Friday, April 5, 2013
Songdo, South Korea mural project
We've got our tickets, so I guess we're really going ... to Songdo, South Korea for a super-quick mural project! Thanks to art teacher, and former Kansan, Vanessa Vanek for reaching out to us and handling all of the logistics. Ashley Laird and I will be working April 20 -30 with students from Chadwick International school on the mural for Songdo's Central Park. Check back here for updates.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Infamous "Reject Brownback" poster sighted in Lawrence
Censored in Topeka and sensationalized in the media, he's baaack. For a limited time only, you can view the crying governor for yourself. "Reject Brownback" is part of the annual Lawrence Arts Center auction on view through April 13th.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Trash or Treasure?
from the Lawrence Journal - World
February 10, 2013
by Sara Shepherd
The blue, metal garbage container at the Social Service League Thrift Store defies its outward appearance as just another alleyway trash bin.
Thrift store employees aren’t the only ones who put things into it. And trash truck drivers aren’t the only ones who take things out. Over the past decade, maybe longer, the bin has evolved into its own unlikely circular micro-economy and a gathering place for both people who live comfortably and the down-on-their-luck. In a project he’s calling “Give Take Give,” Lawrence artist David Loewenstein is documenting the phenomenon.
“It’s unsupervised. There are no rules,” he says. “It’s those of us that use it that have to maintain it.”
Trash bin “community” members know the container as a prime spot to forage for interesting or useful things — and also a haven where they can leave things someone else might want or need.
Cast-off or broken items from the thrift store, at 905 Rhode Island St., go into the trash bin, Loewenstein says. But some donors drop their items in the trash bin instead of taking them inside, either because they arrive after-hours or just because they know someone will find them there.
Not having the soupy, smelly restaurant trash of many other downtown bins helps. There’s also a few unwritten rules.
“People know not to throw dirty garbage in here,” Loewenstein says. “For the most part, they understand this isn’t what this is about.” Also, when trash bin diggers come across a great find they don’t need for themselves, they pull it to the top or set it on a nearby fence, in hopes it will get noticed. Sometimes electrically or mechanically savvy hobbyists pull out a broken item, take it home to fix, then return it to the bin for someone else to find and enjoy.
On a frigid-but-sunny afternoon in January, Loewenstein is curved over the bin — he won’t climb inside it, a personal boundary — with camera and note pad in hand. Rifling through the top layers of stuff, he unearths a retro breakfast-in-bed table, lots of shoes in relatively good condition, a stick horse head with no stick, a toy police truck, a costume witch hat, a glazed coil pot — the list goes on and on. During this inventory, one of several he’s conducted since last summer, there’s one find he wants to keep: a piece of paper bearing colorful doodles and “Happy Mothers Day” in a child’s handwriting. It’s dated May 2000.
“The things that are most interesting to me are the personal things,” Loewenstein says.
They were undoubtedly valuable to someone at one time, he says, but even those things eventually get thrown away. That’s probably true about most anything in the trash bin. Here’s a sampling from Loewenstein’s July 31 inventory:
Desk lamp, gnarly gray comforter, empty box of Trojan Ecstasy condoms with fire and ice lubricant, emergency services documents for someone with kidney stones, painkiller prescription receipts for ibuprofen, ondansetron and oxycodone
The Nov. 16 inventory had a lighter tone:
Turkey shaped couch pillow, tabletop children's soccer game, heavily used black Converse low-tops, Yamaha electronic Portasound keyboard, one baby doll intact, one baby doll head
As Loewenstein digs, a neighborhood resident and off-duty store volunteer stops by to check out what’s in the trash bin that day. A woman dropping off donations inside the store walks over to see what’s going on. A guy no one knows offers everyone cigarettes (no takers). That’s another thing about the trash bin: it brings people together whose paths might never cross otherwise, Loewenstein says — like hipsters hunting for treasures and poor people diving for items they need but can’t afford, or financially sound residents donating items and drug addicts wandering the alley.
When Lawrence resident and Kansas University graduate Rachel Vaughn began research for her doctoral dissertation on waste economies and "Dumpster diving," she expected to find only poor people scavenging the bin behind the Social Service League.
She was wrong.
“There was this sort of diversity of voices,” Vaughn says. “People were going to this and other spaces for lots of different reasons, coming from lots of different social positions, many different needs.”
Vaughn says the Social Service League’s “little Dumpster that could” should be a point of pride for the community, not seen as shameful or gross. Plus, she says, it may inspire answers to a larger question about public spaces and this country’s growing economy of waste: “How do we deal with this huge conundrum of creating stuff? And what do we do with it?”
Funding from the Rocket Grants program is fueling Loewenstein’s project. The grants — a partnership of the Spencer Museum of Art, the Charlotte Street Foundation of Kansas City, Mo., and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts — aim to support innovative, public-oriented work in nontraditional spaces. “By shedding light on ... an alternate economy hidden in plain sight,” a Rocket Grant writeup says, “Loewenstein hopes to inspire others to reflect on how gifts of labor, teaching and time can help bind people together in a connected circuit of goodwill.”
Loewenstein’s home and studio are within a block of the thrift store, and he’s long considered doing a project on the trash bin but worried publicity might change its dynamics. When the city approved plans for a multistory hotel to go up at Ninth and New Hampshire streets, in the empty lot across the alley from the bin, Loewenstein decided he shouldn’t risk losing his opportunity.
“The hotel’s going to dramatically change the environment. There’s a good chance this won’t even be accessible anymore,” he says. “I thought I’d better capture it while it’s still here.”
February 10, 2013
by Sara Shepherd
The blue, metal garbage container at the Social Service League Thrift Store defies its outward appearance as just another alleyway trash bin.
Thrift store employees aren’t the only ones who put things into it. And trash truck drivers aren’t the only ones who take things out. Over the past decade, maybe longer, the bin has evolved into its own unlikely circular micro-economy and a gathering place for both people who live comfortably and the down-on-their-luck. In a project he’s calling “Give Take Give,” Lawrence artist David Loewenstein is documenting the phenomenon.
 |
|
In a project he’s calling “Give Take Give,”
Lawrence artist
David Loewenstein is documenting the unusual gift
economy and
social community that have arisen around the trash bin
behind the
Social Service League Thrift Store, 905 Rhode Island St.
|
Trash bin “community” members know the container as a prime spot to forage for interesting or useful things — and also a haven where they can leave things someone else might want or need.
Cast-off or broken items from the thrift store, at 905 Rhode Island St., go into the trash bin, Loewenstein says. But some donors drop their items in the trash bin instead of taking them inside, either because they arrive after-hours or just because they know someone will find them there.
Not having the soupy, smelly restaurant trash of many other downtown bins helps. There’s also a few unwritten rules.
“People know not to throw dirty garbage in here,” Loewenstein says. “For the most part, they understand this isn’t what this is about.” Also, when trash bin diggers come across a great find they don’t need for themselves, they pull it to the top or set it on a nearby fence, in hopes it will get noticed. Sometimes electrically or mechanically savvy hobbyists pull out a broken item, take it home to fix, then return it to the bin for someone else to find and enjoy.
On a frigid-but-sunny afternoon in January, Loewenstein is curved over the bin — he won’t climb inside it, a personal boundary — with camera and note pad in hand. Rifling through the top layers of stuff, he unearths a retro breakfast-in-bed table, lots of shoes in relatively good condition, a stick horse head with no stick, a toy police truck, a costume witch hat, a glazed coil pot — the list goes on and on. During this inventory, one of several he’s conducted since last summer, there’s one find he wants to keep: a piece of paper bearing colorful doodles and “Happy Mothers Day” in a child’s handwriting. It’s dated May 2000.
“The things that are most interesting to me are the personal things,” Loewenstein says.
They were undoubtedly valuable to someone at one time, he says, but even those things eventually get thrown away. That’s probably true about most anything in the trash bin. Here’s a sampling from Loewenstein’s July 31 inventory:
Desk lamp, gnarly gray comforter, empty box of Trojan Ecstasy condoms with fire and ice lubricant, emergency services documents for someone with kidney stones, painkiller prescription receipts for ibuprofen, ondansetron and oxycodone
 |
|
Lawrence artist David Loewenstein keeps a log of
items he
finds in the garbage container behind the Social Service League
Thrift Store, 905 Rhode Island St. April’s Final Friday exhibit
at the Percolator Artspace, 913 Rhode Island St., will center on David Loewenstein’s Give Take Give project. The exhibit is expected to include a “show-and-tell” element in which community members who’ve found treasured items in the Social Service League Thrift Store trash bin share their experiences. An accompanying book will feature photos, essays and excerpts of interviews he’s conducted. |
Turkey shaped couch pillow, tabletop children's soccer game, heavily used black Converse low-tops, Yamaha electronic Portasound keyboard, one baby doll intact, one baby doll head
As Loewenstein digs, a neighborhood resident and off-duty store volunteer stops by to check out what’s in the trash bin that day. A woman dropping off donations inside the store walks over to see what’s going on. A guy no one knows offers everyone cigarettes (no takers). That’s another thing about the trash bin: it brings people together whose paths might never cross otherwise, Loewenstein says — like hipsters hunting for treasures and poor people diving for items they need but can’t afford, or financially sound residents donating items and drug addicts wandering the alley.
When Lawrence resident and Kansas University graduate Rachel Vaughn began research for her doctoral dissertation on waste economies and "Dumpster diving," she expected to find only poor people scavenging the bin behind the Social Service League.
She was wrong.
“There was this sort of diversity of voices,” Vaughn says. “People were going to this and other spaces for lots of different reasons, coming from lots of different social positions, many different needs.”
Vaughn says the Social Service League’s “little Dumpster that could” should be a point of pride for the community, not seen as shameful or gross. Plus, she says, it may inspire answers to a larger question about public spaces and this country’s growing economy of waste: “How do we deal with this huge conundrum of creating stuff? And what do we do with it?”
Funding from the Rocket Grants program is fueling Loewenstein’s project. The grants — a partnership of the Spencer Museum of Art, the Charlotte Street Foundation of Kansas City, Mo., and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts — aim to support innovative, public-oriented work in nontraditional spaces. “By shedding light on ... an alternate economy hidden in plain sight,” a Rocket Grant writeup says, “Loewenstein hopes to inspire others to reflect on how gifts of labor, teaching and time can help bind people together in a connected circuit of goodwill.”
Loewenstein’s home and studio are within a block of the thrift store, and he’s long considered doing a project on the trash bin but worried publicity might change its dynamics. When the city approved plans for a multistory hotel to go up at Ninth and New Hampshire streets, in the empty lot across the alley from the bin, Loewenstein decided he shouldn’t risk losing his opportunity.
“The hotel’s going to dramatically change the environment. There’s a good chance this won’t even be accessible anymore,” he says. “I thought I’d better capture it while it’s still here.”
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Imagine Kansas Without Art
Check out this blog for updates and information about Governor Brownback's attempts to eliminate state support for the arts.
http://imaginekansaswithoutart.blogspot.com/
http://imaginekansaswithoutart.blogspot.com/
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Graphic Advocacy Exhibition
I'm excited to be a part of this exhibition / book project that just opened in Boston and will travel to other museums over the next few years.
Graphic Advocacy: International Posters for the Digital Age 2001-2012
Graphic Advocacy: International Posters for the Digital Age 2001-2012
Monday, January 7, 2013
Upcoming Projects for 2013
Sioux Falls, South Dakota January and July
Beginning in January, Ashley Laird and I will be working with residents of the Whittier neighborhood on a large community mural for Meldrum Park. The project is being supported by an NEA Our Town grant awarded to the Sioux Falls Arts Council. More about the Sioux Falls project here.
Southern Graphic Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin March 20 - 23
I'll be speaking and showing work related to the Occupy Movement and an ongoing effort to counter Kansas' politicians attempts to turn the clock back on women's rights, immigration, and support for the arts. More about SGC here.
Texas April - June
For the fifth site of the Mid-America Mural Project, we'll be in Texas (town to be determined soon, here are RFPs for Texas communities and apprentices )
Songdo, South Korea April 21 - 30
Invited by Chadwick International School, Ashley and I be working with teens on a mural for Songdo's beautiful new Central Park. More about our project in Songdo here.
Give Take Give May
The culmination of this Rocket Grant funded project will be a book release and exhibition at the Lawrence Percolator. More about Give Take Give here.
Nebraska August - October
We are planning to be in Nebraska (town to be determined, RFP for communities and apprentices here) for the sixth installment of the Mid-America Mural Project.
Beginning in January, Ashley Laird and I will be working with residents of the Whittier neighborhood on a large community mural for Meldrum Park. The project is being supported by an NEA Our Town grant awarded to the Sioux Falls Arts Council. More about the Sioux Falls project here.
Southern Graphic Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin March 20 - 23
I'll be speaking and showing work related to the Occupy Movement and an ongoing effort to counter Kansas' politicians attempts to turn the clock back on women's rights, immigration, and support for the arts. More about SGC here.
Texas April - June
For the fifth site of the Mid-America Mural Project, we'll be in Texas (town to be determined soon, here are RFPs for Texas communities and apprentices )
Songdo, South Korea April 21 - 30
Invited by Chadwick International School, Ashley and I be working with teens on a mural for Songdo's beautiful new Central Park. More about our project in Songdo here.
Give Take Give May
The culmination of this Rocket Grant funded project will be a book release and exhibition at the Lawrence Percolator. More about Give Take Give here.
Nebraska August - October
We are planning to be in Nebraska (town to be determined, RFP for communities and apprentices here) for the sixth installment of the Mid-America Mural Project.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
New essay on Give Take Give blog
I just published a new essay, "Nourishing the Body, Mind, and Sense of Wonder: Economies of good will in Lawrence," for my Give Take Give project. Check it out here.
http://givetakegive.blogspot.com/2013/01/nourishing-our-stomachs-minds-and-sense.html
http://givetakegive.blogspot.com/2013/01/nourishing-our-stomachs-minds-and-sense.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
