Tags: art

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/13491802]

The Olmsted Legacy is a one-hour documentary about the contributions of urban planner and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, visionary designer of many of America’s first great parks.  It features the voices of Kevin Kline and Kerry Washington. 

Artist Tattfoo Tan will lead bike tour of Staten Island community gardens this Saturday, July 24th, hitting Castleton Hill Moravian Church community garden and the Joe Holzka Community Garden. Attendees are encouraged to wear a helmet and bring plenty of water. 

Miami-based duo Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz, known as Guerra de la Paz, create large-scale sculptures from discarded clothing, reflecting on consumerism, waste and history.  They speak about their work and the ‘history of things’ in this 2008 STUDIO 360 interview on NPR. 

The summer group exhibition at Brooklyn artspace Smack Mellon is called “Condensations of the Social.”  It features artistic projects that engage social practice:

artistic projects that refer to the strands of the social that contribute to the formation of culture: pedagogy, ritual/performance, political and ideological engagement, work, and ecology and sustainability as they relate to place.

Americans for the Arts announces their annual Public Art Year in Review, celebrating the year’s best public art works in the US and Canada.  The 40 works listed this year are sited in 29 cities and were selected from over 300 entries by curators Helen Lessick and Fred Wilson. 

Last Saturday, we hosted what has probably been the most provocative and unusual program we’ve seen yet at the Freshkills Park site (the gauntlet has been thrown down! Our open request for program proposals is here): choreographer Kathy Westwater‘s movement-based piece PARK, developed with collaborators Jennifer Scappettone and Seung Jae Lee. 

Through July 5th, New Yorkers are invited to play any of the 60 donated and artist-decorated pianos that have recently appeared in public locations across the city.  Play Me, I’m Yours is the brainchild of British artist Luke Jerram, who has promoted and managed the project since its inception in 2008 and has since placed pianos in cities all over the world.  

Artist Stephen Vitiello‘s multi-channel sound installation A Bell For Every Minute is a site-specific sound installation on the High Line, in the semi-enclosed passage that runs between West 13th and 14th Streets. It opened to the public yesterday, June 23rd.

PBS Thirteen’s Sunday Arts program profiles Materials for the Arts (MFTA), the amazing and popular New York City materials reuse program. Founded in 1978 and still growing under the aegis of the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, MFTA negotiates the transfer of hundreds of tons of materials annually from companies and individuals who no longer need them into the custody of artists and educators citywide who can make use of them. 

The New York City Department of Transportation has announced the winner of its reNEWable Times Square design competition, aimed to temporarily “refresh and revive” the streetscape of newly pedestrianized Times Square while plans for permanent reconstruction proceed (construction is slated for 1012). 

It seems like no New York City site has truly been inaugurated as a public space until it has hosted an avant-garde dance performance.  Our time has come!  A group of artists and performers organized by choreographer Kathy Westwater has developed a movement-based project responding to their research and on-site study of the Freshkills Park site over several visits this spring. 

The third annual ART by the Ferry Festival runs this weekend and next in Staten Island.   Offerings will include visual arts, music, performance art, street performers, circus acts, crafts, literary readings, workshops and local food.  Everything takes place within a few blocks of the St.

We received our beautiful, custom Key to the City yesterday from the folks at Creative Time.  Feeling empowered and ready to open up that hidden door in the Brooklyn Museum.  We also installed and verified the locked box inside the Freshkills Park tour bus. 

As part of its annual SummerFest, the Council on the Arts & Humanities for Staten Island (COAHSI) joins artist Tattfoo Tan in hosting a mobile garden expo and parade this Saturday, June 5th in the Tompkinsville neighborhood of Staten Island. 

The University of Buffalo has commissioned landscape architect Walter Hood to design a 5,000-panel solar array to be sited on 6.5 acres of its campus and to function as a signature piece of land art.  The Oakland, CA-based Hood won out over proposals by Vito Acconci and Diana Balmori with his proposal for a fragmented grid, meant to recall DNA, supported on posts and suspended over low-maintenance grasses, crab-apple shrubs, ornamental lindens, trees and an existing creek, all of which will be publicly accessible. 

The fifth annual Staten Island Film Festival starts tomorrow and features a slate of dozens of intriguing short and feature-length films, many of them about or featuring New York City’s outer boroughs.  Participating filmmakers include 15 from Staten Island (including Wu-Tang Clan leader the RZA) as well as many more from throughout New York City and as far afield as Las Vegas and Australia. 

Working with public art commissioning organization Creative Time, artist Paul Ramírez Jonas has assembled a project called Key to the City that will be taking place throughout New York City this summer.  35,000 specially crafted keys will be given away at daily ‘bestowal ceremonies’ at a kiosk in Times Square from June 3rd to 27th.  

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/11804927]

The excellent “Fast Trash” exhibit—featuring Roosevelt Island‘s signature pneumatic vacuum tube garbage disposal system—closed this past weekend.  A series of public programs including screenings, walking tours and even musical theater helped to make the exhibit, curated by architect Juliette Spertus, into a real must-see. 

This coming Tuesday, we’re happy to have photographer Nathan Kensinger joining us for a Staten-Island-centered follow-up to his March talk and slideshow on New York’s post-industrial waterfront.   Nathan will be presenting photos from around Staten Island, including an abandoned chewing gum factory, a partially demolished color works, rotting train stations, empty hospitals and boat graveyards.

Our second annual Freshkills Park Haiku Contest came to a close at the end of April, and now our esteemed judges have weighed in with their verdicts.  The winners of this year’s contest are:

Adult winners:

Quietly sleeping,
Buried discards of past years
Support vibrant hills

– Stephen Knowles

Now green and growing
This upside-down museum
Forms new paths of hope

– Leona Egan

Tall thousand grasses
rub hollow elbows to the
chopstick cricket legs

– Robin Locke Monda

Student winners:

Looking at the mounds,
you are rolling down the past.