City as Living Laboratory
Mary Miss has reshaped the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, landscape design, and installation art by articulating a vision of the public sphere where it is possible for an artist to address the issues of our time. She has developed the “City as Living Lab”, a framework for making issues of sustainability tangible through collaboration and the arts. Mary Miss has collaborated closely with architects, planners, engineers, ecologists, and public administrators on projects as diverse as creating a temporary memorial around the perimeter of Ground Zero, marking the predicted flood level of Boulder, Colorado, revealing the history of the Union Square Subway station in New York City or turning a sewage treatment plant into a public space. Recent projects include an installation focused on water resources in China for the Olympic Park in Beijing and a temporary installation at a seventeenth-century park in Delhi, India as part of the exhibition 49°: Public Art and Ecology.
In September of 2003 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, English-speaking U.S. artists Deidre Hoguet and Peter Walsh created a series of street actions that focused on the relationship between languages and power. The project featured 13 separate performances, with each artist interacting directly with hundreds of people, a gallery exhibition at P74, artist lectures and two public discussions (one at the 16 Beaver Group in Manhattan and a second in Ljubljana). The English word “tongue” and the Slovenian word “jezik” can both – with slightly different connotations – mean either language or the actual tongue in your mouth.
With the collective help of the citizens of Ljubljana, Peter Walsh attempted the impossible: learning to speak and write Slovene in just three weeks (photo gallery).
VERSION FESTIVAL 10:
Infrastructures and Territories
April 22, May 2, 2010
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: March 1, 2010.
Version is an annual springtime convergence that brings together hundreds of artists, musicians, and educators from around the world to present some of the most challenging ideas and progressive art initiatives of our day.
Exploring SPURA is an exhibition by students of the City Studio at Eugene Lang College, the New School & Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, in collaboration with SPURA Matters. The Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) is the largest undeveloped city-owned parcel of land south of 96th Street, and it has been a contested site since it was cleared for “renewal” more than 40 years ago.
Please join us at a new exhibition by the New School’s City Studio, Exploring SPURA, which delves into the experience of living at SPURA now – the resources and restrictions – as well as the stories of today and the experience of the SPURA diaspora, displaced many years ago. The exhibition springs from the City Studio’s research in the community and hopes to continue encouraging productive conversation about the site’s future.
Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) (www.goles.org) was founded in 1977 and is a neighborhood housing and preservation organization, dedicated to tenants’ rights, homelessness prevention and community revitalization through organizing and advocacy.
The Pratt Center for Community Development (www.prattcenter.net) empowers low- and moderate-income communities in New York to plan for and realize their futures. As part of Pratt Institute, it uses urban planning, architecture, and public policy to support community-based organizations in their efforts to improve quality of life, create economic opportunity, and advance sustainable development.
Place Matters (www.placematters.net) was founded in 1998 by City Lore (www.citylore.org) and the Municipal Art Society (www.mas.org) to foster the conservation of New York City’s historically and culturally significant places. It conducts a citywide survey called the “Census of Places that Matter” to discover places that evoke associations with history, memory, and tradition.
February 4 – April 3, 2010
Opening Reception:
Thursday February 4, 6-8pm
common room 2 is a room in manhattan’s lower east side that explores the production and use of the built environment.
In September of 2003 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, English-speaking U.S. artists Deidre Hoguet and Peter Walsh created a series of street actions that focused on the relationship between languages and power. The project featured 13 separate performances, with each artist interacting directly with hundreds of people, a gallery exhibition at P74, artist lectures and two public discussions (one at the 16 Beaver Group in Manhattan and a second in Ljubljana). The English word “tongue” and the Slovenian word “jezik” can both – with slightly different connotations – mean either language or the actual tongue in your mouth.
VERSION FESTIVAL 10:
Exploring SPURA is an exhibition by students of the City Studio at Eugene Lang College, the New School & Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, in collaboration with SPURA Matters. The Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) is the largest undeveloped city-owned parcel of land south of 96th Street, and it has been a contested site since it was cleared for “renewal” more than 40 years ago.
