This three-dimensional colorful drawing that is a joyous tangle in the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York City, captures the energy and delight I have been feeling since the trees began to blossom here and the tulips and daffodils are popping open. The sculptor named it “To You, Little Bigger than a Sweet Summer […]
City from Below
One reason I don’t blog more here is because I keep up two other blogs, one for I-Powered, a group of students, staff and faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and another for the Race, Space and Law Reading Group at UIUC. This report on our most recent meeting has so many great […]
Transmission
The Guggenheim currently has an exhibit called The Third Mind which features American Artists who contemplated Asia, from 1860 to 1989, with a special commission of a work by Ann Hamilton that circles the rotunda, spiraling down from the top of the spiral to the floor. The Guggenheim website has a short interview with Ann […]
Long Live Activist Art!
Holland Cotter, an art critic at The New York Times, recently wrote an article called “The Boom is Over. Long Live Art!” I read the article with interest and several of us on the activist art education listserv exchanged reactions. I felt a little silly coming to Cotter’s defense because he hardly needs my defense […]
Technology as Spatial Lens
In early February I went to hear Paul Dourish when he was visiting the University of Illinois. He’s a professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and in Anthropology. In addition to the Informatics program, he also teaches in the interdisciplinary graduate program in Arts, Computation, and […]
Actions
Another inspiring link from Sarah Ross: Actions, a show at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). The exhibit includes suits that transform into swings, mobile pool tables, urban farms, dumpster diving, and Sarah’s own velour suits for urban lounging. The table wedged between freeway columns activates the space in a way that creates intimacy. CCA […]
Imagining America, 2008
A friend recently asked me what two things I learned from attending the annual conference of Imagining America in early October 2008. In general, I will say that 1) it matters to see people in their home milieu, and 2) it demystified public engagement work for me. The conference was quite small, and mostly West […]
The Hole
A couple of friends, Damian Duffy and John Jennings, just published a new book, The Hole. Straight from the website of Front 40 Press: “The Hole: Consumer Culture is a science fiction horror story about the buying and selling of race in America, the simultaneous worship and degradation of African Americans in popular culture, and […]
Gaullimaufry
I learned this cool word–gallimaufry–from a recent interview with Germaine Greer. She said it meant “a thing of threads and patches” and my dictionary says, “hodge podge.” In any case, it is an apt word for the meanderings I post here and my daily life, for that matter. The artist Sarah Ross had an exhibit […]
Aesthetics and Protest
The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest #6 is out! There are some very fine pieces in it too. Thanks to Robby Herbst, I was able to look it over. Amy Franceschini is interviewed by Christina Ulke on the San Francisco Victory Gardens+2007. Urban agriculture is on the rise, coast to coast. Amy F’s folks were […]
