On a brick wall by the New Museum on the Bowery. It says “Bring Me Back,” in case you can’t read it. The Silence=Death Project was able to display their activist graphics in the window of the (old) New Museum courtesy of curator Bill Olander. Associated with ACT Up, the graphic has appeared on T-shirts, […]
Martin Puryear at MOMA
In mid-January, we made it to New York City just in time to see the Martin Puryear retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The curators really used the new museum spaces well I thought, with this ladder for Booker T. practically disappearing up into the atrium. Then one could look down on it and […]
From Site to Vision
Not too long ago the women who have been working long and hard on a history of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building put it on the Web. What a gift to all of us to have this e-book! Lucy Lippard wrote the Foreward, Terry Wolverton, one of the editors, wrote the Introduction. Then there are […]
Tumblelog
According to the New York Times (December 23, 2007), “tumblelog” is “a website or blog that is collection of brief links to, quotes from, or comments about things a person has encountered while web browsing. It is a sort of digital commonplace book.” Actually I thought that was what most blogs were–almost an annotated my […]
Malian Wanderings
Two friends just returned from Mali and another artist-acquaintance, Janet Goldner, just left for Mali. Since the last post was rather gloomy, I will move into the solstice with thoughts of Janet sharing art with Malians again. I first met Janet in 1990 in New York City at the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA). I […]
The Inspired Disturbance of All Status Quos
One issue that came up several times during the Political Equator 2 tour was the tiresome question, “Why is this art?” I think Roberta Smith nailed a definition of art in her November 16, 2007, review of Lawrence Weiner ‘s show at the Whitney (“The Well-Shaped Phrase as Art,” New York Times , p. B33): […]
The Political Equator 2
Champaign, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, and then back again. I was really tired when I got home. The idea of this event was truly fascinating: “an exploration of the intersection between sociopolitical and natural domains, foregrounding the notion of collective territory, but also a territory of collaboration that transgresses hemispheric boundaries. At the […]
Teddy, Tacos and Talk
One man after another, talking and talking. The tacos were fantastic and Teddy Cruz must be thirty times more tired than I am. What energy and passion that man puts out, bilingually and all over the map. At the start of our journey from LA, Teddy noted our tendency to “hide beneath weird complexity.” It […]
Political Equator 2
The Tijuana-based artist ERRE (aka Marcos Ramirez) created this “Toy an Horse” in 1997. Its two heads faced north and south, with one set of wheeled legs in the US and the other set in Mexico. Ten years later, this border intervention seems no less apt.
Publico transitorio
The website for the eight-day moving public event between Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana–Political Equator 2— is now online. It looks terrific and represents, in a phenomenal way, the collaborative possibilities of artists, scholars, and designers coming together around issues of common concern.
