Based, in Bologna, Italy, Blu creates politically charged murals, borrowing visual inspiration from the Surrealists. Using house paint and rollers to draw human figures, Blu often comments on the exploitation of natural resources. Graffiti artists have long used video to document their ephemeral work, but Blu’s videos thoroughly reinvent the practice. In his digital stop-motion films, he animates his figures frame by frame, and the drawings appear to come to life as Blu paints out each old image and creates a new one.
Swoon’s artwork stand out in a street art world that’s oft populated with brash, pop art figures. Where some of her guerrilla colleagues fill walls with Andre the Giants, cartoon characters, and Andy Warhol wannabes, she creates life-sized paper cut outs of everyday people, realistic rendered in black and white. With her bike nearly for a quick getaway, she wheat pastes these enigmatic souls—women, children, mermaids—at eye level where they interact with people who happen by. Born in Daytona Beach, Florida and trained in fine-arts at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, Swoon’s illustrations and hand-cut paperwork draw on formal and folk traditions—German Expressionist and Japanese wood block printmaking, Mexican papel picado, and Wayang Kulit, the shadow puppets from Central Java. Read More …
This spring I presented The Interventionist’s Toolkit at a symposium hosted by the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning. The Right to the City, which featured an exhibition along with the symposium, brought together architects, artists, historians, theorists and journalists; organized by architect Lee Stickells and artist Zanny Begg, the program took geographer David Harvey’s 2008 essay “The Right to the City” — with its evocation of Henri Lefebvre’s influential 1968 book — as its critical springboard. As Harvey wrote: “The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” [1]
In recent years this argument has become a rallying cry for activists who oppose the neoliberal politics and policies of the contemporary city. There’s a romantic appeal, maybe even a sense of imminent empowerment, in the prospect of remaking our cities and thus ourselves — a notion that if we change our environments we will change our lives, or vice versa. But ever since the symposium, I’ve been wondering about how we might evaluate the results of those freedoms. How to rate the diverse architectural actions and urban interventions that seek to remake the city? Do knitted cozies for stop signs or street furniture made from discarded pallets rank higher or lower than municipal cultural events? How do we measure the impacts of ambiguously defined and informal activities that are not only creative and civic but also — lest we forget Harvey’s ourselves — emotionally charged?
Sanatorium, the inaugural exhibition in the Guggenheim museum’s Stillspotting NYC series of off-site programs, opened in downtown Brooklyn just steps from the intense bustle and hawking of street vendors and discount retailers on Fulton Street Mall and a few blocks from the Brooklyn House of Detention. Created by Pedro Reyes and housed in an unrented space in the Metrotech Center provided by Forest City Ratner, Sanatorium is a “temporary clinic” designed to treat urban ills. It offers a number of therapeutic balms for the anxiety and depression caused city living. Read More …
A vintage image of the Starship Enterprise enigmatically graces the poster advertising Alternative Histories, an exhibition chronicling the experimental, independent and activist art spaces in New York City since the 1960s. A pop icon, the starship carries with it the original Star Trek title narration, which haunts our collective cultural imagination with the phrase: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” As installed in Exit Art’s gallery on the west side of Manhattan, the art show has little to do with the television show, but hung in the gallery, the Starship Enterprise, boldly floating in space, represents a pioneering mission and, perhaps, an unexpected case of boomer nostalgia. Read More …
AGENCY has been selected to exhibit at the Venice Biennale (La Biennale di Venezia), acting as ambassadors for SUPERFRONT in collaboration with At Work With at the Nordic Pavilion to realize “30S”, a crowdsourced video installation addressing the role of the architect in the design of public space.
Project Description
The project expands the theme of the 12th International Architectural Exhibition at the Venice Biennale to highlight the role of the festival itself in fabricating and amplifying the identity of the contemporary architect.
While “people meet in architecture”, the architect often operates in environments uncannily devoid of interpersonal contact. Paradoxically, it is from these most private spaces that our cities’ civic buildings and public spaces are designed.
The installation will linger in the private space of the architect, projecting a continuous stream of user-generated content from an installation-specific web-based video channel, acting as a clearinghouse for 30-second clips of static-shot digital video. Video will highlight the quotidian, intimate, and banal aspects of architectural endeavor, forcibly colluding these highly personal spaces with the public realm by means of digital projection into the exhibit space of the Pavilion.
AGENCY will host user-generated content in a continuous, looping stream on the AGENCY blog.
As local food movements sprout from Brooklyn to San Francisco, one organization towers over them as the perennial of the bunch. Founded in 1980 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by anti-nuclear activists, Food Not Bombs is a loose collection of some 1,000 global chapters seeking to overturn governmental and corporate policies they believe undergird hunger in a world of abundance. Every week, volunteers cook vegan food and donate it to people in public spaces and at protests. Read More …
In Chronic City, Jonathan Lethem’s 467-page, pot-fumed meditation on New York City’s Upper East Side, the author describes a fictional artwork by a fictional artist: Urban Fjord by Laird Noteless, a figure cut out of the same cloth as land artist Michael Heizer. A monumental earthwork, the piece taunts viewers into throwing all types of detritus into its gaping mouth. Curiously, New York’s Guggenheim Museum holds a similar sway. Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic design – the tantalising volume bounded by spiralling ramps – begs to be filled, but with what? Trees? Trampolines? Chocolate? Read More …
A loaded paintbrush in hand, the artist Kathryn Pannepacker crouches down and applies a black stroke to a steel panel. It’s a late afternoon in January, and it’s starting to snow. The welcoming glow of the Sunoco mini-mart and the car wash’s green neon signs cut through the gathering dusk. She finishes the touch-up on her Wall of Rugs #2 mural (Jordon now reads Jordan), rights her tall frame and surveys Philadelphia’s Broad and Lehigh Streets. Kitty-corner is the empty Botany 500 building, the apparel company’s brick edifice, a commemorative remnant of a once-booming garment district. Throughout the early part of the 20th century, Philadelphia was famous for its textiles—silk hosiery, men’s suits and wool carpets. Read More …
“I was never an architect’s architect. I’m too impatient. I just can’t wait around for years for a building to get built,” says New Orleans sculptor Laurel Porcari. Her preferred medium, kiln-formed glass, is hot, heavy, and dirty, but immediate—a far cry from CAD drawings. Nevertheless, her pieces, cast so that the material flows and warps to take on textures or resemble landscapes, capture an architect’s sensibility. After receiving her Master of Science in architecture. from Columbia in 1993, Porcari headed for Australia, where she taught design in both Perth and Melbourne. She was also working in plastic, hand-printing abstract maps on acrylic sheets to create art installations. Returning to the States, she landed in New Orleans to study in the urban design Ph.D. program at Tulane University.*