So I have a lot, a lot, more to write about this festival but I wanted to say something briefly about what I took to be the ethos, the sense, of Meeting of the Styles this year, which was a kind of improvisation and generosity. Watching various artists paint (forgive my imperfect recollection of names)…
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The Shape of Things
Its all about geometry. The Eucledian stuff you learn in high school. All visual art, whether its public art, or gallery work, requires that you take a drawing that fills a sheet of paper, and expand it to fill a wall, while keeping it exactly the same. Rahmaan Statik Barnes told me and another gallery…
The riskiness of publicity, or, Diego Rivera’s Ghost
After speaking with Amy Johnston, director of Public Engagement at the Mural Arts Program I’ve been thinking a lot about institutionalization. This project was initially framed as something along the lines of “Polemical Murals” and “media space,” with the idea that I would uncover the hidden anxieties and the terrain of domestication and quietude that…
Billboard Wars: How Philly Moves, Alternative Image Economies
How Philly Moves, a project set to be unveiled in June of 2011 challenges classic definitions of what mural, community, and audience. A 50,000 foot long installation to be painted on the Philadelphia International Airport Parking lot it is a collaboration between photography JJ Tiziou, the Philadelphia Transportation Authority, and the Mural Arts Project. A…
Love Letter: A Not so Secret Affair with Graffiti
According to our tour guide on Saturday, while explaining the “Right” mural, Steve Powers had said of it “You ain’t got romance if you ain’t got finance.” The comment can be amplified out to provide a frame with which to think the material infrastructure necessary for urban spaces to become loved, and what the conditions…
Intimate Tourism: Affective Modalities
Philadelphia is the “City of Brotherly Love,” or more gender appropriately (thanks to Emily Winderman) “The City that Loves you Back.” It is appropriate then that the major Philadelphia tourism corporation and the Mural Arts Project have love themed approaches. “Love From Philly,” coined by the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Company (GPTMC) began in May…
Towers and Tunnels: Thinking about Space and Ground in Philadelphia
Yesterday I revisited (literally) the Magic Garden to walk around the space after going to City Hall to take an interior tour and tower tour. There are of course clear differences that would make the comparison of such sites laughable: City Hall was designed by William Penn and adorned by Alexander Calder (the mobile artist’s…
Moments of Inauguration and Spaces of Fragmentation: The Signer and the Magic Mural Garden
In this post I think about the differences between the kinds of looking that two major tourist sites offer. The first is that of “The Signer,” at Chestnut and 4th, near the old Federal Bank. One can stand on the marble bank steps and appraise the figure from its eastern side, viewing it in its…
From Waste Containers to Encounter Generators: Mobile Gateways
Today marks the first day of my trip to Philadelphia to work on the project that I have provisionally titled “Community Mural Arts, Urban Polemic, and Political Tourism: Place-Based Strategies in Media Space.” Entering the city one is suddenly in the thick of Philadelphia’s visual landscape with few “gateway” markers. Driving along Benjamin Franklin Parkway…
“Sarah Palin, Jared Lee Loughner, Gabrielle Giffords, and Vitriol: Emotions and Democracy”
The tragic shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, and murder of John Roll and five others, on January 8th has triggered what Carl Hulse and Kate Zernike term a “wrenching debate over anger and violence in American politics.” Hulse and Zernike suggest that “inflammatory language, threats and implicit instigations to violence have become a steady undercurrent in…