Beacon Food Forest is a developing seven-acre food forest on Beacon Hill in Seattle. A forest. Of food. Learn more and help out.
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
Of his many feats of daring, Harry Smith is likely most well known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, an act of assemblage that threw back the gray flannel curtain of the fifties and offered a glimpse into a weirder America, inspiring a generation of songwriters and listeners. Here’s Charley Patton’s growl like the plea of a ravaged crop on ‘Mississippi Boweavil Blues.’ Uncle Dave Macon is unhinged if not ingenuous, pledging, “Won’t get drunk no more…” on ‘Way Down the Old Plank Road.’ The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers are ethereal, like ghosts trapped in wax. Here’s the fatalism and syncretic religion of an America where strange spirits roamed the land from the Dockery Plantation to Appalachia. This isn’t an America you can straitjacket into the fifties forever, not when conjurer Mister Smith reincarnates the armies of what we were. Upon accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammies, he said “I’m glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music.” And so he did. Because he changed America with music. We’re celebrating the life of Harry Smith — a one-time resident of the building that has now become Ace Hotel New York — later this month on his ninetieth birthday, with music and readings by people who knew him and people he changed.
The songbook picture was lovingly defaced by Harry Smith.
Seattle-based Blackbird Ballard is camping out at the shop above Rudy’s Barbershop next door to Ace Hotel New York until the first day of July. Stop in for incense pyres and friendly faces.
“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.
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