Greetings from New York! I’ve been MIA for the past few weeks (and months) as grad school has finished up, I’ve moved across the country and been working on a new project (details next week, methinks). But I wanted to share some lovely murals I found on the Webby Awards site.

Maybe you’ve seen these murals? Here’s the official rap:

In 2009, the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program collaborated with artist Stephen Powers to create 50 rooftop murals which collectively express a love letter from a guy to a girl, from an artist to his hometown, from local residents to their neighborhood.

While I wouldn’t say that the letters are necessarily from a guy to a girl (are those really our only options?), I think the concept of introducing lovely language into city streets is quite powerful. The best I can articulate this is to point to the process: we begin with the idea of loving something or someone, design a beautiful way of expressing it publicly, then put hundreds of human hours into communicating the message. My sense is that those hours permeate the final design, we see evidence of the desire to make, to say, to feel.

Powers is a part of the graffiti-artist-turned-studio-artist milieu. Working in Philadelphia and New York under the tag ESPO until 2000, he eventually became a full-time studio artist and has shown, for instance, in the Venice Biennale. His work calls to mind Margaret Kilgallen, Shepard Fairey, the Beautiful Losers I love talking about.

Anyway, check out the murals. I hope to get to see them in person but in the meantime, the site is rather lovely itself. And more of Stephen’s work is here. I’ll be back next week with some exciting updates and projects in the pipeline, as they say in offices here. [P.S. For the record, I miss Tucson something fierce.]

Greetings, folks! It’s been a whirlwind few weeks and the semester isn’t over yet. But here are some drawings from my MFA/art thesis, a treasure hunt called Everything Will Be Alright. The event was a success, I think, and more photos are coming soon. Here is essentially what happened: participants came into the museum, pulled instructions off the wall and left for the hunt. At each stop there was a drawing of the space they were standing in. Participants were asked to cut away pieces of the original drawing and reassemble them at the final destination: a bar. Click on the images to enlarge them.

Each space represented and visited holds some kind of meaning for me, even if only in its lack of meaning, which creates a kind of significance of its own. By meaning, I mean history, associations, experiences accumulated.

The idea of the project was to subvert the perceived authority/objectivity of the museum by leaving it, by asking participants to touch and finally dismantle the art. The act of cutting away pieces, carrying them on a path and reassembling them is a metaphor which asks us to reconsider how we as a culture engage with art, with the museum. The last drawing was left unfinished to add a layer of violation to the experience. At each stop was a Margi (a self, an iteration of the self) and she (I) was drawing this last image as the event occurred. In other words, participants were asked to cut away pieces of the drawing/art being created at that moment.

Yesterday (the day after the show), I got to defend the project to my thesis committee. We held the conversation at a local restaurant and all in all it was a successful defense. Of course, I stuttered and mumbled rambled jumbled my thoughts, but, well…I’m tired. Anyway, it’s onto my final-ish manuscript revisions for the second defense. I’ll have more EWBA photographs for you next week!

Really. So here are some hyper-preliminary images from my art thesis: Everything Will Be Alright. It’s a treasure hunt and these are just some details from elements appearing during the event. During the night of the opening (Thursday, April 21 @5pm if you’re in Tucson!), you will have the opportunity to participate in the treasure hunt. There is of course more to it but, well, it’s a surprise.

The postcards are letterpressed. I initially tried them out on the C&P and, after two fruitless hours, dropped it for the trusty Vandercook. The paper is Crane’s Lettra and there are 50 of these cards in existence. (The museum made a whole bunch of other cards too.)

(Yes, these are sparkly stickers. Yes, they’re a part of the show. Yes, this is an MFA thesis.) There are drawings in the show, in each of the spaces. Here’s a detail. Think: environment, textures, words.

I’ll post more pictures next week and perhaps some of my thoughts on the museum as an institution, which this project is essentially responding to. It also has to do with place and the presence or absence of meaning. In the meantime, if you’re in Tucson next week:

University of Arizona Museum of Art
Thursday, April 21 @ 5pm
Bring yo’ walking shoes and party hats!

Hope to see you there.

Not boring at all. However, we might say that art history is basically inaccessible to the average person, particularly if the information is not actively sought. Enter Smarthistory. Concerned with the ridiculous prices of art historical texts (upwards of $130 a piece), Smarthistory began a blog in 2005 to offer the ideas and images to the public for free. Now, the site offers hundreds of images, video recordings and mini-podcasts surrounding the history of art. Hell yes.

The art historians behind Smarthistory, Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, go out into the world and make videos of the pieces they see (ie. now). So they bring the context of now to the work of the past; in other words, we aren’t looking necessarily at slides of paintings but videos of the framed works as they exist in museums and cathedrals today. They even have an app available for when you travel to guide you in your viewing of, for instance, the Sistine Chapel. This is totally innovative, totally disrupts the canon of how we consume art historical knowledge.

And they just announced a Kickstarter project to help fund this pursuit. As of this writing, they’ve reached $7,822 of a $10,000 goal. I hope you’ll support them with me.