For his 2012 TED Talk, 365 days after he initiated the Inside Out project, French artist JR was asked to answer the question “Can art change the world?” As an artist who’s made the world his gallery, he knows that the world can change art as well.
With huge black and white portraits of the unknown pasted on the hillside homes of Rio’s slums, on the trains of Phnom Penh, Times Square and the rooftops of Kenya, JR has used his medium to amplify the energy and humanity of the world’s everyday people. With Face 2 Face, the largest illegal photography project ever, JR and collaborator Marco pasted portraits of Israelis on the Palestinian side of the wall and vice-versa, so both communities could look into each other’s eyes without government intervention. Women are Heroes celebrated the strength and courage of women in Sierra Leone, India or Cambodia who are confronted with war, violence and abuse on a daily basis, calling the world’s attention to the faces of these incredible women. With The Wrinkles of the City, JR exalted our elders in Los Angeles, Shanghai and La Havana — those who’ve laid the foundation for culture, innovation, language, survival and tradition in each city in the world.
Paper and glue: “It is as simple as that,” JR says. He offers the medium to anyone who waits on line at one of his larger-than-life photobooths, or requests that their photo be printed through his site. His conviction to democratize his medium earned him the title “humanity revelator” from French newspaper Le Monde, championing art for its essence: spontaneous, collective and free.
Because of the proportions the project took in less than two years, a documentary was realized, showing how people from different cultures, lifestyles and experiences were able to take part into this project and make it theirs.
For another month or so, you can catch a documentary about Inside Out on HBO.
Passionately devoted to contemporary art and artists, Dorothy and Herb Vogel—a New York City postal clerk and a librarian—began, in 1962, to build what would become a legendary art collection. They collected the art of their time and got to know the artists and their work, eventually bringing together some 5,000 artworks. In 1991, the Vogels donated most of their collection to the National Gallery in Washington. In addition, they selected 50 works for one museum in each of the 50 U.S. states. The Seattle Art Museum is the beneficiary in the state of Washington and will exhibit the Vogel gift in the spring of 2013, which will be contextualized by works from the museum’s collection.
– Catharina Manchanda, Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art
The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection : Fifty Works for Fifty States
Seattle Art Museum, Third Floor Galleries, through October 27, 2013
“In loving him, I saw a cigarette between the fingers of a hand, smoke blowing backwards into the room and sputtering planes diving low through the clouds. In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
Wojnarowicz’s journals have been digitized by the Fales Library at NYU. They, like he, are things of beauty.
BALTIMORE : ARABBER MURAL PROJECT
Gaia is a right-on dude who’s working with Mata Ruda, LNY and Nanook on this important mural project in Baltimore in support of the local arabber community. This project builds off of the mural produced by Gaia last fall for the arabbers on Fremont Avenue and will serve as a segue into transforming the yard into historic preservation site.
Arabbing as a practice began in the 19th century in Baltimore when easy access to stables and the shipyards of the inner harbor made selling fruit with horse drawn carriages an attainable entrepreneurial enterprise for African Americans in Baltimore. During the war effort and after WWII arabbing became an almost entirely African American trade. Competition from supermarkets and restrictions from modern zoning laws have endangered this heritage. Today there are only a couple sites left that serve as arabbing stables, with the Fremont Avenue location being one of the most prominent in the city. Today, arabbing serves as a viable living for a handful of men and their families whilst also serving a variety of communities including neighborhoods that do not have easy access to produce and whole foods.
Mata Ruda, Gaia, Nanook and LNY will use the story and experience of Baltimore’s fruit sellers to produce murals that will span the entirety of inside and exterior of the Fremont stables. The paintings are apart of a larger plan that will be implemented on behalf of the Arabber Preservation Society in the near future to make the site into a visitor center and provide the necessary renovations to the preexisting stable.
Kick down if you can to help them realize this project.
The thrill and excitement that destruction invokes is common to us all. We experience this everywhere in our daily lives. Even though destruction itself may be the opposite of creation, in this age, the boundary between the two no longer exists…. Despite our refusal to empathize with destruction, we must consider it as a constructive site in order to move forward.
— Shozo Shimamoto in “Material Destruction,” Gutai Issue #7, 1957.
Today is the penultimate chance to experience Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Guggenheim — a celebration of one of the most influential and disruptive creative collectives the world has seen.
Ty Williams stopped by Ace Hotel New York to freshen up one of his fishes. Thanks Ty.
Photo by Dominick Volini.
Los Angeles’ Various Small Fires is currently host to Home Office, a solo exhibition by Anna Sew Hoy. Anna taught a workshop and lectured at Snow in the Desert, our gathering for women in the arts at Ace Hotel & Swim Club in Palm Springs last summer. The show is up through the 18th of May. See David Pagel’s review in the LA Times and see more about Anna’s vision.
![INTERVIEW : JAMES VICTORE
James Victore is a man of action. He believes that learning about free jazz and liquor fermentation and speed-racing can make you a better designer, that graphic design is about experiences and stories and using your hands.
Distilling wisdom from decades down in the beautiful muck of making ideas happen, he’s produced a stunning series of aphoristic posters on the nature of art, design and the creative process. His Aphorisms on Art & Idea Execution is on display in the gallery space at Ace Hotel New York through May 25. The installation is in partnership with the 99U Conference. Jocelyn K. Glei caught up with him recently.
What’s a normal day for you?
I like to think we’re like the army. We get more work done by noon than most people do in a full day. Chris [Victore’s sole co-worker] comes in at 10:30 or 11am. We decide on what needs to be done. We rarely work past 5pm. We’re pretty efficient. We make decisions. I look at the agency system and it’s such a waste. That’s why people like Time Magazine come to us. They know they can give it to us on a Wednesday and it will be done on Friday.
[[MORE]]You mentioned ‘making decisions’ earlier as part of the way you function efficiently. Do you think a lot of people get bogged down by that?
Part of the problem these days is there’s so much choice. At some point, someone just has to say: We’re going to do it like this because I want to do it this way. Because, if you don’t, you’re going to be churning out oatmeal. You look at some graphic design today, and you can tell that nobody is in charge.
You’ve been doing a few little films for the book release. Is that new territory? How did they come about?
The publisher wanted a little flat, static image for the book for the website. We weren’t really feeling that. So this is a great example of how we work. We had five minutes to think about it. So we said let’s get out of here. Let’s go under the Bodhi tree where genius is. So we went around the corner to the Italian restaurant, had a pizza and a bottle of wine, and halfway through we said: “You know what would be really funny? A book with chickens walking around on it.”
So we come back to the studio, and Chris calls Iowa. “Do you have chicks? Yeah, we have chicks. How much are they? $34 for a dozen. Excellent, we’ll take a dozen chicks.” So that’s Thursday afternoon. They say they’ll be hatched by Tuesday, and then they’ll ship them. The next Thursday I get a call from the post office, “You have a perishable package here.” So I’m standing in line, and I hear “cheep cheep, cheep cheep.”
So I called Chris and said, “Chicks are here, we need a tripod, a video camera and some barbeque sauce.” So we shot the thing in the afternoon. I kept them one more day, because I wanted to be with them. And we learned how to feed and care for them. Then Saturday morning we took them to McCarren Park and handed them off to a farmer who will raise them. That’s how we do stuff. We just make it up.
Do you do all of your sketching and writing on paper?
Paper, and not in the studio. I’ll go to a bar or a restaurant. When I did the book, I left the studio every morning and I went to the park and sat for an hour, hour and a half. I brought an idea, and I wrote longhand in one of these big sketchbooks. Then I would come into the studio and work during the day. Afterwards, at 4 or 5, I’d go to my bar, sit with a beer or two, and refine it. Or write on a new idea. So it became this really nice process of every day. And it became a habit. I can’t do the think-work in the studio. The studio’s for putting stuff together — for work-work. And if we’re not doing work-work, then we leave. How many great architecture ideas have been drawn on napkins? Because they’re free, they’re not thinking about work. It’s the work you do before you ever put pen to paper. That’s the important part.
Excerpted from the 99u blog](http://25.media.tumblr.com/a7636ce9283bbcc71a07c6d8dcb118ae/tumblr_mlq0uvgXu21qai3sgo1_500.jpg)
INTERVIEW : JAMES VICTORE
James Victore is a man of action. He believes that learning about free jazz and liquor fermentation and speed-racing can make you a better designer, that graphic design is about experiences and stories and using your hands.
Distilling wisdom from decades down in the beautiful muck of making ideas happen, he’s produced a stunning series of aphoristic posters on the nature of art, design and the creative process. His Aphorisms on Art & Idea Execution is on display in the gallery space at Ace Hotel New York through May 25. The installation is in partnership with the 99U Conference. Jocelyn K. Glei caught up with him recently.
What’s a normal day for you?
I like to think we’re like the army. We get more work done by noon than most people do in a full day. Chris [Victore’s sole co-worker] comes in at 10:30 or 11am. We decide on what needs to be done. We rarely work past 5pm. We’re pretty efficient. We make decisions. I look at the agency system and it’s such a waste. That’s why people like Time Magazine come to us. They know they can give it to us on a Wednesday and it will be done on Friday.
Alia Penner created this twenty-foot-wide backdrop for Father John Misty’s Coachella show this year. There’s a lot going on here — kind of like a mashup of John Ford movies, Monty Python and the Care Bears — the perfect visual alchemy for this year’s circus in the Bermuda Triangle of post-industrial America that happens to be our Southwest home and the site of Desert Gold. Stop by any time.
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