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On January 10th I had the pleasure to attend the opening and artist talk for Blaine Siegel’s community-developed site specific project “North Side Crossing.” Co-sponsored by the City of Asylum, Pittsburgh Art Coalition, and Art Place America, the project explores the physical gestures that make up some of the communal life of Pittsburgh’s North Side…

Two weeks ago at the National Communication Association national convention I had the honor and privilege of presenting alongside some brilliant artists and colleagues. I was part of two panels that focused on visual culture in the city of Chicago, one of which was relatively open-ended, the other more narrowly focused on the history of…

The geography of Pittsburgh is dizzying. Three rivers, dozens of bridges, several hills that crop up in the middle of the triangle area punctuated by tunnels. In Upper Lawrenceville, like most of the neighborhood, to walk to work is to tumble down a hill, quite literally tipped into your day in a downward progression. This…

What follows is a transcript of my interview with Bel, a female writer from Chicago, whom I met at the opening party at what is now 15th Street Gallery. Insightful about the dynamics of opening graffiti up to a broader public being in tension with the pleasure of its underground practice, she offers her opinions…

In yet another dramatic performance of America’s disregard for black lives, the cop who murdered Mike Brown was let go, as the grand jury investigating the case found “inconsistent stories.” This technical and rigid reaction tells us much about how history continues to be very much the same in terms of the Justice system and…

In Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s 2003 text, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, she charts a difficult but intriguing course in trying to account for affect as biological as well as nonlinguistic while playfully illuminating the surprising anti-essentialisms that such an approach can unfold. Using Tomkins’ tomes on affect, an approach to affect that, unlike Freud and his intellectual…

I had the great fortune to attend MOS México in Mexico City this past weekend, the final of three MOS events in the country. It has been two years since I have been in the city, three since I have attended a MOS event there, so it was a pleasure, and fascinating, to see how…

Alphabet Soup 2, an exhibit at Galerie F in Chicago’s Logan Square organized by Fullhearted, and sponsored by Modest is rapidly approaching its terminus, next Tuesday, October 7th. The show is a high caliber representation of diverse styles and great talent, exploring and developing the typographic form for an evolving and expanding audience. I had…

This weekend I had the opportunity to return to Chicago for the annual Meeting of the Styles festival. Following the event since 2010, I am always glad to return to this sort of multiple-block-party as my friend Outlet put it nicely, finding old friends and new people to learn from about the history and present…

Moving to a new institution is interesting because while many things stay the same (student questions, academic communities, and carving out time for life sustaining activities like eating, exercising, and bathing) the frame shifts, and for me, that frame is the city. Pittsburgh is weird. It has counterintuitive driving and public transit practices. The “Pittsburgh…