Tags: art

We’re excited to introduce a new way of engaging with the Freshkills Park site: Freshkills Park+, an augmented-reality guide to the site’s many facilities, vistas, natural and manmade features.  The experience, which is available to users of iPhone 4, iPad, Android and Blackberry devices, was constructed using the Layar browser, which makes use of a phone’s camera, GPS, compass and accelerometer to enhance what is seen with a layer of digital information. 

The Council for the Arts and Humanities on Staten Island (COAHSI) runs an interview with artist DB Lampman on their blog, inSIde. Lampman discusses her piece “I am Within/I am Without,” which she will be performing at the Freshkills Park site this Saturday, September 17th.

Nuit Blanche New York’s (NBNY) 2011 Bring to Light festival will fill Greenpoint, Brooklyn with light, video, sound and sculpture-based installations “exploring innovative approaches to temporary public art that transform landscapes, re-imagine public space and foster civic dialogue.” The one-night festival will run concurrently with similar events in Paris, Brussels and Toronto on October 1st, as part of sponsor NBNY’s global event network. 

It is time to announce the winners of our third annual Freshkills Park Haiku Contest! April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, we asked fans of Freshkills Park to submit a haiku inspired by the park.  We split the entries into two categories, Adult and Student, and our judges selected three Adult winners and one Student winner.

Vulgare recently highlighted artist Mel Chin’s Revival Field: Projection & Procedure (1990-1993), a 60 square foot phytoremedation test plot at the Pig’s Eye Landfill in St. Paul, Minnesota. While in residence at the Walker Art Center, Chin worked with scientists at the USDA to design gardens of hyperaccumulators—plants that can uptake heavy metals from contaminated soil (at Pig’s Eye, the soil was contaminated with cadmium, zinc and lead).

An exhibition called Nurturing Nature: Artists Engage the Environment, at Concordia College’s OSilas Gallery in Bronxville, NY, features contemporary art projects focused on “healing our relationship with the living eco-system.”

This exhibition will focus on various spiritual or ethical traditions in relationship to our care of the planet, what Christianity terms ‘stewardship’, Tikkun Olam or ‘repair the world’ in Judaism, and in Buddhism ‘compassion for all sentient beings.’

A new exhibition on the human relationship with hygiene opened last week at the Wellcome Collection in London—a “a free visitor destination for the incurably curious” which “explores the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future.” 

The Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance will be holding its third annual symposium next weekend, to survey and discuss interdisciplinary work at the intersection of dance and ecology.  “Slow Networks: Discovering the Urban Environment Through Collaborations in Dance and Ecology” will include presentations from past participants in iLAND’s residencies, general discussion panels and hands-on workshops in the field. 

At NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, fall term students explored ideas relating to urban farming, phytoremediation systems and environmental data monitoring through a course entitled “Designing Living Systems.” Some of the student projects included a stepped indoor hydroponic farm, a bathroom phytoremediation device and a moss-covered structure with air monitoring capabilities.

The City Room Blog features writer Lisa Dowda and photographer Liz Lignon, the team behind “Chasing Sanitation.”   A new exhibit of their photos and narratives, called, “This is New York’s Strongest” opened Saturday at 411 Lafayette Street in Noho. 

iLAND, the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance, has released a Request for Proposals for applications to their iLAB Collaborative Residency Program. The goal of the program is to support multidisciplinary teams of residents in creative processes that meld New York City ecological issues with public performance- and movement-based art. 

The February 11th deadline is approaching for the Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island (COAHSI)’s annual grant round for Excellence in the Arts Awards, given to individual artists and cultural organizations.

There will be eight $1,000 awards; four for music and four for public art/performance art.

This weekend, Anthology Film Archives presents Site Recordings: Land Art on Film and Video, a series devoted to films by and about artists associated with the Land Art/Earthworks movement.

In the late 1960s and early 70s, modernism’s affirmation of fixity, permanence, and autonomy lost its hold on the Western imagination, shaping the manner in which a whole host of artists engaged with the moving image.

There’s no contest—no other season matches autumn for colors and shapes at the Freshkills Park site.  The grasses and trees are at their highest (or they’ve been mowed, leaving strong contrasts of height and texture), and the reds and golds really stand out among the golden browns and vibrant streaks of still-thriving greens. 

Sneak Peak was a huge success!  About 1800 people joined us at the Freshkills Park site on Sunday to make and fly kites, canoe in the creeks, walk the site with an expert, ride a pony, pet a goat, make a bag or a birdhouse, learn about composting and recycling and energy efficiency, receive a free bike helmet or fitting, enjoy the fun music, cool crafts and awesome food and generally celebrate the potential of this fascinating and amazing site. 

We’ve been eager to host a kite-flying event at the Freshkills Park site since the very beginning of this project.  The grassy, open landfill mounds soar above the surrounding landscape, not only making them high points with incredible views, but also providing access to some prime wind conditions. 

We’re thrilled to be able to exhibit Mierle Laderman Ukeles‘ work The Social Mirror at Sneak Peak this Sunday!  The piece is a 12-ton, 28-foot long 1979 Department of Sanitation collection truck outfitted in mirror glass.  It made its debut in the 1983 New York City Art Parade and was last publicly exhibited at the 2007 Armory Show.

Landscapes with the Fall of Icarus is a two-week performance installation by artist Paul Lloyd Sargent for the the Mobile Literacy + Art Bus (MLAB), a collaborative project of art and architecture students at Syracuse University. From 2007 to 2008, the team converted a 1984 Recreational Vehicle into a mobile classroom, digital photo lab, gallery space, and community center for use by the Syracuse City School District and the greater Syracuse Community. 

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/13517348]

Flavorwire features six particularly interesting art projects featuring plastic shopping or garbage bags.  Nils Völker‘s one hundred and eight is particularly beautiful.

The new exhibit at Wave Hill in the Bronx, called Remediate/Re-vision: Public Artists Engaging the Environment, opened on Sunday.  It showcases remediation- or sustainability-based public art projects since 2002 that have either been completed or are in the planning stages for parks and gardens.