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March 16, 2012

Art/City: Plinio Hernandez
In October of 2011, I was asked to come on board as the public relations manager for a urban renewal pilot project called popuphood. This project gave six months free rent to five local groups of people to start businesses in previously empty storefronts located in the historical Old Oakland neighborhood, a few blocks south of downtown Oakland. Through a cross sector partnership (civic, private and community based) as well as a rebranding and marketing plan for the neighborhood and groups of stores, popuphood has become one of Oakland’s homegrown jewels.
Art/City: Jonathan Green
 “In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is…” …how to continue to move artistic inquiry into a central position as an essential component of civic investigation and discourse in Riverside California, a city where 17% of the population have less than a high school education, only 22% have a Bachelor’s degree, where the medium income is $31,000, and where 59% of the freshman class at University of California, Riverside, are the first in their family to attend college.
Art/City: Michael Caplan
In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is how best to generate the next generation of funding for emerging arts projects around the City – and how best to leverage that funding for maximum impact.
Art/City: Lisa Bullwinkel
How to create more vibrant downtown districts in light of retail jumping to the Internet and leaving vacant storefronts?  Bring in the arts!  Fill those empty spaces with visual and performing artists who are clamoring for space.  The landlords need to become involved in creating a simple process to allow this to occur.
The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium “ART/CITY” on March 16, 2012.
Art/City: Laura Inks
We are working with a group of citizens and the Mayor’s office, to examine an area in town called the Funk Zone. It has been designated an arts, marine and tourist district and is one block from the beach and our main tourist area, the wharf and State Street. Developers are buying up huge plots of land and are raising the cost of living in an area traditionally known for being a cheap rent arts neighborhood. While the developers would also like to keep the funk in the zone, it must pencil out for them and their investors.
Art/City: Mary Lou Breiman

This effort you are spearheading is one that is very important and, as we see in Berkeley to date, a real change agent. First: PARKING.  PARKING.  PARKING.  I have taken classes at the Crucible, Albany Adult School, Richmond Art Center and exhibited at Richmond Art Center.  All have ample free parking.  On the rare occasions I decide to go to Zellerbach, PARKING is my first and main concern.  It is easier for me to go to SF on BART than to the UCB art gallery on Bancroft.  I only live at Spruce and Eunice (approximately), but am 70 and will not walk the distance and certainly not at night w

Art/City: Zach Pine

As an artist whose work primarily consists of engaging people in participatory collaborative events, how can I best use public places in my work? One form my work takes is engaging the public in collaboratively creating ephemeral sculpture using natural materials. I’ve carried out many local public events in a diversity of settings: in Berkeley parks, on pavement  (street festivals), on private property bordering sidewalks, and even on the lawn in front of Berkeley’s Old City Hall.

Art/City: Larry Rinder
BAM/PFA has just completed a new five-year strategic plan. The plan’s goals are meant to define who we will be a year after moving to our new downtown Berkeley location—on Oxford Street between Center and Addison Streets–in 2015. The very first goal reads as follows: 
“BAM/PFA is a uniquely dynamic, diverse, and engaging cultural ‘town square.’”
Art/City: Noah Simblist

What is the role of the university in a city? Are we, as an institution, cultural producers providing the city with content such as exhibitions, lectures, or public projects? Are we organizers, facilitators or interpreters of civic life? Or is our primary role to train students to be cultural practitioners that can either act as cultural workers in our city or elsewhere? This last question can often become a significant choice between encouraging students to stay and act locally within Dallas or to travel to major global cultural centers such as New York, Los Angeles, London or Berlin.

Art/City: Suzanne Tan
 “In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is…”  how can smaller organizations like Berkeley Art Center continue to play an important role in the civic dialouge in connection with and collaboration with larger arts organizations and other multi-disciplinary organizations, in a way that encourages collaborative and community input and a sense of belonging in one’s own community–our city being one that is highly unique, educated, and creative.
Art/City: Shannon Jackson
Reading the blogposts of ART/CITY’s incredible interlocutors, I am struck both by the investment in broadly resonant macro-issues about the conjoined future of the arts and cities and by participants’ willingness to share highly local stories of the puzzles that they are encountering at their own institutions.
Art/City: Kim Anno
In relationship to arts and civic life, what I am struggling with is how to create a more mutually cooperative relationship between all stakeholders of the city, university, citizens, youth, government, schools, etc. regarding arts and culture. We have a rich area, that is unmatched in intellectual and creative individuals and organizations. Arts and culture can provide a more nuanced and long lasting education and economic benefit to all citizens in our area.
Art/City: Annee Knight
“In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is…” is connections between city committees and city officials.  There is a disconnect between information channels, also raising awareness of the Public Art Committee’s role in the community at both city and citizen levels is necessary.  Also, I am interested in how the energy for interesting/innovative projects can be maintained once a program becomes mainstreamed…
The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium “ART/CITY” on March 16, 2012.
Art/City: Susan Medak
“In relation to the arts and civic life, the question I am wrestling with right now is…” what is the future of ‘place based’ arts when the concept of community is being to radically redefined. So much artistic creation has, historically, been informed by a specific location, a relationship with a specific geographic community, and a very real sense of presence and live engagement.

February 23, 2012

Making Time at Human Resources: Megan Hoetger

In a recent conversation with a performance scholar whom I respect deeply, the issue of re-performance, or as it is also often referred to re-enactment (the distinction between these two terms being another topic ripe for conversation), was brought up only to be quickly written off as kitsch and as a sign of a lack of any new platforms for performance production, signaling a sort of dead end in performance’s political efficacy. I was troubled by the shutdown of conversation and what seemed like a full-scale dismissal of any work produced within the matrix of re-performance.

February 22, 2012

Making Time at Human Resources: Spatula&Barcode

We (Laurie Beth Clarkand Michael Peterson) are artists and scholars who make work independently and collaboratively.

Making Time at Human Resources: Jennifer Doyle

1) My work was never organized by a commitment to a disciplinary framework. I can talk at length about disciplinary formations, however. Like – what cultural studies enables for literary scholars – the disinterest many literary scholars have in a reified notion of “the literary,” our sense of happiness in jettisoning the canon, our glee in the discovery that unloading that dead discursive weight didn’t require abandoning our fondness for the formal, the textual. We swapped literature for text somewhere in the mid 1980s.

Making Time at Human Resources: Nizan Shaked

Out of the six exhibitions my students curated since I began heading the Museum and Curatorial Studies program at Cal State Long Beach, two have taken the issue of exhibiting performance as their primary concern. In 2008 Un-figuring the Body (lead by Megan Hoetger) investigated the posthumous representation of performance-related objects in the gallery space, tackling the problem of how to represent the (intensely) physical work of performance after the event took place, and the theoretical implication of how the human body becomes “figured” in representation.

Making Time at Human Resources: Judith Rodenbeck

Several issues emerged from my work on Allan Kaprow and happenings and have been taking up headroom for some time now.

1)  “Strips of behavior” and the repertoire and how these two concepts do or don’t map onto advanced art practice.

2)  Deskilling and its self-conscious institutionalizing as “resistant” practice.

3)  Institutional critique as necessary decoy.

4)  The fetishizing of collective and/or participatory practice v. the problematics of solo work.

Making Time at Human Resources: Tavia Nyong’o

I have been mulling the historical and political contexts and consequence of our present fixation with “participation” — as the art world calls it — or “participatory culture” as it is referred to in media and cultural studies. In a well-known essay, Claire Bishop teased out one key assumption: that between participation and democracy. Indeed, participatory democracy, a cherished value of the new left, has received renewed attention due to its presence within the Occupy movement.