds (multiple percent-for-art budgets are combined)

• Golf tax ($1 per golf bag in Portland)

• Graffiti abatement funds (Minneapolis and many others)

• Corporate sponsorships

• Private gifts and loans

• Trading your art for other art

• Bartering with artists

Have you heard about other financial strategies used to support public art? We'd love to hear about them so we can share more good ideas in these pages. Write to us at office@ForecastPublicArt.org.

SHOPTALK

From the Gallery to the Streets

The Walker Art Center's new curator of public practice explores the museum's role in process-oriented art

Interview by JOSEPH HART

In February 2012, Sarah Schultz added a new tag to her title as director of education at Minneapolis's Walker Art Center: curator of public practice. It's more than a paper distinction. By designating a formal curator for the kind of diffuse, process-oriented projects that increasingly interest public artists, the Walker acknowledges that museums have a role to play in community-based public art. Public Art Review spoke with Schultz to gain a better sense of what this shift means.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW: How did this title change come about?

SARAH SCHULTZ: During the past few years, we've embarked on an ambitious project called Open Field in a green space next to the museum. Basically we wanted to create a cultural commons with this space that is shared and activated by the institution, artists, and the public. It turned out to be a mashup of creative life with people doing everything from yoga to yarn bombing. We curated several artist residency projects as well, including Red76, Futurefarmers, and Machine Project.

It became apparent that the work we were doing in museum education was blurring over into the area of curatorial work. But of course curators are working well beyond the exhibition space, and artists are always pushing definitions and practices.

PAR: Do you think there's a disconnect between experiencing a work of "social practice" and the traditional museum experience of "looking at paintings," or are they connected?

TECHNOLOGY

Update: Online Public Art Projects

Public artists and administrators have been building a number of digital projects that promise to increase access to information relevant to the creators, keepers, and users of public art. Below are updates on several we've been watching.

• Beta testing for Web Resources for Art in Public (WRAP)which aims to "capture the creativity and provide tools used daily by artists and administrators, writers and researchers, educators and theorists"-is in the process of finishing its last beta testing project, based in Kansas City. Staff at a variety of agencies, including libraries, parks, museums, colleges, and even a bank, collaborated in digitally cataloging 102 local works.

55: I think they're connected. I think you're

engaged with art whether you're standing in front of a piece of art, empowered to interpret it, or you're bringing your knitting workshop to Open Field. They're on a spectrum of experience and they're both important. Public practice doesn't replace the experience of going into a gallery, and I don't think one is better than the other. They're different-and the dialogue between them is interesting.

PAR: How is it different for the Walker to commission this work, versus a city department, for example? I'm thinking for one thing that the Walker has a kind of artistic seal of approval.

55: Well, yes, it does. But I see the Walker as primarily a catalyst-seeding and supporting projects-and as an incubator for experiments. This kind of work is really about trying things out. A lot of artists, with some very modest financial support along with some cheerleading, are excited to experiment.

PAR: So the Walker can take more risks?

55: I think so. I'm not interested in setting too many parameters in advance, but rather entering a relationship with an artist and negotiating the project from the ground up. What if the outcome of a project isn't that successful, but the process of getting there was wonderful? I don't know if that's a risk a city department is willing to take.

• CultureNOW's Museum Without Walls listing and mapping program is rapidly approaching 10,000 sites, while its smartphone app features an ever-expanding collection of nationwide works.

• Also expanding is the Western States Arts Federation's Public Art Archive, which now boasts more than 20 collections representing nearly 2,000 artworks, with more coming online every day. Next step is the development of collections management tools designed to serve public art administrators. Watch for their survey at the Public Art Network Preconference of the Americans for the Arts convention, June 7-8 in San Antonio, Texas.

SpecialCoverage

Juxtapoz focuses on public art for its May 2012 issue

Known for covering the underground art of painters, street artists, sculptors, cartoonists, and photographers,Juxtapoz hit the newsstands in May with a special issue on public art.

The editors of the 18-year-old magazine spent a year discussing public art and community service-and how to make better communities around the world-with politicians, festival organizers, and artists. They consider their May 2012 issue, which includes an outline for inexpensive ways local governments can generate cash, a "crash course" for developing community art projects.

"We all know this: Public art, street art, graffiti, has popularity that far exceeds any politician's predictions or tourist board's facts and figures," write the editors. "It is a movement created by people who care, followed by a fan base that will travel across the world to document and see with their own eyes. It's time to really look at new ways to fill our cities."

Juxtapoz printed four separate covers for the issue, featuring works by El Mac, Steve "ESPO" Powers, JR, and Swoon (above). Others interviewed in the magazine include Ron English, Saber and Revok, and the organizers of the FAME and Nuart festivals. Learn more at juxtapoz.com. 17

COMINGFALL2012: AboutPlace

The fall/winter 2012 issue of Public Art Review explore& the intersection of public art and placemaking.

How do artists participate in the creation of our shared spaces? How can we create a common vision for a place based on the needs and aspirations of the people who live and work there?

Creative placemaking has exploded into an international movement, yet the role of the artist in this realm is yet to be fully recognized and valued. We'll examine how artists are using technology and collaborating across disciplines, and how they see placemaking as an important civic action.

Keep your subscription current at www.PublicArtReview.org

Back to the Land Art

By rethinking the legacy of the 1960s land art movement, artists and institutions are redefining environmental art

by GREG ESSER

ABOVE:MichaelHeizer'slevitatedMass-conceptualizedin1968andtransported to L.A.in2012.

BELOW:Heizer'sDoubleNegative(1969), a trenchworkinOverton,Nev.,isslowlydisintegrating.

Artist Michael Heizer and Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), have together redefined what "earth-moving" means this spring with Levitated Mass, a project currently in the final stages of construction at LACMA. The project has captured the imaginations of art enthusiasts, geologists, news media, and the general public.

Perhaps no one more than public art administrators can appreciate the monumentality of transporting a 340-ton, twostory-tall rock along 105 miles of surface streets through four counties and 22 cities. I get heartburn just thinking about the many regulatory agencies involved in planning the rock's epic 11-day journey from Riverside to Los Angeles. Traffic signals were disassembled and utility lines relocated to make way for the rock's fivemile-per-hour passage. Most of the project's $10 million budget covered costs for engineering and transportation.

Heizer originally conceptualized Levitated Mass in 1968, shortly before Bruce Nauman conceived Untitled (Leave the Land Alone), a work that wasn't realized until 2009 in Los Angeles. To create Untitled, five jets flew side by side to skywrite the phrase "Leave the Land Alone" two consecutive times across the blue sky above Pasadena.

The fact that these 40-year-old concepts are finally seeing the light of day indicates a resurgence of interest in the land art, or earth art, movement originating in the late 1960s. Issues such as conservation and preservation, as well as an exploration of new connections among artists, artworks, and the environment, are capturing the attention of artists and curators. While much has changed since the 1960s, land-based artworks continue to resonate in the general public consciousness.

Another example is Heizer's Double Negative (1969). The work, located near Overton, Nevada, is gradually disintegrating. There are no plans to stabilize it. The opportunity to experience the work-and other massive projects like it-in person may erode within our lifetime. This is all the more significant because many of the land artworks created in the 1960s and 1970s would not be feasible today given greater awareness of environmental impacts, as well as higher scrutiny and stricter local, state, and federal regulations.

We are fortunate, then, that the Center for Art + Environment (CA+E) at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno now houses an archive with many of the original documents, including photographs, concept sketches, and correspondence, documenting Double Negative's creation (the work itself is owned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). The center, founded in part on the premise that "up to 97 percent of

the world's art is destroyed within 100 years of its creation," is home to a growing number of archives related to "creative interactions with natural, built, and virtual environments." So far, the repository represents over 400 artists across seven continents. The archive is also an articulation of the growing awareness that the notion of "permanent" in the field of public art is relative.

In September 2011, the center hosted its second Art + Environment Conference. One of the highlights of the conference was a lunch discussion with G. Robert Deiro, a former Hughes Aircraft executive who served as the local-and critical-resource for artists including Heizer and Walter de Maria to realize ambitious projects sited in the western landscape. One of the works on display from the Center's collection is the original cocktail napkin sketch and typewritten budget for de Maria's Lightning Field.

Several other recent conferences address connections among artists, technology, and the environment. In March 2012, Woodbury University's Arid Lands Institute sponsored an international design competition and conference exploring design solutions for a "water-scarce future." Starting in September, the 18th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) will explore the intersections among art, technology, and nature. ISEA2012 "Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness" will begin with a conference September 19 to 24 in New Mexico and continue with exhibitions and regional collaborations through the end of the year.

This renewal of interest in land-based art, coupled with increased attention toward diminishing resources, points to possibilities for artists. Across disciplines, scientific findings point to an escalating crisis. Projections indicate that as many as half of all species may be extinct within the next 100 years. More than one billion people lack access to safe, clean drinking water today. Global temperatures are hitting new extremes, and dramatic weather events occur with increasing regularity. Artists today are often at the forefront of efforts to address these ecological challenges. With the knowledge generated through artistic inquiry, analysis, and synthesis comes the opportunity to shift behavior and culture, even if such change comes too late in the game.

GREG ESSER is an artist and the director of the Desert Initiative for the ASU Art Museum in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University in Phoenix, Arizona.

Over the River Is Out of the Woods

Controversial project gets the green light from county

A project designed in 2007 by Christo and the late Jeanne-Claude appears to be a go. At the end of March, as this issue went to press, the Fremont, Colorado, County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to approve a temporary use permit for the project.

Over the River, nearly two decades in the planning, consists of about 6 miles of fabric panels suspended in several sections along 42 miles of the Arkansas River. Although the piece itself will only be in place for two weeks (currently slated for August 2015), site preparation and environmental remediation stretches its duration to about two and a half years.

With federal approvals complete, heated local opposition led by the group Rags Over the Arkansas River (ROAR) centered on negative effects to the river ecosystem and to rural dwellers whose livelihoods would be disrupted by the project.

The use permit includes a lengthy section of conditions addressing these and other concerns, requiring Christo to assume responsibility for county costs related to the project.

ROAR promises to continue the fight. Two ROAR lawsuits that challenge the project on the federal level remain pending.

-Joseph Hart

ABOVE:InthesamewayChristoandJeanne-Clauderaisedmoneyforotherprojects,planning sketchesforOvertheRiverarebeingsoldtohelpfundtheproject.Thiscollageincludes a view underneaththefabricpanelsanda mapoftheArkansasRiver.Seechristojeanneclaude.net.

Keeping the Lights On

The 2012 Public Art Network preconference will focus on technology

A growing number of public artists are incorporating technology into their works. New advances in digital and electronic arts open up an interesting world of interactivity and put a strop to public art's cutting edge.

But incorporating new technology can cause challenges for those in charge of commissioning and maintaining public art collections, according to Liesel Fenner, the public art program manager for Americans for the Arts.

"Who's changing the light bulbs? Who's updating the operating system when Microsoft issues a new update?" asks Fenner. "These logistics are often overlooked. The artist is long gone, and the arts administrator is left holding the bag."

Issues such as these are the focus of this year's Public Art Network preconference to the Americans for the Arts annual conference. The preconference, which takes place June 7 and 8 at the Pearl Brewery on San Antonio's famous River Walk, will feature artists-including Daniel Mayer, Nori Sato, and Shona Kitchen-whose practices embrace hightech. Sessions will also cover radical new public arts practices such as pop-up galleries and yarn bombing; responding to natural and manmade disasters; and social engagement in public art.

Luis Ubifias, president of the Ford Foundation, will give the opening keynote address and San Antonio poet Naomi Shihab Nye will give the closing address. A sculptors' symposium and party are planned for June 6.

f.lS.H.(2009)byDonaldLipskiwascommissionedbytheSanAntonioRiverFoundationafter theRiverWalkwasextendedpasttheSanAntonioMuseumofArtuptothePearlBrewery.

INMEMORY

RockneKrebs

Born in 1938 in Kansas City, Missouri, Rockne Krebs was, by the 1970s, a major pioneer in public artworks. Krebs was one of the first artists to experiment with lasers and other light forms in his works, the first to create three-dimensional installations with light, and the first to deploy lasers in large-scale public works. For The Source (1980), he directed parallel beams of argon and krypton lasers from the Lincoln Memorial across the Mall in Washington, D.C. One beam floated above the White House, another went toward the Capitol.

A winner of numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, and Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, Krebs died on October l 0, 2011. He was 72.

Frederik Meijer

Billionaire retail tycoon Frederik Meijer-credited with inventing the shopping supercenter-died at age 91 on November 25, 2011. In addition to building a retail empire that inspired the launch of Wal-Mart, Meijer was the major donor to Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, a popular public art destination in Meijer's hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The 132-acre site was recently ranked as one of the top l 00 most-visited art destinations in the world.

The Art of Getting Art Done

Beyond artistic vision, public art requires deep social intelligence

by MARK JOHNSTONE

I live in Hailey, Idaho, a mountain town with a population of 8,500. The town didn't have an arts commission until 2006, and it passed a percent-for-art ordinance in 2008. Events drawing thousands have happened annually since 2007. There are $20,000 of integrated and site-specific public art projects finished, and another $80,000 in progress. How did all this come to fruition in a rural town with a modest budget? Through good communication between artists, elected officials, city staff, the Chamber of Commerce, and through informative workshops offered to artists and the general public. Essentially, it happened the same way successful projects happen in communities of all sizes: through lots of education and negotiation.

Negotiation is a skill that can be developed. Artists apply it, philosophically speaking, every time they enter a relationship with a physical product. In public art, the negotiation skills required are more practical-and they're essential. So is studying up. Here are some practical suggestions from real-life experiences I've had as a chef, writer, editor, curator,

Take the long view

I've always been impressed with the ability of chess and bridgeplaying masters to visualize many future moves and adapt to changing scenarios. Public artists and administrators can learn a lot from them. When the stakes are high-or getting higher-with an over-expenditure of time, energy, materials, and money, it is important to take a step back and try to see the big picture. Flipping out, responding with a knee-jerk reaction, or acting with just a little too much expediency can weaken ideas and plans. Instead, consider all experiences to be a form of education. That view might give you an opening to plant a seed that could change someone's perception-or your own.

'ublic artists and

administrators can learn a lot from chess and bridge-playing mastei:s

public art advocate and administrator, educator, and, yes, cattle wrangler, about how to navigate the personalities, hierarchies, and political processes in the world of public art.

Learn the territory

I observed long ago that managing the process of public art came easier to people knowledgeable about everything from architecture to city codes. I know that when I was negotiating as a public official, for example as a planning and zoning commissioner, I had to be prepared to converse with contractors, developers, architects, and real estate brokers, who are sometimes fellow commissioners, in order to get things done. Both artists and administrators can be much more effective if they understand the language of the other people involved.

Know the people and build alliances

Working effectively with special interest groups, even if they're only participating in an advisory capacity, will always make it easier to leverage their assistance and/or a compromise later. Solicit the input of anyone who might be involved with a project, including subcontractors and residents. You don't have to use that input, but it helps to know it-like a trial lawyer preparing for cross-examination.

Use conflict creatively

Artists have the ability to be the antennae of the moment-listening, "playing," and making connections outside the boundaries and protocols of a hierarchy. So they can be particularly good at recognizing how conflicts can contribute to growth, new ideas, and alternative directions if there's space for them to do so. It may

sound a bit like scouting advice, but by being prepared, flexible, and willing to accept alternatives, artists and administrators can explore problems creatively, take what is useful from them, deal with them, and move forward.

Speak clearly and listen well

A complicated idea is most effective when presented in a simple way. It sounds obvious, but challenging situations require us to think and talk about ideas that are antithetical to our own. When you are faced with people who espouse opposing ideas, ask yourself: What motivates or attracts them?

I was fortunate to be shown examples of patience and tolerance, and the importance of observation, by my parents. During my study of T'ai Chi, I also learned that "the giving way" can be a better path tl1an exerting force to achieve what you think you desire.

Since 1988, MARKJOHNSTONE has worked as a public art liaison between artists, civic groups, corporations, and city government. He wo1ked in Los Angeles from 1977 to 2004, has been a Public Art Review advisor since 1999, and lives in Hailey, Idaho, where he was an unsuccessful mayoral candidate. He is the public art advisor for the State of Idaho.

Maja Godlewska, Imaginary Clouds I Thomas Thoune, Finding New Ground

Erwin Redl & Norman Coates, Lighting programs for NASCAR Hall of Fame

Masayuki Nagase, Aquifer

FOOD tor Thought

imply put: Food gets people's attention. That's one reason public artists are using it effectively as an artistic medium. Food offers multisensory experiences for audiences, encouraging curiosity, questions, and delight. It also provides an intimate way for artists to learn about and address the needs of communities and sites. In the following pages you'll read about the challenges artists face when they work with food, the various ways they're using food to address social, political, and environmental issues, and ways audiences naturally come together around food-based projects to eat, experience, and think. Bon appetit! -The Editors

m(2008)drawsonthecolorsofrealfruitsand halobyTattfooTan.Seemoreonpage28.

Artists who work with food share their solutions to some of the unique problems presented by the medium

BY NICOLE J. CARUTH

As an artistic medium, food holds a particular set of challenges. Whether artists are cooking for museum-goers or cultivating for communities, the perishable nature of their materials demands the savvy of professional food purveyors and the strategy of urban plan-and struggles. Over 100 dead roaches, 99 cut fingers, ners. Artists Carol Goodden and Gordon Matta-Clark five floods, three city citations, one "ruined" truck, and learned this firsthand after opening the legendary (but a total income equal to their expenditures were among short-lived) restaurant Food in 1971. One year later, the less savory details. However exaggerated this list the artists printed in Avalanche magazine an advertise-might have been, their experience is confirmed by ment of "Fiscal Facts" that quantified their successes artists working with food in the public sphere.

ABOVE:MichaelRakowitzservesrecipesfromhisIraqi-JewishmotherinEnemyKitchen.AtitsChicagodebut,foodwaspreparedbylocalIraqicooksandtheserversandsous-chefswereIraqWarvets.

OPPOSITE:JenniferRubel!createdPaddedCell, a roomfilledwith1,800conesofcottoncandy,asan"all-Americanfunhouse"fora 2010eventheldbyPerforma, a NewYork-basedartsnonprofit.

Planning for Bureaucracy

"Cooking is like building," says Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz, who couples ethnic cuisine with political awareness. Since 2004, he has brought his project, Enemy Kitchen, across the nation, inviting groups to join him in conversation while cooking and eating meals based on the recipes of his Iraqi-Jewish mother. Conversations that occur over the course of preparing the foods are central to Rakowitz's practice, but getting to that moment can be "really stressful." Serving food to the public (legally, anyway) means surmounting the bureaucracy of food safety laws and permit requirements. Needless to say, planning the Enemy Kitchen food truck-which hit the streets of Chicago this winter as part of the Smart Museum exhibition Feast-was a slow and complicated process.

Chicago boasts one of the largest Iraqi expatriate communities in the United States. "I decided that better than opening a full-on restaurant would be to collaborate with this really rich community here and to make their presence evident and celebrated," Rakowitz explains. Operating two days per week, the truck's fare was prepared by local Iraqi cooks while Iraq War vets acted as servers and sous-chefs. Rakowitz observes how few Americans have actually come into contact with an Iraqi or a soldier who served in the war; the mobility of Enemy Kitchen extended this opportunity to different publics.

Chicago has been slower than other big cities to embrace the meals-on-wheels phenomenon. Food trucks are, as Rakowitz says, "a contested culture." They're opposed by some

downtown restaurants that fear losing business, and since city law prohibits cooking on actual vehicles, all foods must be precooked and packaged, impacting freshness and taste. Fortunately, Rakowitz was well seasoned in absurd and impossible food law. For his Creative Time presentation Return, he reopened his grandfather's import-export business with the intention of selling Iraqi dates out of a New York City storefront. To do so, he found support from the famous Brooklyn store Sahadi's. "Being able to import something from Iraq on my own would have been completely impossible," he says.

Applying the same collaborative strategy to his food truck, Rakowitz joined forces with the Chicago eatery Milo's Pita Place. Working together was as much about engaging local Iraqi communities as it was about practicality. Because Milo's was already established, Rakowitz circumvented some of the red tape of city licensing. After consulting "sympathetic" food truck owners, Rakowitz also hired a professional to outfit his vehicle to prevent problems like bacteria. "The worst thing to do is have any kind of tension build around a project because we didn't do our research or due diligence about these things. So we're not going to get shut down for uninteresting reasons."

Handling Food with Care

City rules and regulations create difficulties for artists but their primary purpose is to keep the public healthy. The many dangers of perishables-spoilage, salmonella, allergies, verminhold true in art settings. Food can be lethal if not handled

ABOVE:EveryyearJenniferRubelloffersa breakfastinstallationduringArtBaselMiamiBeach.In2011sheconcoctedIncubation, a freeevent,to explorethecreativeactaswellasthecreationof food,life,andart.Here,participantsannointjarsoffreshyogurtwithhoneydrippingfromtheceiling.BELOW:Theincubationgallerywheretheyogurtismadeisa playonthematernityward.

properly, and should misfortune occur, art space and artist assume legal liability. New York resident Jennifer Rubell, known for producing edible art installations of epic proportion, offers this advice: "Before making a piece of art using food, go take a basic food safety course." As an inspiration to younger artists to take up food as a medium, Rubell suggests that "it would be interesting for schools to begin to address issues around it so that artists are mindful of the health and safety issues."

To know the limits and idiosyncrasies of any medium requires dedication and experimentation. When it comes to food, Rubell is particularly adept. After earning a degree in art history, she studied food's materiality and flavors at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu. In planning dinner for the Brooklyn Museum Ball of 2010, she spent months testing (and eating) some 30 different varieties of cheese for their "sculptability" and "melting qualities," eventually deciding to make casts of her head in fontina. Heat guns slowly melted the suspended sculptures over a bed of crackers. Other decadent works by Rubell have included a one-ton pile of honey-drizzled ribs; a room-sized cell padded with pink cotton candy; a wall hung with over 1,500 Dunkin' Donuts; and a yogurt and honey installation. "Food is a terribly imperfect medium," she says. "If the perfect medium is bronze, which basically sits there forever, then food is on the exact opposite end of that continuum ... there's no food that's not challenging in an art context."

Funding Mass Consumption

Budgetary constraints play a significant role in Rubell's choice of materials. Large-scale food presentations are costly. Many of her installations are privately commissioned for art galas. With their hefty ticket prices and big-name guest lists, these events are far from the realm of public art, although Rubell's interests

lie "almost exclusively in the broad public." She explains: "It just so happens that in the course of my practice, the private sphere has given me unbelievable opportunities. As much as I can, I try to make those opportunities open to all viewers." To be sure, up-front monetary support, be it for private or public events, figures greatly into what artists are able to do with food.

"Sometimes it's better to be commissioned," says New York social sculptor Tattfoo Tan. His gastronomic happenings, inspired by food's ability to bring people together, include works such as Bread Rock, where communities collectively make and then "break bread." Participation is free to the public-but no one really eats for free. In Tan's experience, organizations often don't anticipate the cost to feed large groups. "Let's say that I was doing a project on pizza," he says. "People usually think it will be cheap because it sounds cheap." But multiply the ingredients by many mouths, and it can total thousands, excluding any stipend for the artist. While Tan has successfully funded his projects, there might be a trade-off: his artwork is occasionally reduced to catering. Tan suggests that organizations might approach artists like him nowadays with a more-for-yourmoney mentality because food artists are uniquely capable of providing both "an art piece and a dining experience."

For Leah Rosenberg-head pastry chef of the rooftop Blue Bottle Coffee Bar at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art-the line between artistic practice and food service is already blurred. Rosenberg likens the process of "building up" cake layers to making paintings. Cutting into one of her confections might reveal colored patterns that recall the striped works of Gene Davis. Where a painting can consume the viewer, cake begs the opposite. "A cake, to me, is a work of art with the intention of generosity," says Rosenberg. And so she offers them up for viewers to freely devour. (In 2011, she brought her philosophy to Chinese cuisine with Jews for Dim Sum, a Christmas Day pop-up potluck on the steps of San Francisco's Asian Art Museum.)

Private requests for pastries can prove oddly tough for Rosenberg. Even if hospitality is the foundation of her work,

ABOVEandMIOOLE:LeahRosenbergandlminYeh'sJewsfarDimSumatSanFrancisco'sAsian ArtMuseum.BELOW:TattfooTan'sNatureMatchingSystematthePortAuthorityBusTerminal.

she can't bake everything pro bona. Like Tan, she encounters "surprise" and even disenchantment when she tells patrons the price. "Audiences don't recognize the scale and effort as with other works of art," she says. Because people encounter food every day, naturally, they come with preconceived notions-however skewed-about its value.

Earning a living as an artist has long proved difficult for those working exclusively with ephemeral and performance media. As a possible solution, Tan entertains the idea of opening a concept store stocked with goods based on his works. "I always say to myself, 'With all this hard work, I might as well start a business.' In the long run, it makes sense." Having developed a popsicle based on his Nature Matching System project (which encourages fresh fruit and vegetable consumption), he was invited to sell them at local farmers' markets. But retail is easier thought about than done. Tan finds that food-based works often fail en plein air because "people don't trust you," whereas in the context of art, the public comes expecting the unusual. Additionally, supplying possible demand with competitive prices could necessitate factorylike production. "I don't want to spend all of my time making popsicles," Tan says.

Navigating Laws of Land

When Tan isn't cooking food with communities he is showing them how to grow it. Mobile gardens planted in repurposed furniture and limited-edition jars of "Black Gold" compost are the stuff of his agriculture project S.O.S. (Sustainable. Organic. Stewardship.). Food production opens a whole other can of worms, so to speak.

Composting, for example, is the means for St. Paul artist Seitu Jones to raise awareness of our soil and food supplies. It was his work with perishables that led him to begin working "on the waste side of food." His "interventions" into the food system range from installing site-specific sculpture to facilitating public tree plantings to casting seed bombs. Collards are a crop he's particularly fond of because of its relationship

CLOCKWISEFROMTOPLEFT:Acollardseedisgluedto eachofSeituJones'sCollard Fieldcards.Jonesthrowingseedbombsin Port-au-Prince,Haiti,duringthe2009Ghetto Bienniale,justbeforeHaiti'smassiveearthquake.Aseedbombofcompost,clay,andseeds.

to foodways and folklore in African American culture. His current endeavor, Collard Field, consists of just a tiny seed embedded into a plantable paper business card. Jones hopes that in distributing these to the public he'll eventually generate a worldwide field of collards. Of course good soil is essential to his success. Jones is working to make change at the local level, though city ordinances can get in the way. "It's okay to compost in your own yard in the state of Minnesota," says Jones. "But it's illegal to take someone else's waste, even your neighbor's, and compost that." While he acknowledges the public health risks, he also argues that laws such as this typically benefit large soil suppliers (read: big agriculture).

Land laws can be overcome, however, by aligning artwork with government interests. Amy Franceschini, cofounder of the collaborative Futurefarmers, envisioned the rebirth of warera Victory Gardens in San Francisco, and so wove her ideas about urban agriculture into the city's developing environmental policies (see story, page 34). As a result, San Francisco City Hall now has a garden out front, symbolizing internal support for not only Futurefarmers but also sustainable urban agriculture at large. "It just took opening the door and showing the city where they could connect the dots," says Franceschini. Rather than seeing public policies about food as hurdles, the artist considers them opportunities. "We [Futurefarmers] usually see challenges as an open door for change, or an unrealized potential. It takes more to think about improbabilities than ability."

As artists continue to explore food as a medium, the challenges and concerns expressed here will likely endure while new ones arise. Fortunately, none so far seem insurmountable. When served with a large dollop of prudence, food-based artworks will surely have audiences hungering for more.

NICOLE J. CARUTH is a freelance writer and curator living in Brooklyn, New York. She frequently writes on the role of food in contemporary art and visual culture. Follow her on Twitter: @nicolejcaruth.

OPENFIELD: CONVERSATIONS ON THECO

What does it mean for institutions to engage in public practice? This volume examines Open Field, a project that invited artists and visitors to imagine and inhabit the Walker Art Center's campus as a cultural commons-a shared space for idea exchange, creative gatherings, and unexpected interactions.

Contributions by Susy Bielak * Steve Dietz * Stephen Duncombe * Futurefarmers (Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine) * Lewis Hyde* Jon Ippolito * Marc Bamuthi Joseph* Sarah Peters * Rick Prelinger * Machine Project (Mark Allen) * Red76 (Courtney Dailey, Dylan Gauthier, Sam Gould, Gabriel Mindel Saloman, and Mike Wolf) * Sarah Schultz * Scott Stulen * Works Progress (Colin Kloecker and Sharrai Matteson)

BY JOSEPH HART

Artists are exploring the sustainability of our food systems with hands-on, interventionist projects

Last summer, residents of Vancouver's Southeast False Creek neighborhood were drawn into an unusual artistic experiment. On a vacant lot littered with the rusty remnants of the neighborhood's industrial past, artist Holly Schmidt led volunteers in designing, building, planting, and harvesting a thriving container garden.

"I'm not a great gardener; I'm just average," says Schmidt. "So it wasn't so much me being an 'expert."' Instead, she invited passers-by to join in the work of creating the garden. The idea, she explained, was that folks "would come in and help out and learn from each other."

A wide variety of people got their hands dirty. Master gardeners and designers collaborated on the site plan. Artists contributed their own projects. Meaghen Buckley, for instance, wove handmade nets onto an

old industrial structure to serve as a creative climbing gym for runner beans.

Other volunteers just happened onto the project while strolling nearby walking paths. One curious elderly resident dropped by to offer a flat of tomato plants. "She ended up helping out throughout the whole project," Schmidt says. And her tomatoes thrived.

A Critique-and Solutions

Schmidt's project, Grow, is one of an increasing number of innovative, artist-led experiments that explore urban farming or attempt-in a practical way-to clarify and decode the notion of sustainability, especially as it relates to our food.

In large part, projects like Schmidt's reflect recent changes in our relationship to what we eat. In the past 20 years, our food system has come under increasing scrutiny. Books like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma have advanced a critique of industrial agriculture that is becoming embraced by the American mainstream.

In short, this critique focuses on the "green" (read: chemical) revolution of the 1960s. Since then, farms have become larger and less diverse, with severe consequences for farmers, our environment, and our health. Today, just 12 percent of the nation's farms produce 84 percent of our food (and receive billions in federal subsidies), according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The other 88 percent rely on off-farm income. Not surprisingly, few young people are interested in farming; the fastest-growing age group in farming is people over 65. Mono-cropping wears out soil, with petrochemicals making up for the depletion. Centralized food systems also require vast carbon-dioxide-spewing transportation networks. Meanwhile, processed foods are linked to a range of conditions, from obesity and diabetes to pesticide-related cancer.

Responses to this critique represent a range of efforts, including calls for better food labeling and food security, attempts to maintain and improve the USDA's organic standards, and lobbying to reform the political landscape that currently favors industrial farming.

More recently-and most interestingly-come the efforts of food activists: farmers, enlightened consumers, and artists like Schmidt who encourage us to attend to our personal relationship to our food and its production. The rapid growth of farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture, as well as the locavore movement, which encourages us to eat seasonally and locally, all come under this umbrella.

"Art farmers" whose projects and practices focus on food issues range far and wide. They include, to name just a few, artists like Matthew Moore, a fourth-generation farmer who has transformed his family farm in Arizona into an artistic commentary on encroaching suburbia, and who constructs practical farming interventions like hanging portable vegetable boxes. The Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc has facilitated several large-scale projects including water collection developments; a rooftop rice field in Anyang, South Korea; and a seed and plant bank in Paris. Fritz Haeg focuses on front-yard gardens with his Edible Estates project.

Not only do these artists and projects advance a critique of our industrialized food system, but they are also actively engaged in the search for solutions. Whether by demonstrating more holistic techniques and sources of food production or by exploring new, collaborative forms of community interaction, they're helping to define a new day for agriculture.

The Art of Growing

As a curator and cofounder of ecoartspace NYC, Amy Lipton has worked with a number of artists who are advancing practical solutions to the problems associated with industrialized agriculture.

In one 2009 project, Lipton gathered a group at Philadelphia's Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, which also runs a working farm. Each participant in the exhibition Down to Earth: Artists Create Edible Landscapes built unique, living gardens with inventive structures that ranged from a rainwater collection system to a sculptural fence designed to keep deer in check.

Lipton's interest is tied closely to her passion for environmental justice. She ran a traditional New York gallery in the 1980s where, among others, she worked with artist Mel Chin. In 1990, Chin collaborated with a USDA researcher on Revival Field, an artwork that used heavy metal-absorbing plants to clean up a brownfield in St. Paul, Minnesota.

"This work is in a new territory where it's hard to put labels on it," Lipton says. "Even among the artists, no one is super comfortable with terms like 'eco-art' or 'land art.' It's not like minimalism or cubism that sum up very easily."

For Chin, this ambiguity had a concrete consequence: a grant he'd received from the National Endowment for the Arts was rescinded. "They were questioning whether it was an artwork at all," says Lipton. Chin fought the decision and the grant was eventually reinstated.

Amy Franceschini's Victory Garden project in San Francisco provides a striking contrast. Launched in 2006 at the city's Museum of Modern Art, the program enlisted residents to plant back- and front-yard edible landscapes and provided

Projectsfromthe2009Downto EarthexhibitionincludedJoanBankemper'sWilla, a medicinalgardenwithsevenchakras(above),andDeerFencingbyStacyLevy(opposite).

workshops and tours of participating gardens. Franceschini, a founder of the collaborative group Futurefarmers, also created a demonstration Victory Garden in front of City Hall. The highly successful program has since become an ongoing, cityfunded initiative and a model for other urban agriculture projects around the country.

The idea, Franceschini told the Los Angeles Times in 2009, was to declare "a victory of self-reliance, independence from the industrial food system, and community involvement."

Today, she describes the impact of the project in even broader terms. "It addresses the disconnection we have with everything we consume," she explains. "It's a point of initiation to a deeper connection with food. As soon as people started farming and realizing how difficult it was, a lot of other questions unfolded." Ultimately, these questions included the pressing environmental issues of the day, including climate change, transportation, and the challenges of population increases.

More recently, Futurefarmers took up the issue of soil health in Soil Kitchen. Timed to coincide with the 2011 Environmental Protection Agency's National Brownfields Conference in Philadelphia, the project took over an abandoned building, outfitted it with a giant windmill, and turned it into a community gathering space.

The heart of Soil Kitchen was a testing project: Neighbors traded soil samples from their yards for a bowl of soup. Like the Victory Garden program and Schmidt's Grow, the project included workshops and hands-on demonstrations on topics like sustainability, composting, grassroots community financing, and alternative energy. The soil samples were tested by EPA conferees, and the results were posted online. Residents with high contamination worked with the EPA to gain more knowledge ofremediation. The initial project is over, but local residents plan to carry the program forward for another year with the blessings of the city.

ABOVE:Time-lapsefilmfootagefromMatthewMoore(top)andotherfarmersintheDigital FarmCollectivedebuted ata ParkCity,Utah,grocerystore(middle)andwillbecomepart ofanonlinedatabase.BELOW:ServingsoupatSoilKitchen(left)andplantingdayatSan Francisco'sCityHallin2008,partoftheVictoryGardenproject(right).

The Social Dynamics of Food

Like Schmidt's Grow, projects launched by Futurefarmers raise awareness of local, homegrown alternatives to the industrial food system. But they do a lot more than that. By creating collaborative, informal, grassroots interaction, they model an alternative social structure as well.

For Schmidt, this interaction is a key component of her work. "Instead of being didactic and telling people 'This is how it should be,' I'm always looking at how we can come together and start building something interesting. How can we come together, ask questions, and create a new practice?"

In other words, such artists arn challenging the social implications of outsourcing our food production to multinational corporations and gigantic, centralized, and largely invisible farms. They're questioning why the intricate, complex, sometimes maddening, but entirely defining experience of cultivating, harvesting, cooking, and enjoying a meal is reduced to a series of impersonal financial transactions at the drive-through window and checkout aisle.

When Franceschini planted her Victory Garden at San Francisco's City Hall, an unanticipated result was that as city workers and elected officials came out to eat lunch in the garden, they came into contact with gardeners and citizens in a new and different way. "They would talk to people, and a lot of issues came out. People became connected to the city," she explains. "Breaking these sorts of barriers has become an important aspect of our work. We should think of the city as 'ours,' and we should know what's in the soil around our homes, and we should be able to test it ourselves."

In this context, and against the backdrop of our increasingly troubled world ecology, projects like Franceschini's are challenging not only the assumptions of the participants in their works, but the role of the artist. "It's even hard for me to say I'm an artist sometimes," she says. "I've often called myself an educator or facilitator or pollinator. Basically I think it's whatever title you need to have to make happen what you want to happen."

In other words, one of the vital offerings that artists-especially public artists versed in the dynamics of community collaborationcan contribute to the food movement is a new social dynamic that transcends economic relationships. Just as farmers learn to cultivate fertile, biodiverse farms, and food consumers learn to embrace a broader range of Earth's edible offerings, artists like Franceschini can teach us to self-organize around our pressing, common interest in sustaining ourselves with a healthy diet.

JOSEPH HART is associate editor of Public Art Review and the director of the Viroqua Harvest Celebration & Parade (www.facebook.com/viroquaharvest).

SpeculativeArt

Sarah Kavage's Industrial Harvest compared actual wheat to a "wheat future."

Behind every box of Wheaties stands a largely invisible system of international finance, a marketplace of buying, selling, and risk that makes Wall Street seem transparent. At its simplest level, the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile give investors the opportunity to speculate on the future cost of food, transferring risk from farmers to investors.

But the commodities market also turns tangible, life-giving crops into an abstraction, and it's this process that fascinates artist and urban planner Sarah Kavage. "I'm interested in big systems like wastewater treatment facilities, stuff that's around you but you don't really think about how it works," Kavage explains. "That was my initial interest in commodities trading. These guys are working behind the scenes and most people aren't really aware of their profound influence on the food system."

In order to make that influence apparent, Kavage conceived of Industrial Harvest, a massive public art project that she took to Chicago. The piece had two parts. She purchased a grain future on 1,000 bushels of wheat-an investment gamble that nonfarmers use to speculate on the future price of a commodity. At the same time, she bought 1,000 bushels of real wheat from a grain elevator, and had it milled into 20 tons of flour and shipped to Chicago where she gave it away to food banks and other organizations.

"I was trying to educate people not just about where their food comes from, but to make the connection between those fields of corn and the Board of Trade and what people are eating and paying at the grocery store," she says. "Wheat is a good example of monocultural agriculture-humongous fields and destructive farm practices. And what you have is a commodity system that encourages those destructive practices."

Kavage's distribution of the flour she purchased stands in stark contrast to these abstract financial transactions. She tracked where the flour went, partly through an interactive website. "When I started the project, I wondered if anyone would even want flour. Is someone going to a food bank going to want to bake?" What she found was that food banks are under enormous pressure to feed the growing number of people in need. Getting rid of her flour was no problem. "The outcome was that it fed a lot of people." -J.H.

BY JEFF HUEBNER

If you were in rural Sauk County, Wisconsin, in October and thought you saw the word truthinscribed on a hillside overlooking the Carr Valley Cheese shop near La Valle, it was no illusion. It was a work of art by Cathi Schwalbe-

similar mown glyphs

CULTURESHED

(kul'cher-shed) n.

Friends, artists, and students who visited did farm chores in exchange for acco=odations and workspace. And that gave Neuwirth, a theater prop maker, and Salinas, a sculptor and teacher, an idea. In 2000 they founded the Wormfarm Institute, an "evolving laboratory" dedicated to forging connections between sustainable farming and the arts-as well as linking Bouzide, of Chicago, who's created in Illinois. In describing the piece, Schwalbe-Bouzide says, "The soil tells the truth:' That could serve as the credo for the Wormfarm Institute (WFI), a 12-year-old agriculture-and-arts nonprofit that sponsored her piece as part of a new countywide public-art exhibition, just one of its many initiatives.

The WFI's roots actually go much deeper.

In 1993, ready for a change and anticipating the local food movement, artists Donna Neuwirth and Jay Salinas left Chicago and headed to Wisconsin's Driftless region, a place they'd learned to love during country drives. The couple bought a gently rolling, 40-acre, former dairy farm outside Reedsburg-exactly halfway between Minneapolis-St.

1. A geographic region irrigated by streams of local talent and fed by deep pools of human and natural history. 2. An area nourished by what is cultivated locally. 3. The efforts of writers, performers, visual artists, scholars, farmers and chefs who contribute to a vital and diverse local culture.

-Jay Salinas, Wormfarm Institute

Paul and Chicago, 100 miles from Milwaukee, and a short drive off I-94-and started growing organic vegetables for a co=unity-supported agriculture (CSA) enterprise. "Still, our backgrounds are in the arts-you just don't drop that," Neuwirth told me last fall in Reedsburg (pop. 10,000). "So how do you weave these things together?"

people, mostly city folks, with the land where their food is produced. (The nonprofit is named after the precept that most of the world's fertile soil has passed through the guts of earthworms.) Said Neuwirth, "We saw how compatible these two activities were-how [art and agriculture] fed each other."

To that end, the WFI established both an artist residency program (residencies usually last from two to six months and include working on the farm 15 hours a week) and the Woolen Mill Gallery in downtown Reedsburg. Last year the WFI received $150,000 in "creative placemaking" grants from the NEA's Our Town program and ArtPlace to help support its 10-day "Fermentation Fest: A Live Culture

Convergence," a celebration "of all things brined and brewed." It included the inaugural Farm/Art DTour, composed of field installations, "pasture performances," and rural-culture education sites highlighting the bounty of what Salinas has coined the local cultureshed.

"Live culture can be yogurt and it can be music," explained Neuwirth. "Fermentation is about transformation-grain is

WorksfortheWonnfannlnstitute'sFann/Art ofa festivalthatreceived$150,000ingrantsfor"creativeplacemaking"fromtheNEAOurTownprogramandArtPlace-includedDavidWells' FarmedFrame(aboveleft},a "RoadsideCultureStand"byHomerDaehn(aboveright},CathiSchwalbe-Bouzide'sTRUTHintheOrift/essRegion(below},andChristopherLutter-Gardella'sBoots(opposite).

transformed into beer. Communities are transformed." Indeed, the WFI's activities-in partnership with Sauk County and the Reedsburg Area Chamber of Commerce-have helped spark a renaissance in the town and countryside, winning over skeptics. "Farmers are as excited to participate as we are."

Beginning October 7, 2011, we followed the 50-mile Farm/ Art DTour loop in a leisurely two days, stopping to view art (with a self-guided map) as well as to dine, sample cheese, enjoy the bucolic scenery, and buy vegetables fromand chat with-local growers, including Amish farmers. The growers manned the five mobile, artist-built "Roadside Culture Stands"-another WFI initiative-stocked with produce and books. Altogether, 27 landowners participated.

Some of the dozen or so artworks were fun and familyfriendly-murals on silage bags, a Stonehenge structure made of hay bales, giant work boots by Minneapolis's Christopher Lutter-Gardella. Others served as poetic evocations of the rural landscape: Field Weave, an area of fence posts woven with col-

ored acrylic fiber, by Minneapolis's Randy Walker; Sky Cage Traps, tomato-cage towers by Detroit's Terrence Campagna; and hanging woodland "nests" made out of discarded agricultural plastic, by Katie Schofield, a Chicago transplant who became a WFI manager and settled in Reedsburg.

"My work has evolved and changed so dramatically as a result of my time at Wormfarm that it would be difficult to find a way it has not been influenced by the people and landscape of that place," said Schofield.

JEFF HUEBNER is a Chicago-based art writer and journalist who often writes on public art.

Take the Tour: The 2012 Fe1mentation Fest and Farm/Art DTour will take place October 12-21. For more info, see Wormfarmlnstitute.org or FermentationFest.com, or call 608-524-8672.

0n a cargo bicycle converted into a traveling taco stand-complete with solar oven and rocket stove-artist Nance Kiehm rode through the back roads and margins of Copenhagen, Denmark. While exploring and back alleys, she gathered food. As gardens soon as she had enough foraged, bartered, and donated ingredients to start cooking, she made homemade tortillas and tacos and handed them out for free. The catch? She asked recipients for stories, which she recorded, about "land, migrations, homescapes, dinner tables, and persisting eros:•

Thematically, Rambling Range (2006) is linked to Klehm's ur?an farm, which she operates in Chicago. Through eco-educahonal workshops, food-foraging walks, seasonal food. preparation, and a variety of food-sharing events, her public art practice exposes people to natural processes that offer strategies for survival. But the mobile cart-along with the sh_ared foo~ and stories of the Denmark project-served as a vital me~1~m to provoke audience reaction. "The spectacle and the mt1macy of the offering made through Rambling Range delig~ted many -and scared off a few," she says.

Klehm 1s one of many artists using mobile food carts in participatory public art practices. The idea isn't exactly new.

'ABOVE:InTijuana,ClaudiaRamirezusesa tortillapresstospreadthewordaboutGMOs.

LEFT:Karaoke Ice(2007), a mobilekaraokebarservingfrostytreats,inSanJose,Calif.

~earl~ 30 years ago in Seattle, Washington, for example, art1st Cns Bruch began to create sculptural pieces and streetbased performances from shopping carts. In an early street perfor~ance called Vegetable Currency (1987), Bruch dressed as a waiter and used one of his mobile metal cart sculptures to create_ a roving cooking performance that involved frying and servmg onions in Seattle's downtown streets.

More recently, artists have been engaging in field rese~ch, social ?rganizing, community rituals, public intervent10ns, educat10nal workshops, audio documentation, and

LEFT:Acartin Cleveland'sPublicArtforFoodCartsprogram.RIGHT:ForRamblingRange(2006)inCopenhagen,NanceKiehmconverted a cargobikeintoa tacostand,thenexchangedtacosforstories.

performance art with their mobile works-and serving up food and information along the way. Here are a few recent innovative works.

Corn Tortillas: Protesting GMOs

In her ongoing street performance project El Otro de la Tortilla (2006-present), Tijuana-based artist Claudia Ramirez uses tortillas to show that the medium is truly the message. Using a portable tortilla machine as a printing press, she serves up tortillas stamped with political messages about genetically modified corn and the corporatization and security of our food.

"In the wood of the press I carved a pre-Hispanic seal of a type of corn found in Veracruz," says Ramirez. "Since the tortilla is our main food item, the connection that can be made with people is fast. When people see me printing tortillas they approach to ask questions and that's when the dialogue begins."

For El Otro de la Tortilla Ramirez collaborated with activist groups like Greenpeace and Zapatistas to design, create, and disseminate materials to create networked local street actions.

Not only is the project mobile, it uses minimal resources. "A kilo of tortillas, roll and ink, and that's it!" says Ramirez.

Ice Treats and TwinklePop: Connecting Communities

In 2007, a little ice cream truck named Lucci rocked the carcrowded streets of Los Angeles and San Jose's Zerol Festival with a new genre of ice cream truck music called T'winklePop.

A public art project by Nancy Nowacek, Katie Salen, Marina Zurkow, and collaborators, Karaoke Ice attracted audiences to its delectable frozen treats and twinkly renditions of popular tunes like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," "Superstition," and "Heart of Glass." Not only that, Karaoke Ice was a mobile karaoke bar; Lucci was accompanied by a dancing karaoke MC, Remedios the squirrel cub.

For Karaoke Ice's visit to Los Angeles, the project's team worked with Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)to design a route with stops in Watts, Leimert Park, Hollywood, Koreatown, and downtown. Creating a shared experience in these disparate neighborhoods, Karaoke Ice enticed audience participation with free frozen snacks and a mobile stage. A wide variety of performers took the bait, including a family with a rehearsed song, a New York rapper who happened to be walking down Hollywood Boulevard, and the residents at an assisted living community.

"Karaoke Ice was a direct challenge to the common perception that there is 'no public space' in Los Angeles," says Carol Stakenas, executive director of LACE. "In reality, the city is framed by islands of pedestrian culture fractured by the expansive network of roads and freeways. This project used the freeways to become a mobile connector to invite the public to co-create neighborhood portraits while sharing refreshing, flavorful ice in the sUlllffier heat."

Edible Plants: Foraging Urban Terrain Mobilize: The Portable Pantry was a roving public art cart created by artist Emcee C.M., Master of None. "I used it to collect rosehips, crabapples, pine needles, holly leaves, chokeberries, bayberries, and a few other things growing in New York," he writes. "I was learning how to identify plants, cook jams, preserve food, and prepare different teas, in order to throw Wild Tea Parties."

The artist has also worked with Bronx-based Hatuey Ramos, whose EAsT Harlem project investigated solutions to the lack of access to fresh food in East Harlem, where the Mobilize cart offered a foraging tour of public parks to help people identify and gatl1er edible plants. Information about where to find fresh food gleaned through community outreach was used to create an EAsT Harlem map identifying East Harlem's local

gardens, farmers' markets, bodegas, delis, green carts, supermarkets, and community-supported agriculture projects. The map was printed on paper, cloth shopping bags, and online for people in the neighborhood to use.

Supporting Street Food Vendors

In 2010, Cleveland Public Art (now known as LAND Studio, standing for landscape, art, neighborhoods, and development) developed the Public Art for Food Carts Program. Its goal was to support the City of Cleveland's Sustainable Street Food Pilot Program by pairing artists with vendors serving affordable, healthy food.

"At first, we envisioned artists coming up with elaborate art creations for the food carts to draw attention to the various operators and to add a new strain of art and color to the streets," says Vince Reddy, project manager of the food carts program. "It quickly became apparent, though, that what the operators-especially the new operatorsneeded was not the assistance of fine artists but the assistance of graphic artists, who could help them establish a visual identity."

While LAND Studio is wrapping up its involvement in the project, the rising popularity of Cleveland-based food trucks has created a new controversy. There's an increased sense of competition within the culinary business community and many local restaurants have started to feel the heat in terms of attracting a customer base. As a result, the city is now dealing with a new set of concerns regarding vendor permits and zoning.

Such issues can be tricky to negotiate. In 2010, the City of New York attempted to create a law that would have given the city the power to suspend permits to food vendors if they received two citations in a 12-month

NOTICE OF VIOLATION & HEARING period, and to revoke the

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permits of those who committed three violations.

As an artist, media educator, and advocate for the rights of street vendors and lower income workers, Marisa Jahn responded to this situation with Ticketing Jessica Lappin (2010), a choreographed street performance that included the distribution of cleverly designed mockups of actual city citations. The projecta collaborative effort by Jahn, REV {her nonprofit arts organization), the Street Vendor Project, and the Urban Justice Center-organized a diverse community of street vendors and encouraged them to advocate for themselves.

JULES ROCHIELLE specializes in community and CIVIC engagement, participatory media community arts, community organizing, and other nonprofit sector issues. She co-creates innovative public and social practices and cross-sector community collaborations. She is currently based in Los Angeles, California.

iheTemporary Tale

Events that start with dinner and spark deeper thinking about economics and aesthetics

There's a question that inevitably arises when food is involved in a public art project: Is it art or is it just eating? In the early 1990s, Mary Jane Jacob curated several shows, including Culture in Action and Conversations at the Castle, that included artists getting people together to eat. The fact that these social interactions were curated not only marked a milestone in alternative curatorial approaches, it also legitimized public art practice of this nature. More recently, artists have used sit-down meals as a springboard to address a variety of complex social issues. Here, we look at a few projects that have explored the value of food and labor through the combination of dinner and art.

BY KAREN OLSON

Expensive: Redefining Value

Artist and chef Jim Denevan is known for his large-scale earth drawings and as an entrepreneur with his business Outstanding in the Field-part dinner party, part harvest festival, part art event-Denevan calls it a "traveling culinary circus." Launched in 1999, Outstanding in the Field is a summer-long U.S. farm tour. Denevan and his crew roll up to a farm-last summer they made 87 stops-and set up a long table emphasizing form and line. They work with the land's farmer, a notable chef, and local food artisans to create a meal. Participants walk or boat to the theatrically selected site, carrying their own plates.

The event isn't cheap. Tickets can run $240 per person, or more. And so the project isn't really public art, but it almost was. At the beginning, Denevan said, years before "farm to table" was a common phrase, he had a choice: He could go the traditional arts route and secure a grant (or become a nonprofit) and offer the experience as a one-time event or to a very limited audience; or he could put a big price tag on the event and pay farmers and chefs well. He chose the latter. "My greater goal was to create an environment where people would say: This is so damn expensive, it must be valuable. Culturally valuable," Denevan says.

So far, Outstanding in the Field has served almost 50,000 people meals outdoors on farms in 43 states and several other countries, too. They sell more than 99 percent of their available tickets.

ABOVE:Spurseservesupdinnerat ThePublicTable(2006)in NewHaven,Conn.

BELOW:Partperfonnance,partfeast,BanquettorAmerica(2012)at NewYork'sFluxFactory.

OPPOSITEPAGE:A2010Outstanding in theFieldeventat DietzlerFarmsin Elkhorn,Wis.

Free: Encouraging Generosity

The Public Table was a temporary restaurant that predated pop-up restaurants. Run by Spurse, an artist collective, and supported by arts organizations, it operated in three locations for one month each in 2006. The premise: Spurse artists would show up in a town with just one week to gather everything they needed to operate a restaurant-furniture, a kitchen, tableware, and enough food to offer 20-course mealsfrom people they'd never met. The catch: No money exchanged hands in any part of the project.

In spite of the short deadline, says Iain Kerr, a founding member of Spurse, the artists often ended up with more stuff, and food, than they could use. "We weren't so interested in the fact that these things were free, but that reality is inherently excessive."

The three restaurants were very different from each other. In New Haven, Connecticut, Spurse ran a "super high-end molecular gastronomy restaurant." In Bellows Falls, Vermont, they didn't want to compete with the other restaurants in town that weren't doing so well, so they partnered with them. Spurse cooked in their kitchens, then served a free happy hour from a mobile restaurant. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the collective decided that the restaurant could only be built with material found in the space itself.

In each case, the restaurant didn't remain, but members of Spurse hoped that new networks between individuals and groups, and a new way of thinking and acting, would. "We hoped to get people to sense the possibilities of alternative economies and forms of generosity as a type of aesthetics," Kerr says. "It's not how we make art, but how we make our community that we should focus on. It's about co-composing the world we live in."

Bartered: Facilitating Exchange

Banquet for America was a two-week feast and a re-creation of a small town within a gallery. At the town's center was a 37-foot-long banquet table, built by 17 conceptual and performance-based artists selected for the show. While visitors ate at the table, the artists performed on it. They also inhabited the town-inside the artist collective Flux Factory's Brooklyn, New York, gallery space-for the duration of the February 2012 show.

"All of the participants brought something to the tabledonut making, hair cutting-but you had to trade for their services," says Douglas Paulson of Flux Factory. "The project is about that kind of exchange, and showing that barter economies are possible." (But to raise money to buy the food served at Banquet for America, says Paulson, Flux Factory did it the tried and true way: with beer money).

Food is considered an essential organizing element at Flux Factory, which has a kitchen at its center. "Having dinners is not only a way to cultivate our community, but a way to productively generate projects," says Paulson, who regularly uses food as part of his artistic practice.

Still, he has mixed feelings about working with food. "At times I feel I'm criticized for making barbeque art," he says. "I think that's a very superficial reading. Food is a means to an end. And I'm a real believer that when people share work they start to like each other. They can identify with each other. Cooking, eating, cleaning up together-that's shared labor and that's a foundation that leads to camaraderie and to generating other shared labors together."

KAREN OLSON is managing editor of Public Art Review.

Three explorations of food and place

BY JON SPAYDE

ood has always been one of the firmest definers of place. Cheese-steak sandwiches, pit beef, and deep-dish pizza are edible shorthand for Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Chicago. Iowa is about corn and Maine is about lobster. But food has subtler and more complex connections to place. It can be a part of rituals that hallow a location. It evokes memories that are closely tied to where it was consumed. Its presence in the urban environment, in a restaurant, food truck, or street fair, or growing in an urban garden, comforts and energizes.

Public artists are exploring and using these kinds of connections in their efforts to help revitalize neighborhoods and celebrate communities.

In the three stories that follow, food is a major ingredient in artist-led or artist-aided projects that have helped specific urban places become more vital. It's acted as enticement, icon, and talking point. It's helped bridge the familiar artist-public divide, since just about everybody needs and likes to eat, whether they dress in black or not. And it has helped the projects make their communities more conscious of themselves and the world around them.

Pittsburgh: The Waffle Shop a Conflict Kitchen

Many a hungry Pittsburgher has entered The Waffle Shop, in the East Liberty neighborhood, expecting to simply sit down, order waffles, and eat them-end of story. But once you're inside, cognitive dissonance sets in. You order your food, it arrives, you dig in. But you notice that there's a stage toward the back upon which a ragtag live talk show is going on and being videoed.

Somebody might be holding forth on Islamic terrorism or gentrification. Or there might be a discussion of the proposition that Danny Glover is really Nikola Tesla, or an interview with a child in a chimp mask, or an exposition of dolphin raising in Appalachia. If you want to join in the semistructured strangeness, waffle plate in hand, you're encouraged to do so. It's like you've wandered into a dada-tinged version of the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer rescues the set of the old Merv Griffin Show from the trash, puts it up in his living room, and interviews his visitors. The show feeds live into The Waffle Shop's website, from which it gets turned into raucous YouTube excerpts.

Jon Rubin, the Carnegie Mellon University art professor who set up The Waffle Shop in a classroom collaboration with his students, invokes that Seinfeld episode when he explains this artist-run restaurant-cum-performance-cum-experimentalsocial-documen tary project, which debuted in 2008 and is still going strong. Anyone is welcome to propose and put on a talk show during the shop's quirky hours (11PM to 3AM Friday and Saturday nights, and Saturday and Sunday from 10AM to 2PM). There are scheduled shows and open hours, and serious exchanges about real issues are as welcome as tongue-in-cheek rants or instant conversations between strangers who've just met over waffles.

"It's very important to us that this is a sort of bait-and-switch," says Rubin, "that we're not presenting ourselves as an art project but as something that's within the stream of daily life and commerce in the city." That flickering back and forth between the facts of real life, symbolized by a real restaurant serving real food, and total imaginative and communicative freedom, is of The Waffle Shop essence since the project's launch.

"Creating experiences that disturb what is normative in life is one of the functions of art," Rubin says. "But the general public has a set of ideas about art that make engaging in those experiences problematic. In my mind, you just do things, just immerse people, without preparing them to have their expectations disrupted, as you do in something that's tagged as an art event.

"As a food establishment, The Waffle Shop coaxes our customer-participants into the larger project through a gastronomical experience that is universally familiar. Going to a restaurant and sharing food creates an automatic space for sociability and conversation that bypasses our intellect, and thus often our inhibitions. The familiarity of this environment then eases the way for our customers to participate in a more unfamiliar situation, like appearing on our talk show."

"We're artists, so we were always asking, 'What if we do this?' and trying things and adding projects," adds artist Dawn Weleski, who was one of Rubin's students and managed the day-to-day of The Waffle Shop when it was getting off the

ABOVEandOPPOSITEPAGE:Sofar,ConflictKitchenhasservedfoodfromIran,Afghanistan,andVenezuela.Nextup:Cuba.BELOW:TheWaffleShopduringSundaybrunch;theradioshowis broadcastfromthebackoftheroom.OPPOSITEPAGEBELOW:TheWaffleShopshowwitha guestfromtherestaurant(top)andDeniseEdwardshostingtheSalonChairMinistryShow(bottom).

ground. One addition to the mix created by Rubin and Weleski has been Conflict Kitchen, a takeout window in the shop that only serves food from countries whose official relationship with the United States is strained or hostile: Iran, Afghanistan, and Venezuela so far, with Cuba next.

Another add-on happened when the restaurant got use of the billboard on the roof of the building; The Waffle Shop rents

it to anyone in the world who's connected with the shop live or on the Web and wants to publish a message. (Example: "People think I'm a ghost, I don't know, it's really hard to tell. I'm kind of like a ghost, and I might be invisible.")

In its loose, let's-see-what-happens way, The Waffle Shop has managed to make a difference in its neighborhood, according to Skip Schwab, director of operations for East Liberty

Development, Inc. (ELDI), a financial supporter of the project. East Liberty has struggled economically for years, trying to draw car and foot traffic from the more prosperous Shadyside neighborhood next door. It has worked to develop the area around the massive, cathedral-like East Liberty Presbyterian Church, across the street from The Waffle Shop, into an attractive urban plaza. "The Waffle Shop has brought a very diverse audience into the neighborhood-and not just the young and hip," says Schwab. "Its presence has been a real factor in making decisions about how the neighborhood

will develop-at least partly because they've been so good at getting publicity, including international media." The urban plaza idea is going forward, with plans for a boutique hotel and other amenities nearby.

Which is all to the good, of course, but Rubin emphasizes that his project isn't goal-oriented in a community-development way. The Waffle Shop project, like most of the shows on the talk-show set, is an improvisation. "We really are making it up as we go along," he says. "It's a way of pointing out that, really, all institutions-political, cultural, economic, gastronomic-a.re making it up as they go along. In fact, we got the very idea of serving waffles from the proprietor of the bar and club next door, who lent us his waffle iron. That improvisational mode is how an artist approaches reality, and I, for one, arn really interested in that destabilization."

For 20 years, a huge grain elevator stood empty and unused near downtown Omaha. The widening of nearby Interstate 80 had cost it a silo and an on-and off-ramp, so it was abandoned, to become a gigantic white elephant, too expensive to tear down. The 76,000 drivers who passed it daily, if they took note of it at all, probably shrugged it off as a symbol of the mysterious forces of boom and bust in the agricultural economy.

But a yow1g landscape architect who grew up on a farm not far away has happy memories of the elevator in its prime. "I've always loved it," says Anne Trumble, "because it's where I would go to take grain with my dad when I was little. I would sit in the truck and look up at it. I've thought about it all my life."

Trumble also thought a lot about the natural and cultural landscape of her home region, and in between finishing her MLA at the University of British Columbia and taking a job with a New York firm, she stopped off in Omaha to law1ch a nonprofit, Emerging Terrain (ET), in order to, in her words, "see if I could make a difference to the landscape I'm most connected to."

For the first five years of Emerging Terrain's existence, Trumble periodically returned home to brainstorm with her board about how to carry out the nonprofit's founding mission of, as she puts it, "engaging the public in the factors that shape the built environment." (She still bounces biregionally between teaching at Columbia University and running ET.)

The first project she suggested to her colleagues was an architectural competition to redesign the big derelict grain elevator by the highway. Potential funders shied away. Massive sums would be needed, and the redesign, they argued, would mainly benefit the elevator's owners, a rock-climbing club that had established climbing routes on the building's exterio~.

"I'd come to every board meeting with some new scheme for the elevator, and they'd give me the thumbs-down," Trumble laughs. "And then one day I was playing around with a picture of the elevator in Photoshop and I started putting images on top ofit."

The architectural competition turned into a competition for artist images related to food and agriculture to adorn the exterior of the structure, and the Stored Potential: Land Use, Agriculture, and Food project was born. Emerging Terrain was deluged with 500 replies from all over the world. Thirteen designs were chosen to be rendered onto 20-by-80-foot woven polymesh panels to be attached to silos. Jeremy Reading of Seattle created an ear-of-corn-shaped bar code; Austin,

ABOVE:StoredPotential isa projectorganizedbyEmergingTerrain in Omaha.BELOW(leftto right):Bannersinclude a sliceof baconbyBradyClark, a barcodein theshapeofanearofcornby JeremyReading,andSpeakUp/orSmallfarmsbyCastroWatson(alsoinset,oppositepage).EachofWatson's535hexagonswillbesenttoa congresspersonwhenthebannercomesdown.

Texas-based M. Brady Clark depicted a gargantuan slice of bacon; and Speak Up far Small Farms by New Yorker Castro Watson was made up of 535 green hexagons, one for each U.S. congressperson, in a pattern that looks like a cross between an aerial view of a green landscape and a honeycomb. Each hexagon contains the phrase "Speak up for small farms," and Watson plans to send one section to each member of Congress after the banner comes down.

But the visual-art part was only half of Stored Potential. "I'd always dreamed of hosting a meal at a huge dinner table," says Trumble, and so she planned a gala community dinner for October 2010, to be served at a table running the entire 800-foot width of the elevator atop the old rail line. A plan to use a caterer fell through because Trumble and friends wanted everything to be locally sourced, and "the caterer insisted on kiwi fruit and things like that."

Instead, ten chefs from Omaha's burgeoning restaurant scene designed a six-course banquet that was not only locavore, it was Great-Plains-mythic: roasted heirloom squash, bison pot roast, smoked bison bacon. "Except for the sugar, salt, pepper, and olive oil," says Trumble, "everything came from within fifty miles of the city." Five hundred ticket buyers from the community sat down to a meal designed to get them

thinking about the relationship between large-scale industrial agriculture and the intimacies of eating and nourishment.

In May, Trumble and company will hang more banners, fruits of their second competition, whose theme is transportation. But food won't be forgotten-organizers are planning a mobile feast with an artist-designed food cart.

As for the banner-bedecked elevator, it's been transformed from eyesore to icon. It's appeared in a number of local corporate videos, says Trumble, as many in Omalrn have come to see it as a new civic symbol. Todd Simon, who runs Omaha Steaks, a funder of the project, believes that Stored Potential "shows that you can take relics of our Midwestern agricultural culture and transform them into meaningful icons for the present."

Stored Potential has also advanced the communitybuilding function of public art in the city, according to Lyn Ziegenbein of the Peter Kiewit Foundation, which also provided funding. "Public art like this is still something of a new thrill in Omaha," she says, "and we're discovering that it provides a point of unification for the community-the CEO can talk about it with the janitor in the hallway.

"There's something in it for the most sophisticated urban type of person, since it's serious contemporary public art," she adds, "but it's also very evocative for people who have a background in production agriculture. It shows respect for them and for what they do in the world."

BELOW:Allthefoodexceptsugar,saltpepper,andoliveoilcamefromwithinfiftymilesof Omahaforthis2010dinner.Thetableran800feet,theentirewidthoftheelevator. 51

ABOVE:ArtistLynnSusholtzbuiltArt Produce in a formerproducewarehouse in SanDiego's NorthParkneighborhood.LEFT:Participants in theMakeIt Yourselffoodandartexchange in the ArtProducegarden.RIGHT:Treeplantingandfruit canningwithSeeds@ Cityurbanfarmersfrom SanDiegoCityCollege.BELOW:Groupsfromlocal schools,communitycolleges,anduiversities-like theseUCSOstudents-come to learnstudioarts, farmingtechniques,andmore.OPPOSITEPAGE: Artistandfarmer KrimmelinfrontoftheArt Producegallerywinnowingwheatattheendofthe community-basedwhEAThARvesTproject.

San Diego

San Diego public artist, art educator, and all-around community advocate Lynn Susholtz held the grand opening of her vegetable and herb garden on a resonant day: September 11, 2010. The garden was the most recent addition to Art Produce, Susholtz's office/studio/gallery/community art space housed in a former produce warehouse in the multiethnic North Park neighborhood. The occasion was marked by the culmination of a yearlong project by fellow artist David Krimmel, whEAT hARvesT.

Here's how Susholtz describes the event: "Community members had planted wheat in an empty lot down the street and in backyards. On grand opening day we harvested the wheat, and, flash-mob style, danced it down the street to Art Produce, where it was winnowed, milled, and made into bread and crackers by the community. The project lived in the gallery and garden for six weeks as an interactive educational experience-how much time, energy, and water does it take to make a loaf of bread?"

Krimmel's piece, with its emphasis on food, festivity, and community effort, was not only site-specific, it was site-appropriate. Susholtz's garden-an arrangement of earth-filled metal tubs supporting lush greenery, even fruit trees, in the building's parking lot, plus a storm-water catchment system for irrigationis a community space that she created to welcome, calm, inspire, teach, and literally and figuratively nourish the community.

As such, the project also fits neatly into Susholtz's array of other activities, which include public art commissions, painting, sculpture, installation, exhibiting fellow artists in Art Produce's gallery, and offering space in her building and garden for performances, film showings, and community gatherings. "It's rare to find an artist like Lynn who chooses to invest all of her effort into bringing people together," says Gail Goldman, a public art consultant and former public art director for the city of San Diego. "She introduces people to one another based on the idea of a shared arts experience. She bridges the gap between the art world and the rest of the culture as successfully as I have ever seen."

On Thursdays, when North Park hosts its farmers' market, you can see how easily Susholtz's garden works to bridge the gap to which Goldman refers. The garden is set up adjacent to the market area, so, as Goldman puts it, "there's a lot of fluidity and it's easy for market-goers to meander over into the garden." There they'll find Susholtz and her collaborators offering art projects, cooking classes, and miscellaneous help for just about any creative endeavor a visitor might propose. "It's everything from how to make salad dressing from the herbs that they pick right there in the garden to how to throw clay pots," Susholtz says.

There's also a food exchange in the garden once a month, during which urban agriculturalists in the neighborhood can swap produce. Susholtz works with a landscape architecture program at the New School of Architecture and Design, and with an urban agriculture program called Seeds @ City at San Diego City College. "They help maintain the garden," says Susholtz. "They'll bring a group over when it's time to do a replanting or a tree trimming, or to make pineapple-guava-prickly-pear jam."

Texas-born Susholtz moved to San Diego in 1979 and into the North Park neighborhood 20 years later. North Park had once been a flourishing, close-knit urban "small town" but was in decline for all the usual reasons-a nearby mall had sapped its commercial vitality, young families had moved away, and crime and drugs were on the upswing.

But there were beautiful Craftsman houses available, and Susholtz moved into one. She also found a boarded-up produce warehouse on University Avenue, and made it her studio and

the headquarters of her art-production company, Stone Paper Scissors. Her dogged work in making Art Produce an attractive destination and gathering place, and her other communitydevelopment efforts, were important in helping the neighborhood evolve into an urban arts district with plenty of amenities (and a growing risk of gentrification, too, something to which Susholtz is adamantly opposed). Angela Landsberg of the North Park Main Street business development corporation calls Art Produce "a model for design in sustainability and for the kinds of improvements tl1at are possible when people's interests are put ahead of financial gain. Its aestlrntic impact has really changed the fabric of the area."

As for the garden, it was inspired by an urban plot that Susholtz visited in the nearby City Heights neighborhood when she was working on a project documenting ethnic food traditions there on video. In a tiny space between the sidewalk and a wall, a Vietnamese immigrant gardener was raising "papayas bigger than footballs," she recalls. "I stayed for dinner with him and his daughter, and they made me this amazing meal. I was there for four hours, filming and eating, savoring his herbs. I thought, what creates community better than food?"

JON SPAYDE is a write1; editor, and performance artist.

Adam Kuby, Incrementally (detail), 2011. Located at Madison Valley Stormwater Project Storage Facility. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Funded by Seattle Public Utilities 1% for Art funds.

LOVEFIELD.,s PUBLICART

Enriching the Community Through the Integration of Art

The City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs will be introducing 11 new works of public art commissioned by artists from the US and UK. The art will coincide with the renovation of Love Field Airport with themes that support the history, legacy and purpose of the airport while expressing the vibrant culture of Dallas.

Office of Cultural Affairs

CITY OF DALLAS

Intersected Passage

Artist: Tom Orr

Finland's Second City Turku celebrates a year of art and culture

by JEFF HUEBNER

The tugboat Autere cruised down the Aura River through Turku, Finland's oldest city and first capital, headed to nearby Ruissalo Island. For "Capsula: Curated Expedition to the Baltic Sea," our group of two dozen mostly artists and teachers made several stops along the way to see and hear marine-related installations. Here was a catamaran built from waste materials, there an audio piece that allowed you to listen to underwater sounds. On beautiful Ruissalo we disembarked and crowded into Green Matters, a greenhouse-lab that artist Mia Makela built to demonstrate various uses for foraged, Baltic-choking green algae-including drinks.

Organizer Ulla Taipale, who'd organized similar expeditions in Hungary and Spain, told me later, "I would like the expeditions to contribute to the recognition of small and big miracles of nature and consciousness about its extraordinariness-and vulnerability."

"Capsula" was one of the many protean forms of public art that could be experienced at Turku 2011, the yearlong European Capital of Culture festival, which featured 160 artist-curated programs, some 5,000 individual events, and

ABOVE:ArtistMiaMakelacollectsocean-chokinggreenalgaeonRuissaloIslandnearTurku.

BELOW:GreenMaaers,Mlikelli'sgreenhouse-lab,whereshedemonstratesusesforthealgae.

ABOVE:UnemployedweaversmadeRedCarpetOverUr/JanWasteland foravacantprisonyard.

BELOW:"Turku365"included130randomartencounters,liketheserockingchairs.

15,000 artists from Finland and abroad. The European Union selects at least one city a year to strut its stuff in a bid to spark regeneration and raise its profile (Tallinn, Estonia, was the other 2011 culture capital). Turku 2011-a mix of activism and adventure, science and poetry, and ecological concern and fun surprise-was infused with the Finnish penchant for projects that explore the culture of nature. Whether cinema or circuses, reconstructed folk operas or Baltic-ringing bonfires, everything was art and nearly everything was public and free. Multimedia spectacle was balanced with works that grew organically out of a distinct sense of place-both in the city and around it.

"Contemporary Art Archipelago" was another event that involved a water journey. It featured 20 site-specific works by Finnish and international artists flung out across the Turku Archipelago, a region of 20,000 islands, the biggest connected by bridges and ferries. The event included pieces by Alfredo Jaar-perhaps the festival's most familiar art name-and Tea Miikipiiii, one of Finland's prominent artists; her Northbound was a Noah's Ark-like "animal rescue boat" that sailed from harbor to harbor with displays on species decline.

While I didn't see this show, I did talk with Renja Leino, one of the archipelago's best-known artists, whose installations and videos on the impact of climate change could be found at many Turku 2011 sites, including "Contemporary Art Archipelago." She recalls swimming in "crystal clear water" when she was younger. But now, she laments, "I can't give my children the same island feeling I have had. I'm very sad and frustrated and angry about how this all has happened."

In contrast, "Flux Aura 2011" was close by and neighborly. The environmental-art exhibition of sculptures, performances, and installations took place on or along the river, and was produced by the Turku Artists' Association. (Environmental art is the catchall term for Finland's urban or nature-based sitesensitive art; the work is not necessarily ecological.) It included Balancing, by Reima Nurmikko and Satu Tuittila, a flock of giant fabricated river-floating eiders, upon which there were dance performances. Replete with outsized flowers, mirrorcovered boulders, and butterfly feeders and gardens, "Flux Aura" often lent a fairy-tale feel to the medieval-era seaport, whose cathedral and castle-one of a few in Finland-both date to the thirteenth century.

The Water City

It's no accident that many of the hundreds of public works shown or performed during the year had a maritime theme. The city has been shaped and defined by water.

A major shipbuilding center since the 1730s, Turku (pop. 178,000) was the political, commercial, and cultural hub of Finland (once part of Sweden) for centuries before the Russian Empire made backwater Helsinki the grand duchy's capital in the early 1800s. Turku has not forgotten that. (Finland became independent from Russia in 1917.) It exhibits a feisty, homegrown, progressive, artistic esprit-embodied by the activist artists' group Arte and its vanguard Titanik Gallerythat doesn't necessarily take its cue from Helsinki, three times as large and two hours away by train. Turku, center of 1960s and 1970s underground art and music culture, boasts Finland's oldest art academy, municipal theater, surrealist art show, and electronic music festival.

Although it is Finland's fifth largest city, Turku is culturally the country's second city, with its provincial, chipon-shoulder urban and cultural complexes. In recent years,

TeaMlikiplili'sNonhbound,an"animalrescueboat"withdisplaysonspeciesdecline,wasoneof20site-specificworksacrossthe20,000-islandTurkuArchipelago in "ContemporaryArtArchipelago:'

according to observers, the local arts community had felt increasingly marginalized, and there were concerns that the €50 million ($70 million) festival-whose aims were "developing creative industries and culture exports and strengthening internationality"-would enrich the city's image as a culture capital more than it would support its culture producers.

Yet, as the city struggles to transcend its industrial roots and reinvent itself as a cultural destination, festival organizers worked hard to engage and celebrate the local creative community, along with citizens and residents. Turku 2011 spokesperson Saara Malila told me Turku had lost 20,000 industrial jobs in recent years, many in shipbuilding. "Artists are not shipbuilders," she says,_but investments in the arts can pay off in business development.

Appropriately, in December, lighting designer and artist Tarja Ervasti unveiled her widely awaited Mater marinum, an installation that's part of a preserved shipbuilding crane in a former yard. It included elements of illumination, video art, and stone sculpture. Still, you had to wonder why the crane needed art at all; it was a powerful memorial on its own.

Opening Up to Art

The festival program "Turku365" strived to include the most audience involvement through about 130 installations and actions in streets, parks, natural areas, and other public spaces. The idea was to create random, unpredictable encounters with art. One day rocking chairs (on traditional Finnish rugs) would appear, then handmade pillows on riverside benches. Some 50,000 people participated in projects throughout the year.

"We're trying to build bridges between city people and the artist community," said Meiju Niskala, a red-haired dynamo who was the program's artistic director, as we sat on a bench near the Aura River. "My work is to put seeds in the ground-and wait to see how and where they grow up."

The most effective projects in "Turku365" were several large-scale, collaborative fabric installations by Art Clinic that drew renewed attention to disused sites. In Red Carpet over Urban Wasteland, for instance, 1,059 unemployed weavers were paid to fashion a 1,400-foot-long "carpet" that was unfurled around an old, vacant prison complex that the city may raze. Four thousand visitors who walked on the carpet wrote their ideas about future land use in notebooks (e.g., "Free space for everyone!"), but so far no decisions have been made.

"When I started here 20 years ago, it was quite difficult to put art in the cityscape," said Paivi Kiiski, director of visual arts of the Turku Museum Centre, an association of seven museums. "There were so many arguments against-what is this? Is this really art? But I find it easier nowadays. It's more acceptable to bring contemporary art."

I talked with Kiiski in the Waini:i Aaltonen Museum of Art, named for one of Finland's most iconic sculptors, whose modern figural works abound in Turku. When Kiiski was the museum's director in the 1990s, she helped lead a sometimescontroversial environmental-art program that brought 14 permanent pieces to the city. While initially international in scope, the program also commissioned many Finnish artists, like national treasure Kain Tapper.

ONLOCATION

ABOVE:Performersdanceonfabriceidersin ReimaNurmikkoandSatuTuitilla'sBalancing. BELOW:MatermarinumbyTarjaErvastimemorializesTurku'sdwindlingshipbuildingindustry.

Artful Buildings

Earlier, Kiiski had led a bus tour of one of Turku 2011's most popular and inventive exhibits, SaunaLab, made up of four artist-designed, functional saunas that had been installed around town. One sauna, Heidi Lunabba's, which we reached by rowboat, was floating off the Ruissalo beach. Another, Sounding Dome Sauna, by the versatile artist and designer JanErik Andersson and his frequent collaborator Shawn Decker, a Chicago sound artist, was in the shape of a garlic bulb and emitted sounds like steam whistles that were triggered by temperature changes. The saunas-since auctioned off-were the hottest tickets in town at €10/hour.

You can barely go anywhere in Turku without seeing the works of Andersson, who's become well-known both in Finland and in Europe for his public sculptures, art environments, playgrounds, and, increasingly, buildings that are based on stories, folklore, and fantasy architecture. His Gesamtkunstwerk, a quirky, colorful, fairy-tale house in the shape of a leaf, incorporates 15 permanent works by artistfriends from around the world, including many from the United States. Andersson and his family moved into the island abode two years ago.

'Tm very interested in making architecture which is more fun and imaginative than usual," said Andersson, who welcomed many visitors during Turku 2011. "People don't always relate to art, but they relate more to architecture because it's part of their world."

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 Co=unity Murals, Mosaics, and Sculptures.

Canadian Vision

Toronto's waterfront redevelopment models a new process with public art-involving artists right from the start

by R. STUART KEELER

Toronto is a progressive city that embraces a multicultural identity with a vital urban center. Dubbed "the best kept secret of the western world," the city has a strong public art history. Toronto boasts many public art claims to fame, like Mountain (1995), Anish Kapoor's fu-st commission in North America; The Audience (1989), a complex integrated concrete sculpture by Michael Snow at the SkyDome (now Rogers Centre); and many heroes on horseback commemorating the British and French political influences on the city, founded in 1793. While the city continues to actively commission public art through its percent-for-art program, it is also breaking new ground in how public art can be integrated into and improve the experience of urban space.

In one of the largest waterfront development initiatives in the world, Toronto is transforming 2,000 acres of long-derelict brownfield lands on the shore of Lake Ontario into sustainable mixed-use communities with dynamic, beautiful, ecologically oriented public spaces. This renewal is expected to take 25 years to complete at a cost of about $30 billion in private and public funding.

Spearheading this revitalization project is Waterfront Toronto, an independent agency created by the City of Toronto and the governments of Canada and Ontario to oversee development of several new neighborhoods with a combined 40,000 new residential units, 1,000,000 square meters •of employment space, and about 740 acres of parks and public spaces.

gross construction costs and using the money to fund a comprehensive plan to make public art an integral part of the neighborhood, allowing for high-impact projects whose benefits are specifically felt in the public realm. Once construction begins, the agency will recoup its up-front investment through land sale revenues.

West Don Lands, which will be home to the athletes' village for the 2015 Pan American Games, has integrated public art early in the planning process. Designed by Vancouver-based artist Jill Anhalt, the West Don Lands Public Art Strategy is the first public art master plan of its size, with a $6 million budget, to be implemented in Canada.

Waterfront Toronto currently has several works under construction. In 2012, Mark di Suvero's No Shoes will be installed in Don River Park, and Paul Raff's Mirage, which includes about 60 hexagonal mirrored surfaces, will be applied to the underside of the Richmond/ Adelaide overpasses. Anholt's Peeled Pavement, revealing the area's industrial artifacts, will be installed on Mill Street in 2014. Anhalt also designed one of Waterfront Toronto's first completed public artworks: In 2011, Light Showers was installed in the East Bayfront neighborhood's Sherbourne Common.

Art and Infrastructure

Like many cities, Toronto sets aside 1 percent of gross construction costs for public art in all new development projects. The city also advises private Torontoisturning2,000acresofwaterfrontintosustainable,mixed-usecommunities.

dential buildings undergoing gentrification.

Eventually, this former industrial wasteland will be surrounded by residential and business development. But already the park-connected to the downtown core by a lakefront bike and pedestrian trail-provides an abundant and unexpected urban green space for pedestrians, a de rigueur Canadian-style skating rink that doubles as a water sprinkler fountain pad in the summer, and a groundbreaking method for treating storm water runoff.

Sherbourne Common is a 3.7acre pocket park tucked into a formerly abandoned area on the waterfront. Nearby are the historic Distillery District, with North America's largest and best-preserved collection of Victorian-era industrial architecture, and Corktown, a gaggle of historic commercial and residevelopers and new construction to incorporate a percent-forart component in new buildings. It is important to note that the public art consideration comes during planning negotiations for density and height. Above all, the private developer must contribute to the "well-being" of the neighborhood and community. In order to carry out its ambitious and progressive mandate at the "new blue edge where the city meets the water," Waterfront Toronto is doing something different in the planned neighborhood of West Don Lands: It's pooling its projected

ABOVE:InSherboumeCommon, a parkinthenewEastBayfrontneighborhood,stormwateristreatedina UVwatertreatmentfacility,thenchanneledintoartistJillAnholt'ssculptureLighiShowers.

BELOW:Anhaltwasableto designLightShowerstoservebothaestheticandfunctionalpurposesbecausesheparticipatedearlyintheparkplanningprocess.Waterisaeratedasit descendsinveils.

A $28 million project, Sherbourne Common was designed by Vancouver-based landscape architects Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg. It's the first park in Canada to integrate an ultraviolet facility for neighborhood-wide storm water treatment. At its heart is a sleek and savvy modernist garden pavilion structure, which houses the UV treatment facility. After the water leaves the pavilion, it's channeled to Anholt's Light Showers, three concrete sculptural structures that lift the water into the sky and aerate it as it descends in waterfall-like veils. From there, the clean water runs into Lake Ontario.

Light Showers itself serves more than an environmental purpose. The work visually crowns the park. At night, motionsensor lights allow people to interact with the artwork, and the roar of the six-lane Gardiner Expressway overhead is softened by its sounds. Moreover, the very development of the work serves as an example of new ways to negotiate partnerships and vision in the process of making public art.

Workingwith the City

Anhalt was asked independently by Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg to work collaboratively toward the overall design of Sherbourne Common. It is significant that Light Showers, a $1.9 million art project, did not have an art consultant or administrator leading the charge. Rather, the artist and architects worked together early in the administrative process, with Anhalt taking the lead role for contracting and managing the art process.

The design team approach to public art is still somewhat foreign in Canada, with the exception of the City of Calgary

Public Art Program and the City of Vancouver Office of Arts and Culture. A challenge of working this way, says Anhalt, is "how an artwork can be highly-and in some cases even seamlessly-integrated into a design, yet still enable the artist to have hands-on control over how their work is created." Artist control over the aesthetics and construction of a work is especially difficult to achieve given the competitive public open-bid process that most municipal projects must adhere to. The unique behind-the-scenes administrative process between Anhalt and Waterfront Toronto addressed these issues.

Early in the process, Anhalt was adamant about control of the fabrication of the sculptural forms used to create Light Showers. The sculptures were made using large fiberglass molds that were reinforced with an epoxy-covered rebar, then filled with Agilia concrete. The artist knew this was a specialized fabrication method and did not want to relegate the process of creating the forms to a low-bid contractor. "The artwork required such a precise, complex, and crafted forming technique," says Anhalt. "I was concerned about working with a contractor who might not have the experience or capabilities to help achieve my vision and with whom I had never worked before."

Together, Anhalt and Waterfront Toronto were able to concede a portion of the budget to the artist to work with an art fabricator as a construction contractor while at the same maintaining a public bid process on a different portion of the artwork. This process of negotiation and fluidity allowed for relationships to be built and honored. Ultimately, it offers a new model for working in the future.

The Role of the Artist

The field of public art has expanded in the past 25 years, moving from a way for artists to reflect regional civic pride into a global industry and career path for many. At best, the field is now undergoing significant shifts; we're seeing tremendous change in methods and approaches to making public art. In a time when public art agencies are closing and budget cuts are shutting down projects, the opportunity is present for artists to reinvent how public art is made and to model a new process for new types of collaboration in the public realm.

Art in public space without the artist leading the charge is not public art. The role of the artist in the public art arena is vital, and public artists must deliver not only with inventive projects and materials, but also with flexible administrative styles that ensure the best project. We're seeing such innovation in Toronto, and the results are stunning.

R. STUART KEELER is an artist of public spaces who organizes exhibitions and multi-platform projects with the collaborative role of "curator" as the conceptual identity of his practice. Current projects include work at the San Diego International Airport. His book Service Media, on socially based art practices, is forthcoming from Green Lantern Press in Chicago. He is curator and director of programmes at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Toronto.

Dispatch from Nairobi

While in Kenya, artist Helen Lessick explored its capital's public art

by HELEN LESSICK

Smart public practice moves artists, not artwork. When a friend in New York moved to Nairobi for the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), I was intrigued. With support from Art Matters Inc., United States Artists, and my friend David, I went to Africa in October 2011 to research and develop an understanding of soils and community health in the Great Rift Valley, the first of two extended trips. Before leaving, I established connections with the World Agroforestry Centre and Kounkuey Design Initiative. KDI, a nonprofit, international urban planning practice now led by American Chelina Odbert, recruits and works with local planners, architects, and artisans to create civic spaces with impoverished communities. In Kenya, KDI works in Nairobi's Kibera area, purportedly the largest slum in the world and home to accomplished artists and artisans, carpenters and sign painters.

KDI, building its third Kibera project, is stabilizing streambeds with gabions to secure the hilly land for a level play area, community garden, and produce stalls. I visited the community, built relationships, and developed a proposal for residents to consider. With community help I designed a set of permanent plaques reflecting local agricultural practice that were fabricated by local sign painters and installed in spring 2012.

In addition to working in Kibera, I had the opportunity to explore Nairobi and beyond.

Cultural Bones

In incredible wealth and untenable poverty, Kenya is an economic and cultural crossroads. What is the visual language in a nation of 47 distinct cultures? What can public art look like with 70 percent of the population under age 30?

I visited expected places: the airports, central bazaar, NGO campuses, art galleries, and museums. The Nairobi National Museum is the largest cultural institution in town, a complex of natural and social history galleries with contemporary art and ecology shows. Founded in 1901 as a natural history museum, the content and administration were expanded with Kenya's 1963 independence. Pride of the place is Lucy's skull, the oldest link between humans and apes, found in the Great Rift Valley.

In 2007 the museum expanded indoor and outdoor spaces for contemporary art. One public artwork is of Kenya as a huge green glass map silhouette. Another exterior work has blue

blown-glass forms hung from hammered iron armatures in an abstract trellis. Neither work has a plaque; the museum staff did not know the artists' names. The plaza artworks have a midcentury retro vibe. Even with new construction the museum seems to have missed the contemporary public art movement.

Cultural Complexion

But the museum's artist-initiated public works tell a different story. Spanish artist Irene Izquierdo initiated a conceptual art project for Nairobi citizens through her consulate. Izquierdo led a free workshop within the museum September 15-30, 2011. She selected 12 Kenyans working in visual art, dance, poetry, performance, and signage, from an open application process, to explore histories included in the museum.

The conceptual art workshop "The Proud, The Shy and the Angry: Many (Hi)Stories, One Museum" re-contextualized the form and history of Kenyan society with provocative interventions. Opening night was free and crowded. Dancer Alacoque Ntome, performing in a traditional cardinal red cloak, circled a permanent display of family gourds. He expertly circumscribed the atrium and adroitly added his own gourds to the Hall of Ancestors. Upstairs in the history wing, poet Paul Mutuku performed on bended knee before the empty seat of Joma Kenyatta. "Dear Mister President" was an impassioned rhyme on the role of a good, poor Kenyan. Heartfelt yet cynical, Mutuku contrasted plebian expectations for Kenya's 1963 independence with the wealth and leisure of the successive three presidents and first families.

Organizer Izquierdo's own contribution was signage designating the museum's auditorium a free speech zone as Dark Room. Inviting Kenyans to explore expression, the work became a gay speech haven, radical in Kenya where homosexual activity is officially outlawed. Public buzz about Dark Room was sufficient to draw the attention of the Cultural Minister, who asked it be removed before the full project's end.

Green Architecture

Across town in a forested enclave is the UNEP compound. The New Office Building, an unimaginative official name given in 2011, was designed as a global showcase for progressive green architecture efforts. The three-story building showcases four

interior courtyards with thematic gardens reflecting the biodiversity of Africa. Walkable, with a low carbon footprint, and air-cooled with windows that open, the NOB is progressive and elegant, setting a high expectation for art amenities. On occasion, UNEP mounts contemporary art exhibitions there from diverse international constituents, making elegant, timeless, and edgy works available to the public.

The only public artwork on permanent display in the New Office Building when I visited, however, was Woman with a Parasol by Joseph "Bertiers" Mbatia. His oversized stereotype of a female figure is accompanied by a child and a duck. Her view of the ground is impaired by gravity-defying breasts, pregnant belly, and flouncing skirt. The artwork-sited unfortunately in a corner-is a three-dimensional cartoon of selfabsorbed fecundity. No one could tell me how this artist's work was selected, who paid for it, or who decided on the siting. Since then, it has been moved to a new location at the Housing pavilion and given context with plantings and silhouettes of others on the wall behind the sculpture.

Embedded Practice

Banana Hill Artists Cooperative (BHAC) is a community art program, residential colony, and art gallery under one umbrella. Founded in 1992 by artist Shine Tani, BHAC is an open compound in an industrial suburb north of Nairobi. ''Kenya has no fine art material manufacturers," says Tani. "Working together we get materials and provide opportunities to discuss contemporary culture." The City Cultural Commission formally named

BHAC a "self-help group," akin to a community redevelopment agency. Funded by public grants, donations, sales, and Tani's speaker fees, Banana Hill employs a community art model prized by western nonprofits. BHAC now has 45 artists sharing resources, practices, materials, and ideas.

The group has also changed its community, creating seating and meeting sites in a former auto turn-out. The public table and stools may seem improvisational, but community use is real. The only public amenity for a kilometer on either side of Main Street, its furnishings were artist-initiated, self-funded projects.

Jack Kaluva, a BHAC member, uses scrap metal, railroad ties, and tree roots in his extraordinary work. In October his paired cannons bracketed the compound's exterior as public art and related to his solo exhibition in the main space. Repurposing railroad ties put down by the British in 1899, Kaluva created a cabinet of historical curiosities. His railroad ties morphed into record players and electric guitars. Juxtaposing the oppressive and liberating sides of European heritage, Kaluva's insightful and playful vision is inspirational in the collective and his community.

So if you're a cultural tourist looking for outstanding permanent public art, skip Nairobi. But to see embedded public art practice, come to town. Funny, smart, edgy, and politically aware public art is rife in this cosmopolitan city.

HELEN LESSICK is a Los Angeles-based artist building permanent and temporary public artworks internationally. A civic arts activist, Helen curates, speaks on, and writes about art.

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ART MATTERSHERE.

We take creativity seriously in Austin, Texas. Since 1985, Art in Public Places has commissioned over 200 public artworks all over Austin with the goal of inspiring residents, fostering neighborhood identity, creating jobs for artists, and keeping our city unique. We invite you to take a seat at our table, splash in a fountain, or ride the "iron wave" and experience how seriously fun our creative city can be.

Clockwise from top left: Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt, Open Room Austin, Sand Beach Park, 2010; Deborah Mersky, High Water Mark, Cesar Chavez Streetscape, 2008; James Edward Talbot, Your Essential Magnificence, South Congress Avenue Street Improvement, 2011; Colin McIntyre, Arboreal Passage, Austin Nature & Science Center, 2012; Chris Levack, Iron Wave, Austin BMX Skate Park, 2011; Jerolyn Bahm-Colombik and Roger Colombik, La Fuente en Calle Segundo, Second Street District Streetscape, 2010.

Looking to the West Countercultural impulses in California

by AMELIA FOSTER

STATE OF MIND:

New California Art circa 1970

Constance M. Lewallen and Karen Moss

Berkeley: University of Calif., 2011 296 pages, $39.95 (hardcover)

ASCO: Elite of the Obscure C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez, eds.

Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011 432 pages, $60 (hardcover)

Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 was a six-month collaboration of more than 60 cultural institutions throughout southern California, including a 10-day Performance and Public Art Festival. Though PST officially closed March 31, the conversation about the history of art on America's West Coast has continued through several new books.

A good place to orient yourself within the era is State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, which gives a vivid overview of California artists' contributions to conceptual art. Pairing primary images from then-emerging experimental media (site-specific installations, film/video, etc.) with critical essays, this book makes for conceptual art's continued influence on contemporary art.

Similar in its scope, West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977 offers a comprehensive look at the fading boundaries between artistic practice, political activism, and collaborative lifestyles that characterized life west of the Rockies in the 1960s and 1970s.

WESTOFCENTER

ARTANDTHECOUNTERCULTURE

EXPmlMENTINAMERICA,1965-lDn

TOMAS SARACENO:

Cloud Cities / Air-Port-City

Juliane von Herz, ed.

Germany: Kerber Verlag, 2011

176 pages, $40 (hardcover)

Cloud Cities/ Air-Port-City was a temporary sculpture created for Frankfurt's Rogmarkt. Artists and administrators alike will appreciate this fascinating look at how it was commissioned.

NICOLAUS SCHMIDT:

Breakin' the City

Nicolaus Schimdt, photographer; Kathrin DiPaola, ed.

Germany: Kerber Verlag, 2011

160 pages, $44.95 (paperback)

More than l 00 color photographs

by Nicolaus Schmidt capture break dancers from all New York boroughs performing in city streets, parks, subways, etc.

WEST OF CENTER: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, eds. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn., 2012 390 pages, $39.95 (paperback)

BAY AREA GRAFFITI: '80s-'90s: Early Bombing

Sfaustina and Jocelyn Superstar

New York: Mark Batty, 2011 208 pages, $3 7.50 (hardcover)

One collective of that era has received particular attention: ASCO. Born of the turbulent sociopolitical context of the 1970s and 1980s, these Chicano artists were determined to distinguish themselves from the status quo. For 20 years the tight-knit group, formed in East Los Angeles, created groundbreaking performance, public art, and multimedia actions documented within ASCO: Elite of the Obscure: A Retrospective, 1972-1987.

While conditions grew more permissive for conceptual artists, California wasn't exactly hospitable to the nascent graffiti scene of more recent decades. Bay Area Graffiti '80s-'90s: Early Bombing includes interviews with artists alongside gritty film photographs from their illegal endeavors. The book captures the dangerous conditions "bombers" endured to pave the way for today's mainstream street art scene.

AMELIA FOSTER is the program and administrative associate of Forecast Public Art.

FACING THE WALL:

The Palestinian-Israeli Barriers

Avinoam Shalem & Gerhard Wolf

Germany: Walther Konig, 2011

160 pages, $49.95 (paperback)

Avinoam Shalem, Gerhard Wolf, and Dror Maayan have joined the ranks of graffiti artists working on the Israeli-Palestinian wall. This book contains photos of their work from 2006 to 2009.

0

Building Lessons

Explorations of architectural forms offer insights for public artists

by CHRIS DODGE

MODERATORS OF CHANGE: Architecture That Helps Andres Lepik, ed. Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011 256 pages, $55 (hardcover)

RECYCLING SPACES: Curating Urban Evolution Emily Waugh Novato, CA: ORO Editions, 2011 294 pages, $50 (hardcover)

Is it beautiful? How does it make people feel? What is its creator's social responsibility, if any? Makers of public art might do well to consider how contemporary architecture answers these questions. After all, as with public art, buildings and their landscapes affect more than people who live in or near them.

First there's the "cool!" or "how awful!" factor. Twentyfirst-century architects dealing with dense populations and constricted space frequently come up with traditional solutions, building upward. Allen and McQuade's massive Landform Building shows how architects, mostly men, envision buildings as geological forms. Roughly the first quarter of the book is devoted to mountainous structures-the old edifice complex of the pyramid planners.

A more daring approach is to build down, as in French architect Dominique Perrault's campus center at Ewha Women's University, Seoul. Another approach embraces curves rather than right angles. The planned Greenland National Gallery of Art is shaped like a melting tire. The effect in both instances seems somehow comforting, useful, and pleasing.

Large-scale architecture can wow us. Take the landscape

PROJECTS

THE PAINTED KING: Art, Activism, and Authenticity in Hawaii

Glenn Wharton

TH" PAINTED KING

Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii, 2011 216 pages, $19 (paperback)

When Wharton set out to restore a statue of Kamehameha I, he discovered a deep personal relationship between the community and this landmark. A must•read for the conscientious conservator.

~~._ • !:~f5it

ANDREA ZI 11 EL

LANDFORM BUILDING: Architecture's New Terrain Stan Allen & Marc McQuade, eds. Switzerland: Lars Muller, 2011 479 pages, $65 (hardcover)

ANDREA ZITTEL: Lay of My Land

Richard Julin

New York: Prestel, 2011 160 pages, $39.95 (hardcover)

outside Dublin's Grand Canal Theatre, shown in Recycling Spaces. Theaters are spectacular by nature, so luminescent red poles are appropriate here, not intrusive and garish. At worst, though, spectacular architecture evinces disgruntlement, even anger. Look at Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Public Library: visually stimulating but prankish and dysfunctional.

Moderators of Change highlights worldwide projects on a smaller scale, ones based on user input, local materials, sustainability, and beauty. These structures are comfortable, like bamboo school buildings in Bali and a library in Colombia with walls of stone-filled gabions (for natural air conditioning).

Artists might go a step further, downscaling to the max. Small is not always beautiful, but micro-scale architecture and public art may soon be the way of the day. Is artist Andrea Zittel a prophet as she designs portable structures in the California desert just big enough for two people to sleep in? To recognize how little shelter one needs, and how little art-how close to the bone one can live-can be terrifying and liberating at once.

CHRIS DODGE is a freelance editor and indexer in Montana.

WALLS & FRAMES:

Fine Art from the Streets Maximiliano Ruiz, ed. Berlin, Germany: Gestalten, 2011 272 pages, $60 (hardcover) What happens when street art moves indoors? Through essays and photographs, Ruiz explores the tactics of street artists working in galleries-and the influence these artists have on contemporary artists.

GLORIA: Allora & Calzadilla

Lisa Freiman

New York: Prestel, 2011 152 pages, $45 (hardcover)

Puerto Rican artists Allora and Calzadilla made an impressive showing at the U.S. Pavilion for the 2011 Venice Biennale. Among their materials: Six artworks made use of an overturned tank, an ATM-pipe organ hybrid, and Olympic athletes.

ROBERT INDIANA

SOL LEWITT:

Structures, 1965-2006

Nicholas Baume, ed.

New York: Public Art Fund, 2012

226 pages, $50 (hardcover)

A definitive career overview of this public art giant.

DUBUFFET AS ARCHITECT

Daniel Abadie

Paris: Editions Hazan, 201l

192 pages, $40 (hardcover)

Color photographs, drawings, and essays document the monumental architectural works by the father of art brut.

VHILS

Vhils; Introduction by Marc and Sara Schiller (Wooster Collective)

Berlin, Germany: Gestalten, 2011 160 pages, $60 (hardcover)

This emerging Portuguese artist makes ginormous-scaled street art by carving, drilling, and scratching images into city walls.

ROBERT IN DIANA:

New Perspectives

Allison Unruh, ed.

Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011

272 pages, $70 (hardcover)

A detailed exploration of Indiana's 50 years of pop art.

CLAES OLDENBURG

Nadja Rottner

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012 224 pages, $18.95 (paperback)

New perspective on Oldenburg's often overlooked multimedia performances, 1960 to l 965; part of the October Files Series.

MARCEL PINAS:

Artist, More Than Artist

Rob Perree, ed.

The Netherlands: Jap Sam, 2012 144 pages, $49.95 (hardcover) Community practice centered on the story of the Maroons and their threatened native region of Suriname.

CHRISTIAN RUSCHITZKA: Leitmotifs

Gerald Bast, Eva Blimlinger, Brigitte Felderer, Christian Ruschitzka Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011

192 pages, $55 (hardcover)

An introduction to the playful and intriguing Austrian sculptor, conceptual artist, and performance artist.

The City as Sculpture

Brad Downey's invitational art

by JOSEPH HART

Brad Downey

S Spontaneous culptures

SPONTANEOUS SCULPTURES

Brad Downey; Matthias Hubner and Simon Becker,eds. Berlin: Gestalten, 2011 159 pages, $40 (hardcover)

For his piece Tile Pry (Gentrification) (2008), artist Brad Downey used a hammer to remove a section of tile fac;:ade from a building in Amsterdam. Underneath: a swath of graffiti that city officials had attempted to hide. The piece is an apt metaphor for Downey's "spontaneous sculptures": They peel away our banal surface perceptions of the city to reveal its serendipitous beauty.

Downey, who is also a videographer and writer, creates spontaneous sculptural works using materials that happen to be on hand. Like other artists who use the urban landscape as a sculptural medium, Downey's tools include a keen sense of humor and a biting commentary on the bourgeoisie.

But the audacity of his works is what sets him apart. Some of his actions-an overturned street planter, a toppled telephone booth, a street surveillance camera torched with gasoline-are distinguished from hooliganism only by the artist's intentions and the documentary photographs that designate the acts as works of art.

Still, even these pieces are surprisingly cheerful. Other works-a sandcastle built in the space left from excavated paving stones; a telephone booth stuffed with balloons-are positively buoyant.

This uplifting spirit is perhaps attributable to Downey's underlying artistic philosophy, which is less a critique than an invitation. His artwork is successful when it "has given people a new way of seeing artistic potential in their surroundings," he says. "I like that someone could be standing somewhere in a city looking at a pile of stones and thinking: 'Maybe that's Brad Downey's work."'

JOSEPH HART is associate editor of Public Art Review.

The Judd Ant An Excerpt from Uncanny Valley

by LAWRENCE WESCHLER

So the other afternoon I happened to find myself walking the length of the late Donald Judd's enigmatically posed (if strangely imposing) processional of giant concrete dice, spread out a full (and precise) kilometer across an otherwise empty wildgrass expanse along the periphery of his marvelous Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. I say "dice," though of course the (exactly) sixty-four boxy concrete structures are not exactly mammoth dice: rather, at least dimensionally, think of a pair of dice cubes glued cheek-by-jowl one beside the next and then hollowed out, either lengthwise (five meters long by two and a half high and two and a half meters deep, exactly) or through the narrow core (two and a half meters by two and a half and five meters deep); some of them completely hollow so you can see clean through, others stoppered either at the front or tlrn back (like packing crates, alternately wide or deep, lying on their side); the whole lot of them gathered into (at first) seemingly random clusters, three long see-through boxes in a starlike splay here, and then three wide stoppered boxes one behind the next, and then ... groups of three or five or six spread one beyond the next (till you have traversed precisely fifteen such groupings) as you tramp the kilometer's length of the wide wildgrass field.

Open, closed; wide, narrow; three, six, five; radial, side by side, one behind the other: the didactic character of the experience ("Hmm, that's true, you can try it that way, and then this other, and if you add one more you can do it this way, and now hollow them out the other way, and now stopper the hollows") gradually giving way to an experience more lyrical, or perhaps poetical (certain effects seeming to repeat themselves like deep tidal refrains, just beyond the reach of conscious apperception) before the whole mad enterprise begins to throb as deeply existential (the sheer absurdity of the effort involved in lugging these huge concrete slabs out onto this godforsaken field, the defiant assertion of value involved, the primordial insistence on a brute human trace across this otherwise barren high desert expanse).

Not bad, not bad, I found myself thrumming as I now doubled back, returning the length of the rutted patl1, reprising the fifteen groupings in reverse, ambling toward the Foundation's headquarters compound way up ahead, humming along

THEORY/CRITICISM

(didactical poetical existential), my gaze now drifting absentmindedly to the ground before me (churned tire-ruts and dried mud puddles and tufts of dried grass), when-I swear to God-I happened to notice a little ant dragging an improbably long stalk of dried blond wildgrass. And I mean a stalk a good five or six times its own body length. Pulling and pulling on the damn thing, and now laying it down and traipsing back along its length so as to be able instead to push it forward, much of the time (swear to God) tilting the stalk a good 45 degrees into the air, laying it down again, nudging it leftward, going around to the other side, nudging it right, returning to the back to lift it skyward and to shove it forward once again. And so on. And on. Relentlessly.

By this time I was completely absorbed. Minutes passedthe ant, the straw, their rutted course-till finally the ant dragged the thing under and presently around a tuft of wild grass, lay the straw down, pulled back momentarily (seemingly) to appraise the situation, and now began nudging it ever so slightly this way and that, lining it up perfectly (as I now suddenly perceived, astounded) with another length of dry straw which in turn perfectly abutted another length still, the three lengths of identical blond straw now perfectly aligning-nudge, push, nudge, nudge, pull-into one long length. Whereupon, apparently satisfied, the accomplished ant simply wandered off into the gathering evening light.

As, at length, did I, wondering, Had Judd first got it from the ant, or the ant from the Judd, or was it that Judd conditioned me even to be able to notice the ant, or was the ant simply God (or, at very least, God's high priest), or what?

Excerpted from Uncanny Valley: Adventuresin Narrative (Counterpoint, 2011) by Lawrence Weschler, a former staff writer for The New Yorkerand author of several other books including Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder.

THE NATURE OF PLACE:

A Search for Authenticity

Avi Friedman

New York: Princeton Press, 2011 192 pages, $19.95 (paperback)

Avi Friedman's quest to identify what successful environments have in common has taken him across the world. Here he gives a unique, travel-based perspective on urban public spaces.

SUBVERSIVE PRACTICES:

Art Under Conditions of Political Repression

Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, eds. Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011 584 pages, $60 (hardcover)

The knotty essays in this book open the door to inspirational practices of artists under repressive regimes, where making art can result in doing time-or worse.

THEONEANDTHEMAN~

Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context

Grant H. Kester

Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2011 320 pages, $24.95 (paperback)

Kester explores how both wellknown artists and newcomers are navigating the territory of NG Os, activism, and urban planning to make art without borders.

INSULAR INSIGHT: Where Art and Architecture Conspire with Nature

Lars Muller and Akiko Miki, eds. Switzerland: Lars Muller, 2011 464 pages, $70 (hardcover)

The islands of Japan's Seto Inland Sea boast numerous museums and site-specific public projects, and this hefty volume gives readers a photo-filled introduction to the works.

PAD PUBLICART DIALOGUE

Public Art Dialogue, a scholarly journal, welcomes new and experimental modes of inquiry and production on the practice of public art defined broadly to include: memorials, object art, murals, urban and landscape design projects, social interventions, performance art, and web-based work.

We welcome submissions from art historians, critics, artists, architects, landscape architects, curators, administrators, and other public art scholars and professionals, including those who are emerging as well as already established.

The journal is published twice a year in print and electronic formats, and is affiliated with the professional society of the same name. Most issues are theme-based, and each features both peer-reviewed articles and artists' projects.

Find out how to subscribe at: www.tandfonline.com/rpad or recommend Public Art Dialogue to your librarian today!

Art Takes Flight

Top photo by Yan Yan Mao - Courtesy of Janet Echelman Studio

All other photos by Bruce Damonte Photography

For 15 minutes one afternoon last October, artist Kyungwoo Chun gave literal meaning to the phrase "lean on me."

The performance installation, titled VERSUS, featured 50 volunteers sitting face-to-face across from someone they didn't know on two benches shaped like half moons in Times Square in New York City.

Last fall, artist john Salvest made a powerful artistic and political statement at the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City, Missouri. He created the temporary sculpture IOU/USA out ofl0S multicolored steel shipping containers, stacked 7 high and 15 across. A series of white and light-colored containers, placed in between the darker boxes, spelled "IOU" on one side and "USA" on the other. Conceived in 2010, this monumental installation appeared on the Kansas City skyline right next to the Federal Reserve at a moment of blistering political discourse and unprecedented reliance on foreign monies to pay U.S. bills.

Strong reaction to the piece, which was installed from September 2 to October 16, 2011, came from both ends of the political spectrum. The city, not the Federal Reserve, owns the parkland on which the sculpture

Each volunteer then leaned in toward the person opposite them and rested their head on the stranger's shoulder for 15 minutes. No talking was allowed.

The original inspiration for the project came when Chun was contemplating the Chinese character for "human being," which looks somewhat like an upside down Y-a

was installed, but the Fed tried to fight the installation. When it ultimately lost the fight, the sculpture was privately funded and installed with city permission.

By using shipping containers, which are rife with symbolism about American consumerism, reliance on foreign industries and economies, and the environmental ravages of our disposable culture, Salvest made the medium the message. And his finished temporary installation made a lasting impact on its viewers. "Activists of most any persuasion could read the work as a rallying cry for their own ideals," says Stacy Switzer, artistic director and project curator for Grand Arts, a nonprofit art project space in Kansas City. "This multivalence is what makes /OU/USA so potent as a work of art in the public sphere." Photos by E.G. Schempf, courtesy Grand Arts.

shape that might also conjure the image of a standing person. That led to ruminations on how humans need to lean on each other to remain strong and the inevitable existential act of dependence on others. The piece also explores comfort and discomfort and how at ease (or not) we feel relying on others.

Photo courtesyGaain Gallery,www.gaainart.com.

U.S.RECENTPROJECTS

This past fall, the Sacramento International Airport unveiled a $1.3 billion addition. The new construction features 14 major artworks by highly regarded artists; in total, these works cost $6 million, making the collection Sacramento's single largest investment in public art.

One of the dominant pieces in the collection, THE BAGGAGE HANDLERS (above) by Christian Moeller, is a portrait of six of the airport's operations workers, rendered in wood and hung as a relief sculpture. Moeller worked from photos to create the two looming wood panels, each 75 feet by 12 feet, fixed side-by-side in the ticketing hall.

Glass artist Mildred Howard created THIS HOUSE WILL NOT PASS FOR ANY COLOR BUT ITS OWN for the area just beyond the security screening area. The work is a structure about the size of a bus shelter created out of red posts and handblown sheets of purple glass. It is a place

of rest for harried travelers-a home away from home-and a thought-provoking reflection on the nature of home. The purple glass scatters refracted light throughout the sun-filled concourse during the day.

All the works in the collection are large in scale. A 56-foot-long, 19-foot-tall red rabbit by Lawrence Argent called LEAP (right) hangs above the escalators that lead to baggage claim. Artist Donald Lipski's "grand chandelier," which is titled ACORN STEAM, is made of three massive valley oak tree trunks that branch out into a delicate canopy approximately 30 feet in diameter. Each branch is hung with Swarovski crystals that catch and reflect the sun during the day and the artificial light at night.

Other artists in the collection include Ned Kahn, Camille Utterback, Gregory Kondos, Joan Moment, Suzanne Adan, Lynn Criswell, and more. Photos by Corgan Associates(above) andJeremy Sykes (right).

URBANOLOGY is an online, interactive public art game that allows anyone with Internet access to plan their ideal urban environment. The project launched online in mid-October last year as a companion to the large-scale, interactive installation at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York's East Village. More than 13,500 people

experienced the interactive game during the installation and now people worldwide have the chance to participate through the Internet and as the Lab travels to different cities. (The BMW Guggenheim Lab is a mobile lab that travels around the world to inspire innovative ideas about urban life.)

Urbanology allows participants to answer questions about urban issues such as education, housing, health care, infrastructure, and mobility. By answering these questions, participants role-play scenarios for city transformation as the game uses their answers to create a picture of their ideal urban environment. The game then compares a participant's ideal city with other cities around the world.

Questions include:

A huge piece of graffiti is attracting tourists. Will you enforce existing city policy and have the graffiti removed? Many apartments are empty, but there is a shortage of affordable housing. Will you allow the city to forcibly purchase apartments and make them affordable?

Will you authorize a law that forbids the purchase of school textbooks made of less than 50 percent recycled materials, even though it will raise their cost?

Will you install streetlights that are 20 percent dimmer than the existing lights to save money and electricity?

Players can also suggest questions for future Urbanology sessions, provoking a global exchange of ideas among the players and giving them the ability to actively lead the discussion at the Lab.

The game experience for Urbanology was developed by Local Projects, and the physical design was created by Zones Urbaines Sensibles (ZUS). Photos by Roger Kisby (left) and David Heald (right), © 2011 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

New Orleans is getting its first interactive sculpture that also functions as a living space.

Both a house and a musical instrument, DITHYRAMBALINA is the in-progress creation of the artist Caledonia Dance Curry, who also goes professionally by the name Swoon. She is developing the project with New Orleans Airlift, an artist exchange that "exports" New Orleans artists and "imports" visiting artists like Brooklyn-based Swoon. Swoon is perhaps best known for her fantastical Swimming Citiesof Switchback Sea, a series of seven interactive floating sculptures that sailed down the Hudson River in the fall of 2008. Dithyrambalina, however, is her first fantastical living space. It is being developed on an empty lot in New Orleans.

"New Orleans has had a lot of hardship

and we want to make something that is really celebratory," says Swoon. "I've wanted to create something that had this joyously exuberant, outward-facing, to-the-neighborhood attitude." When complete, the structure will feature singing walls, percussive floorboards and surprise sound elements around every corner. Visitors will be able to push a button or pull a lever and "play" the house. She is collaborating with mechanical artists and musicians from around the country to create the sound installations. Last fall, Swoon and her collaborators hosted a temporary installation called The Music Box, A Shantytown Sound Laboratory.This preinstallation installation tested the interactive instruments in a series of live performances and public openings. Photoby TodSeelie.

To celebrate the history of immigration on the Lower East Side of New York City, a fourartist team created MALL-TERATIONS, a temporary art installation on the Allen Street pedestrian mall between Houston and Delancey Streets. Allen Street is also known as the "Avenue of the Immigrants." The installation was part of an ongoing effort to revitalize the neighborhood.

Artists Carolina Cisneros, Marcelo Ertorteguy, Mateo Pinto, and Sara Valente created five different "compass benches" made of old wooden construction barriers and car wheels. The team used the

construction barriers as benches, fixing one end of the bench to a pivot on the ground and attaching the other end to the car wheel. Pedestrians crossing the mall could sit on the benches and pivot around in a circle to get a 365-degree view of their surroundings. Underneath and around the rotating benches, the artists painted maps, charts, timelines, and dates and places highlighting the neighborhood's cultural diversity and the vibrant history of Allen Street. The pieces were installed from October 2010 through the summer of 2011.

Photosby Sara Valente.

The Martha Anne Dow Center for Health Professions on the Klamath Falls campus of the Oregon Institute of Technology has a new series of 44 leaded-glass panel installations by the artist Ralph Helmick. The panels, titled HEART AND MIND and installed last April, hang from the ceiling of the Dow Center's main entranceway. Hung at various heights and angles, they present overlapping forms that change as a viewer moves around and through the entryway. Each panel of vibrantly colored glass framed in silver-painted steel depicts an image that relates to the I nstitute's scientific, cultural, and educational mission.

The panels' individual beauty aside, there is a larger dynamic at play-a 3D anamorphosis, or a drawing (or series of drawings) that reveals its natural form only from certain angles. When viewed from specific vantage points, the panels unite to form larger images: an anatomical human heart or a cross section of the human brain. These larger images come together as one approaches specific viewing "sweet spots"; they separate again into individual panels as one walks past.

The Dow Center for Health Professions houses Oregon programs in medical imaging, preclinical laboratory science, nuclear medicine technology, radiologic science, and respiratory care, among others. For the installation, completed in 2011, Helmick collaborated with stainedglass artist Abby Gitlitz, the Portlandbased architecture firm SRG Partnership, and Nabil Taha of Precision Structural Engineering. The work was commissioned by the Oregon Arts Commission.

Photosby Clements/Howcroft.

U.S.RECENTPROJECTS

Ann Arbor, Michigan, has a new permanent artwork that celebrates the local watershed.

The work consists of a tall, carved metal structure that sits atop a sculpted concrete ramp. Storm water collected from the roof of city hall is directed through the sculpture, pouring down past blue LED lights. When the water hits the concrete ramp, it is directed into a winding path that flows to an underground cistern. (A metal walkway spans the winding path.) The water in the cistern is then redirected either back into the flowing sculpture or out into a rain garden planted in the municipal plaza.

Artist Herbert Dreiseitl hopes this UNTITLED work will "celebrate and express what water does in this particular region." The piece, he hopes, will also be an inspiring symbol that connects this generation to future generations. "Rain is like a gift from the heavens that is all about the future and renewing the earth. Rain drops like pearls and penetrates the surface, glides down, collects, and then flows down the stream. The sculpture tells that whole story," Dreiseitl said at the dedication ceremony. The project, completed in 2011, cost $750,000 and was commissioned by the Ann Arbor Public Art Commission.

Photo by Aaron Seagraves.

Thanks to sculptor Donald Gerola, Pawtucket, Rhode Island, sports the nation'sand perhaps the world's-first woven river.

Pawtucket is home to Slater Mill, one of America's first successful textile mills and birthplace of America's industrial revolution. WEAVING THE BLACKSTONE AT SLATER RIDGE celebrated that history by using 30,000 feet of polyester, nylon, and polypropylene cords manufactured locally to create geometric weavings that spanned the Pawtucket River. The cables were suspended anywhere from 3 to 36 feet above the surface of the water. To support the cables at three spots along the riverbanks, Gerola

giant

(a

is the part of the loom through which thread passes).

The piece symbolically connected the water, which was used as a power source for the old mill, with the "fabric" it helped create.

In recent years, Pawtucket has been working to transform itself from an industrial town into an arts community. It offers special tax exemptions for artists and has redeveloped many of its old mills into artist studios. The Weaving the Blackstone project was funded by the local arts festival and a local printing company and installed in late December 2011 through January 2012.

by Keith Fayan.

A multifaceted new art installation graces the path in front of the South Mountain Community Library in Phoenix, Arizona. Focused on integrating bold visual elements and words, PASSAGE consists of four "poetry trellises" and three "acoustic chairs." These works use sound and sunlight to create poetry audio files and project fragments of written poetry onto the path, engaging library users and passersby in a three-dimensional experience of words.

With the help of local poet Alberto Rios, visual artists Mags Harries and Lajos Heder selected poetry fragments focused on elements of the South Mountain landscape. The trellises, for example, have naturethemed lines of poetry welded into their canopies and set above glass; when sunlight hits the canopy, it projects the shadow of the poem fragment onto the path below. Visitors can walk over and around the words as the words themselves shift with the location of the sun. One of the projected passages reads: "Shade-small fragment of night, cool / Dream's breath on the back of your neck." Another reads: "When first raindrops hit dry mesquite pods,/ Ancient songs fill the desert."

The acoustic chairs sit near the library entrance. The concrete chairs and the pavement surrounding them are embedded with jumbled steel letters and each chair plays a sound recording of a poem. Visitors can sit in the chairs and listen to a poem being read. The chairs play 19 poems in all.

The project was funded by the Maricopa County Community College District and the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture. The total cost for the project was $155,000. Photos courtesy Harries/Heder Collaborative.

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In a new installation at the MetroRail hub station at the Stephen Clark Government Center Lobby in Miami, Florida, visitors help create the art.

REFLECTION is an interactive light installation by the American artist Ivan Toth Depena. The piece uses infrared cameras to absorb the movement of current visitors. Then the installation is engineered to abstract the movement it records and project it back to the observer in real time.

The images appear as bursts of bright, abstracted color on a series of six large LED light boxes spread across the lobby. The software running the program also records past movement so that it can create

The new Brightwater Wastewater Facility, located 10 miles north of Seattle in Woodinville, Washington, looks and smells more like a nature preserve and sculpture park than a sewage treatment facility. Thanks to new technology in water treatment-and a philosophy of being a good neighbor-Brightwater is an aesthetic and aromatic pleasure.

dynamic light displays even when there are no visitors in the lobby. Similarly, several recording columns were placed in a nearby public plaza, recording the outdoor activity and blurring the boundary between transit hall and park. The displayed images also change based on time of day and current number of visitors.

This joyful installation is both a mirror and a memory. It encourages MetroRail commuters to contemplate time and memory and space, all while it brings a smile to their faces. It was commissioned by the Miami-Dade Art in Public Places initiative and installed this past November. Photo by Ivan Toth Depena.

Two of the 12 art pieces at the facility are BIO BOULEVARDand WATER MOLECULE by artist Buster Simpson. Completed in 2011, Bio Boulevard is a long purple pipe made of cast concrete that runs along the entrance to the facility. Water Molecule, also made of cast concrete, is located nearby, creating a tableau that suggests a connection between the water molecule and the transportation of water. But the works don't just serve an aesthetic purpose. Reclaimed water runs through the large purple pipe and empties near the entrance, creating a visually interesting water feature as well as a source of water for a reconstructed wetland at the facility.

These two works of art, like all the art at the facility, visually allude to the mechanical workings of the facility. Since the process of water reclamation is a mostly hidden one, this visual allusion becomes part of Brightwater's educational mission, notes Annie Kolb-Nelson, the media spokesperson for King County's Wastewater Treatment Division, which owns the facility. The largescale nature of the work is also reminiscent of the Herculean public works projects of the past. Photo by Buster Simpson.

A historic Minnesota bridge became a temporary loom in the early spring of 2011, thanks to artist Randy Walker.

The 136-year-old bridge was part of County Road l 02 in Le Sueur County and now spans Shanaska Creek. Its wrought-iron and pin construction makes it a rare design and it is on the National Register of Historic Places.

For PASSAGE,Walker took four large spools of colored acrylic thread-totaling 4,800 feet-and wove the material across and around the truss bridge. The thread was designed to withstand sunlight and remained in place for approximately half a year. Part of Walker's intent with the piece was the opportunity for viewers to witness its changing aesthetic through the shifting seasons.

Primarily, however, Walker hopes the installation will give this now decaying bridge a new chapter in its history and encourage people to celebrate its forgotten past. When the work was removed, the fibers were given to the St. Peter Weavers in St. Peter, Minnesota, where it is being woven into a vibrant textile artwork. The project was funded by the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Le Sueur County Commissioners. Photos courtesy the artist.

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As the Northern Ireland city of Derry-Londonderry readies itself to become the first-ever UK "City of Culture" (a designation that highlights its reputation as a cultural hub) in 2013, it has commissioned artists Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier, in collaboration with ARD Ciaran Mackel Architects, to create a public art piece called MUTE MEADOW. When completed, the work will consist of 40 pairs of angled steel columns, each

one ranging in height from 6 to 10 meters. The field of columns will then be lit at the base to invoke the image of an illuminated forest. Meanwhile, the residents of DerryLondonderry have been invited to record the sounds of the city-including poetry recitals, traffic noise, music, and conversationwhich will be captured and transformed into light waves. These waves will then be used to gently animate and color the light emitted from the base of the installation.

Brazilians got a chance to voice their opinions directly to U.S. president Barack Obama and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez this past fall in Porto Alegre, Brazil, when the world leaders gave visitors free paddleboat rides across the lake in the city's central park. Actually, the presidents were played by actors (who look incredibly similar to the presidents), but the rest was real: Every Sunday between September 11 and October 8 last year, the "presidents" gave visitors rides in a paddle-style boat shaped like a giant swan. Visitors were able to voice their opinions to and about the world leaders during the ride, and then in the afternoon the presidents gave speeches based directly on the opinions they'd gathered.

The work will stretch across the waterfront of the River Foyle and be accessible via the newly constructed Peace Bridge, which links the city center with Ebrington, a former British military site. This is the largest public artwork ever to be commissioned in Ireland and will cost an estimated 800,000 pounds. The commissioners hope it will serve as a symbol of the city's transformation from a place of conflict to a place of culture.

Photo by Brian Morrison Photography Ltd.

THE SPEECH OF THE SWANS, part of the Mercosul Biennial, was the work of U.S.-based artists Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski, who also collaborated on The Waffle Shop and Conflict Kitchen in Pittsburgh (see page 46). In writing about the piece, Rubin noted that "both inside and outside their countries, Chavez and Obama ... function as uncanny screens onto which all sides of the political spectrum project their fears and ideals." So by having them speak the third-person public percep-tions about themselves in the first person, Rubin highlighted the diverse perceptions people have of these powerful men and how they embody so many different things for different people. Photo byJon Rubin.

Covering two passenger trains operating between Brisbane and Cairns (a distance of nearly 1,056 miles), TILT TRAIN PUBLIC ART PROJECT is the longest piece of public art in Australia-and a major accomplishment for indigenous art and artists in Australia.

Over 30 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island artists, including Judy Watson and Alick Tipoti, came together in this joint initiative between Queensland Rail and art+place, Queensland's public art fund, to paint traditional indigenous images for the exterior sides of the trains. After the artwork was created, it was photographed and reproduced by a graphic designer, then transferred to a vinyl wrap that was applied to the trains. Both trains were launched in 2011.

The project was part of the Queensland Government Reconciliation Action Plan. In 2008 the Australian government apologized to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for the unjust policies of earlier governments, and especially for the removal of children from their families. The Tilt Train project represents both a continuing acknowledgment of that regret and an uncovering-and celebrating-of the buried histories of Australia's indigenous people. Photo by Ray Cash.

Graffiti artist Bruno Dias is bringing the traditional images of the Brazilian countryside to the streets of Sao Paolo with his GRAFFITI WORKS. With each piece of rustic street art he creates, he's building a bit of a northern Brazilian village in the heart of the city.

To evoke the feeling of the northern Brazilian countryside, Dias uses the bright colors and floral print motifs found in the art, woodcuts, and clothing of that area. He primarily draws figures and subjects associated with the country-such as animals, fruit, and traditional images from mythological scenes-in his playful, tropical style. Dias is not alone in finding inspiration in traditional Brazilian images; in recent years, the Brazilian street art scene has become

On a cold, dark night last January, the anonymous artists group Luzinterruptus created a six-hour installation of arresting beauty in Madrid's public water fountains.

The installation, AGUA QUE HAS DE BEBER, used strings of illuminated mason jars as a sculptural representation of water, the city's staid (but unused) water fountains as the water "source," and the night sky

known for its use of Brazil's own history and culture.

The northern Brazilian countryside is a relatively impoverished area, and that aspect of the culture also infuses Dias's art. He approaches his creations in a very improvisational way, which he likens to the way people in the countryside must "improvise every day to survive-more so than those who grow up in comfortable surroundings."

Dias hopes that by creating a "village" in the city, he will spark urbanites to think about the challenges facing the country. He also hopes to prompt all viewers to reflect on the ideas of national identity and culture, and the urban and rural environments all around us. Photo by Bruno Dias.

as backdrop. The completed works had a striking beauty, but aesthetics was not the artists' only goal. They wanted to highlight the blighted state of public drinking fountains in Spain's capital city.

"In Madrid, in less than 30 years, more than 50 percent of the public fountains in service have been lost," the artists stated. The fountains have been dismantled, broken, had taps removed, or simply run dry, leaving a bustling urban city without an important public service.

"We wanted to say that water is necessary for life," writes Luzinterruptus on their website. "And that the fountains that are used for drinking and refreshing ourselves seem much more necessary and beautiful to us than those which are merely ornamental."

Luzinterruptus has been staging unsanctioned, temporary light installations/ interventions in Madrid since 2008.

Photos by Custa~o Sanabria.

INTERNATIONALRECENTPROJECTS

As part of the Heartlands project in Cornwall, England, which will transform 19 acres of former tin mining land into a unique cultural and mixed-use community space, British artist Walter Jack has created a retaining wall that appears to defy the laws of physics. The wall, made of solid concrete, appears soft, almost liquid, like a crumpled shower curtain suspended from an invisible rod.

Running 40 meters long and up to four meters high, CRUSHED WALL is both a functioning retaining wall and a symbol of geology and process, says Jack. Since part of the mission of Heartlands is to recognize the land's tin mining history, Jack felt that a functional retaining wall was a serendipitous geological choice. On top of that, the wall he created gives the appearance of having been crumpled and disturbed, much like

the land was disturbed when it was being actively mined.

Jack also wanted the completed project to embody a sense of how it was made. "We wanted our concrete to tell its own story," said Jack, "to retain the liquidness of its process." Indeed, Jack's finished piece has an almost kinetic visual quality that turns what could have been a simple wall into a voluptuous work of art. Photos by Simon Burt.

Thanks to the new ultra short film festival, ART BY CHANCE, you no longer need to go to a theater to see cutting-edge contemporary films. You simply need to pass by one of the 20,000 public screens in over 200 cities in 20 countries that show these juried short films.

Based on an annual theme-in 2011 the theme was "Change"-the videos are submitted by artists from all across the world. A final group of around 20 shorts is then selected from the entries and shown on screens at airports, public plazas, metro stations, restaurants and bars, campuses,

and shopping malls around the globe throughout the late winter and spring. Inspired by a moment of contemplation in an Istanbul metro station and organized by An beam, a group that creates digital content, the installation aims to balance the onslaught of commercial advertising in public spaces with art that inspires the public to reflect and create rather than buy, buy, buy. Public spaces should house "something more interesting, entertaining and inspiring for the public," said Hatice Caglar, festival director and co-founder. "We want

to create opportunities to color everyday life and inspire people to create art."

The 2011 festival ran through June 13 with films airing simultaneously in Austria, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, El Salvador, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Spain, The Netherlands, Turkey, the UK, and the United States. The theme of the 2012 festival is "Home" and this year's juried selections will begin airing on screens worldwide in October. Photos courtesy Art by Chance.

AEROSOUL

ALBERT ZENO

AMAR TATE

AMITRAY

ANDY BELLOMO

ASTRID FULLER

AUGUSTINA DROZE

BARRY BRUNER

BEATRIZ SANTIAGO MUNOZ

BERNARD WILLIAMS BETHSHADUR

BETH WILSON

BRENDA VEGA

BRIAN MORRIS

C. SIDDHA SILA

CALVIN JONES

CARAKUBALL

CARLOS BARRERA

CARLOS CORTEZ

CARYLYASKO

CASPER

CATHERINE CAJANDIG

CELIARADEK

CHRIS TAVARES-SILVA

CORINNE PETERSON

CYNTHIA WEISS

DAL TON BROWN

DAMON LAMAR REED

DANIEL MANRIQUE

DAVE WOODELL

DERRICK HOLLEY

DON PELLETT

DORIAN SYLVAIN

DZINE

ESTHER CHARBIT

EUGENE EDA

GAMALIEi RAMIREZ

GEORGE LEE

GERRY LANG

GINNY SYKES

GREG PENRICE

HECTOR DUARTE

HENRI MARQUET

IVAN WATKINS

J. YAMASHITA

JARAMILLO

JASONDUNDA

JEFF MALDONADO

JEFF ZIMMERMANN

JENNIFER GUTOWSKI

JESUS RODRIGUEZ

JIM BRENNER

JIM YANGISAWA

JOEMATUNIS

JOHANNA POETHIG

JOHN HIMMELFARB

JOHN PITMAN WEBER

JOHN ROBINSON

JOHN UNGER

JOHN YANCEY

JON POUNDS

JOSE BERRIOS

JOSE GONZALEZ

JOSE GUERRERO

JOSH SARANTITIS

JUAN ANGEL CHAVEZ

JUAN CARLOS PEREZ

JULIA SOWLES-BARLOW

JUSTINE DEVAN

K.JUDGE

KAREN AMI

KATHLEEN FARRELL

KATHY BLACKLOCK

KATHY KOZAN

KIELA SMITH-UPTON

KRISTAL PACHECO

LA FORCE ALPHABETIK

LUCYNA RADYCKI

LYNN TAKATA

MARCUS AKILANA

Chicago Public Art Group

MARGARET BURROUGHS

MARIA GASPAR

MARIA VILLAREAL

MARK ELDER

MARTIN SOTO

MARVA JOLLY

MAX SANSING

MICHAEL CLOUD

MIRIAM SOCOLOFF

MIRTES ZWIERZYNSKI

MITCHELL CATON

MONTSERRAT ALSINA

MOSES BALL

NINA SMOOT-CAIN

NIOTI ZAMBEZI

OLIVIA GUDE

ORISEGUN BENNETT-OLOMIDUN

OSCAR MARTINEZ

OSCAR MOYA

OSCAR ROMERO

PATRICIA SOTARELLO

PAUL THOMAS MINNIHAN

PHIL SCHUSTER

RAHMAAN BARNES

RAY PATLAN aoo+PROJECTS

RENE MAJEUNE

RENE TOWNSEND

RIDDLE

ROB MORIARTY

ROBERTO VALDEZ

ROLF MUELLER

ROMAN VILLAREAL

SALIM HURTADO

SANDRA ANTONGIORGI

SANTI IROWUTHAKAL

SOLO

SONATA KAZIMIERAITIENE

STEPHANIE GEORGE

STEVE STAHL

SUN YUN

TERRI EVANS

TIM PORTLOCK

TODD OSBORNE

TRACY VANDUINEN

TURBADO MARABOU

TURTELONLI

VANITA GREEN

VERONICA WERCKMEISTER

VINCENTE MENDOZA

WILL NICHOLSON

WILLIAM WALKER •

YOLANDA GALVAN

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