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.

A friend recently asked if I could make a “cat sarcophagus” for her daughter’s upcoming eighth birthday party. Along with the proposal she included a snapshot of a “cat mummy” from London. Coincidentally, a few months prior, National Geographic had a cover issue dedicated to pet mummies of ancient Egypt, which my family had loved. So plenty of fodder. I took up the task and wanted to document the process and result to share.

Step One
Create the form. Since the sarcophagus was going to be used to store candy, I knew it needed two halves. I drew and cut one out of a large cardboard box, and essentially copied it for the second half. In the center, cut out a square somewhat larger than a shoebox size, leaving enough room on the edges to retain structural integrity.

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The Orion Nebula captured through NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope[A little unusual for here, but...crossposted from my day job] Just yesterday I was reading an article at physorg.org describing the remarkable discovery of an explosion within the Orion Nebula considered to be the youngest “star nursery” ever discovered. A star nursery – that phrase really stuck with me in a way it hadn’t before, and I think it must all be in the context of work.

That same day I came across a 2006 TED Talk by the inimitable Stewart Brand, who founded the Whole Earth Review back when the Internet was a glint in Bob Metcalf’s eye. It wasn’t even ARPANET (I don’t think). Anyway, Stewart Brand in his TED Talk was describing the explosive rate of growth of our cities, and how they represent one of our greatest hopes for a future without poverty. He said a lot of provocative things in his TED talk back in 2006, and one of them is that cities, especially slums, are vibrant nodes of problem solving and innovation. Not a typical view of a slum.

And then he did something remarkable – at least I thought it was remarkable – he played a video clip of the earth in dark. The camera slowly pulls away from the East Coast of the U.S. and its dense, nebula-like cluster of light. We see the dark expanse of the Atlantic Ocean and then London comes into view, then Paris and Cairo and Berlin and Istanbul and soon the entire surface of the earth is shining with these clusters of light and he says something breathtaking: “For the first time, the earth is shining back at the stars.

”Star nurseries. The Internet. Cities. Innovation. Changing perspective.

This is what I’ve been dreaming about for more than a year – the creation of a place where innovative ideas are born and carried forward, an global incubator for “invention as public service.” A place where the worldwide talent of MIT students, alumni and their collaborators can be directed toward some of the great opportunities of our time – from energy production and storage to innovations in international health and sanitation. Agricultural production and processing to new approaches to education and communication delivery.

These are some of the challenges we face, and it is my deepest hope that the MIT IDEAS Global Challenge can be an incubator of some of MIT’s new humanitarian stars.

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!

Last week’s New Yorker cover struck me with some mixed emotions. Great to see it take the format of Time, Life and other “people” oriented news magazines by featuring the portrait of a person of prominence (yeah, whatever). Actually, a very important figure, our new President, Barack Obama.But a couple of things seemed amiss. First, it didn’t really look like the thin and point-featured Barack Obama I’d come to be familiar with from news sources. No, this one looked more like… Denzel Washington?  Then again, what was with the Washington wig?The portrait is called, “The First.” Its clearly intended to give the subject, our 44th, some historical weight. Wait, except he doesn’t need any. His movement, his message, his election *are* the historical weight.To be fair, this cover is about race. At least that’s what the association between the portrait and the title is intended to inspire. And I don’t want to dismiss that. In fact, I think David Remnick’s piece in this week’s magazine is an eloquent, memorable testimony to this important moment in history. Putting a wig on the President and dressing him in 18th century attire and associating him with a leader who, having showed great courage in many ways, did little as president to support the cause of slavery seems awkward and confused.No doubt as President Obama builds his own legacy as the nation’s top leader, the need to project the trappings and images of history will fall away and he will emerge into popular art unadorned, unencumbered. I will look forward to the end of the backward glancing arts.