Art & Activism
Submitted by jaz on July 4, 2008 - 9:27am.
Art
A review on a local show centering on Visual Art & Environmentalism.
» add new comment | 166 reads
Public Architecture
Submitted by jaz on August 24, 2008 - 9:06am.
This article ("A Blueprint for Good") focuses on the work of a nonprofit design firm, Public Architecture, that deals with social issues through building design. One design, for example, is for a meeting place for day laborers which "gives the workers who gather at street corners and parking lots every day in cities across the country a place to wait for work. But it also does more than that. With an elegance worthy of a high-end design firm, it provides a place to make or sell food, use the bathroom, hold meetings, and store tools. The station uses green materials, and it can operate almost entirely off the grid...At the same time, their creation achieved what the best built environments around us do all the time, without us ever noticing: it found a three-dimensional solution to complex problems. It speaks to police, whose tendency to steer clear of day labor groups can make them breeding grounds for crime. It speaks to business owners, whose parking lots and sidewalks can appear unsafe or unseemly, becoming flashpoints of controversy. And by offering a shadow immigrant population basic human needs - shelter, sanitation, and a safe place to seek work - the station suggests a powerful idea for everyone involved to consider: that day laborers have worth and a place in the social fabric."
» reply
Garcia Lorca Quotation
I finally found this quotation that I was looking for about the relationship between artist and audience by Lorca:
"“The poem, the song, the picture is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink — and in drinking — understand themselves.”