Symposium: Experimenting with Art in Public Places
“We hope to provoke questions and shifts in perception that can potentially challenge the viewer’s relationship to a work and open a dialogue with the surrounding environments.”
Experimenting with Art in Public Places
Experimenting with Art in Public Places is a symposium free and open to the public, presented by Northern Lights with the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, which will explore ways to support and present experimental art practices in public places, including in the virtual realm, outside the traditional white cubes and black boxes of cultural institutions. It brings together local and out-of-town artists, curators, producers, and presenters for a collaborative conversation about the public sphere as a site for works of art and art practices that spark the imagination but also challenge perceptions – artistic, cultural, social, political.
Friday evening, there will be a keynote presentation by Seattle phenoms SuttonBeersCuller. Saturday will be a day of Pecha Kucha presentations and panel discussions. Saturday evening, registered symposium attendees can attend the hearSIGHTED party for R. Luke DuBois’ Hindsight Is 20/20 exhibition at the Weisman Art Museum for half price.
Register
Experimenting with Art in Public Places is free, but seating is limited for the symposium, which takes place at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. To register and reserve a space, email aov@northern.lights.mn.
Keynote: SuttonBeresCuller
Friday, October 10
MCAD Auditorium
6:30 pm: reception
7:00 pm: Keynote
On Friday evening, SuttonBeresCuller (John Sutton, Ben Beres, Zac Culler), a 3-person collaborative from Seattle will give a keynote talk about their experimental art practice in the public sphere.
SuttonBeresCuller’s work deals in the realms of experimentation and discovery through site-specific installation, performance and sculpture. The work is meant to be accessible, and it actively involves and challenges the viewer, discouraging passive viewing. It’s meant to create an ephemeral circumstance, caught perhaps in a fleeting glimpse, which removes the viewer from a daily routine and leaves them with a sense of bewilderment. According to SuttonBeresCuller,
“We hope to provoke questions and shifts in perception that can potentially challenge the viewer’s relationship to a work and open a dialogue with the surrounding environments.”
Regina Hackett of the Seattle P.I. writes:
“Not since Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Morris Graves confounded admirers in the 1930’s has Seattle seen a trio of artists such as Ben Beres, Zac Culler, and John Sutton.”
SuttonBeresCuller has received grants from Creative Capital, Artists’ Trust, 4Culture, and the City of Seattle to create work in the public sphere, including their most recent project Mini-Mart City Park.
With Mini-Mart City Park, SuttonBeresCuller is returning a blighted piece of ubiquitous commercial architecture to nature and the public sphere by transforming a brownfield, the site of the former Perovich Bros. Gas Station, into a public park and botanical conservatory in the Georgetown neighborhood in south Seattle. According to the artists,
“It is our goal to create a new model for dealing with brownfields across our country and potentially our globe. This project has been envisioned as a prototype for what we hope will become an eco-arts franchise.”
Schedule: Experimenting with Art in Public Places
Saturday, October 11, MCAD Student Center, 9:30 am – 5:00 pm
8:30 am
Coffee and refreshments
9:15 am
Welcome and Introduction:
Vince Leo, Vice President for Academic Affairs, MCAD
Steve Dietz, Executive Director, Northern Lights
9:30 am
Pecha Kucha:
Art(ists) On the Verge
Moderator: Kristin Markholm, Director, MCAD Gallery
Northern Lights recently awarded grants to 5 emerging artists “working experimentally at the intersection of art and technology, with a focus on practices that are social, collaborative and/or participatory.” In part, Experimenting with Art in Public Places is an opportunity for these artists to “boot up” their practice, and, Pecha Kucha style, Avye Alexandres, Kevin Obsatz, Andrea Steudel, Pramila Vasudevan, and Krista Kelley Walsh will each have 6 minutes – 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide – to answer 3 questions:
- What is the intersection with technology in their work?
- How is their practice experimental and social/participatory?
- What are they planning to do?
10:15 am
Julie Lazar, A History and Future of Experimental Art Practice
Julie Lazar is a trail blazer in the support and presentation of experimental art. She was a founding Curator then Director of Experimental Programs for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1981-2000). In New York, Lazar led development programs at PS 1 Center for Contemporary Art, The Hudson River Museum, Rockefeller University, The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. As a curator, Lazar specializes in commissioning new art works in all media. Among the artists with whom she has worked are: John Adams, John Cage, Remy Charlip, Mel Chin, Anthony Discenza, Juan Devis, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Brent Green, Renée Green, Katherine Finkelpearl, Karen Finley, Janie Geiser, Frank O. Gehry, Gary Hill, Carole Kim, Hirokazu Kosaka, George Legrady, Sherrie Levine, Rick Lowe, Anthony McCall, Pat O’Neill, Martin Puryear, Navin Rawanchaikul, Bruce D. Schwartz, Peter Sellars, Marie Sester, Carl Stone, Elizabeth Streb, Do-ho Suh, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Bill Viola, Garry Winogrand and Grahame Weinbren.
Break
11:00 am
11:30 am
Panel: Playing in Public
Moderator: Jack Becker, Executive Director, Forecast Public Art
As more artists begin to explore and create for the public realm, the definition of public art expands. Today it can be almost anything and anywhere. There’s no job description, no book of rules. What constitutes public art seems limited only by the artist’s imagination. While it’s not all fun and games, the freedoms afforded artists make it attractive and compelling. This panel will look at a range of projects that have played with our expectations for art in public spaces.
R. Luke DuBois’s collaborative film with Lian Amaris Sifuentes was a 72-hour continuous shoot of Sifuentes in a boudoir in the middle of a traffic island in Manhattan being “Fashionably Late for the Relationship.”
Wing Young Huie’s Lake Street USA transformed six miles of a Minneapolis thoroughfare into an epic photo gallery. After photographing everyday life for four years in the fifteen neighborhoods that bordered this singular street, 675 photographs were installed in store windows, bus stops, on the sides of buses, and on the sides of buildings along Lake Street in 2000.
Piotr Szyhalski is well known for his various performances and interventions. He teachs as class on public performance at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Marcus Young is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist whose practice includes such works as Pacific Avenue, a lifelong slow-walking and smiling project; Break, a fortune cookie project for Chinese restaurants; and From Here to There and Beyond, a drawn two-mile line from the gallery to the Mississippi River. He is Public Artist in Residence for the City of Saint Paul.
12:30
Lunch
A buffet lunch wil be available in the MCAD cafeteria, next to the Student Center, for $7.50.
1:00 – 3:00 pm: Breakout Session: Forecast Public Art
From 1-3 pm, there will be a parallel breakout session. This grant-writing workshop will discuss Forecast’s annual grant program, provide an overview of recent innovative public art projects, provide time for artists to brainstorm and discuss their own project ideas and hear about the experiences of past grantees. More information here. To reserve a space in the grant-writing workshop, email Forecast.
1:30
Panel: Technologies of Engagement
Moderator: Carl DiSalvo, Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.
New technologies have clearly enabled new means of engagement with an audience, whether through networks of delivery or interactive and partciipatory installations or both. Technologies does not always mean “Computers! or Internet! or iPhone!”, however, and this panel will explore a more nuanced idea of the technologies of engagement, from the recent past into the near future.
Chuck Olsen is a cofounder of The UpTake, a non-profit dedicated to training and distriibuting the work of video-based citizen journalists. He is also the founder of Minnesota Stories, called one of the best videoblogs by the New York Times. He is the producer-director of “Blogumentary,” the first documentary film about the rise of political and personal blogs.
John Schott is a professor of media studies at Carleton College, was the Executive Producer of Alive from Off-Center, one of the earliest and most successful programs to present cutting edge art to a wide audience using the new technology of television.
Scott Stulen is project director for mnartists.org at the Walker Art Center, an online artist community.
Diane Willow a professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Art, experiments with tangible media, new genres and interdisciplinary collaborations that explore poetic contexts for socially engaged moments of contemplation.
Break
2:45
3:00
Panel: Building an Audience / Community for the Experimental
Moderator: Diane Mullin is Associate Curator at the Weisman Art Museum.
If “build it and they will come” was part of the first generation of technology-enabled community-building projects, experience has shown that building a true community for experimental public art that goes beyond the memorial or the plop is not an easy matter. This panel will explore successful strategies for building a committed audience for experimental art practice over the long term.
Tom Borrup. As Executive Director of Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis from 1980 until 2002, Borrup developed a multidisciplinary, cross-cultural organization recognized nationally for its work in nurturing artists and other cultural assets in its diverse urban community.
Doryun Chong is associate curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center, where he has co-curated the group exhibition “Brave New Worlds” and developed artist residency projects with a range of artists, including Puerto Rico-based Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Thailand-based Rikrkit Tiravanija, and Chicago-based Catherine Sullivan”
Carl DiSalvo’s research and art/design practice focuses on the social and political uses of technology in cities. As part of this work he designs technology platforms and participatory programs that engage and enable urban communities.
Doug Geers founded and directs the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts.
Peter Haakon Thompson is an artist based in Minneapolis interested in exploring and claiming place, privately and publicly, including The Art Shanty Projects, existing for five weeks on frozen Medicine Lake.
7:00 pm – late
Performance: hearSIGHTED AT THE Weisman Art Museum
hearSIGHTED is an evening of music, dancing, food and drink at the Weisman Art Museum, presented in celebration of the exhibition Hindsight is Always 20/20 by R. Luke DuBois. See the exhibition and hear performances by University of Minnesota electronic music students in the galleries. Catch a special musical performance by DuBois at 9:30 p.m. Following the performance, kick up your heels to electronic grooves spun by Minneapolis-based DJ ETones.
Register
Experimenting with Art in Public Places is free, but seating is limited for the symposium, which takes place at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. To register and reserve a space, email aov@northern.lights.mn.
Support
Experimenting with Art in Public Places is a public progoram presented by Northern Lights October 10-11, 2008, with the support of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the Jerome Foundation, through its support of the Art(ists) On the Verge grant program. Northern Lights is supported by the McKnight Foundation.