Category Archives : City Arts and Public Spaces – June 2013


City, Arts and Public Spaces: Michael Dear

The ‘geohumanities’ is a transdisciplinary and multi-methodological inquiry that begins with the human meanings of place and proceeds to reconstruct those meanings in ways that produce new knowledge as well as the promise of a better-informed scholarly and political practice. The term is meant to encompass (but not supersede or replace) related but more specific constructs such as the ‘digital humanities.’

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Christian Frock

As much of my work as a writer, curator and educator focuses on the ways artists work in public space, I am drawn to dialog that parses the meaning of public space in civic life. Recently I have been thinking about two (seemingly) unrelated articles by New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman that explore the value of public spaces in an urban context. In an article dated May 31, 2013, titled “A Streetcorner Serenade for the Public Plaza,” Kimmelman considered the trend towards revitalizing marginalized spaces as “public” plazas largely for the benefit of nearby businesses, while only superficially addressing the failure of POPOS to function as truly public platforms (a revelation heightened by the Occupy movement).

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Imanuel Schipper

Especially when we talk about the specificity of city, we think of something, that is somehow close to a lived situation (with a specific narration, setting, dramaturgy, time-structure) than a fixed place. And this situation is somehow more than „only“ the place. It also seems clear to me that we (as visitors or inhabitants of that city) are producing (or at least co-producing) that situation. I would like to strength the importance of „producing meanings“ (and always re-producing new meanings) to our life and our surroundings – but also the importance of knowing that we are constantly in the process of producing meaning.

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Julia Bryan-Wilson

I’ve started to note what happens when “art” goes plural to become “arts,” as it has in the title “City, Arts, and Public Spaces”: how, and in what contexts, does this multiplicity matter? Art historians often assume that the definition of art in its singular form defaults to the realm of the visual, as if the concerns of, say, painting, photography, and sculpture are distinct from those of literature, music, or dance.

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Linda Haverty Rugg

During the last decade a new field has emerged that increasingly is referred to as the Environmental Humanities. Environmental Humanities research centers often originated either in literature departments, because of the ecocritical movement in English Literature and American Studies, or in history departments, where the field of environmental history emerged after c. 1980. Other contributors to this field have come from inherently interdisciplinary fields such as geography, the digital humanities, gender studies, anthropology, and the history of technology.

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Shannon Jackson

In cross-disciplinary gatherings at ARC, we have found it worth going over territory that we all think we know, to review the staples, the bread and butter of our fields, in order to expose blindspots and to jostle ourselves into new perspectives on the heretofore obvious. But should I really reflect on the term “public”? when so much ink has been spilled on this subject historically…and from so many quarters recently? For this particular session, I guess I think I will, especially because the term is one that links some elements of environmental planning to key questions in humanist debate and artistic practice.

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Susan Moffat

In the Bay Area and beyond, ambitious creek and wetland restoration projects aim to return landscapes to an earlier, more “natural” condition. The scientists designing the projects know that it is impossible to restore a landscape to a pre-human condition when the entire watershed has been radically altered, and they make many nuanced choices in order to enhance habitats. But the public often believes the goal is to put a site back to “the way it was.”

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Susan Schweik

Recently New York City’s official adoption of a new disability accessibility icon has gotten a lot of press: a dynamic figure in a wheelchair zooming through blue space, in sharp contrast to the familiar poky, static handicapped parking-lot sign. (See, for instance, http://boingboing.net/2013/05/25/new-york-city-adopts-new-inter.html.) What I personally have found more interesting, though, is the deliberately unofficial approach advocated by one of the icon’s original designers, artist and researcher Sara Hendren at Harvard’s graduate school of design. She began, with collaborator Brian Glenney, with a graffiti-like sticker pasted informally over any old blue sign, with the old wheelchair icon still showing underneath. Hendren writes of the project to imagine and promote a different vision of disability and prosthesis: “There was something tempting, of course, about the idea of a wholesale re-design—just slap it on, and change the entire message.

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Esther Belvis-Pons

Barcelona 2010. In a scenario characterized by the financial crisis and emerging social fracture appears the first domestic festival called ‘La estrategia doméstica’ (the domestic strategy). The presentation of pieces and artworks takes place in private homes. Friends, neighbours and acquaintances offer a room or a space in their house for artists to perform there. The festival tries to challenge the concepts of cultural enterprise and institution by proposing homes as legitimate spaces for the artistic experience.

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