March 2005
Visual Resistance Stencil-Making Workshop!
Posted March 31, 2005 by in VR Projects
Come hang out with the Visual Resistance Collective at the Grassroots Media Conference 2005!
April 9th --- 11:45 am-1:15 pm
New School University --- 65 5th Avenue at 13th Street, NY
The Portable Printing Press: A Hands-On Guide to Stencil-Making
The stencil is one of the cheapest and easiest ways of reproducing an image. Our collective will conduct a hands on skill-share that will cover the basics of making a stencil. We encourage participants to bring ideas and/or designs to share with the group. It is not necessary to bring supplies, but if you have your own x-acto knife we encourage you to bring it. If you have never cut a stencil before you will leave this workshop with one in your hand, and strategies for putting it up on the street. Folks with stencil-making experience are also welcome to come and share ideas, strategies, and projects.
Securing Photos or How much is a Picture worth?
Posted March 27, 2005 by in Free Speech
A few days ago while riding home on a NJ Transit train I had an interesting and luckily uneventful converstion with a Transit employee. I was testing out a recently purchased camera, snapping pictures of the passing scenery enroute to Penn Station. A few stops go by and I can feel someone's eyes on me. At first I am alarmed and think, "Is this person going to try and take my camera?!?" The thought quickly fades as the likelyhood of such an event was remote at best on such a crowded train. But the person remains and I continue clicking away. Finally, I hear "Why are you taking pictures?" I am still looking through the viewfinder at this point and the voice comes out of nowhere. It jars me, helping to produce a blurred photo of one of my favorite pieces of graffiti. I look up and begin to offer an answer. I say something to the extent that I find the scenery "interesting". This was not a good answer as I was to learn. The man across the way repeats the word and adds "yes it is," in a tone that is meant to entrap. I quickly dodge his intentions by mentioning that I had just gotten the camera a few stops ago and was checking it out. He gave me slow look over and said "yeah you look okay, but just last week I asked some guy the same question and he got all flustered and we had to confiscate his camera and take him in for questioning."
There is no law against taking pictures on NJ Transit trains; regardless of that fact, it seems as though taking a picture does put one in a risky situation--and this situation is largely complicated by how you look. Which makes me wonder what the recent victory by photo advocates means for New York City subways? (For backstory on the MTA's proposed ban check out Eliot's post on the subject).
Banksy
Posted March 24, 2005 by in Culture Jamming / Ads & Adbusting
If you read nothing else today, don't miss Wooster's post on Banky's escapades in New York. The New York Times article is full of the condescending elitism you'd expect, but Banksy's succinct explanation on Wooster is perfect:
Were the works you installed all paintings on canvas?Two of the works were fine oil paintings. I vandalised them so they had some actual meaning. In the Natural History museum I installed a real dead beetle but with model missiles and satellite dishes stuck to it. A bug in the true American spirit [...].
What message, if any, were you trying to convey by putting up these works?
I've wandered round a lot of art galleries thinking 'I could have done that' so it seemed only right that I should try.
These Galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires. The public never has any real say in what art they see. Its good to screw with the selection process sometimes. 'Comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable' as Eleanor Roosevelt once said.
The gas mask painting is about how fear of terror is disfiguring society.
The military officer painting is dedicated to all those who joined the forces to fight honorable and just wars, and ended up feeling like maybe they should have stayed home and been peace activists instead.
The Change You Want to See
Posted March 23, 2005 by in Housing, Land & Development
For anyone who missed it, be sure to check out the pictures from last Sunday's art-making at The Change You Want to See space.
There is another planning meeting to counter rezoning in Williamsburg this Thursday, 7-9pm at Funhouse, as well as another art-making day this Sunday at the Change You Want to See. For background info on the groups involved and the issues at stake, check out CommunityPlan.org as well as our previous post on the subject....
Sumpthin' new from The Icarus Project- Underground Roots: Taproots and Topsoils
Posted March 21, 2005 by in Books & Zines
We got word that The Icarus Project folks have a few new publications in the works...
The Icarus Project's new book, Underground Roots: Taproots and Topsoils is due out in April 2005. In addition they are putting together a smaller publication containing artwork called, Underground Roots and Magic Spells: A Guide to Creating Mental Health Support Networks in Our Communities.
Here's some of the artwork that will be included. These are from Fly, Cristy Road, and Sophie Crumb respectively. Click here to see the full gallery of pieces.
Taproots and Topsoils is all about building community from the ground up, looking at how other people do things and emulating and replicating what works – joining forces with them and figuring out how to grow together into the future. Our social and economic safety nets have either already been or are in the process of being cut, and the big question is: how do we make new ones with the scraps of what we’ve got? Instead of reinventing the wheel, how can we use all the pieces out there to create a whole new way to fly? The contributers provide a clever mix of social movements, healing modalities, and community organizing models.
Here's a bunch of pieces you can look forward to:
MindFreedom - On Finding My Tribe, and Thinking for Myself
Freedom Center–Grassroots Empowerment Model of Mental Health Organizing
Fountain House – The Clubhouse Model-History and Future
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
Theater of the Oppressed
Re-evaluation Counseling – useful tactics/non-heirarchical therapy model
Somatic Experiencing and the Roots of Our Illness
Alcoholics Anonymous
The Harm Reduction Movement
Food Not Bombs – as radical non-heirarchical/decentrailized grassroots network model
Prison Moratorium Project – example of community outreach and education
Lessons From ACT UP
Welcome Home Zapatista – finding community in revolution
The Asambleas in Argentina
Harm Free Zones and Community Organizing by Kai from Critical Resistance
Affinity Groups - history from Spanish anarchists/anti-nuke move
Community Supported Agriculture/Permaculture - reconnecting with the ground
Processwork/Process Oriented Psych– integrating aspects of shamanism into our work
Green Gulch Zen Center – Finding Spiritual Community
A conversation with Beth Ferguson
Posted March 18, 2005 by in Interviews
A few months ago we sat down with the amazing Beth Ferguson to discuss her involvement in various projects around the world including Bikes Across Borders, Green Map, Bread and Puppet Theater, More Gardens, the Beehive Collective, and many more . We discussed the power of using art and performance as a way to educate, raise awareness, and make connections between issues like globalization and the environment, using mediums ranging from puppetry, bikes, block prints, murals, recycled objects, and maps.
Our apologies to Beth for posting this so late!
How did you get started making political art?
I was really lucky growing up in New Hampshire because Bread and Puppet was nearby and I had friends with hippie parents who would bring us to Vermont, to Glover to see Bread and Puppet. Not only was I excited to see the puppets but it was my first chance to see political art and it was like being hit with the real news, that wasn’t getting out on the stations and it was having my mind blown, like learning what was going on in Central America. It really blew me away that puppeteers were coming together from all over the world to put on these shows in the woods all throughout this circus field and up on stilts and dancing and making paper mache puppets and burning them, bringing a lot of people together and eating bread and having a lot of volunteers make this whole thing happen. So that’s what got me started in seeing connections between art and politics and ways of bringing people together.
I went to college and started being interested in environmental studies and saw that there could be a link between environmental studies and art. I got involved in a project called Green Mapping which is using symbols to represent different ecological sites. The first project was started here in NYC 10 years ago by Wendy Bauer the director, was out a preparation conference for UN delegates coming to NY and they wanted to figure out how to show these delegates more about NY’s environment so she started thinking she would make a map and show interesting sites in NY for people to come and see. She came up with symbols like solar energy site, compost site, farmers market, kids places, parks, pollution, places with noice problems, places where communities have been targeted for environmental racism. She had a lot of diverse issues represented in 120 icons. I started volunteering with her as well as doing puppetry work in NY about 4 or 5 years ago and I wanted to have my own work reflect issues about the environment as well.
Since then I’ve worked with puppeteers from Bread and Puppet, after going as a highschool student I spent a summer there in ‘98 during their last big circus. I got to perform with a hundred puppeteers from all over the world which was just amazing. We put on a circus and I learned how to stilt walk, and make paper mache, and volunteered in the print shop. I learned how to do block printing and got introduced to this idea of cheap art and how art shouldn’t just be in museums, it should be out and available in people’s kitchens, living rooms, and schools, and it should be a few bucks or free. And I learned about cheap ways of making art on cardboard and recycled paper with house paints.
I got really into doing that and started working with my friends from college and with other artists in political circles. I started running with puppeteers starting Puppet Uprising in Philadelphia after a lot of puppeteers were arrested. One of the things that drew me to New York was Reclaim the Streets parties that started about 4 years ago. Friends and I came to reclaim the streets and brought some puppets from Bread and Puppet that were Afghani women, a simple mask with a black cloak and we walked through the streets watching people respond to us. What really excited me was how puppets can be up in people’s faces and change a protest like instead of people saying, “Uh, they’re just there because they’re upset,” they say, “Wow that’s a beautiful puppet, or that’s an angry puppet,” or just having the media respond differently. Street performance gets people to sit down and actually hear messages or interact, or start thinking that theater isn’t just for a $20 ticket in a theater, but that they can actually have theater in the streets.
What about the different mediums you’ve used?
While I was working for Green Map here in NY there was a circus called the End of the World Circus in town and I walked by the community garden that was on the green map and saw a circus performer building these double tall bikes. He had to peddle backwards to go forwards. It blew my mind, and we started talking and welding bikes together in a community garden after Adam Purple’s squat had been evicted. My friend Juan had gotten all these bike parts together and some one loaned us a welder, and Aresh from the More Gardens Coalition who I was living with got us a garden space and we started to build these double tall bikes that were really big in the Time’s Up, critical mass bike scene. We built a pirate ship for Halloween which was 4 double tall bikes in the middle and 2 on the side and it was a huge ship and had a steering connection. It seemed dangerous but it survived 2 critical masses and it blew people’s minds to see people riding up there with little pirate hats. So that was the was the medium I got really excited about and having people see bicycles as art, not just as transportation, not just as a luxury sports vehicle but actually something that could have social change, and think about bikes in a different way.
I made friends with some people who broke off from the circus and stayed in NY. We started to build not only bikes but created puppet shows. We made insects who reclaimed NYC after industrialization. We used shadow puppets and performed that at different parties. And we made them into stencils that got sprayed in different places. We made another show after relocating to Austin, TX. Some people there bought a warehouse space that is now called the Rhizome Collective. They called all bike nomads and artists and people who wanted to come create this warehouse into a center for community organizing, political art, and ecological design, which is what it’s become in the last 4 years. I left NY about 5 years ago with Lon and Bracken and started to fix up bikes that could be used for people who need them along the border. A woman in the group went on a delegation to Mexico and visited the machiadores in the sweatshops and found out what was going on down there.
She came back to the collective, who was planning on doing a bike tour into Mexico, “Let’s bring a trailor of bikes and do puppet shows, and touring equipment to do shows for Committee of Border Workers." They were having an event for mothers day and said that they would really like bikes for community organizing. So when we got to the border with a trailor of a hundred bikes and about 15 bike circus performers we found that the taxes were too high to cross with a trailor filled. Sweat shop organizors told us to cross the bikes one by one like a local elementary school had done with desks for their school. So it became this crazy pageant of crossing these bikes over one by one. There were about 10 different trips with 20 people going by. It got us thinking a lot about NAFTA and trade, privelage of being from the north and working in solidarity with people from the south. We got all the bikes across and helped the community start a bike shop. People who were doing labor organizing were excited to have a bike circus performance, we had a lot of fun with local kids and then biked back to Austin.
We realized that we can travel by bike and bring puppet shows with us, and that just got the bike circus going in a lot of different directions. Half the people from that trip went on to Europe and have been there with the bike circus for the past 4 years. Juan, Bracken, Ed, and I made a puppet show about that experience of Bikes Across Borders, of bringing bikes to labor organizers in Mexico. We did a lot of research on NAFTA and border struggles. That’s one of the things I really like about puppetry, is that it gives you a chance to really be a journalist. I feel that puppetry is a form of media because you have to do a lot of research and image making, text writing and finding audiences to perform the show. I like to take it a step further and make comics about the shows so that it can live beyond the puppeteers. Puppetry can be exhausting and you can only be on tour for so much of your life. Comics are a way for the show to be preserved and translated into different languages, put on websites, put in newspapers and magazines.
That’s like, “ The Story of an Orange”?
Yeah, we have a piece called, “The Story of an Orange” which I could sing right now! It actually brings up Radical Cheerleading. One of the orginal members of our Cycle Circus crew was Bracken Firecracker who was a radical cheerleader. Working with a collective it’s important for people to have all different skills. She was a great performer and could put all different rhymes to radical cheers. I was really interested in pulling everyone together to help me write the text and put all different images with the text and keeping things flowing. Juan is amazing with the bikes, puppetry, and getting the imagery really together, and connecting them to the text. Ed was good at putting solar panels on our bike trailors. When you are working in a collective it is really important to have diverse skills, everyone has something to offer, and cover all aspects of what it takes to get images and get work out into the universe and have different people get to see it.
Are you working with other people now, or just on your own projects?
After we did the Bikes Across Borders show for the first time, we traveled with a bunch of puppetistas- folks that had been doing a lot of political puppetry at huge anti-globalization mobilizations. We did a tour through the midwest, landing at the Radical Cheese which was a political puppet convergence at bread and puppet theater about four years ago where puppeteers from all over the country were invited to come and bring shows and do workshops and spend a week together presenting their shows, working on a big pageant eating together, collaborating. Then we had a weekend where an audience from all over came and watched puppet shows that were in the woods, we did a circus with the Bread and Puppet Theater Company, and it was a time where a lot of puppeteers got to connect and now, years later still working together.
I think big mobilizations have been really crucial to political art collective movements in the last few years that I’ve seen. We left the Radical Cheese as the bike circus with twenty bikers and then we did another tour around for a month so that was another 600 mile tour stopping in different villages and small towns. It was when the anti-war movement was starting to grow with Afghanistan being bombed so we went to Burlington and collaborated with bread and puppet to do a big pageant with the population puppets and drums and then onto Washington DC. The cycle circus and political art movements have kind of collided with a lot of different groups when there’s mobilizations. I guess the bee hive collective at the same time were making political banners around the FTAA with images of animals to depict flip tape Bread and Puppet.
When you do puppet shows it’s not only a chance to do research and present a show, it’s also a chance to sell cheap art and that’s a way we’ve been able to support ourselves on the road. Having things like block prints that are either about the puppet show, or about other, either beautiful or dreadful or inspiring things going on, creating those kind of images to sell after a puppet show or during a mobilization and distribute as something that not only helps feed you but also helps the cheap art movement, things like that.
How about disseminating information --- what has been your most successful outlet for distributing your artwork and getting it out?
When I’m organizing tours I’ll often find out if there’s harvest festivals going on, if there’s anti-war mobilizations, if there’s an action going on, because that’s where your audience already is. You can save time from having to put up posters, and getting people there can be really laborious, but if you go where the people are it saves a lot of time and you have an audience that’s interested. But if you don’t want to go where the audience has already converted then that’s a whole other angle on how to get your work out. Talking to teachers I find, like after I do a puppet show a teacher might come up to me and say wow I’d love to have you guys come in and do your show at my high school. We often jump at the opportunity even if there’s no money cause to be able to get young people to be like,"wow you have hairy legs" and," that puppet's really cool" and just get them to start thinking about, like, what a radical cheer is or other ways to express themselves, and often they're pretty energized. When Bee Hive Collective has done tours to universities they’ll often stop at high schools to get kids who often don't get exposed to political ideas thinking about them, which is really crucial.
Do you have any memorable experiences of kids coming up to you after shows?
Yeah, we’ve done workshops in tons of different summer camps or high schools, where we’ll do activities. There was a project called Video Machete in Chicago where we did our puppet show about Bikes Across Borders for their students who were learning video work, and then we made puppets with them after. They’d had a lot of fun making like simple cardboard masks and one student had made a show about kind of, talking about women and harassment. They did a video they showed us of a real plucked chicken that's sitting on a bench and a guy, like a young teenager comes up to the chicken, and says like, “hey chick how’s it going” and it was hilarious, and then in the puppet workshop we made them a fake chicken out of cardboard so they don’t have to use a real chicken, and then they acted out the little show of like harassing the chicken but calling them chick (laughs)
Kids just come up with wild ideas and are often underestimated of like how much their paying attention to, and like if you give them a chance to express themselves they come up with some really cool stuff and they really like the cheer we do about the story of the orange often has the audience does like a background beat to it and can even read along, we’ve made comics of the story of the orange since and had it printed on banners. The Bee Hive Collective prints their work on a recycled plastic bottle banner, and after you spend a ton of time doing graphic layout for comics. Printing it on a banner is a huge time saver, through the tradition of conte estoria a singing song that Bread and Puppet has kind of coined and a lot of puppeteers have learned with, of taking bed sheets and painting them white and then just using house paint or acrylic paints to sketch out your images. I think is also a really valuable form and fun activity for kids to teach them conte esoria workshops. We’ve done that in the past too, where kids have come up with some great story boards, we’ll have kids sketch out an idea with different blockings and then put it together and add maybe music or songs and color.
Most recently what's the work that you’ve been working on and what you intend to do? Could talk about the murals and the design you’ve been doing?
This last year the More Gardens Coalition asked Juan and I to do illustration for a book project they're working on that will be kind of the future, past and present of the More Gardens Coalition and kind of the struggle for community gardens in New York City. My work with Green Map has given me a lot of background in sustainable technologies and urban gardening and greening and community initiatives. I’m working with Juan, who has been one of the illustrators with Bee Hive Collective. We’ve brainstormed with Aresh and came up with all different things for an image of the future of new york city’s community gardens. So we made a list of like, solar panels, green houses, parades, puppets, slow foods, people eating together, bread ovens, solar hot water heaters. We used traditional kind of brown stone architecture of New York, but then cut into it, adding gray water recycling systems using gravity of the building to have waste water from apartments go through water pools and the plants in the pools would recycle and clean the water so at the end it could be used to water the gardens when there’s water shortages.
We created an image that’s just filled with all this information and really positive with all the things that would make a safe, healthy beautiful community and things that exist, nothing that doesn’t exist. That's a motto I’ve been kind of excited about, and it sounds better in Spanish, but it’s alternative technologies exist and they're here, we just need to work together to implement them. Something I’ve been interested in is creating images that are positive to inspire people to actually work together and make some of the changes that we often talk about or maybe forget when we get overwhelmed with how many gray clouds there are right now in our communities, and greater global community.
So we made that image with pen and ink it’s about four feet by five feet, the original, and then water colored it. That’s something I really like doing is adding color to graphic images to give them, kind of a fun look, especially when they're about green cities. It’s like, how can you not put in the green? So that poster’s been finished and now is on big banners and has gone to different festivals and a lot of people have been excited about it and bought posters to bring to their community organizations or put in other books that are working on community garden issues.
I’ve been really inspired by muralists and that’s something I”d like to do more in the future. I’d like to find a spot in NYC to put the More Gardens mural. Something that excites me about murals is it’s almost like a website where you’re saving paper, and you’re not looking for people to give your paper product to. It's putting it up on a wall and people can take it in or not, they have the option. But I find especially in urban degraded environments, murals can bring a lot of peace and happiness and inspiration to people.
The Green Map Project has been using the image too for a new green map in New York which is gonna focus on energy. They're using a portion of the image that shows solar panels and wind generators and composting for a new campaign they're doing to get ideas of how to make New York City save energy and not be so wasteful. I think often big cities, even when they have power outages, it don't even occur to them to think of ways to save energy. A scary thing I heard is before the Trade Towers fell, New York City was at a real loss of energy and was trying to figure out how to get more energy. When we lost the Towers they didn’t have to worry about energy as much anymore because the Towers used so much energy, but we’re just in a crazy time with creating so much waste, using so much energy, and just being this oozing country gobbling as much at the fastest rate possible.
But I think a lot of young and old people are so overwhelmed with that, as artists it’s a real challenge to figure out how to inspire people to face facts and not be a part of it and inspire each other to pull out of that system and ride our bikes and buy local food, and waste less. Another fun movement I’ve been a part of is the trash worship movement where one of my favorite inspirers, an Italian artist here in the Lower East Side named Orlando, who's done trash worship ceremonies where he’ll bring people together at big parties and go through trash transformation process where he’ll get people to cut up cans and make tea lights and take toy boxes from after Christmas and make masks. He inspires people to go through this spiritual experience of transforming trash and thinking about the waste that they're creating and where it’s going. He’s covered the Ninth Street Community Garden with gorgeous flowers made out of metal cans, olive oil cans, pinwheels.
How do you hook up with these various people, collectives, and organizations- do you seek them out?
I think it’s a small world when you get into it, but I think as a artist it’s really important to get feedback from other organizations and other artists, and that’s a way to find different audiences to bring your work to. If you're a puppeteer it's important to know Morgan who organizes the Puppet Uprising so you can go to Philly once a year and bring every new show you have there, and it also gives you a little motivation because it’s overwhelming to be an artist where there’s hardly any grant support and to always be creating new art you have to have outlets and deadlines. Or, like the Earth First Journal has published a lot of our work from the Bee Hive and from comics we’ve done from our puppet shows which has been really nice to have that resource, to have a little motivation to make a comic about work that we’re doing or write a article and get it out there and then have a document of it. And going to mobilizations I think is something that is also a way to network with people.
What big mobilizations have you brought your art to?
Last year the Cycle Circus went to Cancun, Mexico during the World Trade Organization meetings and we got a grant from the Fund for Wild Nature, who's given grants to different political puppeteers and graphic artist to go. Someone handed us the keys to a van so we loaded the van down with bicycles and made a puppet show about monarch butterflies and used the monarch butterfly who travels from Mexico, the US, and Canada on its migration patterns yearly as a metaphor for NAFTA and for learning more about biotechnology. So it’s kind of an example of how finding metaphors in nature brings people together because they want to find out more about this magical butterfly. But then when you throw in topics like border crossings and trade issues and biotechnology people learn more in, this kind of sneaky way and that's kind of journalist work, like figuring out the message you want to bring to an audience, but getting kids to just be blown away with seeing a caterpillar transform into a butterfly.
That's one of the puppets we have is this life size caterpillar that crawls into a cocoon and then a person with butterfly wings jumps out and flies around the audience and all the kids get to chase it. It was really well received when we brought it to Cancun, we knew some of the organizers who told us we could set up the show on a stage in one of the parks, but at the same time our rivalry was the Infernal Noise Brigade, who's one of my favorite marching bands from Seattle. They had hundreds of people all surrounding them in this park, and everyone had pots and pans, kind of banging pots and pans to give memory to the Argentinean uprisings, and right when we’re about to start our show they took the whole audience and did a huge march through Cancun, and then they stopped our show and had a punk band play before us, and we’re just waiting and bummed that our audience left and then the punk bands finished and we set up again and right when we’re about to start the marching band filled the park again but it wasn’t just a couple hundred people, it was a couple thousand people, and the cops had been following them.
Right before we had a chance to perform, it didn’t even seem possible because the audience was wild because the marching band and people were just dancing and having a great time. They got on the microphone and said that the cops had surrounded the park and unless everyone settles down to watch a puppet show they would probably be arrested so that was like the best opening show we could ever have imagined to have like a thousand people from all over Central America and the world at this WTO mobilization protest all of a sudden just stop and listen to our puppet show, and we had local musicians from Cancun play the music so we had some local support with the show. So there were the drummers and then we started with storytelling.
One thing that’s been really fun to do are puppet shows and the Bee Hive Collective's technique of doing story telling. People really like stories and like listening and like learning and questioning after so it’s a great way to bring music and peoples attention together and then have people come up to you later and say, “wow I didn’t know that about monarch butterflies” or, “I work with the NGO in Mexico City that does butterfly preservation stuff we’d love to have you guys come up and perform for them. We performed the same show in a small community in Chaipas and someone came up to us after and said I’d like to take you up to one of the Zapatista communities but I’m not gonna tell you where it is, you just have to trust me, and they hopped in the van with us and brought us up to one of the Zapatista communities in Palenque and we got to perform for their training. They have a school there where they're training young Zapatistas to work in the schools and we got to perform as well in the elementary school there.
Where else have you travelled?
I’ve gotten to travel to Cuba over the last few years with bikes across borders, where we donate bicycles, and also with Greenmap. I’ve worked with the Greenmap collective in Cuba, and have been inspired by murals and political art there. And last year I spent a year there taking printmaking and papermaking classes, working with the stiltwalking theater group that does puppetry in the streets, for kids and does afro Cuban dancing and music, on stilts with a full band and group of dancers. I’ve been able to put my stiltwalking to the big test, that I learned with Bread and Puppet, and working with them.
And I also got to work on an mural project in Cuba. I worked with a community group called Muraliando, “muralmaking". They have about 15x 15 blocks plastered with murals by artists from all over the world- Brazilian graffiti artists, Mexican muralists, or local artists. And we made a greenmap mural last year, where we worked with the elderly community and the elementary school, to do research on important cultural and environmental sites.
In the whole network there’s over 41 countries, making Greenmaps throughout the world, totalling over 175 different print maps. Using low technology stuff to have the whole neighborhood know that their neighborhoods been mapped. They can find their house, and they can find places they wanna fix up. If the mural shows a falling apart baseball field, they can do an image of how they wanna fix it up, or plant more gardens and do more revitalization stuff in that community.
I also went with Greenmap 2 years ago to Italy, for an international conference. I was the translator for the Cuban group, that’s how I ended up getting invited to go to Cuba and work with, their team on design projects. I went to Barcelona and was amazed by how organized the squatter communities are. I went to visit a squat called Can Masdeu, which was an former leper colony hospital that a group of squatters from all over Europe discovered as they were trying to organize an environmental conference. They moved in 3 years ago and haven’t left. Their lifestyle is most sustainable, communal way I have ever seen. They have compost toilets, solar energy, and grow their own food. They also invite the local community to do environmental education projects.
So I got to spend a few months with them and do a map, a birds eye view of their building and community gardens. The image focused on the water systems that they have there. There’s a water mine behind the building, which they tapped into. There’s a little trickle that they were able to put a tube in and fill their bolsas, which are big pools. So I looked at a lot of the photos, and walked around the property a lot in order to design the map.
How do you balance making visionary work with oppositional artwork?
The beehive collective helped us come up with a good title for the More Gardens image,“envision greener futures, demand sustainability today” and that’s been a cool motto. It was great to collaborate with a group that is good with “wordsmithing” and coming up with titles for things. But I think it is important to create images that reflect what is going on for people, to have that reality check, finding out what were up against and have those envisioning images available as well to think about what we can work for and what’s possible in the future. Especially with things that we have today, we just need to learn how to harness them in ways that are affordable and accessible for different communities and fun.
Fun I think is a really important component, because things can get so depressing- but having a puppet uprising...that got started with all the puppeteers were put in jail in Philadelphia during the RNC. They had to come back for their court cases, and then they would just bring their new puppet shows, and they call it a puppet uprising, they bring audiences out to see their new shows, and it was some of the best puppeteers of the country that had to keep coming back to these court cases so It just became this awesome fun event and something to look forward to for going back to court.
Sometimes, even though it really sucks to get arrested or the things we’re up against can be really dismal, there can be really good things about it, like you guys were saying, you wanted to make posters around the Republican conventions here in NY and now you have an awesome collective. Seeing the positivity in the darkest times-I think it’s crucial. Almost balances out the negative. Like what Aresh from more gardens will say is, he loves all the developers because they’ve brought so many of the gardeners together!
So what do you want to work on in the near or distant future?
In the future I’d like to do more mural making stuff. I wanna keep doing block printing and maybe make a little book series, with text in Spanish and English, like a comic book version of the puppet show that we took to Mexico last year of the monarch butterflies' travels through North America . I’m going to be continuing working with the bike circus to do that.
What kinds of support do you receive from the communities you work with?
These projects are sometimes done without any money, and sometimes we get blessed with different bits of support from grants or local donors who will have a fundraiser before we do a project. And my faith is always renewed every time we do something that is totally a stab in the dark to try and pull off a big tour, or try to pull off a project. There is so much support from our local activist communities, environmental groups, and schools. A lot of universitiy tours can be a good way to keep a show on the road and get things printed. When Bush got elected this year I had a sick feeling in my stomach just knowing how much harder we have to work to keep things going and to keep our lives going, so that we can keep sharing political artwork. But I know that I am not alone. I think it only makes us stronger when we have communities that are excited to have things come to them and supportive.
Call for artists: "FUMED"
Posted March 17, 2005 by in Artwork Needed
Got this in the email box today --- any readers who live, work, or have passed through Chicago, take note: This exhibition will present a selection of artists who have examined and artistically used the walls of Chicago as a template for creative pursuits. The grid of the city constitutes a living canvas, a nexus for exploration, reflection and contemplation. This show is not so much about hip-hop per se, as it is about showcasing artists who create work that reflects some of the uniqueness and spirit of the culture.
ELIGIBILITY: Open to all artists working in this medium
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
- Images must be submitted via email to: J-Mendoza [at] neiu.edu
- Images must be JPEG or GIF format ONLY
- Image list (saved as a Word document) must include: title, medium, size, year, and price (if applicable)
- Bio: maximum of 150 words
- Current curriculum vitae
CALENDAR
Deadline for Submissions: May 20, 2005
Notifications Sent: July 1, 2005
All Work to Arrive: November 26, 2005
Exhibition Dates: December 2 – 24, 2005, 2005
Opening Reception: December 2, 2005 , 6-10pm
Pick-Up Work: December 24, 2005
ACCEPTED WORK: Participating artists will be informed of selection via e-mail.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE SEND EMAIL TO: JMendoza [at] neiu.edu
Posters protesting the West Side stadium hit the streets!
Posted March 15, 2005 by in Free Speech
The new poster campaign promoting the Olympics in NYC was launched in the past few weeks as you've probably noticed. Fortunately some culture jammin' folks have created posters to explain how having an Olympic size stadium will actually affect New Yorkers. Although some of the pics on their website of posters on the street are clearly made in photoshop, I spotted them around Manhattan. The pic on the right was taken in Brooklyn. Check out 2012landgrabs.net to view or download more posters.
A web based news source for Prospect Heights, Brooklyn --- dailyheights.com --- interviewed the designers...
EXCLUSIVE: Olympic Rings to be Draped in Construction-Site OrangeThe Olympics will bring us prestige, glory, post-9/11 rebirth, flowers and kittens. Why do you hate our freedoms?
The Freedom to be kicked around by a latter-day Robert Moses and a CEO-mayor is a freedom we can all do without.
Who are you/you guys? Only graphic designers would post EPS files for download.
Bingo.
Are you buying any "official" advertising space, or is this purely a stealth campaign?
NYC2012 and Danny D grabbed all the ad space. Otherwise we'd be above ground.
Be honest. Some of those examples on the "spoofs" page are photoshops, right?
Honesty counts. Yes. But do you have any idea what it takes to get the New York Times interested? It takes Photoshop! Seriously.
Why 2012landgrabs.net? Aren't you afraid the IOC or Bloomberg (or me) will grab the 2012landgrabs.com domain and dilute your message?
That is a very good question. ".net" is of the people. ".com" is of the board room. Having said that, I'll race you to register.com.
Do you think New York has a chance of getting the Olympics in 2012?
Zero.
What do people of New York actually think of the Olympic bid, anyway?
I think they could care less. Honestly. Though if the Olympic Rings could be draped in construction-site orange, well then, maybe.
Have you seen any polls or anything?
63% are in favor, down from 67% in June. Supposedly Bush won Ohio too. But 57% or so are against the West Side Stadium. Those numbers might seem contradictory on their face, but New Yorkers realize that the Stadium is a sure way to kill any chances the City has to win the Olympic Bid.
What's the best method for affixing these signs to a flat surface--keeping in mind, of course, that one won't be vandalizing, or affixing the sign to a surface that one has no permission to affix something to?
Wheatpaste works. Many copy shops can print on stickers. Or one can buy Avery letter-size labels. That works well. A flat, smooth surface is best.
Why should people of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn care about all this?
The Ratner arena and the massive amount of shit that goes with it is a scam land grab. The Olympics are being used to slam it down your throat. Resistance is mandatory.
Anything else?
It is every New Yorker's duty to download the EPS files, learn how to use Illustrator, print the files and affix everywhere and anywhere.
Photo by Mike of Satan's Laundromat. Original available at: http://www.satanslaundromat.com/sl/archives/000486.html
Arts meeting on Williamsburg rezoning
Posted March 14, 2005 by in Events
This Thursday evening, the good people at Williamsburg's The Change You Want To See gallery space are hosting an emergency arts meeting to plan creative organizing against the city's proposed rezoning of the Williamsburg & Greenpoint waterfront.
They've been working with a bunch of arts organizations, as well as community-based groups like the North Brooklyn Alliance and the Williamsburg Warriors and doing strong, door-to-door outreach to gain community support for a Community Plan that would contain the height of new buildings, create low-income housing, preserve small businesses & light industry, and otherwise respect the neighborhood and its residents.
There will also be a hands-on art-making workshop this Sunday (March 20) at the gallery from 12-5. They're working on some pretty rad visual ideas, from props for demonstrations to street stuff...
Whether you live in the neighborhood or not --- I don't --- rezoning, eminent domain, and overzealous development will affect all Brooklyn residents (and Manhattan residents --- and Port Chester residents, New London residents, etc.) in the years to come. Drop us a line at visual.resistance [at] gmail.com if you're interested in getting involved. For mor background on Williamsburg/Greenpoint rezoning, check out the North Brooklyn Alliance website.
$pread Magazine launch party in NYC!
Posted March 14, 2005 by in Events
$pread Magazine launch party in NYC!
Wednesday, March 16th, 8pm at The Slipper Room, 167 Orchard St
Party in New York City with: New York's hottest new punk band I LOVE YOU. Drag, dance, and dissent divas DALIPSTYXX, Playboy's first out lesbian Playmate STEPHANIE ADAMS, Off-Broadway interracial/interfaith comedy sensation EPSTEIN AND HASSAN of "The Black and the Jew", sexpert and author DUCKY DOOLITTLE, HOOK Magazine founders SHANE LUIJTENS and DANIEL W.K. LEE, DJ DESIGNER IMPOSTER Go-go wildness from the all-gender $PREAD DANCERS.
Also: Emcee Raven Snook raffles off t-shirts, magazines, and free passes to NYC strip clubs, $pread contributors read from the first issue, tarot readings, drink specials, and more!
Join sex workers, activists, and literati from around the world in celebrating the launch of the US's first independent sex industry magazine! (also a send off to co-editor Mary Christmas as she departs NYC for an indefinite period) Burlesque performers are to be announced.
Come early for the spectacular show and stay late for the band, DJs and dancing till 2am! Entry is $10 with a copy of the magazine, $7 without; sex workers get in for $8 with a magazine or $5 without.
$pread is the first magazine in the U.S. to explore the sex industry from the workers' perspective and includes articles by sex workers and their allies across the globe. Issue One features original articles by Jo Doezema, David Henry Sterry, and Katherine Frank, an exclusive interview with Carol Queen and contributions from Annie Sprinkle and Scarlot Harlot, as well as news, reviews and stories by sex workers all over the world. Topics covered include women of color in the American porn industry, anti-trafficking policy in Europe, the effect of the recent Tsunami on Asian sex workers, the Bangkok AIDS Conference, retiring fromstripping, and discrimination in Israel-Palestine.
BE THE FIRST TO GET A COPY AT THE LAUNCH PARTY!
Artist Profile: BORF
Posted March 12, 2005 by in Interviews
Since the last time we featured BORF on this site, the elusive DC-based stencilist has made at least one trip to NYC and continues to spark controversy in DC and elsewhere. We sent an email to BORF asking for an interview, and got this response:
hmmm. ive been thinking about what to do if someone approaches me wanting to do an interview. im not sure if it will ruin the "mystery" of the whole thing. i dont want to turn into some fucking fad that quickly dies out once the artist, or in my case vandal, gets too excited and jumps on every opportunity for exposure. but, since your site is effin rad, ill try to do an interview with you.
So here goes:
How did you get into stenciling / street art / vandalism?
Alienation.
I first saw your stuff in NYC right before the RNC, you normally hit up D.C., and you made a big impression in North Carolina.... What's your take on working in different cities and environments? (Safety, placement, what you can pull off, etc.?)
As Bruce Lee once said: "Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.... Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend." I just try to go with the flow. I usually feel like I can pull off anything. As long as you're driven by impulse, the country, city, or neighborhood you do it in doesn't matter. The environments and risk levels change, but the act itself remains constant. As long as you know how to spray your stencil and have your technique down you're fine.
Do you have a favorite method for creating stencils? Any tips and/or suggestions?
I like making my stencils out of cardboard if I'm going to be walking around and going on adventures with them. I don't really know, though. A lot of other people I know really hate cardboard and use some sort of thin plastic or acetate. If they're not big ones, I usually cut them out of the bottom of a pizza box so I can walk around at night and not look like a sketchball. The tricks and disguises that work off of stereotypes and social norms are usually the most successful ones and disguises play the biggest role in not getting you caught.
You've gotten some media attention lately and one of the articles mistook your tag for some cryptic new ad campaign.... Any thoughts?
I think it's funny. We're so used to the omnipresent commercial mind-fucking of billboards, magazine ads, tv commercials, etc., that once an image is repeated several times and out on the streets we automatically assume it's someone trying to sell us something. But, in a sense, I guess they are right. The means I use and the reason I use them are consistent with the advertisers'. We both take advantage of the streets as an open forum to disseminate our ideas. The difference, however, is I'm using their tactics (of maximum exposure and using images to represent ideas) to subvert the very homogenous consumer culture that these advertisements promote. This strategy of subversion comes from the Situationists' idea of Détournement,
which is to "reuse preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble."
Subversion and Détournement both devalue the original manipulative intent of the image or tactic. Sadly, a smiling face placed in the context of the urban environment can be considered subversive. In reality, that was my first time in Raleigh and I wanted to leave something behind. So, I went for a walk with my stencil and two cans of paint and didn't stop until both cans were empty. I'm just a "disturbed individual with too much time on [my] hands."
In one of your pieces you write that "buffing graffiti is like putting a band-aid on a broken leg." We've written a lot about Bloomberg's ramped-up war on graffiti in NYC, what's it like in DC?
DC is primitive compared to NYC. There is no vandal squad. There is a lot of wall space since there are only a handful of kids that bomb regularly. But, I can't speak for what DC used to be like back in it's heyday, because all I know about it is what I've read in the book Free Agents: A History of Washington, DC Graffiti. There is shit still running from over a decade ago because there aren't enough writers that do shit to make going over other people an issue. I think there are a lot of reasons why DC currently has so little graffiti when compared to New York and other cities. One reason is the nature of the city. Most of the people here work for the government in one way or another, and are usually here for only a couple of years before moving away. Another reason is gentrification has, in the past couple of years, picked up a lot of speed here. Whereas NYC (mainly Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn) is well past the saturation point of yuppies and their plastic "communities." A bi-product of mass-produced consumer culture and cookie-cutter style "communities" is alienation. DC hasn't reached its boiling point yet.
In terms of risk, it's like everywhere else in that it depends on the area you're in. The farther away you get from the downtown area and the surrounding suburbs, the less cops there are. But there are a lot more crazy vigilante types. I've been chased several times, yelled at, harrassed, tackled and searched, and not once was it by a cop. At the same time, though, there are a lot of people that are "down," as long as it's not gang-related. The myth that most graffiti is gang-related could be why people are so hostile. When I'm painting in yuppie neighborhoods it's different, people just don't like me writing on their stuff. It's more of a pride/arrogance thing with yuppies than it is with native DC folks in poorer neighborhoods. Rich people don't like authentic face-to-face human interaction, so they call the police a lot more.
Who/what inspires you?
European anarchists, Huey P. Newton, Shel Silverstein, and impulsive kids.
Gated Communities?
Posted March 6, 2005 by in Housing, Land & Development
This past Thursday, March 3rd, Mayor Bloomberg announced a Memorandum of Understanding concerning the Atlantic Yards Project in Brooklyn. The memo officially accepts Forest City Ratner Companies' plan to proceed with the development at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues in downtown Brooklyn.
About three weeks earlier Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates were historically unfurled. Bloomberg marked the occasion by saying, "I can't promise, particularly since this is New York, that everyone will love 'The Gates,' but I guarantee that they will all talk about it," going on to say that “that’s really what innovative, provocative art is supposed to do.” Setting aside Bloomberg’s notions of the purposes of art, his predictions were correct. Everyone--whether they enjoyed it, didn’t get it, or stayed away from it--was at least discussing it. And, as long as you were talking about it, you couldn’t get away from the oft-repeated financial consequences of the exhibit. 21 million dollars. Irrespective of the artists’ voiced intentions, this mantra reframed the discussion.
Emphasizing the “non-commercial” and “non-corporate” agenda of the project, it was repeated again and again that it was a “gift” to the people of NYC. Undeniably the financial benefits to the city have given traction to views that “legitimate” public art must be profitable as well as spectacle-driven. Without question, this creates a divide between the public and the artist, narrowing what is exhibited while insiduiously re-defining the function of art in public spaces. This requires an artist to belong, aspire to, or be connected with a certain economic sphere; and frankly, smells of modernized "noblesse oblige"--we're rich, let's give these commoners a bit of our exquisite good taste--bracketed by "inclusive" liberal language. In one example, writers for the Project for Public Spaces emphasized the “openness and inclusiveness” of the work, describing how they “lost” themselves “in the beauty of the park in winter.”
This aspect of the project has been particularly celebrated ("bringing the city together" in countless iterations), and, directly or indirectly, seems to have helped to curb dissent about it or any other private investment for the good of the public. Consider this—Mike Bloomberg waited until Jan. 22nd to officially accept the project, with a starting date of Feb. 12th, ending on Feb. 28th. The International Olympic Committee ended their 4 1/2 day visit to NYC on Feb. 24th. With the West-Side arena (apparently, an essential component of selling the city as a viable candidate) getting so much press in recent weeks, one has to suspect that Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s gates were meant to do more than simply trace out the contours of Central Park in a warm orange glow. With the image of the “World’s Second Home” at stake, what better way to quell dischord than by finally allowing the rallying spectacle of The Gates? And the emphasis is on allowance, for despite Christo's claim that their works are "a scream of freedom," the artists overestimate their control if they deny the effects of answering to government officials and the placement of a privatized spectacle within the public discourse.*
Mayor Bloomberg chooses to cast himself as a great patron and supporter of the arts. Indeed, by his statistics, he is the greatest proponent of public art in mayoral history. He makes much of his "everyman-billionaire" reputation, and supposedly takes the subway on a regular basis. He expresses reverence for New York's cultural institutions and has overseen numerous art installations displayed on public land. In speeches, he applauds New York City's public spaces, famously re-opening City Hall Park and is, of course, after 25 years, the mayor who said "yes" to the mounting of The Gates in Central Park.
He is also the mayor that denied use of this same park to half a million New Yorkers this past summer who wished to rally there; the same mayor who has recently cracked down on unsolicited public art; and notoriously, the same mayor who is developing New York City at an unprecedented rate with little or no regard for the concerns raised by those most affected. Courtesy of Bloomberg and members of his administration, we are constantly hearing about the benefits of private investment for the good of the public. Specifically, the arena proposals in Manhattan and Brooklyn (don't forget the Frank Gehry cache!), the real estate development in Williamsburg, and countless other projects. How is it that all these investments for the public good receive little or no input from the public themselves? When and if they do enter the public debate, an inevitable outcome has already been secured and what follows only mimics a democratic process.
To find out how to get involved in some of the communities affected visit the following webpages:
Develop Don't Destory Brooklyn
Hell's Kitchen/Hudson Yards Alliance
Greenpoint Waterfront Association for Parks and Planning
[*It is worth noting that there is a long history of government influence in the allocation of so-called “benevolent” programs, “gifts” to the public, creation of popular movements and the development of land for public use. A great example of this is how the Abstract Expressionist movement in the US was co-opted for its apparent anti-communist sentiment. It is now well-known that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was funded by the CIA and, in conjunction with a Rockefeller-owned MOMA, an artistic movement was branded.]
Cell phone image by Mike of Satan's Laundromat. Original available at http://www.satanslaundromat.com/sl/archives/000481.html
New Celebrate People's History posters
Posted March 2, 2005 by in Posters
Josh MacPhee's radical distro site, JustSeeds.org recently got a new look, and more importantly, new stuff. Three new posters from the consistently wonderful Celebrate People's History posters are included in the update:
The Celebrate People’s History poster series is an on-going project producing posters that focus around important moments in “people’s history.” These are events, groups, and individuals that we should celebrate because of their importance in the struggle for social justice and freedom, but are instead buried or erased by dominant history. Posters celebrate important acts of resistance, those who fought tirelessly for justice and truth, and the days on which we can claim victories for the forces of freedom. In the past 7 years over two dozen posters have been produced on a variety of subjects, from the Battle of Homestead to Fred Hampton, Mujeres Libres to Jane, an underground abortion collective.These posters have been and will continue to be posted publicly (i.e. wheatpasted on the street, put up in peoples’ home and storefront windows, and used in classrooms) in an attempt to help generate a discussion about our radical past, a discussion that is vital in preparing us to create a radical future. I have also been using this project to create a loose network of artists interested in creating radical public art and showcasing the work of lesser known artists that want to create art that is functional, carries a social message, and doesn’t get buried at the bottom of the heap of the capitalist “art world.”
Check out the new site and read more about CPH here. You can also always pick up copies of the posters at Bluestockings bookstore in the L.E.S.
Interview with Melina and Peter Rodrigo
Posted March 1, 2005 by in Interviews
Melina and Peter Rodrigo create illustration and design that comments on their social and political surroundings. Check out their excellent website risewithus.com. Also see the poster images that Melina contributed to the NoRNC Poster Project here.
What political or social issues do you address in your work?
Most of our work revolves around poverty, racism, corporate oppression, and the overall climate of the American culture. We often try and address a point of view more than a particular issue. If your work revolves around one particular issue, it not only dates that piece, but also limits your audience because anyone who doesn't think that issue pertains to them will pass it by. On the other hand, if you base your work on a particular principle, and find a way to put that specific principle into a general context, you not only reach more people, but also still get your point across.
How did you get started in art, what politicized you?
We've been making art since we were children. As far the political aspect it was a series of things including personal experience, books, and hip hop music.
Could you name some specific books, music, artists, or experiences that inspired you to create social and political art?
Living My Life by Emma Goldman is an incredibly inspiring book. We enjoy listening to the music of Immortal Technique whose lyrics expose a great deal about the system.
What is the potential power of combining hip hop with community organizing?
There is really no telling just how powerful such a relationship would be, but it is safe to say it would be monumental, as hip-hop is the most popular music at this moment. But in order to make it a true success, it would have to be something that honestly got everyone involved. You see a lot of hip-hop campaigns like Vote or Die and The Hip-Hop Summit that generate support and attention, but at the same time there is very little awareness being created in terms of what can be done beyond the campaign itself. This is not to take anything away from Puffy or Russell Simmons, but at the same time they got where they got because they understood the system and what they needed to do in order to overcome it. They didn't attend a rally and become moguls through someone else's campaign. They took fate into their own hands, and I think that's the real power of hip-hop.
Right now we have a bunch of people (rappers, producers, CEOs, etc) who are not only wealthy, but also understand poverty, racism, and oppression firsthand. They now have the chance to use their wealth, influence, and experience to open doors for others. If you sit back and realize that some of these rappers have made over 300 million dollars for themselves out of absolutely nothing, you can only image how much could be overcome if we used these same independent minded people and the empires they have amassed to continue our progression.
What is your artistic process (do you work from photos, collage, illustration, graphics programs), what materials do you use?
We use a variety of materials including markers, crayons, spray paint, photos, ball point pens, and cloth. As far as the computer we mostly use Photoshop and Illustrator.
Is it displayed and distributed only on the web or elsewhere?
Our work has been displayed in group shows across the United States and Europe. This year we'll be in some new places such as Japan, Israel, and South America. We've also had our work printed on posters, apparel, books, magazines, and newspapers. We tend to display a lot of our work online. The web it is a great way to reach thousands of people.
You have participated in shows in other countries. Was your work site specific or relevant in a global context? What was the response to your work? Did the experience differ from shows in the US?
Our work has been in a global context. This started with the realization that everyone outside the US hates Bush. One of my friends from France wrote me with this response the other day. He said, ‘Your work is like a new "eye-opener" that is understandable by everyone all over the globe...your zines speak a universal language.’
The experience has been different because our work has been received with great energy and enthusiasm outside the US. Inside the US we have faced resistance and censorship.
What are you working on next?
We're focusing on our apparel. Issue 9 of the zine is almost complete. Also getting posters together for several shows including Paper Politics West and a tsunami fundraiser.
What is issue 9 of the zine about, can folks get it somewhere besides the web?
The zine is autobiographical. Lately I've been obsessing over snail mail. So issue 9 has the theme of postal mail.
My zine is currently only available on the web. The internet has allowed my work to reach far more people than I ever would have dreamed.
As far as print goes each issue is made at a 350 dpi resolution. I received quite a few requests for a printed version. I've been working on researching printing and the various other elements that are required. I hope to make a printed version happen in the near future.
What are your thoughts on art in public space or sold cheaply vs. sold
or displayed in galleries?
Aesthetically we love the way work looks on the streets and in less sterile environments. We embrace the idea of it being affordable. However, art is work and some pieces can be costly to produce. Artists deserve to make a living.
Do you put art up on the street?
Somehow it keeps showing up there.
Melina, could you talk a bit about your style (which is very unique, almost childlike), and why you like to use humor in your work?
I was studying design and found the computer to be too impersonal. I also was tired of all my projects being client driven. I wanted to express my point of view and wanted my visual voice to maintain a human quality. So I started drawing in a primitive manner. I use bright colors and lively lines to invite the viewer into difficult subject matters like war,religion, and poverty.
Humor makes things more approachable. I don't watch the regular news it's far too depressing. I enjoy the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. We laugh through the whole thing. And as Oscar Wilde said, "If you want to tell people the truth make them laugh otherwise they'll kill you.
Melina's zine is in need of sponsors and she needs help to sustain the project. The cost of sponsorship starts at $30 and includes having a banner space above the next issue. She would appreciate any advice you could offer! Contact her at Melina[at]RiseWithUs.com
