Consume!

Consume is an online project created by a design student at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Florida featuring milk carton culture-jamming tutorials, minizines, and printable posters for everybody to enjoy. Thanks to designer and professor Allen Harrison for inspiring and sharing his student's work.

Paper food exchange

Lori Waxman recently told me about an interesting public printmedia project at the Sharjah Biennale: Thai art collective SOI Project created a fruit stand stocked with real fruit and printed paper models of fruit. Visitors to the stand could cut and fold their own paper fruit, which in turn could be exchanged for a piece of real fruit.

Flatstock!

Anyone interested in the world of poster-printing as a creative business venture should know about Flatstock, a major exhibition/sales fair of rock poster art and related creative printing from across the country and abroad. The show, which is presented by the American Poster Institute, takes place at several large music festivals every year. This July Flatstock 17 took over a main artery of the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago with all sorts of gorgeous multi-screen prints. Showgoers could buy by Chicago favorites Jay Ryan, Mat Daly, Alana Bailey, and Dan MacAdam of Crosshair, as well as tons of other printers from across the country. Flatstock 18 and 19 will take place in Seattle, WA and Hamburg, Germany this August and September. Even if you're not interested in poster-making per-se, it's pretty graphically gratifying just to soak up the incredible ways these artists use color, texture, line, pattern, transparent layers, etc. etc. The music was great and all, but I think the astounding display of accessible, affordable, interesting prints was one of the most interesting part of the festival.

Art In Odd Places

Call for Entries:
In October 2008, the fourth annual Art in Odd Places (AiOP), Pedestrian will take place on 14th Street in Manhattan NYC: the great divider of uptown and downtown / highbrow and lowbrow. From the East River to the Hudson River, artists of all mediums will encourage the masses of daily pedestrians to rediscover this corridor of diverse commerce, political upheaval, and historic significance.

AiOP seeks proposals from visual and performing artists of all media who are interested in exploring connections between public space, pedestrian traffic, and ephemeral transient disruptions. DEADLINE FOR PROJECT SUBMISSION IS MAY 30.

In any event, you may want to check out examples from past AiOP festivals. Gumball-machine galleries, winking coins, and so much more! Visit the AiOP website for submission guidelines and images of past projects.

Contemporary Art + the Gap?

In an interesting twist on the whole artist-designed-tee phenomenon, a certain fashion chain has partnered with the Whitney Museum of Art in NY to create a series of limited-edition t-shirts designed by highly regarded contemporary artists including Sarah Sze, Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith, and a few socially-conscious ones like Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and (gasp) my former grad school advisor, Kerry James Marshall. On the one hand one could see this as a way of expanding artistic ideas and practices to the masses -- making contemporary art more accessible and maybe even provoking dialogue at the mall! On the other hand, very few of these shirts operate as anything other than cool-looking hipster gear -- Cai Guo Qiang's wound/stain/explosion shirt stands out as an exception -- and I wonder what percentage of those buying these limited-edition shirts are those already well-versed in the art. I've got nothing against artist-designed consumer items, especially when they're as lovely as some of these are. I'm just a bit disappointed that so few of these artists took the opportunity to push the envelope in terms of how such a thing might operate in the world.

Art in your Trash Can

Check out this site-specific sticker campaign from a homeless shelter in Portugal. Found recently on Guerrilla Innovation.

Amy Walsh- sculpture/silkscreen hybrid

So I came across this article floating around the internet-

http://www.roadsidescholar.com/2008/02/07/lets-chat-amy-walsh-silkscreens-sculpture/

It's an interview with artist Amy Walsh, and has a very unique way with her art. She uses silkscreen in her sculptures. I like how the sculptures are interactive and sort of form into a public space all by itself. It's demanding presence, seems like it would make you want to go look inside it. And with examination, you find all these silkscreened goodies inside! Kind of reminds me of some of the more simplistic, but very elegant stencils that some of my classmates did...