MixedMedia

As a mixed media artist, I’m always on the lookout for intriguing, clever, playful, whimsical ways of using ordinary materials to bring delight to the urban experience. A few recollections came to mind recently – principally as a result of a cool project I learned about during the annual MIT IDEAS Competition retreat I attended this week.

The project that got me thinking back to my days of RAOC (random acts of collage) is a “kite mapping” project that will engage youth in Brazil’s slums in surfacing the narratives of place where they live. The idea is one part arts engagement (cultivate narratives of place), a second part technical (use sophisticated technology to document narrative), another part advocacy (application of evidence to legitimize place). Of course, I’m crazy about using collage as a means for story-telling. Like Rauschenberg, I believe collage best replicates visually how we perceive the city.

I won’t go into more detail; you can learn more about “My City, My Future” (aka ArteRio) here. But here’s my point: an “owned” city space is a healthy city space.

We as the ambulatory denizens of urban settlements claim public space each time we move through it, yet we rarely leave evidence of that claim. When we do, its either harmful (waste) or viewed askance (graffitti). One generally must be a “professional” – sign-maker, architect, landscape designer – to have the privilege of shaping urban space.

And yet the delight and surprise we encounter when we come across the legacy of a Nina, Keith Harring, a Bansky, or a Shepard Fairey is part of what makes cities great – and ultimately a safe, welcoming, familiar, vibrant, exciting place to call home. Public art has never been, and should never become, the playspace of technocrats and establishment programs. And there may even be a bit of a renaissance in this “claiming” of public space by young artists working in a startling range of exciting media, which I wanted to catalogue briefly with three examples:

• Dispatch Work uses, inspires others to use, and documents in-fill of cracks and fractures, opened recesses and crumbled away facades with delightful lego work. Recent work includes Improvisal Design in Sao Paolo, Brazil.
• Tape Art is a public art and education collective that uses the line, as it can be drawn with tape of any color, to bring rigorous visual work into public and private spaces. Check out their river of art.
• Blu! has created stunning large-scale animations in the UK and Brazil using the cityscape as canvass. MUTO is their piece de resistance (I think).
• And who doesn’t love the work of the little people in London, left to (of)fend for themselves amidst the hustle and bustle of daily life. The micro-macro relationships are jaw dropping.

Its an exciting time for the urban artist and a great time for us to think and push the boundaries around art, participation, and community development.

During a brief family holiday along the Erie Canal last week, I had the pleasure of stopping in at the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative. What a thrill! Why? Several reasons:

•  Its a bright open physical space in the heart of a city ready for a rebound. Artists know what that feeling is like: a kinetik sense of opportunity that can be won or lost at any moment.
• A great show on the walls. Richard Rockford is a mixed media and assemblage artist with a knack for subtle colors, balanced proportion, and ingenious mystery.
• A working, rentable printshop crammed with manual and automated machinery dedicated to keeping the craft and art of book- and print-making alive.
• A schedule of workshops and open studio sessions through which artists, crafters, and the curious can learn basic and advanced printing techniques and more.
• A tidy shop topped off with papers, cards, notebooks and  more titillating to the fingertips, staffed by knowledgeable staff in love with the printed letter.

Overall, I was enlivened by the sense of possibility and exploration at the relatively small corner space. Buffalo you must know is a city that peaked maybe in the ’20s and ’30s, immortalized by the contributions of canonical American creatives Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmstead, Charles Burchfield and many others. One can’t help wondering on arrival, “What the hell happened – where’d the vision go?” I have a belief that, like with the Roycrofters and the Arts and Crafts movement, these traditions emerge slowly, of a synchrony of many visions that seek to reconcile an impulse to shape the future with an instinct to draw forward gleanings from the past. Anyway, that’s more philosophy than I’m used to. But my point is that efforts like the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative are inspiring because I believe they are similarly inspired – a recognition that through preservation, inspiration and reinvention we can build great movements. I wish them much success and will look forward to any opportunity to revisit. I hope you will too!

This summer the Africa-India Technology Institute (AITI) in Accra, Ghana will host Maker Faire Africa, a two-day showcase of African ingenuity and entrepreneurship. Modeled on the popular Maker Faire format developed in the U.S. by Make Magazine and O’Reilly media, the festival will include exhibitions of functional devices invented locally, artwork derived from found objects and materials, workshops and demonstrations such as cellphone hacking, and panel discussions across a range of topics, including financing invention and the challenges of moving from invention to production.More information and a program available at http://www.makerfaireafrica.com 

Love this idea of the ICE – I just might have to enter for the fun of it:Artists each make 13 collages (more or less), size not bigger than A4 (about 8″ X 10″ or 20cm X 26cm), and send them to me in New Zealand, to arrive by 20th March, 2009. One from each artist will be offered for sale at an exhibition here in New Plymouth, New Zealand with the artist setting the price. 30% commission taken. That selling exhibition will also be on the Net on the Virtual TART site, at http://virtual.tart.co.nz allowing the world-wide audience the chance to buy these collages. If unsold, that collage will rejoin the exchange. One is part of a month-long exhibition on the Virtual TART site during April and is also exhibited at the PukeAriki Museum in New Plymouth for at least a month. It will then travel to Samoa, to the MADD Gallery school of found-art assemblage and collage. It will also permanently be on exhibition on the outofsight.co.nz Internet site. The other 11 (or 12 if you didn’t sell) are shared out into parcels which are sent back to each contributing artist.So you send 13 of yours, get back 12 others (or 11 and money from your sale), and you become part of a public collection. NOTE: if you can’t finish as many as 13, or you want to send more, that’s fine. You’ll just get fewer (or more) back in your parcel. Learn more at: International Collage Exchange

Two founder-centered arts organizations, which each address the impact of violence on youth in different ways, are profiled in this month’s issue of ODE Magazine. One, founded in Los Angeles on principles of forgiveness and victim reconciliation, works with youth already deeply involved in the cycle of gang violence. The other, founded and operating in Cape Town, centering its activities on the needs of women and children who are victims of  abuse, violence and exploitation. The Tariq Khamisa Foundation (TKF), born out of the grief and generosity of a father who lost a son to a senseless act of violence. That was 12 years ago. Today, the foundation reaches millions of students in California with a message of hope, forgiveness and personal responsibility through programs that teach peace. Through community service projects, the TKF Foundation encourages children and youth to strengthen their ties to community.In South Africa, Angela Rackstraw founded Community Art Therapy after seeing children directly affected by gun violence playing among the dead victims. Her work, carried out in a shipping container structure at St Mary’s Catholic Church in Nyanga, a township skirting Cape Town, aims to bring healing to as many women as she can on the monthly income she scrapes together from individuals and foundations.I can imagine Peace Tiles being a resource for groups like these, offered as a tool to reach shared awareness-raising, therapy,  self-advocacy and research goals.