What would an artist do?
Some inspiration and food for thought….
Look to the Art
It is difficult It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. william carlos williams Look to the art that is being created today to see the future. Artists are the barometers of time – the recorders of history, the sensors […]
Send in the Clowns
The year is 1995 and Bogota, Columbia is listed on the international watch advisory as the most dangerous city in the world, rampant with narco traficantes, warlords and corruption. Traffic deaths alone, caused mostly by the fear of carjacking, top one thousand five hundred a year. It’s a nightmare. You’re the new mayor. What do you do? Enter Antanas […]
The Famous 5
October 28, 1929 was an historic day for the 50-something-year-old country of Canada. Thanks to 5 women from the Province of Alberta – Emily Murphy, Nellie McLung, Irene Parlby, Henrietta Muir-Edwards and Louise McKinney – Women became persons. Twenty years ago, Albertan and feminist activist Frances Wright noted the glaring absence of these 5 […]
Alfredo Jaar – Burn it to the ground
We sat cross-legged on the carpet in the living room at the gathering after his presentation, just me and Alfredo Jaar, the other guests chattering on the surrounding sofas and chairs, invisible and inaudible to my eyes and ears,. “So what do they teach at the Kennedy School?” he probed, after I invited him […]
Alfredo Jaar – Dear Markus, 2011
In the spring of 2010, Public Art Interventionist Alfredo Jaar was on the verge of giving up on the commission for Turku, one of six thousand small islands comprising the archipelago in Finland’s Baltic Sea. That year, Turku had been named the Arts Capital of Europe and as he explored the extraordinary, barren and […]
Act Up
ACT UP caught my attention and captured my imagination months before I was introduced to the concept of leadership espoused by Professors Dean Williams and Ron Heifetz of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. The activities of this New York phenomenon were brought to my world thanks to Helen Molesworth, the then […]
El Sistema
While being rational creatures, we humans are also both spiritual and creative by nature, at all ages. Music, as a catalyst for societal progress, has proven to be particularly effective with the youth of our species. One of the best modern day examples where an artistic intervention has had an unprecedented impact on education […]
The City of Lights
At about the same time as Mayor Antanas Mockus was using mimes to reduce traffic deaths in Bogota , across the ocean in post-Soviet Albania, Edi Rama, a larger than life artist politician was elected Mayor of Tirana, an ugly, neglected patchwork city of grey, uniform, sterile buildings cluttering streets lined with bulbless lampposts hanging uselessly […]