Public Art Review issue 44 - 2011 (spring/summer)

PETERSSTUDIOS

From the land of sunshine and traffic jams, three writers explore this region. StillI Rise:Innovativeart in thetimeof furloughs•HELEN LEss1cK • 41 Cityof

ReportsfromtheField Expanded coverage of people, places, and projects from around the globe. SculpturalShangri-La:lnhotim,anenchantedart

TheCreativeTimeSummit:NewYork,NewYork• RENEE PIECHOCKI • 63

MyCity'sStillBreathing:Winnipeg,Manitoba • RACHAEL SEUPERSAD • 64

BACK ISSUES

SPIRITUALITY & RELIGION issue 44 • spring/summer 2011 • vol. 22 no. 2

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In the News story on San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital (page 85), the mosaic artist credited should have been Owen Smith. Additionally, in Recent Projects, Adam Kuby's Portland Acupuncture Project (page 93), listed each sculpture's height at 18 feet tall, when it should have been 35 feet.

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"In public art, we don't have a shared, overriding theology, ideology, or pedagogy. There are no standards, no universally accepted rights and wrongs;'

The Gospel of Public Art

I like to go on road trips with my friend Scott, a philosopher, sculptor, and boat builder. We have lengthy conversations, speculating about the size and nature of the universe, debating the big bang theory. Folks like Scott gravitate to the mysteries of life, while others require hard facts (I'm from Missouri, the "show me" state, but I like a good fantasy). I postulate that, ifzero is the unknowable and one is the known, we humans all reside somewhere in between. Of course there's an infinitely long spectrum between total assurance and complete uncertainty. But, as Scott points out, reality is a mental construct, and we all perceive things differently-however slightly. We all judge things differently, too.

An important topic of conversation in the public art world today is assessment. How do we measure what constitutes "good" in public art when art lives somewhere between O and 1? What might be considered good in Boise might not in Chicago. The "average Joe" at the bus stop may have a different opinion of a work's success than a funder. There is a dearth of research efforts focusing on public art and its impact. The evidence is mostly anecdotal. Some attempts have focused specifically on economic impact, but this doesn't tell the whole story, nor even the most important stories.

In public art, we don't have a shared, overriding theology, ideology, or pedagogy. There are no standards, no universally accepted rights and wrongs. There's no job description or rulebook for a public artist. Perhaps we need a Ten Commandments of Public Art:

1 Place art and artists at the center of the public art sphere, and be supportive of all artistic disciplines-permanent and temporary.

2 Consider the common good, our shared environment, and enjoyment by the public.

3 Honor all participants in the process and promote mutual respect-be mindful, ethical, professional, and open to different opinions.

4 Utilize fair contracts that provide adequate time, compensation, clear scope, and decent working conditions for artists and clients.

5 Documentation, promotion, and criticism should fairly represent the work, and be freely accessible for educational use.

6 The content of a public art project should consider its context.

7 Use all materials and technology wisely.

8 Do not commission art that cannot properly be maintained within its appropriate lifetime.

9 Be thoughtful when siting a work of art and don't expect artists to fix every problem or address every issue.

1 Q Pursue the creation of high-quality public art with originality, innovation, spirit, vision, and courage, and strike a chord in the hearts and minds of broad and diverse audiences.

Two artists I had the pleasure of knowing and who successfully carried their visions into the public realm are Dennis Oppenheim and Richard Posner, both of whom have recently passed on into the great beyond (see obits on page 78).

Oppenheim was a brazen pioneer who often ventured into the unknown. He never shied from a challenge. He took on all kinds of subjects, including religion itself. His Device to Root Out Evil (first shown in Venice in 1997 and later installed in Vancouver) was a simple, Puritan church structure, tipped upside down-pointing to hell instead of heaven. Some viewers thought it fun, some complained it spoiled the view, and some declared it blasphemous. It was removed and later found a home in Calgary.

Posner was a young rebel with an acerbic wit who asserted his independence and challenged assumptions at every turn. As San Jose public art program manager Barbara Goldstein eloquently remarked in an emailed eulogy, "Richard employed his work to tackle issues of war and peace, consumerism, and social justice holding a mirror up to the compromises and hypocrisy that many of us are resigned to accept daily .... In my mind, the best legacy we can offer Richard is to continue his commitment to employing public art as a means to provoke thought about our society and using our skills to heal our world and make it a more just and equitable place."

With the world in crisis and people looking for solutions, it's no surprise that artists like these are employing their creative talents to raise questions and address challenging issues. Good public art is not just about looking good.

I often feel like Public Art Review is my "good book" and I'm on a mission to spread the gospel of public art. The "word" in my book is public and it means that everyone is in the audience for public art. The public artists addressing the problems and all the bad in the world-going where no artists have gone beforeare serving humankind in their own unique ways. The value of Richard's and Dermis's work is undeniable, despite the fact that it's hard to measure with any accuracy. Just take my word for it, for goodness sake.

JACK BECKERis the executive director of Forecast Public Art, publisher of Public Art Review, a nonprofit based in St. Paul.

ArtistCollaboration

The Big Print, 2010 lnk and paint on fabric

The Big Print contains 1180 reprinted relief blocks from ArtOrg's 2008 "1000 Print Sun1mer" stean,roller printing activity at ten different venues.

ArtOrg, P.O. Box 2, Northfield, MN 55057 USA www.artorg.info

The Art of Conversation

Toward a more civil-and creative-American discourse

Over the years, my writing has been dedicated to the proposition that there is a life for art beyond the legitimizing walls of museums and galleries. Like the Tao running wild as a dragon in heat, art is everywhere. In a critical shift from the idea of art as monologue and self-expression, I have defended a more decentralized creativity that is dialogic, interactive, and participatory. Following the trajectory of my own argument, I wrote a book in the form of dialogue: a series of conversations in which many voices and opinions were present, not just mine. So I shouldn't have been that surprised when one day, a woman called me up out of the blue, asking if she could attend one of iny conversational "salons."

In fact, I didn't have a salon, as I explained, adding however that I'd always wanted one. She offered to bring a few other people along, and from that first serendipitous conversation and encounter, our once-a-month Saturday salon was born about four years ago. On the third Saturday of every month, some ten people gather at my house for food and drink, followed by a more formal hour or two of what we consider to be "enlightened conversation."

As there is never a subject planned in advance, we view ourselves a bit like jazz musicians improvising music-except that the music, in this case, is conversation. Our free-floating talk over the years has included a broad range of topics:

In his book Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, Stephen Miller laments the decline of conversational art in America, defined as "a discussion of great and small topics by people who practice mutual tolerance for opposing viewpoints." The best conversations, he claims, are playful. Quite often, people don't discuss anything because they're afraid of offending-or "if they do discuss something, they're screaming." At salon, we do have rules of the road. People listen respectfully. There is no cross talk, no showboating, no bristling. Just the exhilaration of a wide range of opinions generously offered and gratefully received.

"We are facing our final evolutionary exam," Buckminster Fuller warned many years ago. Will humanity survive its test? I am the worrywart in the group, who wonders if any new paradigm can save us anymore. (Sometimes you will find me inscribing fairly lurid writing on the walls.) Speaking of walls, the salon has been officially

Artful conversation is

doesn't use up valuable

resources or pollute

invited, in one of those sly winks of fate, to create an art exhibition around the theme of "Conversation: ecologically sound: it Salon Style" for a gallery on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg. The moral of the story? Art, like love, is where you find it-insistently offbeat and unpredictable-as when God says, "Tell me your plans."

or contribute to the

Synchronistically in tandem with our invitation, lethal gunshots suddenly rang out at a political rally in Tucson. Unchecked verbal venom consumer trance.

Benazir Bhutto's assassination, the pros and cons of one-stop Wal-Mart shopping, life after death, surviving in a political culture of lies, the Sarah Palin effect, synchronicity, optimism, despair, Barack Obama's presidency, the sometimes ludicrous prose of Camille Paglia, and most recently, Facebook revolutions in the Middle East.

Artful conversation is ecologically sound: it doesn't use up valuable resources or pollute or contribute to the consumer trance. It doesn't cost anything. When unexpected laughter falls like loose change on my living-room floor, it seems to restore the distorted nervous system of the world to normal functioning. We are at a point where the line between our personal lives and the world has become so permeable and nerve-wracking, it helps to have a special time and space in which to clarify thoughts, share anxieties, talk things over.

became a bomb with the fuse lit, and the demand for civility in public discourse was now a focus of the whole country. President Obama got an unexpected chance, and he took it. A lack of civility did not cause this tragedy, he assured everyone, but only a more civil and honest public discourse would permit the nation to face up to its challenges. To sharpen our instincts for empathy, we would need to listen to each other more carefully and exchange ideas without rancor. Salon, we realized, was slightly ahead of the curve: we had already created a template for what the President was proposing.

SUZI GABLIK is an art critic, artist and teacher. She is the author of Has Modernism Failed?, Living the Magical Life: An Oracular Adventure, The Reenchantment of Art, and Conversations Before the End of Time. Her present writing is mostly online at virgilspeaks.blogspot.com.

Spirituality and Religion in public art

JON SPAYDE

he very idea of religion and spirituality as a topic, a special subhead, under the general category "public art" testifies to our modernity. For most of human history, most art in the public realm simply was religious. From Stonehenge to the Parthenon frieze, from the immense stone Buddhas of the Longmen Grottoes and the intricate decoration of the Imam Mosque in Esfahan, Iran, to Chartres Cathedral's west portal, most art made for the eyes of the community was either wholly devoted to, or intimately connected

ABOVELEFT:ImamMosque in Isfahan,Iran,1602-1619. ABOVERIGHT:TheseBuddhasarea fewofmorethan100,000statuesattheLongmenGrottoesnearLuoyang in Henanprovince,China.

BELOW:MarthaRamirezandPatriciaQuijanoFerrer,Tlazolleod:FuerzaCreadoradeloNoTejido(Tlazolteod:CreativeForceoftheUn-Woven),LosAngeles,1999.

with, the transmundane ideals and hopes of that community; and those ideals and hopes were served by a cultus, a traditional body of beliefs and rites. This was true even when art served to glorify kings and emperors, who, when not believed to be living deities themselves, were understood to rule by virtue of the special favor of God or the gods.

Today, public art has a much more complex and uneasy relationship with matters of the spirit. Public work is still commissioned for specifically religious purposes, of course-for adorning churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples or their grounds. But most public works today celebrate earthbound rather than transcendent realms-cities, neighborhoods, communities, campuses-or share with studio and gallery art the goal of communicating a unique artist's vision to the spectator, in a meeting of two minds rather than a meeting of two planes of reality as described in sacred texts.

The story of the general desacralization of Western art is a familiar one: the emergence of classical pagan themes in the Renaissance, the rise of the very this-worldly landscape and genre painting, the surrogate faiths-in the artist as demiurge, in the Nation, in Nature-that inspired Romanticism, and then a modernism that pushed art further into alliance with the modern substitutes for traditional faith: rationalism, irrationalism, psychology, politics. (Art practice in Asian countries underwent a similar desacralization process, but at warp speed, from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries forward.)

Public art, as defined in American practice and discourse since the 1960s, was also shaped by American realities: our substitution of a civil religion (liberty, e pluribus unum) for an established traditional one; corporate patronage, with its preference for images of secular modernity; and our very ethnic and religious diversity, which has made outright religious statements in the public art realm potentially controversial.

And yet there are countless ways in which religious and spiritual traditions have hung on in the world of art. First, of course, there are artists of faith who make no bones about their beliefs. Then there's the very iconicity of forms: every

recognizable portrait or portrait sculpture, no matter how abstract, in some sense recalls a Madonna or a saint. And if we understand spirituality as a means of communion with some higher or deeper power that may or may not be a traditional deity, many of the modern substitutes for traditional religion have generated powerful spiritualities or semi-spiritualities of their own: artists connect with Jungian archetypes, the earth, the spirit of an ethnic or cultural group, the power of art or creativity itself.

Equally significant is the number of artists who have found a spiritual home in a non-Western tradition, with Buddhism being probably the most prominent of these. (Much of Western Buddhism outside of Asian immigrant communities, of course, makes peace with the secular by emphasizing the psychological rather than the devotional aspects of this religion.)

Postmodernism, of course, mixes things up by its openness to all of the imagery of the past, including religious icons-and by a generalized irony that even undermines

satire and critique. That makes it hard to tell whether, say, a visually grotesque African Madonna by Chris Ofili is being offered as an homage or a gag, or something poised perilously and intriguingly between the two.

It's fair to say that public art, by virtue of its attempts to reach out to a wide range of human eyes and hearts beyond gallery walls, has an irreducible urge toward inclusivity, and that inclusivity takes on a genuinely spiritual coloration quite easily, as artworks attempt to lift up the hearts, or just improve the moods, of as many passersby as possible. Religious icons are a natural element in public art that attempts to represent communities-especially communities like the Mexican American or African American, in which religious faith is a crucial internal bond. And public artists, like any other artists, have the freedom to infuse their work with their own spiritual convictions in subtle ways that may have nothing to do with a doctrine or a commissioning program.

As you explore the articles in this issue of Public Art Review, you'll see examples of many of these relationships between public art and the spiritual. Arlene Goldbard talks with four prominent contemporary public artists whose spiritual lives-in-art span a spectrum from Buddhism to unconventional Christianity to passionate belief in community and in the order of the universe; the profiled artists discuss the subtle ways that faith finds form in their works. In an excerpt from her new book, Suzanne Lacy writes about connections between engaged Buddhism and engaged art.

Eleanor Heartney looks into the core issues at stake when public art arouses religion-centered controversy-when secularists decry religious imagery in the public sphere, and when religious people find irreverence in artworks-and discovers that genuinely antireligious artists are quite rare, but art-inspired struggles over the Establishment of Religion clause in the Constitution are not.

I profile two artists, one Muslim and one Christian, who are sincere and up-front about their faith, but choose to embody it in forms-hip-hop and conceptualism-that have long been considered the height of art-world secularism and irreverence. Dylan Mortimer deploys an ultra-hip postmodern irony to tweak the hypocrisies of secularism, while Mohammed Ali fuses the

ABOVE:CliffEubanks'BornAgain, © 2000and2006CityofPhiladelphiaMuralArtsProgram.

brashness of graffiti with the visionary urgency of the Qur'an's message: surrender to God and be at peace with one another.

Lee Gilmore explores the relationships between spirituality, symbol, ritual, and public art at Burning Man. And on the Last Page, Wisconsin artist B. J. Christofferson offers her inspired in-the-computer additions to railroad-train graffiti: vivid Catholic icons that "sanctify" the wildstyle.

In juxtaposing God, religion, spirit, public spirit, art-making, truth-seeking, belief, practice, and prayer in these pages, we come to no conclusions. Instead, we celebrate the variety of shapes, verbal and visual, tliat reflection on the ultimate questions can take, and we pay homage to the inextinguishable human urge to image a Greatness beyond all images.

JONSPAYDE is guest editor for this issue of Public Art Review. His book How to Believe: Teachers and Seekers Show the Way to a Modern, Life-Changing Faith was published by Random House in 2008.

PublicArtas a S iritualPath

Exploring the meeting of art and spirituality with Agnes Denes, Tyree Guyton, Ned Kahn, and Lily Yeh yielded conversations as distinct as these artists' works, yet each dialogue reflected the same truth. Despite marked differences, they share precisely those characteristics-creative force, hunger for awakening, deep sense of purpose, and reluctance to settle for the superficial or conventional-that drive the larger search for meaning, shaping countless spiritual journeys. Talking with them, I recalled the notion of "radical amazement" that Abraham Joshua Heschel expounds in God in Search of Man: the greatest hindrance to larger awareness "is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental cliches.

Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is therefore a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is'.'

These artists share a transformative intention: to awaken those who interact with their art from the trance of ordinary reality into deeper awareness and wonder. Whether or not they identify with a religion, all four artists see their art as spiritual

practice. And all are mindful of the delicate-sometimes vexed-nature of religion and spirituality in public discourse. When I asked Lily Yeh whether the spiritual ideas that animate her life and work were shared with community collaborators, she explained, "It's certainly not in the public dialogue. It's not in what people talk about. We experience it in action."

One of Ned Kahn's core intentions is coming up "with a modern Buddhist art that is about the essence of things and the processes that underlie things," an aim as explicitly spiritual as aesthetic, yet seldom part of his public self-presentation. He described being asked how his work ties in with spirituality: "I was fumbling through a response, and I saw this local politician get up and leave. He just did a beeline for the exit when this California artist started talking about spirituality. It's much easier for me to create an artwork and let people get whatever they get out of it than going down the slippery slope of trying to verbalize what it is Everything I've done, I feel like people could completely grasp it with just their senses, just their eyes and their ears and hands. I'm completely happy with that."

ABOVE:OneofseveralgardensandparksYehhelpedcreateinNorthPhiladelphia'sVillage ofArtsandHumanities,1986-2004.OPPOSITEPAGE:Yehpainting a muralonSt.John's CatholicChurch ina communitybuiltaroundavastgarbagedump,Korogocho,Kenya,1994.

The DustlessWorld

Lily Yeh was born in China and grew up in Taiwan, which she describes as "an environment imbued with Taoist and Confucian teachings. Buddhist thinking is familiar in the way we regard life .... But in essence, all spiritual practice shares one sentence. In Confucianism, it's 'Do not do to others what you don't want done to yourself.' Isn't that Jesus's teaching, 'Love your neighbors as you love yourself'? Ultimately it's about compassion and love.''

Yeh, author of Awakening Creativity: Dandelion School Blossoms (New Village, 2011), has been exposed to several varieties of religious thinking, but her primary spiritual practice has been her art. "My real spiritual encounter was through the study of Chinese landscape painting," she says. "From the age of 15 until I graduated from college, I loved the tradition and threw myself into learning it. Through painting, I've come in contact with a very special place. The Chinese call it 'the dustless world.' The dust does not refer to physical pollution; it refers to the mental pollution of attachments, passions, and selfishness. The paintings I studied, those that made my heart beat faster, although they are of this world-they are about trees, rocks, clouds, waterfalls, and mountains-are imbued with a pristine beauty, very powerful and full, but with an utter stillness, clarity, and serenity. I feel such peace when I look at those paintings, a deep sense of tranquility and exhilaration at the same time."

Lily Yeh

Yeh was 22 when she moved to the United States and felt a huge culture shock: "I got transplanted, and then I tried to find my roots, to understand who I am. I realized that I was searching for my place, through traveling, painting, reading, and studying art and religion. I was trying to look for the spiritual reality that I had lost. I realized that I couldn't do another Chinese landscape painting: one cannot go back. But how to find my way home? That was the beginning of my search."

"Of course," Yeh tells me, "I didn't realize all that until I looked back at my journey after 15 or 20 years. People usually understand my work as community-building or healing. But fundamentally it is this deep sense of longing to return home: not to a place in Taiwan, not to the home of my parents or siblings, but to the home of that distilled wholeness, spacious and full at the same time. I keep on making gardens, murals, and sculptures, and it's all about defining that space, which I call a luminous void. And that sense of stillness, luminosity, serenity, and fullness was revealed to me through the study of Chinese landscape painting."

A key spiritual practice for Yeh has been facing fear-a type of fear that has by now become a signpost, directing her to engage an opportunity fully. She first encountered it at the site of her flagship project, the vast North Philadelphia complex of mosaic sculptures, murals, and gardens known as the Village of Arts and Humanities. "Before [that project], I was just kind of doing what was laid out ahead of me," she says. "When I was given the chance to go to inner-city North Philadelphia, I was frightened. I didn't want to go. But my heart spoke in a tender voice and said, 'If you don't rise to the occasion, the best of you will die, and the rest will not amount to anything.' I mustered my courage and went to that abandoned lot. The people I worked with and what I experienced there changed my life."

"Since then," she explains, "I always go to forlorn and abandoned places. The broken community becomes my canvas, and the people's stories become my pigments, and together, we make something beautiful that does not belong to one person, but belongs to all." Through her nonprofit organization Barefoot Artists, Yeh has carried out projects in deeply distressed communities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Her work over the past 15 years in Korogocho, Kenya, has expanded outward from a church built on the edge of a massive dumpsite that both poisons and generates livelihood for the many thousands who live there. "When I went there I understood the violence of poverty [described] by Gandhi: the daily assault on one's body and the overwhelming burden of life, of living I realized that the act of creating together, the act of making beauty, is like striking fire in the heart of darkness, in the depth of a winter's night."

Ned Kahn

ABOVE:NedKahn'sWindArbor, a workcommissionedforSingapore'sMarinaBaySands hotel,willbehislargestwind-animatedbuildingfacadeto date,covering6,800square meterswith260,000aluminum"flappers"thatmoveandshimmerwithlight.

A ModernBuddhistArt

Ned Kalm is a practitioner ofVipassana Buddhism (often called "insight meditation"). Kalm describes it as "similar to Zen, but very pure in the practice, not entwined with a lot of the ritual that most people associate with religions. They've tried to boil it down to an essence of what the Buddha taught."

Kahn's sculptures meld art and science, rendering the invisible visible. His objects and environments encapsulate natural forces-wind, sand, water, fire, and fog-revealing their perpetual motion through interaction with viewers and the elements.

Kahn's artistic intentions represent the convergence of art and two streams of thought and experience. At the University of Connecticut, Kahn took transpersonal psychology courses. "I was 20 years old at the time," he recalls. "A psychology professor gave everyone a quick lesson on how to meditate, and I was immediately drawn to it. I've been interested in Buddhism and meditation since then, so it's been 30 years." After college Kahn spent 12 years as artist-in-residence at San Francisco's Exploratorium, a pioneering interactive museum focusing on science, art, and human perception. "From working there, and becoming really interested in the confluence between art and science, I delved into physics and got intrigued with the quantum mechanical view of reality. And part of that completely resonated with experiences that I'd had meditating," Kahn says.

"So with a foot in the science world and a foot in Buddhism, practicing as an artist, I was intrigued with how to create a modern Buddhist art that integrated these three seemingly disparate enterprises .... How can I create an artwork that has some of the elements of reality I've experienced through meditating and from spending a bunch of time with scientists talking about the subatomic world? And for both of those worlds, everything is changing-it's this constant energy flow of changing electrical phenomena. I started to think, what would artworks be like if they had no static elements, or if the essence of the artwork was about change that's not programmed or sculpted or determined by me? Opening up the artwork so that it can respond to nature or become a frame around a process and a phenomenon. That set the whole stage and frame for all my artworks."

The evolution of Kahn's work has been guided, in part, by practices integral to the Buddhist spiritual path. He explains the impact on his work of the exhortation to practice "right speech": "The Buddha said that everything you say should try to be true, useful, timely, to the point, and kind. It's a really interesting model to think about in the realm of art.

"With those guidelines, I've tried to make art that's true somehow, that's directly linked to reality. Useful-a lot of

ABOVE:NedKahn,RainOculus,2011,MarinaBaySandshotel,MarinaBay,Singapore. BELOW:NedKahn,FireTornado,2010,Phaeno,Wallsburg,Germany.

the current projects I'm working on are artworks that also provide some useful function for a building: that provide shade, that divert heat, that reduce energy costs, that actively generate energy, gather rainwater, or reduce water usage. And then timely: I've tried to do artworks that are based in exactly what's happening now, as opposed to some imagined future or remembered past. To the point is the idea of making something as simple as possible.

"And the last thing is kind. I've been drawn to make artworks that give people the opportunity to reconnect with nature, or to have a respite from the craziness of life. I think about how I feel looking at water, parking myself in front of a bay or river. It makes me feel happier. I've tried to create artworks that give people the opportunity to have that kind of feeling."

Visitors to Kahn's website will find photos and videos capturing his dynamic works in action, arranged in categories according to the natural elements they engage: fog, water, fire/light, wind, and sand. Soon, they may find two new categories, thanks to a recent conversation the artist had with the monks of Abhayagiri Monastery in rural northern California, '"Okay,' they told me, 'you've worked with fire, and you've worked with wind, and you've worked with earth and water, but there are two other elements in the Buddhist view of things: space and consciousness.' I've been trying to set my mind on that."

TyreeGuyton

ABOVE:TyreeGuyton isbestknownforTheHeidelbergProject, a multi-layeredinstallation coveringseveralabandonedlotsandhousesonEastDetroit'sHeidelbergStreet. It wasoneof 15projectschosentorepresenttheUnitedStatesatthe2008VeniceArchitectureBiennale.

Medicinefor the Spirit

Tyree Guyton has a clear sense of divine inspiration as the driving force for his work: "I've found my calling. I've found my true purpose in being here, and my purpose is to create art in such a way that people see the beauty in themselves. My art is a medicine. I'm the conduit, I'm being used to do what I do. There's something bigger than myself that's controlling everything that we see and don't see in the world today. And that same energy is also controlling me to do what I do."

Guyton's best-known venture in artistic healing is The Heidelberg Project, a richly layered installation of paintings, found objects, and recycled materials transforming a blighted collection of abandoned lots and houses on East

Side Detroit's Heidelberg Street into a source of community pride. It was one of 15 projects invited to represent the United States at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale. The project's polka-dot houses, gardens, elaborate constructions of stuffed animals, shoes, and discarded appliances make it a leading attraction for Detroit visitors. Guyton sees these artworks as vehicles for a larger transformation. "We can't heal the land first without stepping in there and healing the minds of the people."

"I've grown up in the church world, been exposed to religion at an early age," Guyton says, describing his spiritual path. "The last five years, I've been studying metaphysics, looking at it from a scientific point of view." Guyton's studies began when he was introduced to a course based on the teachings of Dr. Henry Clifford Kinley, founder and dean of the Institute of Divine Metaphysical Research (IDMR) and a former Church of God minister who, in 1931, saw in a vision something he recognized as a universal pattern of divinity and purpose. Today, IDMR-affiliated schools appear in many African American inner-city neighborhoods. "The class blew my mind," says Guyton, "because [despite] everything that I thought I knew about religion, going to this class really helped me understand that I knew nothing. And one of the things that it taught me is to be quiet and to listen. Once you learn to really listen, you can hear God."

Guyton's ongoing series Faces of God was rooted in "trying to understand this entity and reading the Bible and spending a lot of time in the churches, listening, and coming to the realization that God is everything. You have six billion people in the world, and every one of us was created in His image and likeness. That is so powerful. How :: J do you understand that? Who is God really? So I decided to :c do a body of work to give people my interpretation of what I

j was :~:~o ;e:~~ about his motivation, Guyton replies, 1, "Using the proper name, I'd have to say Yahweh, which is God, gave me the backbone, gave me the vision, gave me the courage to go out there." (A core point of IDMR's theology is the use of divine names based on the original Hebrew

ABOVE:ApaintingatTheHeidelbergProjectfromGuyton'sFacesofGodseries. BELOW:AnimalTreeFarm,alsoonHeidelbergStreet,celebratesanimals in Detroit.

orthography.) He feels certainty in the face of setbacks. "Can you imagine going out there and doing something so radical with the world laughing at you? City government tore down the project twice. I was arrested and put on trial, and people thought I was crazy. But then it came to me: relax, surrender, you've got to do what you've been put here to do."

Guyton's self-account has the flavor of a hero's journey, wherein strength grows as obstacles are overcome. He explained that the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, where he was told in the early 1980s that he didn't fit in, recently awarded

him an honorary Ph.D. A dissertation wasn't required for that honor, but he intends to write one anyway, during a yearlong residency at the Laurenz Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. "I remember when they told me, 'We don't think you're going to make it here, Tyree,"' he says. "And now it's 'You have surpassed what we were able to teach you here, and we're willing to help you with what you're trying to do now.' As I sit here talking to you now, I am fearless. Don't tell me that I can't do it. I believe in taking the impossible and making it possible. But it's not me-I'm just being used."

LEFT:ForRice/Tree/Burial,Lewiston,NewYork,1968-1979-consideredbysometobethe firstextensiveecologicalartwork-AgnesDenesplanted a ricefieldabovetheNiagaragorge, wrappedchainsaroundtreesina forestsacredtoNativeAmericans,livedontheedgeof NiagaraFallsforeightdays,andburied atimecapsuletobeopenedathousandyearsfromnow.

Agnes Denes

the Shape of the Universe, a 5.5-ton etched ceiling of Pink Rosa glass in the lobby of the First National Bank of Chicago's New York headquarters. "A banker came to me and said, 'Ever since your ceiling was installed, I feel good about coming to work. I look up at your ceiling in the morning, and I do a good day's work, and I look up at your ceiling before I go home.' And that is like somebody gave you a bump on tlrn head: 'Wake up, wake up, you're doing something."'

Questionsof PlanetaryReality

Agnes Denes recognizes a deep spirituality in her work that is entirely distinct from religion. "Religion is man-made," she says, "and spirituality is a little bit above that, I think." As we speak, she draws clear contrasts between her own view of the spirituality of her art and some of the ways others have described it. For example, given that many of Denes' works focus on environmental healing, some people have seen it as expressing the sacredness of life on Earth. "I don't believe in the holiness of the planet," Denes says. "It's just a planet. I base my work on science. I never had any spiritual practice except my art. What I know is what I learned from my art. But to say that spirituality infuses all my work, I feel comfortable with that. And it does it on different levels."

For example, in Morse Code Message, a project executed in 1969-1975, Denes converted Biblical passages into Morse code, "setting out to put all the religions into one language, the common denominator." Then she used the code to generate percussive music, recalling the time "when ancient villages had no other way of communicating with each other but through the drums." Or consider her 1986-1987 project, Hypersphere-The Earth in

It Transports You

"There is spirituality in a work of art when one is transfixed by it, feels elevated, moved, when one cannot get it out of one's mind and keeps finding layers and mysteries in it on various levels. Something beyond words, beyond the expected, that lingers and has the strength to mesmerize you each time and lift you out of your everydayexistence.

"Art on this level puts you in a special place where words are spoken in a hushed voice. You don't know why and how but you are in a sensitive place where everything feels cleaner, fresher, more poignant; the smells are stronger, and the everyday world recedes.

"Good art does this, in whatever form. It transports you to another place, and this other place is a spiritual one.

Tree Mountain-A Living Time Capsule comprises 11,000 trees planted by as many individuals on a mountain of refuse in Finland, using what Denes describes as "a complex mathematical pattern derived from a combination of the golden section and the pineapple/sunflower system." Maintaining the forest over 400 years will restore the ecosystem, creating one of the world's largest environmental reclamation sites while connecting the tree-planters and tl1eir descendents in a sustaining global matrix.

Denes sees each of her projects as having a reason for being that addresses ultimate questions of planetary reality, in contrast to large-scale outdoor works driven by an artist's ego. She describes her earliest environmental project, the Rice/Tree/Burial of 1968, as being "about our relationship to the earth. It's like a layer of bacteria in a Petri dish, this tiny little layer [of human presence]; all of humanity is less tl1an 100 feet high around the globe." The project embodied a Hegelian philosophical argument, thesis-antithesis-synthesis. She planted rice, representing life; put chains around trees in a forest that was sacred to Native Americans, "representing death, evolutionary mutation, and interference with life," as she puts it; and buried a time capsule to be opened in a thousand years-a long-awaited, ultimate synthesis.

Denes' art emerges from a dense and complex matrix of ideas, but she is convinced that the works' spiritual impact can

"It is dangerous to try to name these things because they quickly dissolve into platitudes, cliches. They must be felt and experienced.

"This art involves a way of living, thinking, and being in the world, a kind of spirituality that looks at a blade of grass differently from others and sees symbolism in things." -Agnes Denes

Excerpted from "The Paradox of Eco-Logic: Individual Creation vs. Social Consciousness," a lecture Agnes Denes first presented at the College Art Association conference in 2000. To read the entire text, go to www.forecastpublicart.org.

ABOVE:TreeMountain,Ylojarvi,Finland,originalplanfrom1982andactualsitein2001.A400-yearproject,TreeMountainaffirmshumanity'scommitmenttothefuturewel-beingofecological,social, andculturallifeontheplanet.BELOW:MorseCodeMessage,theessenceoftheBiblesetintoMorsecode,thenmusic,1969-1975.Madeof hand-craftedplexiglasswithplasticcodereliefs.

be experienced without engaging their intellectual infrastructure. "I love that kids love my work," she says. "They say that my work is so highly philosophical that it's difficult to understand-it's not true. A child of five or seven can understand it and feel good, just as well as grownups can. I think that all good art [is like] that to a certain extent, even if it's not spiritual. You get into another realm. You see people searching for something when they look at a great work of art: they're looking for themselves, in order to understand it."

"What you see when you Google my work," Denes tells me, "is the end result: an environmental forest, a mathematical forest, a wheat field. But underneath, there's what motivated it. As I visualize mathematics and logic-invisible processes-I also visualize spirituality. I'm very happy that people pick up on that. I make people feel better about themselves, and that means an awful lot to me. I make them feel good, getting above the humdrum of their lives, their dissatisfaction with their lives, looking for deeper elements and understandings. That is what is related to spirituality. It's not a church or a temple with a high ceiling. It's inside yourself, what you find."

ARLENE GOLDBARD is a writer, speaker, cultural activist, and consultant who works at the intersection of culture, politics, and spirituality. New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, her other books, her talks, essays, and blogs can be found at arlenegoldbard.com.

Service andArt

Artists and Buddhists

engage

SUZANNELACY

Both engaged Buddhism and engaged art found fertile ground in the United States during the 1960s, a politically charged era when social justice, activism, and community engagement were being redefined by race, war, gender, and economic equity. In the United States a convergence of spokespersons from Asia, emphasizing ethics and wisdom practices, expanded our understanding of Buddhism. Charismatic teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh joined civil rights and antiwar activists in a discourse on individual rights and the morality of nations. Artists adopted overtly political stances, such as the New York-based Guerrilla Art Action Group who protested the Vietnam War.

While grounding themselves in traditional models of discipline, virtue, and altruism, engaged Buddhists, as Donald Rothberg suggests, "have extended the meanings of Buddhist precepts [to encompass] the wider perspective on what is ethically meaningful, in the context of contemporary social realities, and the imperative to act in ... contexts that are, at least from the point of view of traditional Buddhist practice, relatively new and unexplored."

As with engaged Buddhism, the question comes up for activist artists: Is it really art? (Or Buddhism?) Although in recent years "communities" have become acceptable contexts for art practice, the concept of service is worth examining. In Buddhism, the existence of suffering evokes an understanding of universal responsibility that compels action to alleviate that suffering. Buddhist teachings lead to a sense of responsibility based on the belief that nothing is separate; everything is related to everything else. Recalling Indra's net, a vast expanse of jeweled facets where each node reflects all other jewels simultaneously and each jewel's motion causes all others to move the net, Joanna Macy says, "Everything is interdependent and mutually conditioning-each thought, word, and act, and all beings too, in the web of life."

For engaged Buddhists, awareness of suffering demands immediate action. Bernard Glassman explains with characteristic straightforwardness: "If I cut my hand and it starts to bleed .I don't join a discussion group or wait until I am enlightened .... I immediately get some rags to stop the bleeding-because it's me that is bleeding." Engaged Buddhists understand service as a practice of mindfulness that leads to an awareness of unity, which in turn regenerates the desire to serve. Service is a vehicle through which the server reaches a deeper understanding of life, a practice that benefits the greater whole of which we are all a part. This service is neither patriarchal nor proscriptive. It is reciprocal.

In the visual arts, "service" is not seen as an art form, nor is it a proper "result" of art. Service and use-value are disparaged as

functional applications of the creative process. While many artists do successfully combine their creative practice with other types of service, this is not the stuff of mainstream art discourse. The notion of service is often dismissed with a knee-jerk post-colonialist critique: The very word seems to represent disempowerment.

Yet we do serve, those of us involved in engaged art. We do what we can to alleviate the concrete conditions of human affliction, and we know that along with community-based practices come relational obligations and responsibilities. But this direct service, which is part of the work, is not all of the work. The multiple audiences addressed by artworks-those in the immediate environment and those faraway and removed from the issues of the work-complicate art as service.

Conceiving of art as a meaning-making activity that takes place in a relational space sets the stage for art to be of service. Whether it actually is of service depends upon the incorporation of values and language-words like compassion-that are pretty much foreign to today's art discussions. Considering the relationship of engaged art to engaged Buddhism offers an opportunity to reflect on values, perception, and practices of creativity and enlightenment within the social nexus of relationships. Artists and Buddhists know that perception itself has the power to transform situations. If things are seen differently, they change.

From these shifts in perspective we, too, are changed. Joanna Macy stresses that being present to pain without self-destructing into helplessness is the edge that social activists walk. Practicing art is taking a stand against helplessness. "Making" (a word we artists are fond of using, removing both object and subject to focus on the act) is innately optimistic, offering a form of action for all producers. The belief in tlie Buddhist notion of reciprocity is a foundation for engagement. Macy discusses the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka, an extensive Buddhist project of rural community development. They have a saying: "We build the road and the road builds us." As artists we act, and the effects ripple out in time and space, each act affecting all the others in Indra's net. We make the art, and the art makes us.

SUZANNE LACY is an artist and writer whose work is focused on interventionist art, policy, and the public sphere. She designed and chairs the Master's in Fine Arts: Public Practices program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. This text is adapted from her new book Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974-2007 (Duke University Press, 2010).

Some punditshave declared the culture wars over. They shouldlook at what still happens when public art touches religious nerves.

ELEANOR HEARTNEY

hen a David Wojnarowicz video was removed from the National Portrait Gallery's Hide/Seek, an exhibition in November 2010 devoted to homosexual identity, censorship based on charges of sacrilege was back in the news. Wojnarowicz's 1987

A Fire in My Belly includes an 11-second clip of ants swarming over a crucifix and was inspired by the artist's rage over the indifference displayed by religious and politicalestablishmentstowardthe AlDS crisis.

For many who lived through the culture wars of the early 1990s, the controversy seemed a weirdly unreconstructed replay. But in fact in the years since Congress, the religious right, and the art world sparred over Mapplethorpe and Serrano (and Wojnarowicz). the larger world has changed a great deal. New factors complicate the always uneasy

relationship between art and religion. The events of 9/11, the "clash of civilizations," the "War on Terror," the rise of the Internet, and the demise of the Soviet Union all play, in different ways, into an increasing sensitivity to symbols of religion and the way they are presented and disseminated.

One could point to any number of flashpoints-uproars in France over the prohibition of the public wearing of the Muslim veil; the murderous aftermath of the Danish cartoons satirizing the prophet Mohammad; the banning of minarets in Switzerland; recent desecrations of Jewish cemeteries by swastikas in Israel, Latvia, London, and Chicago; flaps over public displays of Nativity scenes and the Ten Commandments throughout the United States; the closing of art shows containing works that satirize Christianity in Russia and Poland. This heightened sensitivity is not simply about religion, and is in fact, as often as not, a surrogate for other issues-economic imbalance, geopolitical shifts of power, demands by minority groups for more participation or outright independence.

The art world, as one of society's repositories of image culture (others include the media and entertainment), often

finds itself embroiled in religion-related controversies. Other recent incidents in the United States include last October's uproar over the display in a Colorado museum of Enrique Chagoya's 2003 The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals, a multi panel lithograph that includes an image of Jesus receiving oral sex. The artist describes the work as a commentary on the corruption of the spiritual by religious institutions.

One could also cite the flap over Richard Kamler's 2009 right around the corner, a work meant to celebrate the religious diversity of New York's Lower East Side through interwoven pages of the Qur'an and the Torah. Instead it was seen as a desecration of sacred books.

Such controversies raise questions with important implications: Is it hate speech to cover a crucifix with ants? Is it a civil-rights violation to alter someone else's religious symbols? Can we separate critique of religious institutions from critiques of religious beliefs? Who owns these symbols and who gets to decide how they are used?

In many ways, this debate is bound up with understandings of the basic nature of American society. Is this a "Christian nation," as some politicians and religious leaders have maintained? Or do we live, as the title of a book by philosopher Charles Taylor suggests, in A Secular Age? What do we make of the notion, proposed by Jurgen Habermas, that seems to split the difference by declaring this a post-secular world? What kind of community is America? Has religion become another form of identity politics? In a

multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious society, how do we deal with worldviews and discourses that are essentially antithetical to one another?

Church,State, and PublicArt

Most of the flare-ups mentioned above involved the display of art in private spaces. When art employing religious symbols appears in public, questions about the role of religion in contemporary life become even more urgent. When these cases come up in the United States, reference is often made to the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment states that "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." What this actually means is open to a lot of interpretation. For defenders of religion, the second half of this statement provides the basis for freedom of religion. For nonbelievers, the first half provides a bulwark for the separation of church and state.

Protests against art with religious imagery tend to break along these lines. On one hand are cases in which members of religious communities demand the removal of offensive depictions of their religious symbols. On the other are the lawsuits brought by nonbelievers who argue that nonironic presentation of sacred symbols on public property is tantamount to an illegal government endorsement ofreligion. The Supreme Court has occasionally been enlisted to clarify

BELOWandOPPOSITEPAGE:FourphotographsfromKatarzynaKozyra'sBloodTies,1995.In1999,thetwophotographsbelowwereusedto create a billboardforanoutdoorexhibitionorganized by GaleriaZewnetrznaAMSinthestreetsofPolishcities.Thebillboardwassubjectedtocensorship;thenudityofthefigures,alongwiththereligioussymbolsofcrossandmoon,wereblockedout.

matters, and the high and lower courts have ruled at times on both sides of petitions concerning the display of creches, menorahs, crosses, or copies of the Ten Commandments in public places.

But beyond the legal issues, public art with religious imagery also enters into the complicated dance in our country between different forms of religious belief and between those who do and don't believe in God. Sometimes the outcome of this dance is simply comical, as when dueling billboards appeared last Christmas on either side of the Lincoln Tunnel, the automobile channel that connects New York to New Jersey. Motorists heading into New York were greeted with a large billboard sponsored by the American Atheists that declared, "You know it's a myth. This season, celebrate reason!" On the New York side, the National Catholic League countered with the billboard message "You know it's real: This season, celebrate Jesus. Merry Christmas from the Catholic League."

Such conflicts are rarely resolved so equitably. As the battling billboards suggest, in the United States Christmas seems to hold a special place in the religion wars. For years, talk show hosts and Christian conservatives have been decrying "The War on Christmas," which, they charge, manifests itself in challenges to creches in public spaces and the replacement of "Merry Christmas" by the greeting "Happy Holidays."

ABOVE:UnfilledfromtheAntSeries(spirillfality),1988-1989, a stillfromDavidWojnarowicz's 1987AFireinMyBelly,whichexpressedrageoverreligiousindifferencetotheAIDScrisis.

LEFT:JerryBoyle,HolierThanThou,2003.Thesignincludes a messagefromtheartist: "I wasbroughtupCatholic. I rememberbeingsevenandgoingintothedarkconfessional boothforthefirsttime. I kneltdown,andmyfacewasonlyinchesfromthethinscreen thatseparatedmeandtheonewhohadthepowerto condemnmeformyevilways. I was scaredto death,forontheothersideofthatscreenwasthepersonayouseebeforeyou:'

A different kind of issue arose in 1994 when artist Tom Sachs participated in a Christmas window display at Barneys, the upscale department store. He contributed a satirical creche in which the three kings were replaced with Bart Simpson figures, the Virgin Mary with Hello Kitty, and the star over the stable with a McDonald's logo. Following a phone campaign against the work, initiated by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights (the same group that sponsored the Christmas billboard and led the protest against the Wojnarowicz video at the National Portrait Gallery), the work was removed.

On its face, this controversy appears to be a simple conflict between believers and a nonbeliever, but in fact the situation is more complex than that. Sachs is a known "bad boy" artist, also responsible for Prada Death Camp (1998), a scale model of a concentration camp created from a Prada box, and a work involving live ammunition that got his dealer Mary Boone arrested. However, with his Hello Kitty Nativity he had a specific critique in mind. The work expressed his concerns about the commercialization of Christmas, which, if presented in a different format, might have found a very sympathetic hearing among his critics.

This raises an important point about religion/art controversies. Rarely do they actually involve attacks on religion itself. Rather, the altering of religious symbols allows artists to highlight the distance between religious ideals and the practice of religion in contemporary society.

This appeared to be an element in a more recent controversy involving a work displayed at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, by sculptor Jerry Boyle. Titled Holier than Thou, it was installed in front of the school's Memorial Union in 2003 and consists of a bronze bust of a grimacing Catholic bishop whose pointed miter hat resembles a penis. The work provoked a lawsuit against the school on the grounds that it conveyed an impermissible state-sponsored message of disapproval of the Catholic faith and religion. (This

was an interesting twist on the more familiar Establishmentclause argument for removing religious symbols because they condone religion.) In the end the lawsuit failed and the work remained on site for its allotted year. Throughout, the artist remained vague about his actual intentions, while many of his supporters drew a link between the work and the ongoing pedophile scandals in the Catholic Church.

In OtherCountries

Critiques of religious institutions are not confined to the United States, though they become considerably more dangerous when undertaken in countries without our constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Since the end of the Soviet regime, Poland's Catholic Church has become increasingly powerful. There have been a number of cases of artists censored, or even put on trial, for works that involved the desecration of religious symbols. In the public art arena, the most notable is that of Katarzyna Kozyra, who created a photo work titled Blood Ties (1999) that was to be displayed on billboards in cities throughout Poland. Intended to highlight the suffering of women brought about by the religious nationalisms at the heart of the Kosovo war, this work presented images of naked women, one with an amputated leg, lying on a Red Cross or a Red Crescent. These

were the immediately recognizable symbols of the Christian and Islamic charities offering relief to war casualties.

Following a clergy-instigated campaign against the billboards, Kozyra agreed to the effacement of the religious symbols, thereby avoiding the fate of her countrywoman, artist Dorota Nieznalska, who was convicted in 2003 of violating the nation's blasphemy laws for exhibiting a video that mingled images of a crucifix and male genitalia.

All of which argues for a little perspective in relationship to our own culture wars. While artists in the former Soviet bloc risk imprisonment when they run up against the Church hierarchy, and religious dissenters in Muslim countries may be courting death (which is the penalty for blasphemy in Pakistan, for instance), in the United States, art/religion conflicts generate more heat than fire. These conflicts are part of the complicated process in which Americans hammer out their identities and social roles. Allowing a place for that to happen may be one of the important functions of public art.

ELEANORHEARTNEYis a contributing editor to Art in America. Her books include Postmodernism; Defending Complexity: Art, Politics, and the New World Order; Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art; and Art & Today.

TomSachscreatedHelloKil/yNativity,1994,fora Christmaswindowdisplayat Barney'sdepartmentstorein NewYork.Theworkwasremovedasa resultof pressurefroma phonecampaign initiatedbytheCatholicLeagueforReligiousandCivilRights,whichalsoledthecampaignagainstWojnarowicz'svideoattheNationalPortraitGallery.

and

Dylan Mortimer and Mohammed Ali use the irreverence of the edgiest contemporary art styles to express their profound faith.

JON SPAYDE

Religion, with its emphasis on pretty uneasy relationship with in contemporary culture, art included. tradition, has a the latest styles Much church art, including public art, wavers nervously between a comforting traditionalism and an attempt to be of the momentsomehow. (The cringe-inducing attempts of religious authorities to "reach the youth" by, say, text messages from Jesus suggests that this nervousness is well founded.)

The work of two young public artists suggests, on the other hand, that very radical contemporary styles can work powerfully to convey religious messages-as long as the artist is equally passionate about the style and the message. For Dylan Mortimer, a seemingly irreverent conceptualism serves a deeply held conviction about the nature of the religious quest. For Mohammed Ali, the power of the Qur'an's challenge to our complacency is perfectly conveyed by the energy and color of graffiti art.

Prayingin Public

In the fall of 2008, visitors to Manhattan's Tramway Plaza Park at 59th Street and Second Avenue were invited, in a particularly cheeky way, to pray in public. Kansas City artist (and pastor) Dylan Mortimer installed "prayer booths" in the park, in phone-company blue, with kneelers, a praying-hands logo instead of a Baby Bell insignia, and the word "Prayer" substituted for "Telephone."

Within, there was an instruction panel indicating how to kneel and fold the hands, and a warning: "This device exists to facilitate and control prayer in public space. Improper use may result in a penalty or fine. Please avoid the booth if you are sensitive to or feel threatened by actions that are religious in nature."

The faux-officialese, with its nervous care to avoid offending secular sensibilities, shows up in other Mortimer works, too: his alarmingly orange "Bible dispenser," for example-a copy of the sort of kiosk that contains real-estate-listing pamphlets or Learning Annex catalogs. The outside bears a triangular warning logo with an exclamation point, and "Caution/Cuidado: Religious content may be encountered inside." The orange covers of the Bibles inside the dispenser bear the san1e warning.

And there's a digital print from 2002, "Caution: Interacting with the Homeless." In the flat, saturated colors of airline emergency instruction cards, a man stands with a shopping cart packed with belongings and a Bible in his hand; another man sits on a park bench, also holding Holy Writ. "Interaction with the homeless may result in discussions of a religious nature. If you are sensitive to religious or spiritual topics, avoid interaction with the homeless."

"Coming from the perspective of a person of faith," says the artist, who is also the lead pastor at Kansas City's Rivercity

Community Church, an inner-city congregation, "I find it interesting to see how people in our culture are pressured not to acknowledge that they have spiritual or religious connections. I want to step into the messiness of what it would be like if you didn't have to hide your beliefs."

It's a message that Mortimer sends in the most un-churchy visual vocabulary imaginable. The "cool" comes from his training at Kansas City's Art Institute and the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in Manhattan, from which he graduated in 2006; the interest in public signage was the result of an undergraduate

34 semester in Britain. "Seeing foreign road signs for the first time jolted me out of my familiarity with signage and struck me with the immediacy of the communication that signs provide," he says. He put up temporary, and illegal, signs in Bristol, including several near an Anglican church. They said things like "Prayer Allowed: 40 yds." and "Some Sacrifice May Be Required" above a black-on-orange crown of thorns.

Mortimer had been attending Rivercity Community Church for a few years before going to SVA; on his return to Kansas City, he was asked by Rivercity's departing pastor to take over the pulpit. But Mortimer the artist isn't proselytizing for the Christian faith-as he explains it, he's engaging with the reality

ABOVE:MohammadAlicompletedWriUngontheWall,2010(www.writeonthewall.co.uk) in frontofa live,ticketedaudienceof450people in Birmingham,England.Poetsperformed whileAlipaintedthemural-withitsmessagesofunity,peaceandlove,andbirth,life,and death-insideTheBirminghamRepertoryTheatre.ThispaintingwaspersonalforAli;he created it a fewmonthsafterthedeathof hisfather,anda monthbeforethebirthofhis firstson.BELOW:Ali'sTruth,2009,KualaLumpur,Malaysia.Theword"truth"iswrittenin Arabic,English,andJawiscript,anArabicalphabetadaptedforwritingtheMalaylanguage.

of people's lives, a reality that often includes faith, doubt, and the search for truth. The search is the main thing, he believes, that ties together his artistic and pastoral vocations.

"I told my friends in the art community that I was going into the pastoral stuff, and I was expecting them to be skeptical," he says. "But all of them-one hundred percent-said 'That's awesome.' And the people I respect most on the spiritual side are willing to do the same thing that artists do: question everything. Both art and religion are ways of mining for truth."

His current work is insouciant in a whole new way: fusions of hip-hop culture and religion, including rhinestone-studded "bling" jewelry that reads "Jesus Christ, God!" and "Ble$$ed" and "Who Created Yo Ass?" The materialism of the milieu doesn't deter Mortimer. "I get it that people in poverty sometimes express liberation through material things," he says. And the frankness of hip-hop returns him to the values implicit in the sign pieces. "In hip-hop, there's total permission to express things directly," he says. "There's no sense of 'This is what I believe but I'd better not say it out loud.' I find that really compelling."

AerosolArabic

Hip-hop and religion? They've found a seamless fusion in the work of British artist Mohammed Ali. Of Bangladeshi heritage, the Birmingham-born Ali-who sometimes prefaces his public talks with a tongue-in-cheek apology for not being the heavyweight champ-started out as a straight-ahead hip-hop/ graffiti kid. But he traded in the indecipherable and hermetic wildstyle for a wildly colorful muralism-with-a-message on urban walls that typically picks a single crucial, uplifting word or phrase from the Qur'an-"Unity" or "Knowledge," "Purity" or "To Him We Belong, To Him We Shall Return"-and renders it in a surging swirl of Arabic calligraphy and in English, too, with very legible but arabicized Roman letters. The works began as bright bursts of wisdom, guidance, and optimism on the brick streets of Britain's iconic gritty, industrial city.

If the "message" of much graffiti and graffiti art is an assertion of the artist's bravado and brilliance, Ali is on a different path, and he has been since he returned with passion and conviction to his familial Islamic faith as a college student.

"My coming to faith in Islam was a gradual process," he says. "No flash of light. I simply became disillusioned with the life I was leading and began asking myself, what is the purpose of my existence? What is my duty as a human being?"

He worked as a graphic designer in the advertising and videogame industries, an experience that only deepened his desire to live to a higher purpose, to find a third path that was neither 'ff.

commercial art nor art for art's sake. Informed by his faith, he began message-muralizing-with permission-on the walls of local businesses.

Today he's an international artist who's done mural commissions in London, Toronto, New York, Melbourne, and Dubai and exhibited his spray-painted works-on-canvas all over the world. He teaches his art in schools throughout Britain and lectures on how art can ease the strains inherent in multicultural societies. Whatever street cred he may have lost by his wholly legal-and now sought-after-spray can practice (and his legible lettering). he hasn't wavered in his appreciation for hip-hop culture, or his conviction that it is reconcilable with Islam.

"I realized I could live my life being inspired by both hiphop and Islam, without feeling there was any kind of conflict or clash between them," he says. "Hip-hop is an expression for all. White, black, anyone can pick up a mike or a spray can. You don't have to go to dancing school to learn break dancing. This is very parallel to the openness of Islam. Islam doesn't have a hierarchy, or even levels of righteousness; anyone can pick up the Book and it's the same message to everyone. The verses of the Qur'an call out to the average person and ask him or her to ponder them."

That, of course, is exactly what the words on Ali's murals do. His advertising and graphic design experience survives in his assertion that he's "in the same game as a billboard or poster designer. I've got two seconds to communicate a powerful message to the guy who's driving by or passing on the train."

And although there are purist graffiti artists who consider his Roman lettering "wack"-that is, insufficiently wild-his Arabic usually fascinates them. "Mention Arabic calligraphy to any graffiti artist and their eyes will light up," he says. "Graffiti artists have a true passion for letters, how they interlink, and the balance between straight lines and curves. When they see Arabic or Chinese calligraphy they feel the letters practically dancing in front of them."

Of course, the point of lettering in what Ali calls "aerosol Arabic" goes deeper than beauty, deeper than graff art for graff art's sake. It's about the sacredness of Arabic-all translations of the Qur'an are understood to be mere interpretations of the text-and it's about the message. "I'm trying, " says Ali, "to bring forward messages that we definitely need in our lives."

JON SPAYDE's book How to Believe: Teachers and Seekers Show the Way to a Modern, Life-Changing Faith (Random House, 2008 ).

Ali'sThirsttorChange,2009,Melbourne,Australia.Commissionedbythecityof Melbourne during a drought,themural'smessageofpreservationcomesfroma sayingbytheProphet Muhammed:"Donotwastewater,even if youarebefore a flowingriver:'

DavidBestandTimDawson'sTamp/aofForgivanass isa vehicleforremembrances and blessings,promises,andforgiveness.Attheendofthefestival,theTemplebumsandfalls totheground.Seemoreatwww.burningman.com.

(Rev. Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping); a massive, open-framework Gothic cathedral (the Conexus Cathedral by the Conexus Village); a giant inflatable Ronald McDonald, reimagined as a golden Buddha (Ronald McBuddha by the Church of Renault); labyrinths, goddesses, crosses, and Balinese kecak. All are freely appropriated and playfully reconceived on the blank canvas of the Black Rock Desert.

The art of Burning Man is often explicitly interactive and draws upon the vast well of human culture and history. Every symbol ever imagined is liable to turn up in the Black Rock Desert and be gleefully reshaped into new and hybrid forms. In so doing, participants make and remake social meanings and inscribe shared identities. Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called this bricolage-the process by which we all cobble together our belief systems about the world based on the sensory, cognitive, cultural, and historical ingredients we have at hand. Art participates directly in this process and engenders feelings of spiritual connection by immersing us in immediate creative experience.

Religion itself is a nexus of bricolage. Religions are simultaneously defined by fixed boundaries and traditions, yet are also malleable and adaptive witnesses to historical and cultural change, with dynamic and ever-contested meanings overlaid upon one another, century by century, in response to changing contexts. Through art, symbol, and ritual our perceptions of the sacred are produced out of the cultural and natural elements available to us, as we tell ourselves stories about what it means to be human.

Art summons forth deep layers of human experience, where the sacred and the creative intersect with the realm of imagination, profoundly textured by the natural and cultural worlds around us. Through direct and embodied creative encounters, the sacred oozes out beyond the convenient borders of religious traditions. Burning Man's raw artistic pastiche decenters "the spiritual" by questioning comfortable assumptions about the nature and location of religious practice. In calling for immediate and participatory engagement, the art of Burning Man challenges participants to confront a sense of inspiration and the extraordinary.

LEE GILMORE is the author of Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010) and teaches religious studies and anthropology at California State University, Northridge. See burningman.com for more on the Burning Man festival.

Taking It to the Streets

"Southern California" is shorthand for pleasant, year-round climate, stunning landscape, and traffic gridlock. Here, in stereotype, we mindlessly navigate freeways, isolated in our cars. It's no wonder some of the most innovative SoCal public artworks address the street as public space.

How Many Billboards: Art in Stead was an extensive program of artists' billboards, bus tours, panels, and lectures in the spring of 2010 organized by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House in Los Angeles. MAK Director Kimberli Meyer, who says that "art should occupy a visible position in the cacophony of mediated images," commissioned 21 artists to design billboards for display across the L.A. basin. Most billboards juxtapose desire and need. The best works in Art in Stead explored billboard conventions, questioning underlying messages in commercialized space.

Ken Gonzales-Day examined the beauty standard, contrasting profiles of an antiquarian black marble statue and a dark-complected man. The antithesis of advertising, his project

questioned history, culture, and public image.

The Urdu script in lauren woods' billboard was exotic in a landscape of English and Spanish signs. Highlighting cultural dominance, woods' work was, for most, unreadable and alienating. Her art required non-Urdu readers to engage Urdu-speakers in order to decipher the content: a bucolic landscape poem.

Lively questioning of public convention is core to many public initiatives. The L.A.-based duo Owen Driggs noticed working sign spinners and freewheelers across the southland. They saw convention-breaking art in the activity ofnontraditional athletes who sculpted the shared built environment.

Inspired by this "instrumentalization of the body," Owen Driggs curated Performing Public Space Tijuana (PPS Tijuana}, an 11-artist exhibit of temporary public projects. Entering the Tijuana community in partnership with Mexico's La Casa de! Tune! gallery, Owen Driggs displayed a spectrum of artists harnessing their bodies and social practices as art throughout the border city, tied to an art gallery exhibition.

Public display is well established in Tijuana, as gang enforcers routinely display severed heads on city bridges. PPS Tijuana contested this dominance in March 2010 by breaking pedestrian expectations, not municipal laws.

Nancy Popp's untitled Tijuana piece was one of the most intriguing efforts. Climbing a utility pole near the international border she broke street, age, and gender conventions to obtain

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new views. Popp spent five minutes about 12 feet above the sidewalk before police took her away for questioning. She was eventually released, and her public climb was front-page news in local papers; the gallery exhibition was not.

Time, Space, and Water

Unexpected use of public space was central to 2010's Glow, Santa Monica's biannual oceanfront arts festival. Drawing on Paris's Nuit Blanche, minus the surrealism, Glow activated a section of Pacific beach on September 25, 2010, with 20 commissioned artworks.

Glow is a framework, emphasizing a temporal and communal art experience over repeat views of static work. A civic event co-created by the City of Santa Monica's Cultural Affairs manager Jessica Cusick and artistic director Marc Pally, Glow connected local and international artists, commercial interests, security forces, and funders in a remarkable publicprivate partnership. Raising millions to commission truly ephemeral works, Glow drew an international audience to its beach nocturne.

Steve Roden's Coast Lines was among the most successful efforts. Inspired by Santa Monica's locale, Roden sited two large screens at water's edge. Fluid, hand-drawn images limned the coastline of the eastern Pacific. One screen traced the coast south from the Santa Monica Pier to the tip of South America. The other tracked to the top of North America. Projecting locally and thinking globally, Roden beautifully parsed the connection of time and place and water's edge.

In nearby Culver City, Judy Starkman worked with water and connection. The artist and athlete was inspired by the municipal pool, calling it a "southern California public space with an incredible diversity of swimmers, from former Olympians to handicapped elders." Her Secret Life of Swimmers project comprises diptych portraits of strangers in pool attire and street clothing.

Starkman's documentation of a truly local community drew the attention of Christine Byers, Culver City's proactive arts administrator. She is working with Starkman to produce Secret Life street banners for summer 2011 as a public art project.

Unlike many municipalities, Culver City is building. Percentfor-art funds accrue from Sony Pictures' constant set construction.

ABOVE:DuringthePPSTijuanaexhibit,pole-climbingNancyPoppmadefrontpagenews. BELOW:FallenFruitplanted21fruittreesontheU.S./MexicoborderforPPSTijuana.

Byers's office also works with developers, including the national chain Westfield Malls. They commissioned three permanent works for the local mall, including David Trubridge's lovely and insouciant Neptune's Necklace. In Southern California, even mall walkers get great public art.

House and Home

Shopping or driving, SoCal artists are inspired by public policy and personal impact.

Kim Stringfellow was drawn to the effects of Southern California's 1938 Small Tract Act, which encouraged desert settlement. Jack Rabbit Homestead, her artist-initiated project, is a road trip, audio tour, web exhibit, and book documenting the encampment 80 miles from LA.

In 1947 huge lots were available for low prices in California's remote Wonder Valley. Services and support were equally low. Today many homesteads have only jackrabbits as occupants; few have been repioneered by humans. Stringfellow's tour of abandoned and reoccupied homesteads

explores domestic aspirations and failed dreams.

Southern California is a temporary home for many immigrants coming to study. One of the newest images of home will be built high above the University of California-San Diego footpaths. Do Ho Suh's remedy for student homesickness is Fallen Star, a domestic yard surrounding a simple house. Seven stories up and cantilevered over the Engineering Building's roofline, the house is a precarious monument. Suh balances complex engineering and simple charm in his secluded public art.

Fallen Star is the largest commission to date for the Stuart Collection, the university's contemporary art entity. This public art program does not leverage a percentage for art; instead, budgets are raised around artists' specific proposals. Envied for the ability to truly curate a commissioned public art collection, director Mary Beebe and her committee wisely prefer quality over quantity. Fallen Star, the eighteenth work in the 30-year-old collection, will break ground when campus closes in summer 2011.

Memory and Memorials

SoCal is often accused of being without memory, erasing buildings, art, and faces with ease. The Los Angeles County Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, however, finds reason to remember and celebrate the Bob Hope Patriotic Hall. Noted muralist Kent Twitchell won the historic opportunity with the County Arts Commission.

Twitchell will honor the legendary Helen Lundeberg by reinterpreting her WPA murals made for the hall. Free Ballot and two other 1942 works are lost, known only in documentation. Twitchell is designing tributes to the three lost Lundebergs, calling them "monuments to American cultural heroes." They will be unveiled in 2012 when the hall, a registered state historic resource, is renovated.

The Los Angeles Unified School District also links public history and public art. The Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools-a K-12 educational complex on the site of the Ambassador Hotel, where Kennedy was assassinated-opened

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ABOVE:Documentation of HelenLundeberg'sFreeBallot, aWPAmural.MIDDLE:Sunand Wyatt'slnspirahonPark.BELOW:1972HirokazuKosakaperfonnanceatPomonaCollege.

in autumn 2010 with several interior art commissions. Artists May Sun and Richard Wyatt chose the public face of the Ambassador Hotel property for their work Inspiration Park. A truly public asset of the school district, the park provides quiet space for students and the general public outside the closed campus.

The below-grade treatment unites image, text, and atmosphere under a canopy of sycamores. Encouraging contemplation of Kennedy's legacy, one stone wall holds excerpts from his speeches. Another displays quotes from other champions of social justice. An erect stainless steel plate and blue glass floor reference the glimpse of light hope provides on our darkest nights.

Institutions: The future of History

Public schools and institutions rarely commission cuttingedge public art. But with visionary partnerships, SoCal museums are making community art on a grand scale within the museum community.

Pacific Standard Time (PST) is the Getty Research Institute's initiative to connect arts institutions across Southern California. This fall, 50 cultural entities will host exhibitions featuring postwar artworks from SoCal, bracketing a 10-day performance and public art festival in January 2012.

Ann Philbin, director of the UCLA Hammer Museum, describes PST as "one big extended museum, with freeways as museum halls." Michael Govan of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art notes the artists' works "continue to inspire, marking L.A. as a truly international city."

Ten years in planning, PST has inspired regional museums to embrace their heritage. It Happened at Pomona: Art at Pomona College 1969-1973 examines temporary, ephemeral, and performed works in the college town. Documentation shows Hirokazu Kosaka's untitled 1972 performance presaging Matthew Barney and James Luna. Kosaka, the L.A. arts worker and Shigon Buddhist priest, will create a new public performance and sculpture at Getty Center in 2012.

Orange County Museum of Art will mount State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, an exhibit that includes documentation of Chris Burden's pre-punk injury performance, in which he literally took a bullet for art in Santa Ana. This early performance along with body and ecological actions by others in SoCal are the unacknowledged precedents for social practice art. Many vibrant exhibitors working in the 1945 to 1980 time frame of Pacific Standard Time are teaching, curating, and impacting the conversations of contemporary public practice.

Creative and civic, Southern California's public art and artists find opportunity amid challenges of finances, policies, and resources. Undaunted, we echo Maya Angelou's classic poem:

"Does my sassiness upset you?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Does my sexiness upset you? Still I'll rise."

HELEN LESS I CK is an artist, public art activist, and consultant. Her artworks have been experienced in the United States and Europe. She has managed public art efforts across the country,

Cityof MissedOpportunities InSanDiego,powerstrugglesproduce blandpublicart-with somenotableexceptions

ANNJARMUSCH

Contemporary public art in San Diego is subject to an ongoing tug-of-war between visionary artists and curators and, unfortunately, blatantly hostile public officials. Providing one end of the spectrum is the renowned, site-specific Stuart Collection, which keeps evolving at the University of California, San Diego, and tantalizes and enriches minds every day. At the other extreme are government percent-for-a rt projects that a re slapped on urban design mistakes along the downtown waterfront like so many flashy Band-Aids.

As in many cities, citizens are divided in their desire (or tolerance) for public art, an unsettled condition that has enabled elected officials here to make a lot of noise, rally public opposition, then kill proposals by artists highly respected in the art world. These battles are embarrassing, according to more than one public art expert interviewed for this article.

The ongoing recession and budget crises have, of course, added fuel to these rants (art vs. police, fire, and potholes), enabling government entities to put percent-for-art requirements for capital improvement projects on hold, regardless of the works' significance, prominence, or public support. As this is written, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders is asking the city council to suspend 15 art projects in various stages of development-including commissioned works by Donald Lipski, Einar and Jamex de la Torre, and Roy McMakin-for the city's new central library. This suspension effectively calls the city's 2004 Public Art Master Plan into question.

But even as the public art program manager Dana Springs has been forced to hit the pause button, she's optimistic the program will benefit from scrutiny. "The mayor's call to examine the public art policy is completely logical in the current cultural and economic climate," Springs said in a prepared statement. "It's my hope that this is an opportunity to make some changes to the public art policy that will result in more innovative, more meaningful, and more relevant public art for the citizens of San Diego and visitors to our city."

In fact, the city hasn't added much public art to its streets, bridges, and beaches at all during the past three years. Moreover, residential projects in redevelopment areas, such as the forest of high-rise towers built during downtown's recent boom, are

exempt from the city's public art program for developers. A prime example of this public and private neglect is "Tweet Street," a display of artist-made birdhouses in the obscure greenbelt called Cortez Hill Park, which few people ever see. Even more troubling, questionable art is trotted out in prominent places. The San Diego Unified Port District's underwhelming Urban Trees sculpture series, for instance, is installed annually in concrete planters along the concrete embarcadero hugging San Diego Bay. Made by a host of artists, these works wither amid the handsome tall ships and yachts moored nearby. "It's one of the most abysmal public art projects I've ever seen," says Leah Ollman, a San Diego-based art writer for publications such as Art in America and the Los Angeles Times. "The money would have been much better spent on real trees."

The Port District, alas, is a repeat offender when it comes to settling for mediocre art. Worse, its commissioners have crushed controversial projects by Nancy Rubins, Vito Acconci, and Ellsworth Kelly. Instead, they embrace bland, patriotic bronzes: the bigger tl1e better. Thankfully, J. Seward Johnson's 25-foot commemorative sculpture of an iconic World War II sailor kissing a nurse was only on temporary loan on port tidelands-but for a whole year!

A place to see a mixed bag of public art, if you have time and you're not too distracted by pat-down body searches, is San Diego International Airport. This art program has

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improved since the airport management became independent of the Port District several years ago. Pieces relevant to travel and flying by Anne Mudge and the de la Torre brothers spark the imagination without hitting one over the head, and more quality work is anticipated as part of a Terminal 2 expansion.

'Tm more excited about the future than the past. Good stuff is coming [to the new library and airport]," says Mary Livingstone Beebe, the director of the Stuart Collection, who refers to her service on local public art selection committees as "my 30 years of trying."

One of Beebe's frequent companions on those panels is Hugh M. Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. A curator and skilled fundraiser, Davies has advanced public art through the museum when other avenues caved. The museum commissioned monumental works-an LED-illuminated sign by Jenny Holzer and an installation of bronze blocks by Richard Serra-for its newly added downtown location.

Ollman has a theory about San Diego's public art tugof-war. "The history of public art in San Diego is a history of missed opportunities," she says. "That's a very predictable outcome when you have the combination of a beautiful natural environment, which people want to protect, and a fairly conservative mind-set. Together, those spell caution. Together, they spell very tame, very bland art."

There are exceptions, of course, and one of the most vibrant and meaningful can be found under the San DiegoCoronado Bridge. The explosive political and cultural murals of Chicano Park represent true public art, the raw expression of community outrage and pride to protest the bridge's massive destruction of part of Barrio Logan during the 1960s. No percent-for-art program needed when passion is the catalyst.

ANN JARMUSCH, the former architecture critic for the San Diego Union-Tribune, writes about art, architecture, and historic preservation for local and national publications.

CLOCKWISEFROMTOPLEFT:TerryAllen,Trees,1986,StuartCollection,UniversityofCaliforniaSanDiego(detailonright).NancyRubins,PleasurePoint,2006,MuseumofContemporary Art. TeddyCruzandMarcosRamirez,PumpStaUon #4,CityofSanDiego.TimHawkinson,Bear,2005,StuartCollection.BruceNauman,VicesandVirtues,1988,StuartCollection.

LosAngelesandItsMurals

AninterviewwithPatGomez,publicartsmanager

REBECCABANYAS

The city of Los Angeles is known for its murals-but their creation is now burdened with complex legal, generational, and restoration issues. To better understand these challenges, I talked with Pat Gomez, public arts manager for the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for the past 10 years. Well-known for her mural expertise, Gomez manages the murals programs and oversees the city's art collection and Private Arts Development Fee progran1s. Gomez is also a visual artist whose work was recently featured at Avenue 50 Gallery in Los Angeles.

Rebecca Banyas: How many murals are in L.A.?

Pat Gomez: Impossible to say. The mural movement is organic. They continually spring up and many have disappeared or are endangered. Our database contains records of 1,700 murals, reflecting 1,300 still in existence. Of these, about 600 were funded by the city or are on city property. Most murals are on private property-you know, individual businesses with a painted mural on the exterior. Hundreds of these murals have been created without city funding or review, so we don't have records for them.

RB: What are the most pressing issues for murals in L.A.?

PG: Vandalism, preservation, and signage codes. It's a dynamic time for murals here. It's an important, populist art form that offers a great snapshot of the cultural and political landscape of our city. But there are major challenges.

RB: Let's start with a little historical context.

PG: The mural movement exploded in L.A. during the 1960s and 1970s, largely fueled by the politics of the times. Chicanos were organizing, protesting the Vietnam War and bringing social issues to light. The work of the Mexican mural masters was highly influential. Since the 1970s, Judy Baca and the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) have been leaders in developing community murals.

RB: So political and cultural activism spurred the contemporary mural movement?

PG: Yes, and then it morphed into a mural movement that flourishes today in every ethnic and cultural community in L.A. Murals reflect the hopes, heroes, and concerns of our city.

RB: Let's shift to vandalism.

PG: Graffiti and vandalism are the biggest threats. Our murals are aging. Many don't have protective anti-graffiti coatings, and as they age, they fade and end up looking neglected. We recently completed a condition survey of 400 city-funded murals. Of those, 291 were still in existence, and 240 had graffiti and other condition issues. We were able to identify 40 murals with viable coatings, enabling the city to remove graffiti on those.

RB: I like to think that public art and muralism are deterrents to graffiti.

PG: Indeed. But several forces have contributed to the reverse here: Murals have become targets for graffiti and vandalism.

RB: Why?

PG: As murals age, they can lose their relevance to a community and its young people. Kids see a deteriorating mural that doesn't have meaning to them. When the street art/graffiti culture exploded in the 1990s, taggers realized that a tag on a mural doesn't get removed as quickly as on a blank surface. Painting over graffiti on a work of art can involve navigation of artists' rights, so it's more complicated to remove, and graffiti removal on an uncoated paint surface is more costly. There has also been a decline in youth arts programs, which had, in the past, given kids the opportunity to participate in mural-making and feel a sense of ownership of the artwork.

RB: I understand that most murals are not publicly owned, so do not fall under the city's jurisdiction to maintain. How should preservation of our murals be addressed?

PG: There is a continuous need for city efforts. Last year the city applied anti-graffiti coatings to 51 murals and cleaned graffiti 183 times. But there is a lot of opportunity for community, property owner, and private involvement. This is already happening with Neighborhood Councils restoring pieces. Establishing maintenance responsibility is absolutely essential. Education about the processes is key, too.

RB: Explain the signage code situation.

PG· Sadly, murals got caught up in the City's attempt to control the proliferation of super-sized advertising. In 2002, the City changed its sign code to ban what they called "mural signs." A "sign," according to the code, "draws attention to itself and contains a message." A "mural sign" is a sign with a

third caveat-it "contains less than 3 percent text." The city's Department of Building and Safety, charged with enforcing the revised code, initially worked in close cooperation with Cultural Affairs to differentiate artwork murals from "mural signs."

RB: And then?

PG: There was litigation with signage companies claiming discrimination, because artwork murals were being reviewed differently than signage. In 2007, City attorneys determined that art murals fall under the mural sign prohibition, and the First Amendment prohibited us from using content to differentiate between the two.

RB: So how does this affect new murals?

PG: All "mural signs" are now prohibited on private property. This means a business cannot get a permit to paint a mural on the exterior of its building. Art murals are allowed on public property, but new neighborhood/commw1ity murals, so plentiful on private property all over the city, are now not allowed.

RB: What now?

PG: The sign code needs to be changed so that murals can be

PatGomez.

implemented on private property without ilie fear of a fine and order of removal. Our department is actively working with the other City departments to identify solutions to this dilemma.

RB: Final thoughts, Pat?

PG: This is a pivotal moment in the evolution of muralism in Los Angeles. We are navigating diminishing public budgets, aging artworks, complex legal issues, artist and community concerns, and the desire for opportunities for young artists. There is tremendous love for this art form, and the city council has sponsored motions to address these concerns. The voices of L.A. groups such as SPARC, the Murals Conservancy, and In Creative Unity (ICU) Art will be essential as we search for solutions. Regardless of the difficulties with a shifting creation and support paradigm, artists continue to paint murals in Los Angeles. We are working to support their efforts.

REBECCA BANYAS, a Los Angeles-based public art consultant, works with public municipalities, transit agencies, artists, and communities nationwide to integrate works of art into public environments. She has lectured and taught workshops nationally

Sculptural Shangri-La Reaching lnhotim, Brazil's enchanted art park

To visit the Centro de Arte Contemporanea Inhotim (CACI) in Brumadinho in the hills of the Brazilian hinterland is an act of committed art pilgrimage. Located about 40 miles from Brazil's third largest city, Belo Horizonte, this utopian private gallery and museum for Brazilian and international artists is composed of open-air artwork, rare fauna, and a tropical savanna botanical garden containing 3,500 species, all set in a 178-acre landscape of forest, lakes, and hills developed from proposals by landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx. But more than that, Inhotim is also a twentyfirst-century Versailles for contemporary art, with more than 500 artworks by 100 artists of over 30 different nationalities presented in an outdoor art park with sculpture in the landscape and architectural pavilions.

Inaugurated in September 2004 and opened to the general public in 2006, Inhotim was created through the philanthropy of Brazilian businessman Bernardo Paz, who funded the art collection with his mining fortune. Paz started buying art in the 1980s, but the gestation of Inhotim stems from the purchase of his first contemporary piece: True Rouge (1997), an installation by Tonga, is a series ofred elementssuspended glass bottles, netting, and liquids. This purchase led to Paz's focus on large-scale installations that necessitated the construction of purpose-built galleries to exhibit the

collection. The galleries developed into an institution that now employs more than 500 staff members, including the curatorial board of Allan Schwartzman, Jochen Volz, and Rodrigo Moura, who constantly monitor art fairs, galleries, and exhibitions to maintain the international context of the Inhotim collection.

The Collection

The ambition and scale of the operation at Inhotim is impressive. The center's unique capability has been to create a series of architectural pavilions to display its collection through long-term shows in museum exhibition format. Currently on extended exhibition in the Galeria Prai;:a is Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet (2001), a sound installation of a recording of a choir performing Thomas Tallis' Spem in Ali um of 1573. Another work exhibited in a pavilion is Helio Oiticica and Neville d'Almeida's Cosmococa (1973), described by the artists as series of living "sensorial environments" that recreate the experience of 1960s happenings. Here visitors can relax on hammocks to watch films and listen to music.

Chris Burden's Beam Drop Inhotim (20081-one of Inhotim's commissioned sculptures-uses 71 steel beams, sourced from scrap yards and showing the color, rust, and marks of previous usage. These beams were dropped in place

over a period of 12 hours from a 45-meter-high crane in a haphazard vertical arrangement into a cement bed. Piscina (2009) by the Argentine artist Jorge Macchi is a magical-realist joke-a functioning swimming pool resembling an address book, complete with A-Z alphabetical tabs as steps into the water. Jarbas Lopes's Troca-Troca (2002)-translated as "titfor-tat" or "swapping parts"-consists of three Volkswagen Beetles whose monochromatic panels were reconfigured in a harlequin patchwork of red, yellow, and blue, and which move to different locations around the site.

The commissioned pavilions include an exceptional work by Doug Aitken. Sonic Pavilion (2009) might in another context be a modernist astronomical observatory. Inside the circular chamber the glass wall becomes mysteriously opaque close-up and a central glass-capped borehole disappears 200 meters into the earth. At the bottom are microphones recording, relaying, and amplifying the ethereal seismological soundings: humming, moaning, creaking, groaning, and occasionally silence from the geological underground realm. Matthew Barney's De Lama Lamina (2004-2008) is set in a eucalyptus forest and presents two linked steel and mirrored-glass geodesic domes containing a sculptural tableau of a tractor caked in red soil holding a white resin tree in its metal jaws.

Bernardo Paz is married to the Brazilian artist Adriana Varejiio and the pavilion dedicated to her work, opened in 2008, is a hard-edged concrete box with pools, bridges, ramps, stairs, vertical voids, and roof terrace designed by Rodrigo Cervifi.o Lopez intended to link architecture to the body. The interior features the existing sculpture Linda do Rosario (2004), a partially destroyed white tiled wall with disturbing organic human interior, and an installation of five azulejos, traditional blue and white Portuguese ceramic tiles evoking the visceral and corporeal, pleasure and sensuality. Celacanto Provoca Maremoto (2004-2008) is a mural covering all four walls of

DeLamaLamina,2004-2008,isthefirstpennanentinstallationMatthewBarneydeveloped fora museologicalinstitution.Init, a tractorliftsa resintreeundertwogeodesicdomes.

the first story, suggesting a distorted Hokusai wave; a panel, Panacea Phantastica (2003-2007), presents 50 drawings of hallucinogenic plants; Passarinhos-from Inhotim to Demini is a series of tiled benches on the roof terrace made with domestic-size tiles that contain images of birds. Other works at Inhotim have been commissioned and purchased from artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Doris Salcedo, Cildo Meireles, Vik Muniz, Ernesto Neto, and John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, who created two figurative sculptural reliefs depicting people from the surrounding community.

Celebrating Brazilian Culture

Inhotim, which attracts 160,000 visitors a year, has established a credo of education and social development with the Department of Inclusion and Citizenship and the Labat6rio Inhotim, which works with the adjacent town ofBrumadinho. It has also created a program involving music as well as art for teenagers, designed to raise awareness of their cultural heritage. The ever-present culture of Brazil is music and dance, but as the country's contemporary art scene is being discovered through events such as the Bienal de Sao Paulo, Semana de Arte do Rio in 2011, and ArtRio in 2012, Inhotim is an impressive and specifically Brazilian philanthropic model for the pedagogical and theatrical presentation of artists' works in an enchanted art wonderland.

JEREMYHUNT is publisher and editor of the Art & Architecture Journal and a media commentator specializing in art in public places. He is a consultant for the art and architecture program for Guimaraes 2012, European Capital of Culture, Portugal.

Beta Test: Innovationin administrationat San Jose,California'sNorman Y. Mineta Airport

San Jose, the legendary capital of Silicon Valley, is California's third largest city and the tenth largest in the United States. It's home to the corporate headquarters of Adobe, Cisco, and eBay, and major facilities of Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, and Lockheed Martin. Apple and the Googleplex round out Silicon Valley's bright lights. Smaller stars of twenty-first-century technology abound, ready for their close-up and shot at fame.

It stands to reason the City of San Jose's Public Art Program would commission innovative tech-based projects for the city's new airport. But the real star of the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport art program is in public art management.

Masterpiece:The Master Plan

In the United States, municipal percent-for-art uses a formula of pennies on the dollar spent on above-ground construction to fund artists' commissions. In contrast, airport public art funding typically comes from airport user fees. The users, including tenant airlines, on-site car rental agencies, and chain restaurants, recognize public art as an enhancement for paying customers. Airport art funding has a flexibility befitting the client-based attitude of the businesses paying user fees.

The visionary leadership of Barbara Goldstein, San Jose's public art program director, reified by Mary Rubin, airport art program manager, resulted in a new and flexible commissioning partnership. The visionary airport public art master plan posits allied and evolving innovation in art and technology as the starting point.

Created by the Rome Group in close partnership with the city's creatives in diverse industries, the plan reflects Silicon Valley's innovative attitude. It provides artists a framework to use new technology and to change and diversify commissioned artworks as technology changes. Permissive, not proscriptive, the plan encourages partnership between industries, artists, and the multiple communities using the airport. Artists, graduate students in public art, critics, and anyone who opines that administrators are not creative must study San Jose's Airport Public Art Master Plan (www.sanjoseculture.org).

Artists always stretch boundaries, explore, and think of ways to break the system. The meta-commission of the public art master plan is its "art activation infrastructure," by the technical team of Gorbet+Banerjee (G+B). The plan stretches the very canvas of the public art experience through its visionary infrastructure design for future commissions; it exceeds and extends twentieth-century art support systems and challenges artists to field-test media art.

Enteringthe Digital Valley

In Silicon Valley, tech professionals and. media artists talk about data: digital representations of phenomena and formula. It is not a substitute for experiencing stuff, but a new perspective: the stream of stuff-data. This leads to engaging data content, sometimes at the expense of physical and visual experience.

An installation called eC/oud, by Nik Hafermaas, Dan Goods, and Aaron Koblin, is a phenomenological cluster of small rectangles of switchable privacy glass. Sited high above the concourse, the glass squares alternately appear clear and clouded. The amorphous cloud is as compelling as twinkle lights, and as resonant. Real content lies in the pedestrian level where meteorological data from around the globe are displayed on a flat screen. Is it cloudy and cool in Moscow, Russia, and lightning in Moscow, Idaho? That is interesting. The wired cloud sculpture is two dimensional, a shadow of the global perspective NOAA satellites deliver in real time.

More artistically successful, funny, sinister, and meaningful is Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen's Dreaming F.I.D.S. The artists took the phenomenon of airport surveillance to absurdity. An aquarium stocked with live fish and submerged plants graces the concourse. Nonhuman life is remarkable in any U.S. airport, whether a lost sparrow or foraging rat. The aquarium draws harried travelers to its calming presence. The fish, however, are working a sting. Come close and they capture your image for display inside their tank. It is a delightful entrapment: Curiosity earns you a perp walk for the underwater set.

Equally playful and smart is The Wunderkammer by SuttonBeresCuller, a three-person collective. Their alternative curiosity cabinet comments on the pace of technological innovation. Witty and multifaceted, this cabinet recycles material from the past century when motherboards were platesize and camera lenses were larger than your thumb. Old computers were harvested and cut like so many quilt squares. Silicon chips and cathode ray tubes were sorted and rewired into dimensional trees and folk art computer "bugs." The Wunderkammer is a quilted diorama of used tech posing as landscape and furniture, drawing in geeks, grans, and kids alike.

The team ofBanerjee, Gorbet, and Gorbet (BG+G)contributed prototype artworks as well as the infrastructure. Convey, over the baggage conveyor belt, projects text and emoticons on luggage when an arriving plane disgorges its hold. Experienced by a visitor without checked bags, it is a slight graphic. Maybe the anxiety of waiting for your luggage adds to the work's frisson. This platform may improve if a future commission includes a creative writer, typographer, or graphic novelist as a contributor.

BG+G's Chronos and Kairos is much more successful. For this project the team included Margaret Orth, a weaver with a sense of physical texture and sculptural presence. This ceiling artwork consists of rows of articulated mechanical claws, opening and closing in a rhythmic pattern interrupted by a momentary clutch of jaws. It is mesmerizing and slightly scary, like the experience of the open ocean or time itself.

Similarly, Camille Utterback's Shifting Time tames technology to create an experience exceeding its data. Blending screens of twentieth- and twenty-first-century San Jose, this mural-sized projection is smart. The images split and weave, shift between color and black and white, invoking loss and possibility, site and memory. Activated by passing travelers, Shifting Time's technology truly serves the artist's vision.

The current temporary artworks, on display for two years, are great accomplishments. But better than these parts is the whole: artists and industry truly collaborating on a living public art platform.

HELEN LESSICK is an artist, public art activist, and consultant. Her artworks have been experienced in the United States and Europe. She has managed public art efforts across the country, and consults and writes on civic art issues from Los Angeles.

ABOVE:BenHookerandShonaKitchen'sDreamingF.lO.S.isa newtakeontheaquarium. MIDDLE: InDreamingF.lD.S.,surveillancesoftwaretracksbothfishandtraveler. BELOW:Banerjee,Gorbet,andGorbet,withweaverMargaretOrth,ChronosandKairos.

Community, Industry, and Creativity

Revelations in the Ruhr Valley, 2010 Capital of Culture

Expecting an unremitting industrial landscape, urban to its last brick, I was pleasantly surprised by the Ruhr Valley. Th.is elongated segment of geography, named the European Capital of Culture for 2010, which stretches east to west with a scattering of towns, is by no means relentlessly urban or constantly industrial. Instead, it .is wrapped in bosky layers and ruffs of green with autobahn and efficient rail hammering away against a dense backdrop of trees seemingly there to defy definitions of a city. Why was I only noticing it for the first time, having visited before? Perhaps it was my desire, brought on by the Year of Culture, to do greater justice to the nature and the culture of the place. Th.is return visit would surely be enriched by a better understanding of the valley's historic, economic, and social context which might even offer a reason for the trees. The "European Capital of Culture" accolade effectively made th.is visitor a hostage to curiosity.

While I took in many arts projects in the Ruhr region, the main focus of my visit was to experience projects created by the artist Jach.en Gerz. In his constant quest to excite creativity in others and return it to the denied, he delved into the very composition of the Ruhr region. For more than five years, he painstakingly built an intricate and extensive infrastructure of people, buildings, and funds, which together would make each project a reality and eventually add perfectly to this Capital of Culture's cultural harvest.

2-3Streets

For its European Capital of Culture year, th.is postindustrial region, considered less than fashionable, hosted Jach.en Gerz's major project, 2-3 Streets, which he hoped would trigger "a unique social process aimed at transforming not only the streets but also our understanding of art." In Duisburg, Millheim on the Ruhr, and Dortmund, the artist discovered, negotiated for, and found sponsorship for 60 empty apartments. Each apartment was offered free for one year to applicants who believed tl1eyhad something to offer the location, whether they were artists or not.

More than 1,400 people applied, and 78 were accepted as participants. In exchange for free rent, the participants contributed a regular written record of their experiences on free laptops. Visitors, permanent residents, and neighbors of the scheme were likewise encouraged to provide ilieir own texts, which togetlier with those of tl1e participants were published in full in a two-volume set of books at the end of the year. The scale of the undertaking boggles the mind.

The book includes the diaries of the 78 participants, the reflections of their neighbors with whom they were interacting, and the comments of the passing observers (even as a critic I was invited to contribute). This unedited colossus of words will surely be one of the most revealing pieces of anthropological material ever gained from a single art project. Or will it? Will its multilayered prose, written with knowledge of its future publication but with no chance of revision, be a more poetic revelation of the Jach.en Gerz experiment in living and his belief in universal creativity? The confrontation between hard cultural facts, even where they contain social prejudice, and creativity is a common theme for Gerz-one that provides a dynamic to his vision and a shape to the outcome of any given project. One must read the final publication to discover

whether the texts consist of amiable postcards or a series of theses on the continuity of immigration in the Ruhr, but I imagine they will also inevitably expose the essential danger that must lie within a successful participatory art project. I believe the book will be a revelation of the risk of an open invitation to write for posterity: Surely it will disclose the scope of the unexpected and even the downright alarming-a constant theme and linchpin of Gerz's work.

My brief but fascinating conversations with a number of the invited tenants suggested the great range of talents gathered together for 2-3 Streets. In Mtilheim, Viennese artist Charles Kaltenbach.er cheerfully proclaimed his giddy take on evolutionary progress and his designated role as the "education pet of the house," the "house" being a 20-story vertical street named Hans-Bockler-Platz 7. Kaltenbach.er busily explained Picasso to a pleased hairdresser, who as a result is now understood by her academic and no doubt rather superior daughter currently studying art history. Meanwhile, h.is temporary apartment bristled with the intriguing but benign paraphernalia of an artist's studio, which was no doubt a curiosity for his neighbors. Similarly ensconced, Rudi Jorg Fromm, a Swiss writer and environmental activist, notionally retired, was absorbed in strategies for community involvement and became somewhat of a star of the local media, explaining the project to a wider world.

When I was there, these participants and a host of others were preparing for a Visitors School to which the public was invited, to talk to all those involved with 2-3 Streets and to contribute to the store of texts and therefore extend the "community of authors." One artist, Anna Wiesinger, created new and easy conversations with permanent residents in Dortmund by giving them small canvases in their favorite colors. Yellow, the color of the famous Dortmund football team, is universally popular, and green, the holy color for the Qur'an, is ever popular with the immigrant Turkish community. Wiesinger's gentle inquiries could not have been planned and were incalculable in the evolution of creative neighborliness.

ABOVE:Publicwritingdayfor2-3StreetsattheMuseumOstwall,DortmundLI-Tower.BELOWLEFT:VienneseartistCharlesKaltenbacher in October2010.Helivedinoneofthefree2-3Streets apartments in MUlheimanderRuhrandcheerfullytookontheroleof "educationpetofthehouse'.'BELOWRIGHT:NicoleSenske of Dortmundcontributesinwritingto Gerz's2-3Streetsproject.

From the evidence gleaned during my minimal stay, it is little wonder that Jochen Gerz had far-reaching support throughout the Ruhr region for this massive project. Each of the three designated Ruhr towns amply manned its office with a lively team of project managers and staff to assist the artist as he masterminded every new chapter of the year's work. The feeling in the Ruhr was one of cooperation; people listening to each other was the very medium of the work.

European Promise

In spite of its magnitude, 2-3 Streets was not the only engagement one could have with the work of Gerz in the Ruhr district. This prolific artist has a longstanding enterprise in

the town of Bochum, where, since 2005, his Square of the European Promise has collected nearly 14,000 signatures of those who subscribe to the idea of a united Europe. Several hundred of these are already inscribed on the floor of the tower of the nineteenth-century Christ Church, which was bombed in World War II. The remainder of the signatures will be laid into the new paving of the landscaping around the tower.

The whole endeavor is overseen and promoted by a valiant Ayla Wessel, representing the German and Turkish cultural center of Bochum. She explained that some who decide to sign up to the idea of a united Europe become nervous about what they have committed to, and for some the notion of Europe suddenly becomes highly complex.

ABOVE:SquareoftheEuropeanPromiseincludes a goldenmosaiclegendlistingGermany's perceivedenemystates,1929-1931.Ontheflooraresignaturesofthosewhosubscribe to a unifiedEurope.BELOW:Visitors atSquareoftheEuropeanPromise,ChristuskircheBochum.

The ironic twist to Square of the European Promise is the decorative context of the Gerz piece: a golden, mosaic legend on the interior walls of the tower, installed between 1929 and 1931, listing Germany's perceived enemy states. Many of the names are European, but the slightly ludicrous inclusion of Panama and Peru under the P's appears amusing only until you remember the very serious reason you have accepted the invitation to sign up for a peaceful, unified Europe. It is no joke, and only an artist in this situation and in this place

can conspicuously deal with it. His pledge hangs in the air and dares us to consider yet another item in our normally suppressed audit of threats.

Other Ruhr Highlights

In contrast to the participatory projects of Gerz, the 2010 Ruhrlights: Twilight Zone festival of light installations celebrated another scale of creativity. Entirely visual, vast, and in close communion with the region's architecture, it rendered the spectator a tiny speck of audience in theatrical awe. After progressing along the river for 20 days, the festival culminated in an exhibition in Duisburg. Lighting techniques have become increasingly sophisticated, and I saw from a preview that this show dared to be beautiful while using most of them.

Artist Peter Kogler controlled 10 projectors to drape a beguiling, glittering net of white moving lines over 350 meters of steps, making their architectural permanence evaporate. On the opposite bank, skirted with redeveloped warehouses, a starkly modern Jewish Community Center and a Dani Karavan-designed park hosted a number of other temporary installations. In Karavan's highly inventive take on new space, new, temporary architecture constructed from translucently lit water tanks and geometric projections played further havoc with perceptions of permanence and perspectives of distance. Made by Modulorbeat and Mader Stublic Wiermann, respectively, these installations confounded the real while Karavan's green space disappeared into the black night. In Ruhrlights, curator Dr. Stike Dinkla demonstrated sensitivity mixed with a keen understanding of the setting and a need for the spectacular.

So what now of my Ruhr Valley investigations? Only on my last day was the real nature of the Ruhr properly

disclosed to me in a quick visit to a photographic exhibition entitled Ruhrblicke. Hung in a new gallery nestled among the preserved and stately buildings of a former coal mine, now converted into a breathtaking Ruhr Museum complex, the exhibit answered many questions. Here all facets of the industrial, agricultural, social, and domestic life of this region were exhibited, from the famous and now familiar, perfectly framed portraits of ancient industrial plants by Bernd and Hilla Becher, to the mute interiors of Candida Hofer. Furthermore, landscapes by Ji:irg Sasse illustrated (and therefore confirmed for me) the odd but attractive Ruhr characteristic of constructing massive, but apparently wellmannered, industrial installations next to farmland: grazing cows, slim smokeless chimneys, Eiffel-high pylons, and eager woodland all in the same frame. Capping it all is a black-and-white photographic essay by Elisabeth Neudi:irfl illustrating the invasion of redundant, contemporary buildings by energetic vegetation.

The Ruhr Museum itself-with its preserved coalwashing plant, gigantic machinery, and artifacts of an earlier industrial time-nearly laid my curiosity to rest. But only nearly, especially after I spotted a woodland sculpture park adjacent to the museum. But there was no time; I was due to run for the plane. The 2010 Ruhr Capital of Culture was overly generous with its portions of culture. Fortunately, I had one more corridor of calming green to travel through on my way to the airport, to ponder the inventions I had seen and to marvel a little. Thinking of Gerz's European Promise, the scenic contrasts between mighty metal and waving trees now felt more like an answer to my questions and no longer a mystery.

ISABEL VASSEUR, visual arts activist, writer, and one-time Arts Council of Great Britain's public art evangelist, curates and produces major public art events and commissions. Vasseur also writes for a variety of publications, runs ArtOffice publication's list, and lectures extensively.

ABOVEandMIDDLE:GruppeModulorbeat,Undded,Johannes-Corputius-Square,Duisburg. BELOW:PeterKogler,Ohnelite/,madewith10projectorson350metersofsteps,Duisburg.

CONFERENCEREPORT

PublicArt 360

Asheville, North Carolina• September 23-25, 2010

Following its first successful convening in April 2008, the second Public Art 360 conference, "Professional Development for Artists and Administrators," was held September 23-25, 2010, in the arts haven of Asheville, North Carolina. Founded by public art consultant Janet Kagan of Chapel Hill, the southeast regional gathering was presented by Asheville's public art program with support from the North Carolina Arts Council. Held at the Crest Center nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the conference featured scenic surroundings and southern hospitality at the locus of America's renowned arts and craft community.

On the first afternoon, attendees had the option to tour nearby arts centers including the Penland School of Crafts, Black Mountain College Museum, and Asheville Art Museum. An evening welcome dinner at the Crest Center and Pavilion (pictured right) offered a much-needed face-to-face regional gathering (a.k.a. reunion) of arts professionals-art administrators and artists alike. As the sun set, the creative buzz of activity was high as regional artists put the finishing touches on sitespecific installations on the Crest Center grounds.

Two session tracks were offered for artists and arts administrators; both tracks offered a 101 practicum tailored to those new to the field. Session topics included the nuts and bolts of public arts administration, public art academies, red tape, and contracts. Led by veteran public arts professionals including Barbara Goldstein, Thomas Sayre, Jean Greer, and Larry Kirkland, the gatherings brought national lessons to a local and regional context. Sessions offered sample project problems; for example, where to site a proposed public artwork in a new private development. Attendees collaborated in small groups to propose options, then presented their solutions. Also, through one-on-one conversations, administrators were

offered a refreshing introduction to a new generation of talent ready to "go public."

Bill Ivey, founding director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University and former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (19982001), gave the keynote address. It was an inspiring call to action, the battery-recharger so many arts professionals increasingly need. Impressively, he had tailored his presentation to specifically address public art. A resident of Nashville, Tennessee, home to a robust public art program, Ivey described Alice Aycock's Ghost Ballet for the East Bank

he said. "Public art has improved the quality of life everywhere."

Still, Ivey recognized the budget challenges facing all arts programs, noting that "public art is like a canary in a coal mine ... [these are] challenging times, for sure." But reiterating the importance of public art he said, "Let's take a step back, take a fresh look. How do we establish lasting value?"

Referencing his book Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights (University of California Press, 2008), Ivey laid out his six-point "Cultural Bill of Rights." Because public vitriol was high (and worsened in the fall 2010 elections), Ivey emphatically defined the chief tenet of the Bill: "the right to the prominent presence of artists in public life, through their art and the incorporation of their voices and artistic visions into democratic debate."

Ivey ended his address with an assignment: "Conduct your survey of visual art assets in the public realm. This will be the basis for a new kind of cultural plan and require a new set of partners," a proclamation of fortitude in light of continued cuts in arts budgets.

The generational mix at Public Art 360 was evident as a new crowd of Asheville artists came to hear Mel Chin present the closing address. Chin described his ongoing work in post-Katrina New Orleans and The Fundred Dollar Bill Project (www.fundred.org). Chin's continued commitment to addressing local lead problems and broadening the focus within a national lens is to be commended. The outcomes of his dedication are hitting pay dirt.

More regional public art convenings need to happen and Public Art 360 is a leading model. Attend the third Public Art 360 conference, "ReGenerating Our Cities Through Art," September 2011, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (www. publicartcollaborative.com).

LIESEL FENNER is the public art program manager at Americans for the Arts in Washington, D.C.

The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice 2

New York, New York• October 9-10, 2010

Around a thousand people gathered at the Cooper Union School of Art this past October to attend "The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice 2." The event, curated by Nata Thompson of Creative Time, assembled an international group of artists, curators, and critics who presented projects intended to inspire, provoke, and challenge ideas about social practice art. The days were divided into themed sessions including markets, schools, regional reports, food, geographies, governments, institutions, and plausible art worlds. Creative Time's format for the event-each session featured a keynote speaker and strictly timed solo presentations-is noteworthy as it organizes a massive amount of personality and information in a way that is within most people's attention span.

New this year was Q&A time following each session. Despite Nata Thompson's request to the audience to not pose questions with a five-minute preamble or life summary, people could not help themselves. Many of the Q&A's fell flat, and the time would have been better spent with another artist presentation. One exception was the session on geographies, which had interesting discussion between session leaders Trevor Paglen, Dinh Q. Le, and Regina Jose Galindo.

This year's second annual Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change was given to Rick Lowe of Houston, Texas, in recognition of Project Row Houses, an artist-initiated, community collaboration that started with the preservation of 22 houses in Houston's Third Ward. Today the neighborhood integrates low-income housing, social and community services, green spaces, offices, and gallery and performing arts spaces. It is an international model for how artists can create change in neighborhood infrastructure. Lowe, who was introduced by actor and activist Wendell Pierce, commented that "change is not just for change's sake; it has to have an objective. And to me, coming out of an activist background, the notion of change has to be attached to justice."

Project Row Houses achieves social justice, Lowe added, because "in the process of honoring a place, you give it a sense of dignity And with dignity, then a place can sustain itself and continue to perpetuate the honor it deserves." He told stories about people who grew up at Project Row Houses and the success they have achieved, and how some of them have returned to the community. He described the project as creating "an illustration of a path through which people can find their own way. If they can find their dignity, it sets them on a path where they will get the justice they deserve."

Laurie Jo Reynolds was the only artist invited to present at the first and second summits, and was the keynote for this year's "Governments" session. Last year, she captivated the audience with a presentation about her project Tamms Year Ten, which started as a poetry project for prisoners at the supermax prison in Tamms, Illinois, and evolved into a successful, grassroots effort to create positive changes to operating procedures and living conditions at the prison. This year, she focused on her new work with sex offenders and their families.

Reynolds seems to be in the early stages of this work, formulating what her direction will be. She is meeting with offenders and their families, looking for common denominators, making observations about their lives. The reaction to this year's presentation was different, and not only because it was not a

ABOVE:RickLowe,recipientofthe2010LeonoreAnnenbergPrizeforArtandSocialChange. BELOW:ArtistLaurieJoReynolds,whoseworkwithsexoffenderscausedmixedreactions.

presentation of a "completed project" with a distinct narrative. I found her choice to work with this group compelling, but in speaking with colleagues and listening to conversations afterwards, I learned that the feeling was not universal. While they were not bothered by her work with Tamms's prisoners last year, some were troubled, even irritated, by her choice to work with sex offenders. For me, the discomfort was a sign that Reynolds is pushing boundaries and expectations of artists' roles in public practice. It will be interesting to follow this project over the next few years.

There was an increase in the number of presenters whose artworks were made in reaction to varied art communities or specific art world practices. I found those projects less interesting than work by artists who were engaged with other communities, such as the Danish collaboration Superflex's project Guarand Power; Amy Franceschini, who takes community gardening to a new level; and Laura Kurgan's Spatial Information Design Lab. Creative Time has generously posted videos of each presentation on its website, www.creativetime.org.

RENEE PIECHOCKI is an artist and public art consultant Jiving in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

CONFERENCEREPORT

My City's Still Breathing

Winnipeg, Manitoba• November4-7, 2010

Unless you are a big fan of the cold and snow, Winnipeg may not be your first choice for a November getaway. Last fall, however, more than 250 creative minds from Canada, the United States, Europe, and Australia braved the frigid temperatures to participate in "My City's Still Breathing: A Symposium Exploring the Arts, Artists and the City." Together, they offered an array of perspectives and experiences that, when sparked by the impressive caliber of speakers, ignited stimulating dialogue and debate on every conceivable connection point between artists and the cities in which they are born, live, create, die, and imprint their legacies.

As a public art administrator I sought to engage in conversations related to my field, but this symposium had a life of its own and my best-laid plans were interrupted by big doses of inspiration and introspection. The keynote lectures pushed and prodded and at times made my heart pump in dizzying thuds. It was more than a symposium; it was a revelation.

Although Australian advocate Jon Hawkes rambled a bit on culture as a necessary pillar of sustainability, he referenced the endurance of primitive cultures and stressed the importance of citizen participation in the arts, not just passive observation. He noted that "[as] the embodied set of values that any city has ... culture must be brought to bear on all city planning and policy making." Furthermore, he called cities out for trying to "be" something other than what they are, saying that "government's primary responsibility is to its constituents no one else. Stop trying to be some other place and do things for some other audience."

Matthew Lennon, director of civic art with the Houston Arts Alliance, reminded us that public art is "about place, not object." It is art that is informed by the city and informs the city. He spoke about the city as icon and art as experience, suggesting

that we should all be working toward an "internationally recognized collection of experiences." Lennon also warned against the installation of CRAP-culturally regimented artistic product-or plop art.

I was particularly impressed to learn that the city of London (UK) employs a cultural economist, Allan Freeman. His job is to interpret the economic impact of culture, a job that he, as a self-confessed numbers geek and art enthusiast, loves. Freeman's theory is simple: Art has a social impact, which has a civic impact, which has an economic impact. If we understand cities as hubs to facilitate exchange, and as places where cultures meet, then cities are places where meaning is created. Public artists interpret these new meanings and help us understand ourselves in the context of our city. Their art serves as a way to reorient ourselves within our surroundings time and time again.

Beyond the wealth of knowledge and insight provided by the keynote speakers, this symposium's success was the result of its local orientation and global relevance. Winnipeg took a risk. It opened itself up for us to explore, dissect, examine, and critique it as a place. Artists shared their bittersweet city-love, administrators argued the need for plans, planners argued the need for art, and through it all we saw ourselves, we heard our voices, and we thought about how we could create and enhance those same vital connections between the arts, artists, and the cities in which we live.

"My City's Still Breathing" (artsforall.ca) reminded me that cities are people and people are inherently creative. Cities are suffused with possibilities even as they carry forward past legacies. As artists and public art administrators, we must strive to generate experiences that celebrate, encourage, and spark an ongoing exchange of ideas that create new meaning in our cities. That's what Winnipeg did.

RACHAEL SEU PERSAD is the superintendent of the Public Art Program for the City of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

ROADSIDE AMERICA: ArchitecturalRelicsfrom a Vanishing Past

John Margolies

Ki:iln, Germany: Taschen GmbH, 2010 255 pages, $39.99 (hardcover)

Remember that lumberjack statue gathering dust on an old highway, or the classic dining car diner with glass brick and blazing neon, rotting in the industrial side of town? John Margolies has traveled more than 100,000 miles photographing these roadside attractions and gathering ephemera like colorful hand-drawn maps and black-and-white postcards oftomist traps.

Treating these outrageous statues, signage, and architectmal oddities as valid pieces of art, Margolies has chronicled these colossi and led a movement to preserve the vanishing landscape of America's first renaissance on the road. Margolies' collection of photographs and postcards is easily one of the largest in the world of America's roadside, and Taschen wisely steered clear of cluttering the pages with too many images or kitschy design dingbats. The result is Margolies' best slides in breathtaking reproduction to make even the most cautious homebody want to rev up the Chevrolet to see the U.S.A.

The title recalls the 1992 guidebook The New Roadside America, and the subsequent website (roadsideamerica.com) that attempts to cover all the country's bizarre attractions. While the offbeat sense of humor of the earlier book inspired a generation of highway art aficionados, Margolies takes a different tack with evocative, almost romantic light, portraying even the X Po Adult Theatre of Wilmington, California, in a nostalgic glow. Roadside America cleverly juxtaposes earlier images that the New Deal's Farm Secmity Administration's photography program commissioned, such as Dorothea Lange's photo of a giant dog-shaped refreshment stand in 1939 Oregon, opposite a Margolies shot of the Dog Bark Park Inn Bed & Breakfast cabin in modern-day Idaho, in which tourists sleep in the belly of the pooch.

Some of Margolies' photos have a static, timeless, and almost documentary feel, as though his goal was to catalog these pieces before the bulldozer had its way. In fact, he purposefully shot the structures with no automobiles to avoid dating the images. The lack of people in the book (except for the final image of the author's back) gives an eerie post-apocalyptic sensation that these classic attractions may indeed be part of the vanishing landscape of Americana.

ERIC DREGNI is the author of Weird Minnesota (New York: Sterling, 2006) and Midwest Marvels (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

ALL THAT W E

SHARE

ALLTHAT WE SHARE: How to Savethe Economy,the Environment, the Internet, Democracy,Our Communities, and EverythingElse That Belongsto All of Us

Jay Walljasper

New York: The New Press, 2010 288 pages, $18.95 (paperback)

Artists became individuals when they began signing their paintings. In recent decades, a new Renaissance has dawned: a different sort of paradigm shift in which the we of eons ago joins the me of more recent centuries. Art is for the artist, sure, but (as public artists know) it's ultimately for the public-a core of the commons philosophy.

In All That We Share, Jay Walljasper, one-time Utne Reader editor, presents success stories, horror histories, the prickly problems of now, and the sweet solutions of a reachable future in this "field guide to the commons." Deft editing transforms the book from a static anthology to a live-action manual to (in the words of the subtitle) Save the Economy, the Environment, the Internet, Democracy, Our Communities, and Everything Else That Belongs to All of Us. Kind of sums it up.

Perhaps the idea of the commons appears threatening. Entrepreneur Peter Barnes sees it realistically, noting the central problem: The real threat comes from a self-made utopia enjoyed by a few people in the private sector and driven out of control by corporate economics. He proposes an upgrade of capitalism, adding a device to protect what belongs to everyone. "These twin engines-call them the corporate and commons sectors-would feed and constrain each other. One would cater to our 'me' side, the other to our 'we' side," creating a balance." Variations of this idea thread throughout the book. Rather than revolution, the continued existence of the commons is a matter of evolution.

Walljasper includes examples of commons-oriented artists: DJ Spooky's sampling experiments that rename the world's My Music folder, or Lily Yeh's community art park that kicks the hellishness out of a Philly ghetto. There are the copy left efforts of Creative Commons, and the culture bank ofwikis. But this is not really an art book, unless you take the long view: Privatization limits the possibilities of public culture.

As R. Buckminster Fuller said, "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Sounds like an artist's job.

DAN WAHL is an artist, writer, teacher, and mentor who lives at Windfall, a country place near Northfield, Minnesota.

MEMORIAL MANIA: Public Feeling in America

Erika Doss

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010

458 pages, $35.00 (hardcover)

At first glance, there's little to connect the spontaneous altar of flowers and teddy bears at a roadside crash site to the juried and capitalized public-art memorial for war dead. The former is a democratic stake to claim personal remembrance or grief; the latter a ponderous monumentalizing of public events.

In spite of their apparent differences, according to Erika Doss, both are expressions of Americans' "obsession with the issues of memory and history," as well as our "urgent desire to express and claim those issues in visibly public contexts."

For Doss, our national memorial mania waxes as any claim to a unifying narrative of American history wanes and is "driven by heated struggles over self-definition, national purpose, and the politics ofrepresentation." By staking a claim to a memory of, say, witches burned at a stake or cancer survivors (to name just a few of Doss's examples), we also stake a claim to competing stories and values, and a collective sense of shame and anger.

In this comprehensive, exhaustively researched, and copiously illustrated treatment of the subject, Doss, an American history scholar, explores a variety of conflicting emotional motivations behind our memorializing instinct; her chapters, titled "Grief," "Fear," "Gratitude," "Shame," and "Anger," give some indication of her concerns. Along the way, she writes lucid explorations of landmarks like the Vietnam War memorials, the colossal Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore sculptures, and the proposed 9/11 memorials-as well as lesser-known monuments.

A clear writer and temperate rhetorician, Doss turns what might otherwise be a fairly predictable romp through porno "textual" analysis into an interesting, insightful, and surprisingly gentle critique.

Doss has much to offer practicing public artists. In particular, her discussion of efforts to commemorate the victims of a Duluth, Minnesota, lynching provides an interesting call to embrace complexity in memorializing the past. Doss seems to encourage us to cast off the reductionist categories and reject the distancing from and fixing of history inherent in the construction of a memorial and the memorializing instinct. After all, memory is only as useful as its impact on our choices for tomorrow.

JOSEPH HART is associate editor of Public Art Review.

DESTINATION ART

Amy Dempsey

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010

272 pages, $29.95 (paperback)

Contemporary art can no longer be contained by the boundaries of the gallery. Beginning in the 1950s, artists sought to blur the line between art and reality by diluting the monumentalism of so-called fine art and establishing a broader sense of place by taking art out of the designated viewing area and into public environments and natural spaces. As structures and sculptures bloomed like exotic invasive species everywhere from urban Chicago to the Mojave Desert, revitalized notions of viewership flourished within communities of outsider artists, environmental activists, architects, and junk collectors as land art went from curiosity to destination.

Artists and critics have deployed practice and theory to explore this trend away from the gallery. But surprisingly, few comprehensive, intelligent, and stylish guidebooks exist to assist us in finding and viewing such works. Writer Amy Dempsey fills this void with this tour of the 200 "most important" modern art sites on planet Earth.

Pedants will no doubt find "important" artworks omitted from this guidebook, but most travelers will be satisfied with Dempsey's exploration through menageries of sculptures, monumental dwellings, and manipulated land forms. Fifty key art destinations from around the world are featured in substantial essays offering brief histories, vivid site descriptions, and stunning full-page photographs. Among the many influential artists included are Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, James Turrell, Constantin Brancusi, and Nancy Holt. Following the catalog is a wide array of travel information including site addresses and contacts, as well as an accessible survey of additional public works of art, making Destination Art an essential guide for international connoisseurs and adventurous spirits alike.

With just shy of 300 glossy pages and an academic format, Destination Art fits somewhere between a quality coffee table book and a cumbersome Lonely Planet guide to destination art. While Dempsey's prose is intelligent and serious, it is also inviting to the uninitiated. The book's engaging illustrations allow for absentminded leafing, and with its plethora of practical information, it may also serve as an inspiring locus for the reader's next journey.

KAISA CUMMINGS is a a student at Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois.

Amanda Boetzkes

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 240 pages, $25.00 (paperback)

The instrumental view of nature as resource-as a" standing reserve" for human needs and desires-has long prevailed in the West. And still does, despite the counter-nanative of romanticism. But neither, according to Boetzkes, provides us with a viable ethic in our relations with the earth. For that we need a means of recognizing the earth's unrepresentability, its temporal and sensorial excess, its difference. Earth art, beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the present, is that means; it provides both an opportunity for what Boetzkes calls "receptivity" and a "threshold" for (nonobjectifying) experience.

That experience, though, is not of or in "nature," a term that Boetzkes avoids because of its instrumental connotations. Instead, earth art brings us in contact with "elementals," the uncontainable constituents of the earth-water, wind and atmosphere, light and land, time-which exceed the limits of representational form. "By providing a surface of visibility for elementals," Boetzkes argues, earth artworks "mobilize an ethical contact with natural activity."

While the book's title expresses its philosophical/theoretical focus, Boetzkes makes her complex argument through the specific work of two dozen artists (and includes photographs of each work discussed). She effectively connects her thinking on those artists to theorists Merleau-Ponty, Craig Owens, and, most significantly for the key issue of difference, Luce Irigaray.

Specific chapters are devoted to "the nature of site," to Spiral Jetty, to the "immersive situation" (James Turrell, Chris Drury, Olafur Eliasson), to the body's role in earth art (Ana Mendieta, Susan Derges, Jackie Brookner), and to the role of water (Ichi Ikeda, Basia Irland). The discussions of Turrell's, Mendieta's, and Irland's works are exceptional; only the flat and merely descriptive section on Ikeda is disappointing.

While Boetzkes provides dense and rigorous readings of nearly all the artworks she examines, more importantly she succeeds in explaining an intriguing sort of ethical contact with the earth and art and earth art. Her emphasis on the withdrawal from representation, on the recognition of plenitude, on the sensorial engagement with elementals-these (and more) suggest to the reader a satisfying and neighborly way to rub up against the earth.

CAPPER NICHOLS lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Borrego

Springs, California.

IN PLAIN VIEW: 30 Years of Artworks Illegal and Otherwise

Dan Witz

Berkeley: Gingko Press, 2010 222 pages, $39.95 (hardcover)

When Dan Witz was obtaining his art education at prestigious Cooper Union in the late 1970s, realist painting was like the proverbial fart at a dinner party: People of taste pretended it didn't exist. This fact was enough to hook the iconoclastic Witz. From his first exhibition, however, featuring hyperreal portraits of pasty, overweight, middle-aged men stripped to the waist, it was clear that Witz would appropriate painterly realism to his own ends.

Eventually, Witz brought the medium to the streets. His first series featured gorgeously rendered, life-size hummingbirds painted on doors and walls in Manhattan. Since then, Witz has consistently pushed the boundaries of street art, using humor, his considerable skill, and his enduring irreverence to pioneer new territory.

In Plain View is a compendium of Witz's compelling projects and has much to recommend it. The text is refreshingly straightforward, the bulk ofit being an interview conducted by Marc and Sara Schiller of tlie Wooster Collective instead of the usual inscrutable scholarly essays. Witz's engaging personality and humorous self-insight are perfectly suited for the questionand-answer format.

The rest of the volume is given over to luscious full-color, full-page illustrations that amply document Witz's work. Most of these photos are devoted to his street art. In addition to the hummingbirds in the Birds of Manhattan series, these include a wistful series of boats and, more recently, disturbing images of incarcerated (and sometimes bloody) people peering through faux ventilation grates and security bars. Witz's paintings are also represented.

At his best, Witz captures the unique blend of camp and rage that are the unlikely twin sensibilities of the punk ethos. His Lonesome Boats series, for example, portrays a fist-sized rowboat titled Lonesome, which transforms the two-dimensional steel planes of dumpster walls into beautiful expanses of water.

Witz describes the project as one of "letting go," since he deliberately chose impermanent surfaces on dumpsters and freight cars. But the series also demonstrates what is probably Witz's most radical achievement as a street artist (and the thing that sets him apart from many others in his tribe): his ability to find-or invent-beauty in the urban streetscape.

JOSEPH HART is associate editor of Public Art Review.

LUCY+JORGEORTA: LightWorks

James Putnam, Gabriela Salgado

London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010 192 pages, $49.95 (hardcover)

A chronicle of Lucy+JorgeOrta's worldwide large-scale image projections, this colorful book contains photographs of their ephemeral light art installations as they were projected by powerful light cannons. Projections took place at sites of cultural and ecological importance around the globe, including Machu Picchu, Cappadocia in Turkey, and the Chartres and Evry cathedrals in France. Concise essays by James Salgado and Gabriel Putnam further explore the context and complexities of these artworks.

THE ART AND LIFE OF CHAZ BOJ6RQUEZ

Marco Klefisch and Alberto Scabbia Bologna, Italy: Damiani, 2010 190 pages, $50 (hardcover)

This monograph documenting the career of Chaz Boj6rquez, a Mexican-American, Los Angeles-born artist, covers his early work in the Cholo gang graffiti tradition; his later signature, stylized calligraphy; and his ultimate transition to gallery shows.

GINY VOS: Singingin the Dark Jeroen Boomgaard, Daria Ricchi, Ilse van Rijn, Sandra Smets, Christophe van Gerrewey, Dirk van Weelden

Amsterdam: Valiz, 2011 180 pages, $45 (paperback), English/Dutch

This reflection on the past 25 years of site-specific works by Giny Vos includes images from light installations she created for public venues worldwide. Vos's artistic process is chronicled through an archive of 3D renderings, technical drawings, and test prototype images.

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE: EarlyWorks1958-64

Matthias Koddenberg Bonen, Germany: Kettler Verlag, 2010 192 pages, $35 (paperback)

The first book in decades to document Christo and Jeanne-Claude's early work, this volume begins with the couple's lives in late 1950s Paris. Created in close collaboration with the artists, the book presents previously unpublished works and photographs from their archives that detail Christo's arrival in Paris from his native Bulgaria as well as his relocation to New York with Jeanne-Claude.An extensive interview with the artists and a detailed chronology of 1935 to 1964 accompany the photographs.

LEO VILLAREAL

JoAnne Northrup

San Jose, CA: San Jose Museum of Art, 2010 192 pages, $55 (hardcover)

This monograph of a pioneer in the medium of LED and computer-driven light art accompanies Villareal's first major museum survey exhibition, which began in California in August 2010 and will conclude in Georgia in June 2012. The book's first section contains essays that explore the artist's response to twenty-first-century technological innovations. The remaining pages display Villareal's largescale installations with vivid, full-page, color photographs.

NATURALHISTORIES:

PublicArt by LarryKirkland

Carolyn Horwitz and Anthony lannacci, eds. Los Angeles: Architecture/Interiors Press, 2010 194 pages, $70 (hardcover)

This volume features plans, drawings, original sketches, and photographs of installations by public artist Larry Kirkland. More than 20 projects showcase his versatility in multiple media such as marble fountains, hanging sculptures, wall engravings, and urban plazas. Text accompanies the images with facts about the site-specific decisions and processes.

:E MUSEUMS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

en Jennifer Barrett

Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011 tc:: 208 pages, $99.95 (hardcover)

An investigation of the role museums play as >- sites of democratic space and centers of public g; discourse. This book explores the changing idea of the museum in relation to other public t- sites and spaces such as community cultural centers, public halls, and the Internet. Jennifer Barrett offers several case studies and ideas of how museums can engage with the public in new and productive ways.

SITE-SPECIFICPERFORMANCE

Mike Pearson

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 272 pages, $29 (paperback)

Leading theater artist and scholar Mike Pearson suggests organizing principles and innovative strategies to bring performance into new locations. By suggesting methods and exercises for a variety of locations, Pearson proposes original approaches that push theater into new contexts. Recommendations for effective models of critical appreciation and practical initiatives for conception are also included.

ART IN PUBLIC:Politics,Economics, and a DemocraticCulture

Lambert Zuidervaart

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011 352 pages, $28.99 (paperback)

NANCY SPERO:The Work

Christopher Lyon

New York: Prestel, 2010 312 pages, $85 (hardcover)

A comprehensive retrospective of the work of Nancy Spero spanning more than 60 years, this large-scale book includes newly photographed masterworks Notes in Time (1979) and Artemis, Acrobats, Divas and Dancers (1999-2001). Christopher Lyon's extensive research in Spero's archives informs his comprehensive investigation of her core principles and objectives as well as her sources and techniques.

BARRYMCGEE

Barry McGee (Aaron Rose, editor) Bologna, Italy: Damiani, 2010 176 pages, $49.95 (hardcover)

This book takes the form of a visual collage that draws upon the artist's current and past installations, photographs, drawings, and paintings. Completely devoid of text, full-page images depict McGee's early years as a graffiti artist on the streets of San Francisco. McGee transmits a tone of public address that demands his audience's response.

This book addresses the most basic questions about funding for the arts: Why should the government provide funding? What are the social responsibilities of artists and their publics? Lambert Zuidervaart challenges common assumptions about the state and the arts in democratic societies by presenting a strong case for increased arts support. Art in Public proposes a new conception of public art's role with implications for education, politics, and culture.

GAME URBANISM: Manual for Cultural Spatial Planning

Hans Venhuizen, editor

Amsterdam: Valiz, 2010 224 pages, $35 (paperback)

Hans Venhuizen, a specialist in culture-based spatial planning, addresses the needs of contemporary urban centers through largescale social games. By advancing a broad understanding of local history, heritage, architecture, and community arts, Venhuizen explains a fundamentally different way to link space to its culture. This book uses the unique lens of urban gaming to distill the true interests of those involved while simplifying the process of change.

ART & THE PUBLICSPHERE

Mel Jordan, principal editor

Bristol, UK: Intellect Journals, 2011 114 pages, $20 (paperback)

This journal's premier issue provides academics, artists, curators, historians, and theorists a platform to discuss international art practices situated in the public realm.

CONCRETE MESSAGES: Street Art on the Israeli-Palestinian Separation Border

Zia Krohn and Joyce Lagerweij Arsta, Sweden: Dokument Press, 2010

128 pages, $29.95 (hardcover)

Internationally known street artists Banksy, Swoon, Ron English, Blu, and others have created subversive artworks on the separation barrier between Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. This volume gathers images of the artists' installations as well as commentary from the artists themselves, giving another dimension to these politically charged gestures.

MAURO STACCIOLI: Sites ofExperience

Marco Bazzini, Massimo Bignardi, Maria Laura Gelmini, Mauro Staccioli Bologna, Italy: Damiani, 2009

176 pages, $65 (hardcover), English/Italian

This book documents Italian sculptor Mauro Staccioli's large-scale environmental sculptures as they were installed throughout his hometown of Volterra. Staccioli calls his abstract geometric works "sign-sculptures" that originate from close observation and interpretation of the relationship between art and the space it occupies.

MIXED USE, MANHATTAN: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present Douglas Crimp and Lynne Cooke, editors Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010

300 pages, $49.95 (hardcover)

This title documents 1970s recession-plagued New York and the artists who appropriated its run-down lofts, abandoned piers, vacant lots, and deserted streets for their own artworks.

From Gordon Matta-Clark's Day's End on a Hudson pier to Willoughby Sharp's Pier 18 photo exhibition, Mixed Use, Manhattan documents a variety of artists and media on the streets of Lower Manhattan. Includes numerous essays and a chronology of policy decisions that altered the face of New York.

JAMES MAGEE: The Hill

Richard R. Brettell and Jed Morse

New York: Prestel, 2010

200 pages, $40 (hardcover)

A companion volume to the 52,000-square-foot artwork of the same name, The Hill gives a tour of James Magee's enormous installation in the Texas desert. The work is composed of four buildings as well as sculptures made from stone, Aowers, wood, iron, and glass. Full-page color photographs detail the installation's stark presence in the Texan landscape. Essays by Richard R. Brettell and Jed Morse detail Magee's process and situate The Hill within Ma gee's existing body of work.

EMSCHERKUNST.2010: An Island for the Arts

Florian Matzner, Karl-Heinz Petzinka, Jochen Stemplewski, editors

Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010

216 pages, $40 (paperback)

This book details public art installations created for the European Capital of Culture event in Germany. Forty internationally known artists, including Lawrence Weiner, Rita McBride, and Tobias Rehberger, came to Emscher Island to create site-specific works during the summer of 2010. Following an introduction to the history of the region, Emscherkunst.2010 takes readers on a photographic tour across Emscher Island and its newest public artworks.

KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO: Guests

Bozena Czubak, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, John Rajchman, Anna Muszynska + Wodiczko New York: Charla, and Warsaw: Zacheta National Gallery of Art, 2009 168 pages, $45 (paperback). English/Polish

A collection of photographs and analysis of KrzysztofWodiczko's site-specific videoand-sound projection Guests. This project took place in the Polish Pavilion during the 53rd Venice Biennial. By animating public monuments with the projections of illegal immigrants, Wodiczko brought attention to "eternal guests" while investigating the ideas of boundaries, inclusion, and exclusion. The book begins with a lengthy interview with the artist; its latter section documents selected projects from 1986 to 2008 and includes an extensive artist chronology.

TEMPORARY LANDSCAPES

Bruno Doedens

The Netherlands: Thieme Art, 2009 192 pages, $50 (hardcover+ DVD)

This volume serves as an introduction to a Netherlands-based public art organization called SLEM (Stichting Landschapstheater en Meer). Since 1996, the group has been creating large-scale public installations, often situated on the shore of the North Sea. Past works have included labyrinths in the sand, 70 giant glass "shells," and thousands of lanterns. Through their work, SLEM seeks to place the genre "landscape-theatre" on the map while encouraging public discussion. A DVD shows the group's process of project development.

IT IS WHAT IT IS: Conversations About Iraq

Jeremy Deller

New York: Creative Time Books, 2010 180 pages, $39.95 (hardcover)

This book is the companion volume to a project of the same name by artist Jeremy Deller. It Is What It Is began at the New Museum in New York with an installation of a car destroyed by a 2007 bombing of Baghdad. From New York, the artist traveled with the car's remains across the country, using the piece to initiate civil dialogue about the war in Iraq. Throughout the road trip Deller recorded each conversation, saved notes and drawings, and photographed the project's participants. This book comprises these documents as well as transcribed conversations from his journey.

LIGHT COLOR SOUND:

Sensory Effects in Contemporary Architecture

Alejandro Baham6n, Ana Marfa Alvarez

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010 336 pages, $75 (hardcover)

A showcase of 30 contemporary buildings around the world in which sensory effects are the central focus. Sorted into sections titled "Light," "Color," and "Sound," this book covers the conceptual, aesthetic, and technical integration of sensory effects into structures. The process of transforming buildings into mechanisms of interaction with their publics is explored through architectural renderings and vivid color photographs.

PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE NOW!

Philip Jodidio Koln, Germany: Taschen, 2010 416 pages, $39.99 (hardcover) English/German/French

This volume highlights groundbreaking new trends in public architecture worldwide, including libraries, airports, museums, and more. Presented as a worldwide cross section of public structures, Public Architecture Now! includes innovative designs from architects like Herzog & de Meuron and Jean Nouvel. Small text blurbs accompany photographic profiles of each building with details about the purpose, cost, and location. Send RECENT PUBLICATIONS announcements

2011,Volume 1

3 issues per year

ISSN:2042793X Online ISSN:20427948

in collaborationwith 1x1a wwwixia-1nfocom

Art & the Public Sphere

PrincipalEditor

Mel Jordan Loughborough University

Editors

Dave Beech

University of Arts1 London ChelseaSchool of Art & Design

Andy Hewitt

University of Wolverhampton

Gill Whiteley

Loughborough University

Art & the Public Sphere provides a new platform for academics, artists, curators, art historians and theorists whose working practices are broadly concerned with contemporary art's relation to the public sphere The journal presents a crucial examination of contemporary art's link to the public realm, offering an engaged and responsive forum in which to debate the newly emerging series of developments within contemporary thinking, society and international art practice.

Doyou havean original ideathe world simply needsto know about?Weare hereto supportyour ideasand get them published Tosendusyour new book or journal proposal,pleasedownloada questionnairefrom wwwintellectbooks.com. view our catalogueor order our booksvisit www intellectbooks.com.Intellect,TheMill, ParnallRoad,Fishponds,Bristol,UK,BS163JG.I Tel:+44(o)1179589910

Jessica Stockholder

JRWINS TED PRIZE

JR, a French artist, is the winner of the prestigious 201l TED Prize, which comes with $100,000 and the opportunity to make a wish to change the world with the support of the TED community. The TED conference-a California lecture series named for its beginnings in technology, entertainment, and design-has traditionally given the prize to bigger celebrities, like chef Jamie Oliver, Bono, and Bill Clinton. Still, JR,who calls himself a photograffeur (graffeuris the French word for graffiti artist), seemed like the obvious choice to the selection committee. "JR's mind-blowing

The Latest Stats

NEA'SOUTDOOR ARTSFESTIVALSSTUDY

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has completed its first National Study of Outdoor Arts Festivals. Not only is it the most comprehensive survey of America's outdoor arts festivals, it is the first time the NEA has examined informal arts participation. The study found l 02 million people attend arts and cultural festivals every year and that festival audiences draw a larger percentage of Hispanic and African American audiences than other arts activities. Of the activities tracked by the NEA's Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 8 percent of attendees are Hispanic and 7 percent African American, whereas festival audiences are 15 percent Hispanic and 16 percent African American. The study found that support from local government is crucial to the success of arts festivals, 77 percent of them take place in towns with fewer than 250,000 residents, and 46 percent take place in a park or plaza.

creations have inspired people to see art where they wouldn't expect it and create it when they didn't know they could," said TED Prize Director Amy Novogratz.

The pseudonymous artist works in "pervasive art." With teams of volunteers in urban environments, he mounts large black and white photographs on the walls of buildings. In 2006, JR created Portraitof a Generation.He enlarged photographs-mostly caricatures-that he'd taken of residents in a troubled Paris neighborhood and plastered them on walls throughout the city. In 2007, he posted photographs of Palestinians and

NATIONAL ART INDEX STATS

Americans for the Arts recently released its 2010 annual National Arts Index scores, which measure the health and vitality of the arts industries in the United States. The 2009 score of97.7 is the lowest score in the 12 years measured by the index, and it demonstrates that the arts follow the nation's business cycle (the highest score was l 03.9 in both 1999 and 2007; there is no upper limit to the score). Losses sustained from 2007 to 2009 were nearly double the gains made from 2003 to 2007. Attendance at mainstream arts organizations and events continues a long-term decline, but the number of nonprofit arts institutions grew by 3,000 between 2007 and 2009. The arts sector is now composed of l 09,000 nonprofit arts organizations and 550,000 for-profit arts businesses. There are 2.2 million artists in the U.S. workforce, up from 1.9 million in 1996. From 2005 to 2009, arts volunteerism increased l l .6 percent.

Israelis-including an imam, a priest, and a rabbi-in eight Israeli and Palestinian cities. Since then, JR has done similar projects with residents of downtrodden neighborhoods around the world, calling attention to the demolition of historic neighborhoods in Shanghai, the dignity of women in Kenya and elsewhere who are often the targets of conflict, and the people of Brazil's favelas.

JR's wish to change the world: "I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we'll turn the world ...lNSIDE OUT."

Photocourtesythe artist.

CARO IN COTTESLOE

In March, at its seventh annual Cottesloe exhibition, Sculptureby the Sea transformed a popular beach near Perth, Australia, into a sculpture park with 76 works by talented artists, including two major works by Sir Anthony Caro: ErlKingand Aurora.Caro was pleased to have his work included, telling the West Australian that he had fond memories of the continent. "I went to Australia in 1971 and liked the place very much," he said. "I found the people forward-looking and energetic. There was an atmosphere of can-do. Visually it was unexpected and beautiful."

Sculptureby the Sea is growing. In 201 l, more than 200,000 visited the Cottesloe exhibition, up from 140,000 in 2010. There are two more Sculptureby the Sea events this year: in Aarhus, Denmark, from June 2 to July 3, and at Bondi Beach in Sydney,Australia, from October 27 to November 13.

Send your latest public art NEWS to: office@ForecastPublicArt.org

MAINE LABOR MURAL REMOVED

This spring, Maine Governor Paul LePageordered the removal of a 36-foot labor-history mural from the Maine Department of Labor.The 11-panel mural, depicting Maine history through scenes of mill workers, labor strikes, and child laborers, was created by JudyTaylor with support from a $60,000 grant partially funded by the federal government. According to LePage,reports the PortlandPressHerald,the state's share came from

a surplus in unemployment insurance premiums paid by employers. LePagesaid he had a problem with the fact that employers were not given credit for that money. He also said the 2008 mural was biased toward organized labor and not in keeping with his pro-business agenda.

Donald Tuski, president of the Maine College of Art in Portland, said the removal was an "act of censorship." In a statement, reports the Associated Press, Tuski said, "Governor

LePage did not like what he saw. By removing the mural, he smashed that mirror-an attempt to rewrite history."

Critics of LePage'saction sued, contending that he violated their First Amendment right of access to the artwork. In late April, a federal judge denied the plaintiffs' request to order Maine to return the mural, saying its removal was a permissible act of gubernatorial authority. Photo courtesythe artist.

PETITION TO CHINA

In April, members of the international art community-including Chinese artists the Gao Brothers and Cao Fei-signed a petition calling for the release of artist Ai Weiwei, best known for designing the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics. He is one of 59 activists and intellectuals arrested so far this year in China.

The petition reads: "On April 3, internationally acclaimed Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was detained at the Beijing airport while en route to Hong Kong, and his papers and computers were seized from his studio compound. We members of the international arts community express our concern for Ai's freedom and disappointment in China's reluctance to live up to its promise to nurture creativity and independent thought, the keys to 'soft power' and cultural influence. Our institutions have some of the largest on line museum communities in the world. We have launched this online petition to our collective millions of Facebook fans and Twitter followers. By using Ai Weiwei's favored medium of 'social sculpture,' we hope to hasten the release of our visionary friend."

Initially launched by the Guggenheim, museums around the world have shared the petition online. The Tate Modern in London has written "Release Ai Weiwei" in prominent black letters on its fa~ade [pictured at left].

And on April 17, protestors across the globeincluding in front of the Chinese consulate in New York City's Midtown-gathered to demand Weiwei's release. Mirroring a 2007 Weiwei installation, in which the artist used 1,001 chairs to express his anger at Chinese government policies, protesters sat silently in chairs in front of the consulate. Photo by Elke Wetzig (Elya) / courtesy Wikimedia Foundation.

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PublicArt and Digital Technology

A Reuters article about TAKE IT ARTSIDE!, a free iPhone and Android app about public art in Kentucky, was recently published in periodicals around the world and generated a lot of buzz about the project. Created by students and faculty at the University of Kentucky and the Gaines Center for the Humanities in Lexingtonand launched by the Kentucky Museum Without Walls project-the app offers images, descriptions, and GPS locations of works of public art, as well as a gaming activity where viewers check in at various artistic locations. Christine Huskisson, co-founder of the project, believes the application could work well for other regions like central Kentucky, which isn't exactly known for its public art. The region's public artists, groups, projects, and technologies were discussed at the "Public Art and the City" conference at the University of Louisville in April.

Last November, the creators of BOMB IT-a global graffiti documentary directed by Jon Reiss-launched a free gee-location graffiti and street art application for both iPhone and Android operating systems. It allows users all over the world to take photographs of graffiti and street art and upload the images to Google maps.

Web Resources for Art in Public, or WRAP, is a collaborative effort to build and organize digital resources in the developing field of public art. WRAP grew out of a Spring 2010 effort of the combined leadership of Forecast Public Art and the Americans for the

Arts' Public Art Network. An expanded group of national and international Web resource providers met again in February at the College Art Association conference in New York. With the help of a private foundation, Helen Lessick was recruited to develop a project strategy. She is proposing a series of regional pilot projects to address needs identified in the field, including cataloguing temporary and process-based works, smartphone applications for cultural tourism, and public art research and education. You can connect with WRAP (search: Web Resources for Art in Public) on Facebook.

In April CULTURENOW received an award from New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg for creating one of the "Best Overall Apps" in the NYC BigApps 2.0 contest.

The application started as a cultural and historical map of Lower Manhattan in 2001 and has expanded into a nationwide collaborative effort to create a digital "National Gallery" of art and architecture in the public realm. The collection contains more than 6,000 sites and 11,000 images.

The VIRTUAL PUBLIC ART PROJECT, an augmented reality platform, allows users of the iPhone 3GS and Android phones to see digital works of art when visiting the real-world public places in which those works are digitally placed and exhibited. The first VPAP exhibit, held at Design Philadelphia 2010, consisted of eight virtual sculptures by eight Philadelphia artists. Learn more at www. vi rtua Ip ubl icartproject.com.

LIGHTS ON TAIPEI

The Taipei Lantern Festival, during which families and friends gather together to eat rice balls and to admire exquisitely made lanterns, dates back thousands of years. In 2011, for the first time, Taipei introduced public art installations-including a 3D light show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei and the lighting of lanterns around the Red House Theater and Treasure Hill Artist Village. A total of nine venues throughout the city comprise a special feature of the festival. "By bringing art into the neighborhoods, we want to encourage community participation and let people enjoy the aesthetics of lanterns in their own districts," Hsieh Hsiao-yun, head of the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs at the festival's opening ceremony, told Taiwan Today. The Lantern Festival takes place on the fifteenth day of the first month of the year in the lunar calendar. Photos by Takeaway/ courtesy Wikimedia Foundation.

ONE PERCENT-OR NOT As we go to pressgiven the dire economic conditions facing most every state, county, and municipality-dozens of government-run public art programs are in jeopardy of severe cuts and even extinction. While the State of Oklahoma recently lost its percentfor-art program, St. Paul, Minnesota, Ketchum, Idaho, and the City of KeyWest, Florida, recently established new programs. "The community is very excited for this commitment to art in the public domain, and we anticipate a renewed vigor and support from artists, businesses, and the public sector," says Michael Shields, member of the Art in Public Places board in KeyWest.

WATTS TOWER GETS A BOOST Watts Tower, Simon Rodia's 1950s landmark folk-art masterpiece in Los Angeles, consists of 17 intricate structures in need of repair. The City of Los Angeles was able to contribute only $150,000 in funding to the project in 2011, and then the James Irvine Foundation came forward with a $500,000 grant. Of the $20.8 million in grants the foundation gives to support the arts each year, very few grants go to restoration projects. Foundation organizers felt compelled to step forward, as president James Canales recently told the Los AngelesTimes,because "we see Watts Towers as an important cultural icon for Los Angeles."

CAPED CRUSADERS In a publicity stunt for its new TV show The Cape, NBC partnered with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and dressed iconic statues-like George Washington in Union Square, William Shakespeare in Central Park, Eleanor Roosevelt on the Upper West Side, and Benjamin Franklin downtown-in superhero garb. "This sponsorship will benefit the preservation of New York's collection of public art in the parks while drawing new audiences to them," said Vickie Karp, director of public information for New York City Parks and Recreation. "The new NBC series is a novel way to remind even the most jaded New Yorker that heroes are all around us."

LUNAR CUBIT IN THE UAE

The proposed Lunar Cubit has been selected as the winner of the 2010 Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI). By day, this installation of nine monolithic pyramids will collect solar energy and power thousands of surrounding homes; the work would pay back its own carbon footprint in five years and its own construction cost in 20 years. It was also conceived as a monthly calendar; at night it illuminates in inverse proportions the phases of the moon.

Designers Robert Flottemesch, Adrian Deluca,

Johanna Ballhaus, and Jen DeNike envision Lunar Cubit as a landmark in Masdar City, United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Created in 2009 by the UAE-based husband and wife creative team Elizabeth Monoian and Robert Ferry, LAGI aims to broaden public awareness about renewable energy and to design and construct public art installations that also generate large-scale clean energy. LAGI is currently seeking partners for construction of Lunar Cubit.

Photos courtesy Robert Flottemesch.

ENERGY PLANT AND SKI PARK

A Copenhagen project billed as the single largest environmental initiative in Denmark, with a budget of$650 million, has an approved design. A waste-to-energy plant that will double as a ski slope, the initiative integrates the latest technologies in waste treatment and environmental performance, and features design elements by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), AKT, Topotek l, Man Made Land, and realities:united, creators of the building's interactive fa~ade.

The building will replace the adjacent 40-year-old Amagerforbraending Plant. It will also be used as a recreation site. An internal elevator gives visitors a view of the workings of the plant and carries them to the roof of what will be one of the tallest structures in Copenhagen. From there, they can ski down the outside of the building on a recycled synthetic granular slope. Each time one ton of fossil CO2 is produced by the building, will release a condensation-created smoke ring, visible at night through heat-tracking

laser light, as a gentle reminder of the impact of consumption.

"The new plant is an example of what we at BIG call hedonistic sustainability ... that a sustainable city in fact can improve our quality of life. The waste-to-energy plant with a ski slope is the best example of a city and a building which is both ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable," says Bjarke Ingels, founder and partner of BIG. The building is scheduled to open by 2016. Photos courtesy BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group.

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Obituaries

DENNIS OPPENHEIM

One of the most influential figures in international contemporary art, Dennis Oppenheim died of liver cancer on January 22 at the age of 72 in New York, where he had lived since 1966.

Born in Electric City, Washington, Oppenheim's early works encompassed earth and body art, video, and performance. Along with Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson,

his work was included in Earthworks, an important 1968 exhibit at New York's Dwan Gallery. With like-minded colleagues such as the minimalist sculptors Carl Andre and Robert Morris, he joined the Art Workers' Coalition, which organized demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the 1970s, Oppenheim started using his own body as site, and in the 1980s his machine pieces were metaphors for the artistic process. He then moved on to sculpture based on the transformation of everyday objects. In the mid- l 990s, he fused sculpture and architecture in large-scale

and the recipient of McKnight, Jerome, and Jackson Pollock-Lee Krasner Foundation Fellowships. He received public commissions for major works at science museums, federal buildings, urban parks, universities, and hospitals. His studio work is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Smithsonian, the American Embassy in Stockholm, and numerous private collections.

permanent works. He always sought new ideas and became known for his protean body of work.

"Here was a man who really craved and carved out a new vocabulary in art," Thomas Solomon, Oppenheim's dealer and personal friend, told the journal Sentinel of Milwaukee, a town that nearly became home to one of his most controversial public art projects, Blue Shirt. Another controversial project was Device to Root Out Evil (rendering pictured left; learn more on page 11).

"Dennis Oppenheim was an artistic live wire and a Geiger counter of postmodern possibility," writes critic Jerry Saltz in www. vulture.com. "He always maintained a stringently personal and highly resolved theoretical position. I loved the way he made discoveries, shared them, then moved on."

As Oppenheim himself told art critic Douglas Kelley in a 2009 interview, "No one is particularly prepared for the kind of artist they become. You're there to be thrown around, not only by rambling, interfering concepts but by life itself."

Oppenheim exhibited his works internationally in galleries and museums. He received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2007, he was recognized for Lifetime Achievement at the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale. He was at work on a monumental light beam entrance to Las Vegas when he died; the city has decided to complete the project. Eaton Fine Art Gallery in West Palm Beach, Florida, is holding a retrospective of his work through June 4. Images courtesy Dennis Oppenheim estate.

Buster Simpson noted that Posner believed "wholeheartedly that art-making is a full-body baptismal immersion sport" and that he "was never in over his head." See Posner's work at www.flickr.com/photos/posnerperson.

Photo by Petra Korink.

KAIS AL-HILALI

Libyan cartoonist Kais al-Hilali was known for his political street murals.

RICHARD POSNER

Richard Posner-known both for his work with glass and in the public realm-died in his Tucson, Arizona, home on March 12 at age 62, the victim of a shooting.

Originally from California, Posner was a four-time Fulbright Scholar, a two-time National Endowment for the Arts Fellow,

"Public and studio art practices are different disciplines-for me," he once told High Performance magazine. "The public-art arena forces an artist to learn how to become an aesthetic samurai-someone who is visually literate, streetwise, and fluent in both interdisciplinary communication and cross-cultural understanding. Public-art practice is a process that embraces both 'the public' and 'the art' as equal sides of the same equation The ability to navigate the currents and eddies of the public art administrative process requires the eye of a journalist, the ear of a poet, the hide of an armadillo, the serenity of an airline pilot, and the ability to swim."

Writing about Posner after his death, reports the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet, artist

During the height of the uprising in Benghazi in March, he painted caricatures of Colonel Muammar Gaddafl throughout the city. With brilliant detail, he depicted Gaddafi getting the boot, in a noose, and as a monkey. According to the New Yorker, witnesses say he was shot and killed at an improvised checkpoint on March 20. CNN reports that al-Hilali's mother is convinced the gunmen were Gaddafl loyalists. "He loved his art very much and he was everywhere," she told CNN. "Every time someone asked him to draw something, he would do it."

JULY11-AUGUST19, 2011

Six-Weeh International Residency

Interdisciplinary approaches with leading visual artists, architects, landscape architects, new media artists and performance artists worhing in the public realm.

Studio space and state-of-the-art fabrication facilities included.

U.S.RECENTPROJECTS

Artists Patrick Miller and Patrick McNeil, who produce collaborative work under the name Faile, installed large, customized PRAYER WHEELS on the streets of Brooklyn in late 2009 and 2010. Each wheel is hand carved from merbau wood and mounted on a steel base. The wheels, which are 12 to 14 inches in diameter, are densely carved with commercial icons and painted in vibrant colors. Despite being bolted down and weighing 100 pounds, the first wheel was stolen from the street. Undeterred, Faile recently installed another one on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg.

The wheels are modern-day updates on ancient Buddhist prayer wheels, which were used by the devout to enhance focus during prayer, accumulate wisdom and good karma, and purify negative energy.

Faile often reimagines sacred objects. They also recently overhauled and decorated a crumbling temple on the streets of Lisbon, Portugal, with modern-day phrases and slogans. Photos by Faile.

The Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan has a new stained-glass window co-designed by artist Kiki Smith and architect Deborah Gans. The circular window called STAR OF DAVID-which consists of 1,200 plates of glass, is 16 feet in diameter, and weighs more than 6,000 pounds-has a Star of David at its center and 600 smaller stars swirling around it. Installed in December 2010, it is meant to symbolize and represent the Jewish faith and the Lower East Side's

immigrant population that founded the synagogue in 1887. New engineering processes in stained glass allowed Star of Davidto appear lighter and more transparent than traditional leaded stained glass.

Star of David is Smith's first stained glass installation for an architectural space, though she has worked extensively with glass before. She hopes the glass window contributes to the ethos of calm reflection at the synagogue.

Photo by PeterAaron/Esto.

The new LOUISVILLE ARENA PEDWAY in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, is an allglass marvel of engineering that serves an important function and also adds beauty to downtown. Connecting the Galt House Hotel and the KFC Yum! Center one story above street level, the dramatic structure is composed of one-inch-thick laminated glass walls and roof and laminated glass trusses. Holographic films, which change colors and are activated by LED lights at the base of the trusses, give the pedway a

magical, illuminated quality. There are steel and architectural silicone in the underlying supports, but the rest of the structure is 100 percent glass. The pedway is both a ceremonial entrance for the Yum! Center and a gateway to downtown Louisville.

The pedway, which was designed by glass artist Kenneth von Roenn Jr. of Architectural Glass Art, was part of the larger construction project involving the KFC Yum! Center. It was completed last October. Photo by Architectural Glass Art.

California artists Mark Grieve and Ilana Spector were commissioned by the city of Santa Rosa, California, in conjunction with the Nissan car dealership of Santa Rosa to create a monument to the bicycle. CYCLISK is located at the gateway to the Santa Rosa Arts District. Ironically, it is also positioned right in front of the car dealership.

Cycfiskis a five-story-high Egyptian-style obelisk made from some 340 bicycles and one tricycle; it weighs more than 10,000 pounds. The project, completed in September, is part of the city's Art and Culture Element in the General Plan 2020, which calls for the creation of inspiring places for the residents of Santa Rosa. Nissan, which is building a $3.7 million dealership in the city, chipped in $37,000 for the project. Photos by David Haines (left) and Ilana Spector (above) © 2070.

Westbrook Middle School in Portland, Maine, sits on the site of the Oxford-Cumberland canal, where trees were once logged and transported to the ocean. To create RE:TURN, a sculpture that represents a tree from an oldgrowth forest, artist Aaron Stephan used some of the logs-now over 500 years old-that sank along the canal during transportation. Stephan repurposed and shaped the logs to form the tree, which appears to rise out of the school's floor toward the skylights overhead. The tree measures 25 feet high and 16 feet wide (branch to branch) and consists of about 100 individual pieces of reclaimed wood. The use of reclaimed natural materials matches the school's environmentally friendly geothermal technology. RE:tum speaks both to environmental preservation and to Westbrook's history as a lumber and paper hub.

It took Stephan a year to complete the sculpture, which was installed at the school in early December. Stephan lives in Portland. Photoscourtesythe artist.

U.S.RECENTPROJECTS

For three months last fall, the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and artist-in-residence Daniel Peltz softened the blow of getting a parking ticket by handing out citations with yoga poses on them. The drawn poses are an attempt to take some of the anxiety out of getting a parking ticket. Peltz came up with the idea for CROSSING NONSIGNALIZED LOCATIONS after riding along with parking control officers for several weeks.

New street signs, which were written and designed to appear as if they are official, were also installed around the city as part of the project. The signs played on the official language of parking and driving regulations. For example, one official sign reads, "If you're

reading this sign, you're biking the wrong way." Peltz's nearby sign reads, "If you're reading this sign, you're reading this sign." Peltz also created a "soft boot" that is made of fabric that will be placed on cars throughout the city; it is meant to be a less humiliating version of the real boot (which Peltz himself once experienced). Peltz also installed 10,000 Excuses,a large, handwritten drawing comprising all the excuses drivers have submitted in parking disputes over the past five years, at the Cambridge Arts Council Gallery.

The project was co-presented by the Cambridge Arts Council and the Department ofTraffic, Parking, and Transportation. Photo courtesy the artist.

The Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles are located on the former site of the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Inspired by this history, artist Lynn Goodpasture has installed a 690-square-foot ceramic tile labyrinth called KEELEY'S GARDEN, LABYRINTH 1. The French encaustic tiles are styled after the tiles that once decorated the Ambassador Hotel.

In 11 sections along the labyrinth's path, Goodpasture installed slabs of basalt that the children can use as chalkboards, making the installation interactive and educational. For example, children can illustrate sequential lessons in history or science on the slabs and then walk through the labyrinth to read the full story. The hexagonal labyrinth and its many square tiles can be used by teachers to illustrate math and geometry concepts. The Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools comprise six different pilot schools with students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Photo by Lynn Goodpasture.

The main interior wall of the student commons at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, got a little brighter this fall with the installation ofTHE BIG PRINT, a 5,000-square-foot mural comprising individual art pieces by 1,180 children and adults. The overall design of the mural, which evokes a Norwegian knitting pattern, was created by Kari Alberg.

The nonprofit arts organization ArtOrg sponsored the project and, with grant money from Forecast Public Art, organized summer printing events where children and adults could come and create prints. Each participant took

home his or her print, but ArtOrg kept the printing blocks to use later for a collaborative project such as The Big Print. The printing events, which were free and open to the public (and likely always will be in the future), were held in 10 regional locations, including Minneapolis's Walker Art Center.

The bright, almost electric colors enliven the large, stand-alone wall at the student center, and the Norwegian knitting pattern is a perfect thematic fit for a school named after the patron saint of Norway. The piece was installed in November. Photo by Tom Roster.

Internationally known sculptor and environmental artist Roy Staab worked with students on the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire campus this past October to create a site-specific sculptural installation on the Chippewa River, called EAU CLAIRE CURRENTS. The installation coincided with an exhibit at the Foster Gallery chronicling three decades of Staab's environmental art.

The installation is a series of long, Y-shaped ropes made from bundled weeds that have been hung from the north side of the university footbridge and float in the water below. The ropes have logs tied to their ends and the logs pull the ropes downstream with the flow of the current; when the water is low, the ropes and logs rest on the sandbar below the water.

Staab often creates work on or near water and incorporates the water as part of the work. He is a Wisconsin native who has lived in Paris and New York City but moved back to Milwaukee in the 1990s. Photo courtesy the artist.

Dutch artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, who collaborate under the name Haas & Hahn, are painting large-scale murals that span entire city blocks-and transforming the hardscrabble slums of Rio de Janeiro into beautiful places to live.

For the FAVELA PAINTING PROJECT in the slum of Santa Marta, they trained local youth to work with them to convert more than 34 houses and 700 square meters into an eclectic rainbow canvas. The local youth learned to work with different types of paint

and to navigate scaffolding-and they were paid for their month-long painting effort. Haas & Hahn first visited thefavelas, or slums, in 2005 when they filmed an MTV documentary about favela hip-hop. They decided to stay to work with local youth and help improve these bleak and often violent urban areas.Their first project was a huge mural in Santa Marta called Boy Flyinga Kite.The duo's eventual goal is to raise enough money to one day cover an entire hillside favela in murals. PhotocourtesyHaas & Hahnfor www.favelapainting.com.

In October, street artists Broken Crow, Bushdwellers, Eelus, Ian Cox (Wallkandy}, Logan Hicks, Lucy McLauchlan, Mysterious Al, and Xenz traveled to Makasutu, the Gambia, and transformed the area into a living art village with WIDE OPEN WALLS: AN ART SAFARI. Makasutu is part of an 85-squarekilometer protected conservation area in Africa that includes 14 villages and 100,000 people. The project aims to boost tourism in this part of Africa with the larger goal of eradicating poverty in the Gambia-and on the continent. Over the course of two weeks, the artists painted murals in various sizes and themes on the sides of buildings, retaining walls, houses, and even trees. Mythological human and animal figures come to life on crumbling walls and tilted shanties, giving these lonely villages a beautiful, other-worldly quality.

The sponsors and artists hoped the project would investigate the following questions: How does the art benefit the village? How can public art help social problems? How does creativity effect social change in poor and rural communities? How can we tell the story of the village to the world? The project is slated to happen again in 2011. Photos by Ian Coxof www.wallkandy.wordpress.com.

Last May, artist Ray King completed a commission for the Luzhou Metro Station in Taipei, Taiwan. DANCING FEATHERS is a large-scale feather made from colored glass and metal and suspended from a giant circular skylight at the station. Sunlight streams down from above the giant feather, illuminating the sculpture and refracting light from the colored glass to create a cascade of colors for the train passengers below.

A professional sculptor for more than 30 years, King uses natural light as an artistic medium. He's also interested in creating "light responsive" sculptures that enliven the surrounding environment and interact with viewers. Another of King's interests, realized in Dancing Feathers,is the juxtaposition of elements from the past with modern-day construction materials. Dancing Feathersis one of three monumental sculptures that King was commissioned to install in Taipei as part of a larger exhibition called Adventures in Light and Color.Photo courtesythe artist.

INTERNATIONALRECENTPROJECTS

In August, five artists completed a new aboriginal-themed mural, THROUGH THE EYE OF THE RAVEN, on the west wall of the Orwell Hotel, at 456 East Hastings in Vancouver. The mural, covering six stories and 7,600 square feet, was developed collaboratively, with input from the local community and financial involvement from the Great Beginnings Program (run by the City of Vancouver) and the Province of British Columbia. The 55-room Orwell Hotel is operated by the Vancouver Native Housing Society (VNHS) as part of the government's Provincial Homelessness Initiative.

The mural took more than 30 days of work to complete and adds new vitality to the Downtown Eastside community. The mural incorporates themes of renewal and positive directions in the urban aboriginal community. The artists and project coordinators hope the mural will both spark and reflect the ongoing renaissance in this community. The five artists who worked on the project are Richard Shorty, Haisla Collins, Jerry Whitehead, Eric Parnell, and Sharifa Masden. Photo courtesy Vancouver Native Housing Society and special thanks to Nick Ivanov at Aerial Photo Image (www. aerialphotoimage.com).

Ghostly hooded figures have been haunting different locations in Austria since 2007, scaring children and leaving adults with a pervasive sense of existential dread. The creation of Austrian artist Manfred Kielnhofer, TIME GUARDIANS and LIGHT GUARDS (an illuminated variation of the Time Guardians) are a group of draped figures shaped like the grim reaper. The figures appear to be made of concrete but are actually formed out of hollow treated textiles. They have appeared throughout Austria at indoor and outdoor installations, and Kielnhofer photographs them in front of

disparate backgrounds, including modern highrise buildings and ancient cathedrals, often at night. His first guardians were a bleak gray, but some of the newer figures have bright colors and patterns.

Kielnhofer often installs the guardians abruptly in public places only to remove them the very next day. He has run the Art Park gallery in Linz, Austria, since 2005, and he refuses to comment on his intention with the Time Guardians, leaving interpretations-and spooky feelings-up to the observer.

Photo courtesy the artist.

SECONDE NATURE, a new permanent installation in Marseille, France, has two parts: an 18-meter-tall sculpture shaped like a sailboat and projected images of a giant garden. The large garden images (28 meters by 14 meters)-mainly cactuses, succulents, and palm trees-are projected from the bright orange sculpture onto surrounding warehouses. Each plant grows in its own unique, virtual way and follows the cycles of the seasons. The garden is also interactive. When the tramway passes by the installation, the "wind" that trails it blows all the leaves off the virtual plants and thereby makes room for a new garden to grow. When pedestrians walk by the plants, the plants spiral around themselves.

The work was commissioned by Euromediterranee for an initiative called Marseille 2013 and installed in October. Artist Miguel Chevalier and architect Charles Bove collaborate regularly on public artworks. Photos courtesy the artist.

The first-ever site-specific art installation at a nuclear power plant has opened in Yeonggwang, South Korea, with a video installation by the artist Kimsooja. EARTHWATER-FIRE-AIR was organized by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, and the Membership Society of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power and Hanjin Shipping are both financial sponsors. Several different artists are scheduled to create unique works for Earth-Water-Fire-Air in the future.

The projects will be installed on a l, 192-meter-long and 8-meter-wide strip of land that stretches between the power

station and a nearby lighthouse. Kimsooja's video installation, which went up this past September, has six channels that are projected onto large screens-spaced 200 meters apart-along the breakwater. The videos were taken on Lanzarote Island off the coast of Africa and near volcanoes in Guatemala, and are meant to evoke the four basic elements being reincarnated as each other: lava flows become rock, which becomes dust, which is blown in the air, and so on. The videos evoke Zen Buddhism and Taoism.

Earth-Water-Fire-Air is the first of what organizers hope will be many collaborations between Korean power stations and artists.

Photos courtesy Kimsooja Studio.

Over the past year under the cover of darkness, anonymous artists have taken to the streets of Kabul to create provocative street art. The guerrilla stencils include images of tanks, soldiers, dollar signs, poppies, refugees, students, helicopters, Talibs, and question marks, arranged as a series of equations. True to the title, CHAND AST?-which roughly translated means "how much?"the images are intended to raise questions about the cost and consequences of the war. While the individual artists remain

anonymous, as a group these activist artists are known as Combat Communications. The nonprofit group Mountain2Mountain, which helps educate and support women in conflict regions, has partnered with Combat Communications to foster the arts and future artists in Afghanistan. The group sees the arts as an avenue for sustainable change in wartorn countries like Afghanistan, and artistic expression as a way to build community and take an active role in the future of the country.

Photo by Talibansky.

The East German city of Wittenberg is experiencing an invasion-of 800 small, plastic statues of Martin Luther. Luther, a sixteenthcentury Protestant reformer, first railed against the practices of the Catholic Church in Wittenberg. So when the large statue of Luther that usually inhabits the town square was taken down for renovation, the city turned to artist Ottmar Hori to create the plastic substitutes called MARTIN LUTHER-l'M STANDING HERE. Hori created the onemeter-high figures to look exactly like the permanent statue.

Some theologians are upset by the installation, saying it mocks Luther's achievements, but causing controversy is not new to Hori. In 2009, he created an installation of 1,250 garden gnomes with their right arms raised in the Nazi salute. Hori is the president of the Academy for Fine Arts in Nuremberg, Germany. He lives in Wertheim in BadenWurttemberg. Photos by Christoph Busse.

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INTERNATIONALRECENTPROJECTS

Renowned artist Antony Gormley has created a new sculpture for Canterbury Cathedral. Using antique iron nails from a repaired section of the cathedral roof, Gormley created the outline of a human body that appears to be punctured by the nails. The sculpture is suspended-so that it appears to float-above the first tomb of archbishop Thomas Becket, who was murdered at the altar in 1170.

With the name TRANSPORT, Gormley hopes to evoke the concept of life moving through each of us and the lives of the individuals who have moved through the cathedral. "The body is less a thing than a place; a location where things happen," says Gormley of the sculpture. "Thought, feeling, memory and anticipation filter through it

sometimes staying but mostly passing on, like us in this great cathedral with its centuries of building, adaptation, extension and all the thoughts, feelings and prayers that people have had and transmitted here."

The Dean of Canterbury, the Very Reverend Robert Willis, expressed deep appreciation for the piece. "lt...suggests the way in which sacred spaces communicate a sense of time and eternity, of the finite and the infinite. We are hugely grateful for this work."

Gormley often explores the human body's relationship to the space it inhabits. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his sculpture, including the prestigious Turner Prize in 1994. Transport was installed in January. Photo byJason Dodd© the artist.

Paris-based artist Tania Ruiz Gutierrez has installed a moving panorama, ANNORSTADES (ELSEWHERE), at the Malmo Central train station in Malmo, Sweden. The piece, composed of 46 projections and deployed over 360 linear meters, is the largest permanent video artwork in Europe. It was commissioned by the National Public Art Council of Sweden and Trafikverket and installed in December.

The projected images are scenes viewed from the window of a train, turning the station itself into a virtual train. The images are sourced from around the globe, from Saigon

to Siberia, Kensington Street to Sicily. The projections are also timed so that viewers on fixed schedules are unlikely to see the same image twice in a short amount ohime. Unlike the window views from an actual train, which speed by quickly, the projections have been slowed down to counterbalance the rapid pace of modern life.

Elsewhere, is Guitierrez's second major public art commission. She was commissioned to create the video sculpture Garde-temps for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. Photo by M.Castoriano.

Artist Suzanne Lacyorganized ANYANG WOMEN'S CONVERSATION, a public installation and performance involving more than l 00 women from various backgrounds in Anyang, South Korea, last September and October. Over the course of l 0 days, the women engaged in taped and photographed conversations at 15 different locations around the city, where they talked about their perceptions and experiences as women. They discussed topics including economic stability, humanenvironment issues, school experience, employment opportunities for women, violence, and women's future in an economic downturn.

The conversations were eventually presented to the mayor and city council as a way to set a women's agenda for the coming decade and identify key issues that will affect women in Korea. An outdoor public exhibition in Hagun Park coincided with the performance and featured photos and an installation of a "women's room."

Lacy works in many mediums, including video, performance, photography, and largescale installation. Photos by Raul Vega.

The OpenSpacesSacredPlacesNationalAwardsInitiative invites proposals from cross-disciplinary teams who seek to create a publicurbangreenspace and study its impact on visitors. We know intuitively and anecdotally that nature heals and uplifts the human spirit. And, we believe there is a growing need to complement these insights with empirical evidence in order to advance understanding.

The Initiative will fund the creation of significant new Open Spaces Sacred Places across the US from a fundingpoolof$5 million. Teams will work collaboratively to conceptualize, plan, design and implement the physical space, the research study and the dissemination of the findings.

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B. J.Christofferson's MaidenRockTrainProject

In the fall of 2007, 8. J.Christofferson's heart opened to the tiny village of Maiden Rock, Wisconsin (pop. 121), on the western shore of Lake Pepin. She bought a turn-of-the-century house that sits between Main Street and busy train tracks that run along the Mississippi River. As she transformed the house into a home, studio, and gallery (www.secretheartgallery.com), she fell in love with the trains in her backyard.

The next year, Christofferson was invited by fellow Maiden Rock artist Celeste Nelms and a local band called The Ditchlilies to participate in the Maiden Rock Revue of Trains, a music, art, and spoken word event. That's when Christofferson began the Maiden Rock TrainProject.

"I borrowed a camera and over three months' time made a photographic record of the public art (graffiti) that the trains display,"

she says. "I was amazed how often the graffiti seemed spiritually oriented, with words like signs, galaxy, await. I think they're beautiful. The ultimate public art."

Christofferson, whose work is inspired by religious iconographyespecially early medieval images and Mexican icons-then combined the photos with icons from her archives, merging, she says, "what is divine with the irreverence and beauty of contemporary street art." Because she's only now learning to use a computer, the actual Photos hop work was done by photographer Tom Dolan.

"Through this work the boxcar becomes a shrine, a dwelling place for the saints and guardians of the train," says Christofferson. "Visitors to my gallery nearly always read them as straight photographs from my travels in Mexico."

Artwork by B.J. Christoffersonand text by KarenOlson.