Tags: art

The Land Art Generator Initiative is hosting an international design competition to design outdoor public art installations that generate renewable energy–in Dubai.  While the United Arab Emirates has made most of its wealth by exploiting oil reserves, Dubai has become an international hub for innovative architecture and infrastructure projects due to its dizzyingly rapid pace of development. 

A couple of exciting exhibitions and projects featuring the built and natural environments are currently underway at the MoMA and P.S.1.  The MoMA exhibition, “In Situ: Architecture and Landscape”, opened last April and will be running through February 22nd. 

A recent New York Times piece features a valuable piece of NYC Parks property: the Alice Austen House, a National Historic Monument located in the Rosebank section of Staten Island.  Accompanying the story is an audio slide show narrated by caretaker and curator Paul Moakley, a freelance photo editor and photographer who maintains the house, museum and grounds in exchange for free accommodation in the house’s upstairs apartment.  

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=f09lQ8Q1iKE&w=507&h=370]

Photographer Chris Jordan makes staggering representations of human waste, consumerism and cultural practices, focusing on the immense environmental impact of collective consumption.  Jordan illustrates daunting statistics–4 million plastic cups used each day on airline flights alone, 166,000 overnight packages shipped by air in the U.S.

Philosophy in the Land II, an exhibition featuring photography, drawings and prints by artist Agnes Denes spanning the last 50 years, is on view at the Leslie Tonkonow Gallery in Manhattan until January 16th.  Denes is a pioneer of the environmental art movment whose ecological and philosophical interests surfaced in her 1968 piece Rice/Tree/Burial, which has been described as “the first site-specific piece anywhere with ecological concerns.”

[vimeo= http://vimeo.com/6686323]

LentSpace is a 37,000 square foot temporary park and cultural space at Canal and Sullivan Streets in lower Manhattan.  The site opened to the public on September 18th–Park(ing) Day–and is on loan to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for three years from Trinity Real Estate, which hopes to build on it when the City’s real estate market improves. 

Photographer Nathan Kensinger has posted a set of terrific photos and his impressions of the Freshkills Park site, collected during our photographers’ tour last month.  We’ve been doing these tours every few months; if you’re a professional photographer interested in participating in future photo tours, feel free to be in touch.

UbuWeb, the large online archive of avant-garde art, has posted a streaming video of Gordon Matta-Clark‘s 1972 “Freshkill,” filmed at the Fresh Kills Landfill.  The short film depicts the destruction of the artist’s truck by a bulldozer.  The video is also available for download as an MP4.

Artist Maya Lin is exhibiting both architectural sculptures and environmental installations this fall in and around New York City.  Among the sculptures on view at Salon 94 are number of “asteroids” constructed from children’s toys, bottle caps and other recycled materials, as well as topographical formations carved from atlases and phone books. 

The Indianapolis Museum of Art is in progress developing the largest museum park in the US: 100 acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park.  Formerly a construction site and gravel pit, the 100-acre parkland has evolved naturally into woodland and wetland areas and includes a 35-acre lake. 

Randy Ludacer’s performance at the Freshkills Park site last Saturday was terrific.  An eager audience poured out of our Parks bus at North Mound to hear Randy serenede them (and the millions of tons of discarded packaging buried underfoot) with the new album of songs he’d recorded for the event, including “The Prettiest Package” and “This Landfill is Your Landfill.” 

Spencer Finch’s The River That Flows Both Ways–the first public art commission on the High Line–is an installation of 700 panes of colored glass on the Chelsea Market building, between 15th and 16th Streets on the elevated park at 10th Avenue. 

Choreographer/performer Jill Sigman and composer/vocalist Kristin Norderval have collaborated to produce Our Lady of Detritus, a performance piece focused on “trash and transcendence” that has been making its way through various outdoor New York City sites for the past month.

We’ve updated our flickr stream with photos from the Composting Workshop we held at the end of August and last weekend’s reading from the works of Robert Frost.  Both events were rainy but drew enthusiastic and game crowds and speakers. 

GreenEdge NYC and Solar One‘s free, seven-evening Solar-Powered Film Festival begins tonight on the East River.  A series of environmental documentaries will screen in Solar One’s outdoor eco-theater, with projector and sound system powered by solar energy captured nearby.

Thursday, September 10 – Addicted to Plastic (2007, 85 mins)
Friday, September 11 – Who Killed the Electric Car (2006, 93 mins)
Saturday, September 12 – Flow: For the Love of Water (2008, 93 mins)
Sunday, September 13 – [Rain Date for any of above]

Thursday, September 17 – A Sea Change (2008, 85 mins)
Friday, September 18 – The Garden (2008, 80 mins)
Saturday, September 19 – Burning in the Sun (2009, 65 mins)
Sunday, September 20 – [Rain Date for any of above]

September 25 at 7 PM [Rain Date September 26] – What’s On Your Plate?

The Guinness Book’s record holder for World’s Largest Photograph was created at the site of the Orange County Great Park, a brownfield-to-park project in Orange County, California.  The Great Picture is a gelatin silver print measuring 10 x 30 meters, or roughly three stories high and eleven stories long. 

Randy Ludacer has unveiled the design scheme for the “Songs About Packaging” CD he will be giving away during his Saturday, September 26th performance at the Freshkills Park site.  Each package is a miniature pop-art homage to items found in his recycling bin, paying respect to the product’s original design while commenting on its disposable nature.

[vimeo vimeo.com/2802531]

Before PBS Thirteen’s online series The City Concealed featured Freshkills Park, it featured another unusual Staten Island park happening, at Mt. Loretto Unique Area, a state preserve on the island’s southern tip.  Artist Doug  Schwartz has been building pyramids of thousands of rocks, spanning nearly half a mile of beach at Mt.

Mary Miss makes site-specific artwork aimed at making abstractions like site history and environmental function tangible to the public.  Her work, from the 1960s through the present, has engaged issues and practices of landscape, architecture, infrastructure and ecology.  She has participated in a number of park design projects, including proposals for New York City’s Riverside Park South and Orange County California’s Great Park.  

Transportation Alternatives is requesting submissions for POP.Park, a competition to design a pop-up park for Park(ing) Day in New York City. Since its inception in 2005 by art and design collective Rebar, Park(ing) Day has celebrated pedestrians by transforming parking spaces all over the city into temporary parks.