NYFA Current: Public Art Off the Grid
UPDATE: NYFA’s archives are open, so registration is no longer required. See the updated table of contents from NYFA Current: Public Art Off the Grid below.
The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Current, a newsletter by and for artists, has focused their current issue on artists producing unfunded public art projects:
Thinking outside of the art market box, without the support of galleries or sponsors and in most cases using little or no monies of their own, the artists in this month’s Current work in both urban and rural environments
Registration is required to access the articles, but Inside you’ll find four features, including an interview with the infamous ad-jammer Poster Boy, as well as activist and art critic Lucy Lippard’s take on land art.
NYFA writes:
All of the works featured here are temporary, and political to varying degrees, for the artists in this issue have dared to seize unregulated spaces to freely and independently make their mark.
The table of contents includes:
John Fekner on Public(shing) Art Redefined
Multimedia artist John Fekner provides a brief history of unsanctioned public art, beginning with the ’70s and ’80s street/graffiti art explosion, when Fekner began his provocative stenciled-art projects throughout NYC’s five boroughs. Fast forward 30 years, and artists now post their work in online “urbaniconografi” communities.
Rebecca Bengal on Karen Brummund’s Time-Based Drawings
At sunrise, they can look like ghosts of structures, or on closer inspection shrouds made of countless sheets of paper, which artist Karen Brummund installed last summer on a barn and home in upstate New York. Writer Rebecca Bengal considers the cycles of creation and destruction as wind and hail cause the sheets to curl, fall off, and expose once again what was there before.
An Interview with Poster Boy: by Suzan Sherman
It’s an ongoing project that started 10 months ago, when the ads on NYC subway platforms began being altered. In their place, stinging mashups appeared that skirt the line between vandalism, street art, graffiti, and advertising. NYFA Current asked Poster Boy, the anonymous and increasingly notorious producer of these works, a series of questions over email.
Peripheral Vision by Lucy Lippard
Lucy Lippard offers up her shifting views on land art, from the iconic earthworks of the ’60s, to the future of art tourism in the “museumized” landscape of the New West, to the recent creations of students in the land arts field program at the Universities of Texas and New Mexico. This essay is excerpted from Land Arts of the American West, an anthology edited by Bill Gilbert and Chris Taylor, due out early next year.
Ann Reichlin on 914 Whitesboro Street
A 10-year project in the making, sculptor Ann Reichlin’s thorough investigation of an abandoned house site in Utica, NY, went through three decidedly different transformations, Insert, Solitary View, and Translucent Home. Just completed this month, Reichlin writes on working amid the charged atmosphere of a home that is falling apart and eventually demolished.
Deadlines & Headlines
NYFA Current’s Deadlines & Headlines section regularly provides listings of upcoming grant, award, and residency deadlines as well as information on upcoming NYFA events and news on NYFA artists. These listings are for November deadlines. Profiled NYFA artists include Eyal Danieli, Kate Gilmore, Stephen Talasnik, and Tommy White.
Related posts:
- Plates and Records: Brooklyn’s Artist/Activist-led Public Supper Club
- LAND/ART: A Collaborative Exploration of Land-based Art in New Mexico
- A Bus Tour of the Urban Oilscape of Los Angeles with the Center for Land Use Interpretation
More on Art, Culture Jamming, New Media, Research, Street Art
