Art Events

APInews: Out Now: Journal of Arts & Communities #2

Issue #2 of the Journal of Arts & Communities is out from Intellect in Bristol, England, examining “the arts as a socially relevant practice.” Edited by Hamish Fyfe, of the faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries, University of Glamorgan, Wales, the issue offers (not online) articles on “Along Paseo Boricua: The Art of Josué Pellot Gonzalez” by Sharon Irish, about a project that engages with the public on Paseo Boricua in Chicago's Puerto Rican neighborhood; “Inventing rituals; inhabiting places – ritual and community in public art” by Ruth Jones, who commissioned five temporary art events in public spaces in Cardigan, Wales, part of the project Holy Hiatus; “Riverscross – A Drama-in-Health Project with Young People, run by Spanner in the Works” by Tony Coult, which produced a soap opera with adolescents in a mental-health hospital, and more. Issue #1 is accessible online.

Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

APInews: Out Now: Journal of Arts & Communities #2.

Non-Toxic Eco-Art Roundup

Since it’s recently been made public that supposedly “inert” ingredients of pesticides like Roundup are not, in fact, not so very intert, we thought we’d celebrate (hem hem) with a short overview of detoxifying eco-art events.

You might have seen the buzz for it, but the LAND/ART symposium just passed.  We were forced to miss it this year, but there are some riveting descriptions on the Smudge Studio Blog. Especially check out CLUI’s Bus Tour of New Mexico’s Superlative Ground-Sky Resonances. The title is super-intellectual: the journey is all about enchantment and the atomic bomb. Feeling detoxified yet?

Fellow eco-art blogger Abigail Doan altered us to the presence of Aviva Rahmani’s new booklet: What the World Needs is a Good Housekeeper. we just got it in the mail. It’s a small, bound overview of the Rahmani’s process, detailing some of her artistic work in collaboration with restoration ecologists, scientists and architects.  An instructional pamphlet, if you will. A quote: “The value of an artist’s eye is to see relationships that might otherwise be missed.”

Lastly: they are always having fun in the Netherlands. The image above is from Yang Zhichao’ s Planting Grass, currently featured in an exhibition called  Foodprint at Stroom in The Hague. Featuring works by Fritz Haeg, Agnes Denes, and Atelier Van Lieshout,  it examines our relationship with food and landscape. The artworks are paired with a timeline that parellels advances in industrial food production with the development of European and American art. Very mentally refreshing.

Go to the Green Museum

Natural Balance

For the past few months I’ve been working with our friends Lluis and Yolanda from Hibrids, on an exhibition called Natural Balance : Art & Ecology (TEMPORARY OUTDOOR SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATIONS IN GIRONA, BARCELONA, SPAIN. May 9-17, 2009). It’s part of a big flower festival and includes soem great work by Harmen de Hoop (Holland), Samantha Clark (United Kingdom), Lucrecia Troncoso & Karrie Hovey (Argentina and United States), Terry Berlier (United States), Jeanette Ramírez (Venezuela) and Isidro López Aparicio (Spain). Yeah, this is a plug for the event (which I unfortunately can’t be there for) and I really hope people can get to see it while it’s up! The big challenge for these international ephemeral art events is how to reshape them so they have a powerful positive impact and not just consume resources and jet fuel. (Check out Samantha Clark’s great project as a fun solution to this.) I’d love to see more innovative re-purposing of these traditional art events. How can we better use this infrastructure to make something really different and useful happen? More of a Natural Cultural (Re)Balance…

Go to the Green Museum