Dedicated to critical cultural production at the intersection of art and activism.

The Urbano Project and Artists in Context lend a hand to Mel Chin’s collaborative art piece, Fundred, this weekend, as the project celebrates its Boston kick-off. Fundred is an advocacy strategy to garner $300m in federal funding for lead decontamination efforts in New Orleans. Participants draw interpretations of U.S. $100 bills, and after 3,000,000 have been collected, they will be delivered to Congress in a vegetable oil-powered armored car, along with the request that the fake bills be exchanged for real funds.

A hand-drwan Fundred from Fort Wayne, IN

The city of Boston has pledged to raise fifteen thousand Fundreds.  Participants needn’t wait for the Fundreds to come to town, as an online template will help you get involved now.

Mel Chin explains the project in his own words in the video below, from Art21.

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We’re frequently involved in conversations about what comprises an intervention, and what makes interventions effective. The Urban Wilderness Action Center (UWAC) is expanding that line of inquiry further, asking: “What is it in which we’re intervening?”

UWAC is an Eyebeam family project, initiated by alum Jon Cohrs and in collaboration with Eyebeam Student Residents and artist Kai-Oi Jay Yung.  It’s a guerrilla gardening effort, combined with a discursive online platform that seeks out the ground beyond the more common manifestations of nonhuman life in urban environments.  Beyond those parks, urban farms, and the ivy that grows in abandoned lots, what is urban wilderness?

If you have an answer, submit it to UWAC here.

Some respondents will have the opportunity to present their ideas, selected by UWAC, at the international Electrosmog festival this March.

Via Eyebeam

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The Free Store, courtesy of Gallery 400

Following on the heels of LA’s counter-CAA, Chicago plays host to the gathering of visual arts professionals in 2010 – beginning today – and organizers will offer programming for socially engaged artists both within and outside of the conference center.

Three Walls will workshop the history, practice, and theory of experimental pedagogy inside and outside institutions, in conjunction with AREA Chicago’s issue #9 (Peripheral Vision), with Greg Sholette, Dara Greenwald, Counter Cartographies Collective, Bert Stabler, and others this afternoon.

The ongoing Art/Work exhibit (get your free copy of the newspaper from us here) and Free Store are promoted in conjunction with the conference, as is Mess Hall’s Chicago Activist Art Spaces, Collectives, and Projects.

Within the conference walls, the Radical Art Caucus offers a range of meetings and sessions, from pedagogical to cartographic concerns, the schedule for which can be found here.

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Our friends at the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination need your video skills.  Their forthcoming book/film, Paths Through Utopias, will be a brilliant speculative fiction, a look at the crisis folklores of tomorrow through the lens of today’s post-crash resistant spaces:

Whilst the book is a piece of travel writing about the experience the film is a documentary fiction in the form of a post crash road movie, shot in the places visited but set in the future. The book and the film are seen as a dialogue between present and future, fact and imagination.

Unfortunately, the Lab of ii’s film editor has fallen ill – too seriously ill to finish the project, and they’re in need of a new person to fill that role.  If you have the experience, especially if you have worked with feature-length films, know Final Cut Pro, are open to experimental and collective working environments, and share in the film’s vision, you might just be perfect for the job!

There’s a modest sum of money attached, £2000, to carry you through the July 2010 deadline.  If you’re not busy and are interested, drop us a line before the end of January and we’ll put you in touch with the right folks.

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Traditionally cultural institutions have often excluded ongoing dialogue about social issues outside of the art world. Artist, Allan Kaprow wrote, “life in a museum is like making love in a cemetery,” * metaphorically equating a museum with a cemetery— a dead and sterile space. Kaprow’s quote motivated multiple collaborative community based projects currently being executed by the first year Public Practice MFA graduate students at OTIS College of Art and Design. In 2010 the graduate students in collaboration with LACMA Lab’s founding director, Bob Sain; artist, Andrea Bowers; art administrator, Pauline Kamiyama and the 18th Street Art Center will develop an exhibition as a laboratory. The social/political obligations of cultural organizations to their respective communities will be investigated through partnerships with several community based organizations. The project’s ethic of action and engagement will lead to an artistic manifestation, and the participating Public Practice artists hope the communities involved will realize positive outcomes that will outlast the exhibition.
This exhibition will be presented at the 18th Street Art Center Gallery from January 23rd — March 26th 2010.
LOVE in a Cemetery Blog

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