Parallel Tracks: Three Case Studies of the Relationship between Street Art and U.S. Museums in the Twenty-First Century

An examination of three case studies involving U.S. museum exhibitions of street and graffiti art in the twenty-first century. This thesis covers the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Graffiti” show in 2006, Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Art in the Streets” in 2011, and the 2012-2015 activities of the Baton Rouge Museum of Public Art. These events offer a chronological and geographical range to provide a broad scope of investigation into the pitfalls and opportunities of museum’s exhibiting graffiti and street art. The heart of this research is not to prolong the debate about whether museums endanger their authority when they show street artists or whether street artists lose their edge by engaging with institutions, but rather, to accept their long-standing relationship as a fact and historicize the challenges that have faced these parties over many years. In each instance covered here, the museum’s objective was to harness and convey the energy and value of street art to new audience. Each museum setting sought to demonstrate the communicative power of graffiti and other forms of transgressive urban art. At some cost to the institution, their efforts had significant, positive consequences on the art form, whether in the art market or in the public domain. The catalog of the obstacles which faced these organizations, as laid out in this research, will enable museums to mitigate those costs in the future and contribute to a road map which museums can use to better navigate the parallel paths of subversion and compromise they themselves accept when supporting controversial art

The Israeli West Bank wall: iconographic storytelling

2After the Arab Spring, in the early 2010s, street art burst onto the urban scene filling meters and meters of walls in the major cities of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria and many other Arab countries. Specifically, our focus is on a very particular case: the Israeli West Bank wall (better known as the Israelian Security Fence/Palestinian Apartheid Wall). This study aims to examine how a wall that was born as an element of separation, closure and marginalization, over time has become a means of openness and communication, but above all the manifesto of a condition and a social malaise visible to the eyes of the whole world. All thanks to the messages traced or engraved on the wall that ordinary people, local artists and international street artists wanted to leave to express their thought and communicate them in a context that is certainly not trivial. The messages that follow one another, mostly iconographic, are often intertwined with slogans purposely written in English that refer to international events or personalities. Graffiti techniques merges Western influences with a distinct national heritage, recognising local history and shaping a future open to new influences.openopennetti, rossana; mansour, osamaNetti, Rossana; Mansour, Osam

Chicana/o Artivism: Judy Baca's Digital Work with Youth of Color

Part of the Volume on Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media Astounding digital murals have emerged from the minds and souls of Chicana artist Judy Baca and the youth of color who have collaborated with her over the past ten years. Their workspace is SPARC, the Social and Public Art Resource Center, founded by Baca in 1996 and dedicated to the creation and support of community and public art in Southern California. But the digital art they produce is not only located in SPARC -- it can be found in virtual installations globally, as well as on the walls of Los Angeles barrio housing projects and in the hybrid spaces of the Internet. We call their activity "digital artivism," a word that is itself a convergence between "activism" and digital "artistic" production. The digital artivism we find expressed through SPARC, we argue, is symptomatic of a Chicana/o twenty-first century digital arts movement. This digital artivist movement also advances the expression of a mode of liberatory consciousness that Chicana feminist philosopher Gloria Anzaldua calls la conciencia de la mestiza, i.e. the radical consciousness of a mixed race peoples. Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre call attention to this mode of digital artivism enacted by Baca and young people who are vested in the convergences between creative expression, social activism, and self-empowerment

Two weddings: an examination of the design process as applied to Blood Wedding and Vernasz

The objective of this study was to examine the design process, and how it was affected when applied to the different forms of opera and theatre, using two specific examples as test subjects. To ensure homogeny between these subjects I chose Federico Garcia Lorca's play, Blood Wedding, and an operatic adaptation, Sandor Szokolay's Vernasz. Using my personal design process as a basis for study, I developed preliminary and final scenography, including scenery and costumes, for both pieces concurrently. These theoretical productions were designed for the Shaw Festival Court House Theatre and the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, respectively. The results revealed that, although scenographic decisions were influenced by factors exclusive to opera, theatre, and the selected theatres; the design process itself was unaffected

Development of a method for recording energy costs and uses during the construction process

Rising energy costs should be a concern to contractors, designers, and owners. It is difficult to make a quantity takeoff for energy usage because these costs are imbedded in the materials, equipment, or overhead costs. This research examines energy consumption during the construction process, sets forth methods for recording this energy consumption and establishes a program for the recording and analysis of this data. An energy study of electricity, gasoline, and diesel consumption was made for the construction of three buildings to determine what data was available. After available data was evaluated, and the Energy Data Analysis program developed, three other construction sites were visited to determine how readily energy data can be recorded using the program. Four construction energy phases were identified from this research. The four phases are: 1) site clearing and preparation, 2) building structure, 3) interior finishes, and 4) commissioning. The main type of energy consumption during Phase 1 is diesel fuel for earth moving equipment. The energy uses for Phases 2 and 3 varied considerably among the projects studied and were difficult to quantify. However, the energy use during these phases was low compared to other phases and for many projects may not be economical to evaluate. During Phase 4, electrical energy demand was high due to Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) commissioning requirements and power up of all electrical power uses including lighting. These few construction projects are not enough to make definitive conclusions about what percentage of the total project cost is spent on energy. This research found that construction energy costs vary during different phases of the building process and can be a significant part of that phase (as high as 5.7% of the cost). The Visual Basic program developed during this research will facilitate future energy studies on construction sites. When the program is applied to a project, it identifies and quantifies the energy use, and makes predictions as to which project tasks warrant further energy studies

Making it Big: Street Art Muralism in a Post-Political World

Making it Big is an ethnographic exploration of the critical role that graffiti and street artists can play in resisting neoliberal attempts to pacify radical modes of artistic practice in North American cities today. Over the last decade, street art muralism has increasingly been identified as a key component in reshaping urban infrastructures and economies, namely though the development of arts districts and the organization of urban or mural arts festivals. It has also been mobilized to confront social injustices and raise public awareness to environmental and global issues. Influenced by graffiti and street art, street art muralism is argued as being a distinct form of public art, heroic to monumental in scale, and produced in public settings with consent. The shift towards professional and institutionally managed street art mural projects and programs demands a closer and critical evaluation of equality and content in place and space, and the democratization of arts in the city. As commercial and government interests grow urban arts infrastructures using street art mural-based tourism strategies, they are met with either support or resistance from purists and muralists in the graffiti and street art communities. On the one hand, purists argue that the street art muralism threatens to supplant graffiti culture and informal systems of aesthetic regulation. On the other hand, muralists see opportunities to develop their public and professional arts careers and use their art to raise awareness to environmental, cultural, political, and social justice issues. Social relations which have emerged from new configurations of work and art have also produced new subjectivities, perspectives, and worldviews which can help to expand rather than detract from counter-hegemonic struggles. This research will show how graffiti and street artists and the multiplicity of social spaces where they find themselves working have contributed to an expansion of the field of artistic intervention. As such, this research probes the struggles and tensions produced by these new and changing social relations and spatial forms surrounding their professionalization and the popularization through street art muralism to draw out the contradictions between these commercial and emancipatory projects

The Phoenix Vol. X, No. 7 (April 29, 1947)

https://mushare.marian.edu/phnx/1127/thumbnail.jp