Box construction started today! On Friday we will be painting it. Someone suggested the phrase “Core Sample” as a title for the project. It has a nice ring to it.

Ever been on vacation and seen these souvenirs made out of layers of colored sand?

On Friday afternoon, Heather and Julia and I went to Home Depot and bought the materials to create a giant Plexiglas case, our version of the bottle of sand. Once we build it in the studio this week, everyone at NUA can start dropping objects, artwork, poems, whatever, into the case and making beautiful layers of history. These layers can refer to the media we use at NUA or the history of the building of NUA. So, for example, there could be a layer of materials that were used to make the building. There could be another layer of fabric because the building used to be a clothing store. There could be another layer after that of sculptures or photographs or other media because now we make art at NUA. You just need to get there first and start putting stuff in the case to create the layers!

These layers of life at New Urban Arts will be a stratigraphy just like the layers you might see when you dig deep into the Earth.

Carla Herrera-Prats, Artist in Art+History

Carla does research in archives and then creates artwork that comments on cultural and economic transactions around the world. She uses photography and material from other sources to question the documentary value of both images and text.

Carla was the co-director of a gallery called Acceso A in Mexico City and is part of a collaborative group of artists called CAMEL. Carla has exhibited her individual work in Canada, Colombia, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the United States, in venues such as Centro de la Imagen, Museo Dolores Olmedo, Centre Vu, Artists Space, and The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore. She has received numerous awards and grants for her artwork in the US and other countries. Carla was recently a Visiting Lecturer at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and taught the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Now she teaches at CalArts, Valencia, California.

Carla graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from “La Esmeralda,” in Mexico City, and her Master of Fine Arts in Photography from CalArts, Los Angeles.

Carla would be happy to answer any questions you might have for her about her work by email at carlaherreraprats(at)yahoo.com but first, check out her website at www.carlaherreraprats.com.

This is Rosie:

Rosie Branson-Gill, Co-Curator of Art+History

Rosie says:
I am a second year masters student in the public humanities at Brown University. I am interested in the role the visual arts play in our communities, and I study public art, artist residencies and visual arts organizations. Last summer I completed a practicum at the Wanas Foundation, an outdoor sculpture and installation park in the south of Sweden. This Spring I am working at the Harvard Art Museum. The focus of my internship is on the relationship between art museums and healing.

Coming to Providence last fall was actually a return. I graduated from Brown University in 2003 with a concentration in Latin American Studies and contemporary Cuban politics and art. After college, I moved to New York for two years before returning home to Boston. In New York I worked at the museums, as an art critic, and for a non-profit dedicated to fostering artistic exchange between the United States and Cuba. Back in Massachusetts I worked with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the Somerville Arts Council, The Berwick Research Institute, and for Errol Morris.

Please feel free to contact me about the Public Humanities Program. My email is: Rosemary_Branson_Gill (at) brown.edu

This is Meg:

Meg Rotzel, Co-Curator of Art+History

Meg says:
I am a masters candidate in Brown University’s Public Humanities program. I graduated with my Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Museum School/Tufts University along with a Diploma from the Museum School. I have been an exhibiting artist, curator, collaborator, lecturer, panelist, artist-in-resident, and community service provider at national and international organizations and institutions. I founded the Berwick Research Institute, a nonprofit in Boston that supports individual artists, through residencies in studio and public art, and supports artistic research projects. I directed the Institute from 2002-2006. Now I work at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), where I coordinate the Fellowship, and Visiting Artist programs and manage the Public Program. I received a grant from the MIT Arts Council to travel and work as an archivist with “Lost Highway Expedition,” a three-year project based in the Western Balkans.

If you have any questions about this project or any of my others, I’d be happy to answer them when we meet at New Urban Arts or at Brown!

Yearbooks Three Ways:

1) Yearbooks represent the official history of a high school student. But how many people’s lives really reflect what the yearbook tells us? Or, maybe your life looks like the yearbook sometimes and sometimes looks completely different. We could create a piece that talks about the relationship between official and unofficial histories. We were thinking specifically about the juxtaposition between typical portraits for the yearbook and the beautiful portraits of students in the front area of NUA. But this could include other media as well.

2) We all have different roles in our lives – student, teacher, sister, daughter, friend, athlete, etc., and sometimes we think of them as living in very separate parts of our lives. We could construct an installation that illustrates some different realms of life in an abstract way (home, school, NUA, for example), and map the connections between them with string or something else. Then others could begin to add / hang things on the connections

3) We could create a character, even create NUA as a character, and illustrate the roles and relationships in its (his? her?) life.

White Electric:
You all know the coffee shop, right? Well, it used to be a store that sold electrical appliances. A coffee maker IS an electrical appliance! White Electric does show art, and might be interested in hosting an installation of ours. We could build something really neat using a lot of coffee-related supplies -
• Make paper out of coffee filters
• Dye fabric or paper with coffee
• Make little Zen sand gardens out of coffee grounds
• Build sculpture out of old coffee pots and other supplies
• Make a bouquet of cords or use them to hang things from
• Make jewelry from the colorful wire within the cords (possibly at lock-in?)
• Coffee tins!
• Teabags
• Mugs, cups, (smash and make a mosaic?)
We could also create an installation on this theme in the window of NUA and point it towards White Electric.

History of (or Story of) NUA:

We could create a stratigraphy of histories of NUA using the variety of different media in the studio as different layers. So we could have photographic layers, printed layers, handmade paper layers, painted and drawn layers, fabric layers….

Ava and Ashley, we wanted to know if there are any stories that jump out for you for this option, since you’ve been at NUA the longest.

Anyway, please comment on these and let everyone know what your favorite option is so that we can pick a topic and start making stuff.

Simon Starling’s site-specific installation at MASS MoCA relates the place’s history to its contemporary life as a museum. When MASS MoCA was a factory, the workers went on strike. The owners and managers of the factories brought in Chinese laborers for low wages to break the strike.

Starling looked at this original stereopticon image of the low paid Chinese workers

And he decided to blow the photograph up to larger than life size. The holes in the stereographic photo becomes a window from the past of the factory into the present of the museum.

When you look through the two holes in the giant photo wall, you see two different giant, shiny sculptures.

The two sculptures represent two particles of silver, which Starling extracted from the surface of the original photograph and viewed under a microscope.

He made models of the particles and sent them off to China to be produced as giant sculptures by LOW PAID CHINESE WORKERS!

The visitors to the museum are the new inhabitants of this giant space that once was a factory but is now filled with art.

Shannon and Abby mentioned The Fantastic Umbrella Factory in Charlestown, RI. They have been visiting ever since they were kids and had really fond memories of the place. The Fantastic Umbrella Factory is a hippie commune started in 1968. There are funky shops, a cafe, live animals, a greenhouse, and garden. Shannon mentioned that there is a great visual display that tells the history of the place. How visuals are used to tell the history of a place is something to think about…

Sol Lewitt chalk lines

Sol Lewitt chalk lines (2)

As Lewitt went further with his work, he gave the draftspeople more freedom to interpret his drawings.

Sol Lewitt Wall Drawing 289 (label)

Sol Lewitt Wall Drawing 289 (detail) Notice, this is a *detail* of a much larger piece for four walls. Why would Lewitt chose to only show one wall of the piece? Does this change the way the piece is specific to the site?

Here are a couple more examples of Lewitt’s work in this retrospective exhibition

Sol Lewitt Wall Drawing 46 (label)

Sol Lewitt Wall Drawing 46 (detail)

Sol Lewitt mid-career

How does Lewitt's art work in this old mill building that has been turned into a museum? Why would Lewitt choose this building?

Towards the end of Lewitt's life, he went back to just using graphite.

Lewitt instructed the draftspeople to "scribble" or "take the lines for a random walk." Who is the artist here? Lewitt or the draftspeople?

site specific- there are many definitions of “site specific artwork.” this is a basic definition from the Wikipedia 

site specific artwork is created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork.

To read the full article on Site-specific Art go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site-specific_art>