Category: Reports
Red Lines & Death Vows
These 9 posters were originally produced as lightboxes for Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, an exhibition I designed about the politics of mortgages, held at the Queens Museum of Art in the summer of 2009.
In March 2009, Red Emma’s (a worker-owned and democratically managed bookstore and coffeehouse), the Baltimore Development Cooperative (an artist group) and the Indypendent Reader (a free quarterly newspaper) co-organized a conference in Baltimore called “The City from Below.” Our motivation for the conference came out of our own organizing experience and a shared recognition that the city is increasingly the space in which all of our diverse struggles for social justice – for affordable housing, environmental justice, prison abolition, living wages, food security, decent public education – have the potential to come together and form something greater.
Let me be honest. The radical arts infrastructure in Michigan, much like its present economic state, has faced better days. When I left the state nearly a decade ago, I never intended to make my way back to Michigan. As someone who was born and raised in rural areas of the state, while also studying art at both the College for Creative Studies (Detroit) and Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo), it didn‘t take long for me to realize that the opportunities to become actively involved in contemporary arts practice were dismal, similar to the fate faced by the rest of Michigan‘s working-class.
We are a duo of artists that has been working together in San Juan, Puerto Rico since 2005. We do not receive sustenance from a patron. On the contrary, to be able to finance all the expenses of our artistic ventures we work like normal people. We‘ve worked with a website, in a house basement, and contribute to independent organizations or those focused on the development of emerging artists, among others.
The website covers events of the young/emerging artistic community. It addresses the need to document and show those cultural activities that are out of the mainstream.
My egg economy fell out on Monday. All of my quail and all but one of my chickens were killed by a predator with dexterous digits—one that can turn a latch and pry chicken wire away from an armature. Prolly, aka PNP, aka Probably Not Peaches, my one remaining hen, is in a liminal state of health. She is hovering. I am sitting in my bathroom with her. She is breathing deeply, sitting on a bed of straw in a small cage with a dish of her favorite foods nearby: scrambled eggs with crushed egg shell, raisins and chickweed. This food has remained untouched.
There might only be one thing worse than the financial support structure for artists: the support structure for art writers. Today, to try and be a writer of essays for catalogs, magazines or journals without being an academic, even a lowly adjunct academic, is to play against long odds. Which is why it feels that traditional scholarly art history writing styles and concerns, which in the past often felt distinctly different than the style and concerns of art criticism, are increasingly on display in contemporary art writing. Academics have the training to finish a text fairly fast and are the only ones who can afford this writing habit, excepting the insane and the independently wealthy.
Rather than begin, we surrender. We surrender to Richard Florida, promoter of creative gentrification. Our small, southern city has been intoxicated by the idea that the “creative class” can save a city. While our existing cultural institutions struggle, enormous amounts of money have been spent betting that “creative entrepreneurs” will immigrate here if only there are enough art parties. Art + martini = Artini! Importing a “Creative Class®” is intended to raise property values. No mention is made of what will happen to the uncreative class that currently populates the target neighborhoods.
Recent Articles
- ART WORK at Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller Gallery, Feb. 1-28
- ABC No Rio, NY, Discussion, February 18th
- Money! Money! Money!, February 12th, Sprout Spaghetti Dinners
- Art Work Discussion, MCAC, Bloomington/Normal, IL
- Art Work in Grand Rapids, Michigan
- Art Work at Gallery 400, Chicago
- Art Work at Conduit Gallery, Dallas
- Intermedia Porch Gallery & Public Space One, Iowa City
- Personal Economy #16
- Events in Austin (Jan. 22) and Houston (Jan. 23 & 24)
Money! Money! Money!, February 12th, Sprout Spaghetti Dinners
Copies of the newspaper will be available at the is event.
Many thanks to Rebecca Uchill for making this happen!
You’re invited to
Money! Money! Money!
a sprout spaghetti dinner
Sprout spaghetti dinners is a dinner theater series seeking to bring people from the Somerville and Cambridge communities together around good food, good music, and good performance. Each month, we’ll find an eclectic group of performers to explore the month’s theme through different lenses. In the tradition of dinners hosted by NYC-based theater company Great Small Works, we want to cast new light on common ideas from artistic, musical, and scientific perspectives. You can
find information about past dinners at our blog.
The theme for this month’s dinner is Money! Money! Money! It will be happening just outside of Davis Square at sprout (339R Summer St.) on Wednesday February 17 with dinner at 7:30pm and performances beginning at 8. $10 suggested donation. The spaghetti will be prepared by Food not Bombs, and our performers will include ::
- Local musicians Jon Hersh and Kathy Fletcher playing a set of old-time tunes on banjo, fiddle, and voice.
- Frank Ackerman, a research scientist at Tufts, speaks about the economics of global climate change, addressing the question, “Does it make economic sense for us to try to fight global warming?”
- Shauna Gordon-McKeon, a researcher in the field of moral psychology, will perform and discuss experiments in social psychology and behavioral economics looking at how money affects our decision-making processes.
- Liz Hall and Casey Engels of Artists in Context will present The Fundred Dollar Bill Project, a nation-wide drawing project started by artist Mel Chin. Audience members will contribute to the project by designing their own “fundred” dollar bills to help raise money and awareness to begin clean-up efforts of lead-contaminated soil in New Orleans.
- Community members will also share personal monologues responding to the prompt “Literally, money represents gold or silver; socially, it is a status symbol; personally, it might mean everything from success to security to selling-out. What has money meant for you?”
Please send any questions to spaghetti@thesprouts.org or call
617.575.9219.
339R Summer St.
Davis Square
Somerville, MA 02144
About
Art Work is a newspaper and accompanying website that consists of writings and images from artists, activists, writers, critics, and others on the topic of working within depressed economies and how that impacts artistic process, compensation and artistic property. The newspaper is distributed for free at sites and from people throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. It is also available by mail order from Half Letter Press for the cost of postage.
Distribution
Art Work is being distributed throughout the 50 United States and Puerto Rico (among other locations). To find a hard copy of Art Work near you, please read on.
Major support for SPACES is provided by The Cleveland Foundation; Cuyahoga Arts and Culture; The George Gund Foundation; Donna and Stewart Kohl; Kulas Foundation; Toby Devan Lewis; National Endowment for the Arts; Nimoy Foundation; and the Ohio Arts Council.
Art Work is partly funded by Lauren Rich Fine & Gary Giller and the John P. Murphy Foundation.