The Future Imperfect of Cities,Landscapes and Dreams

An installation by Leslie Ryan, PhilippBosshart, Deborah Forster & their students from NewSchool of Architecture.

January 30 - March 7

Jan. 30, 10am-2pm-  Utopian North Park, model-making workshop.

February 6, 6-9pm - Opening Reception

February 20, 7-9pm - Panel Discussion- A conversation, " Community Development in the Context of Art" with Gail Goldman, Public Art Planning and Policy Consultant, Leslie Ryan, Landscape Architect and Planner, and Lynn Susholtz, Artist.

Rather than ask how art is part of a community plan, we ask- what is community development in the context of art? What is the city that you would invent?

Urban landscapes are more than scenery – the appearance or view of a place – they are scenario as well: emergent narratives and organized ways of dreaming about both near and distant futures. The current conversation about the future of North Park urges us to look at what continues and what changes over and through time and space. What is already written in this place and what will the future erase? What will be invented and how will we inhabit it? In this urban workshop, we ask about the future imperfect of cities, landscapes and dreams.

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
- Italo Calvino Invisible Cities

It seemed to me then – as it still does now – that other notions, feelings, and desires governed the makers and builders of towns, that the city did not grow, as the economists taught, by quasi-natural laws, but was a willed artifact, a human construct in which many conscious and unconscious factors played their part. It appeared to have some of the interplay of the conscious and unconscious that we find in dreams.
- Joseph Rykwert The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of the City

2009 Orchid Award for Public Art!

ART Produce Gallery has been honored with an Orchid award in the category of Public Art by the San Diego Architectural Foundation.The jury noted that this award "generated much debate over what exactly defines the "public" aspect in public art... "When artist Lynn Susholtz renovated the old North Park Produce building, her plans included a pedestrian art gallery.. The long and narrow space has storefront windows along University Ave,where the art is part of the street, the art viewer is also on display, and the activity of the street becomes part of the experience of the art. Places like this are fundamental to the experience of walking in the city. It creates a public space, a meeting space. It is places like this gallery and the view it shares with the street, that make walking in the city worthwhile... It's a provocation to think about art in the community" Learn more about the award at www.orchidsandonions.org.

Recent

United & Severed
That window of Time...

United and Severed is an interdisciplinary work based on the experiences of 3 women living with traumatic injuries. Research for this artwork began with Diekman & Schaffman's interviews with Kim Anderson, Michele Caputo, & Ivy Kensinger. They tell their personal stories of shock injury where in a single moment their lives were changed forever. Show runs to December 6th, 2009.

Kristine Diekman & Karen Schaffman
(writing-audio-videography-choreography-installation)

Richard Keely & Anna O'Cain
(sculpture-installation)

For more info. about United & Severed: http://www2.csusm.edu/diekman/un_sev/

Voices:Mapping the Hood

Art@theCore/Building Community

Stone Paper Scissors, Eveoke Dance Theatre, TranscenDance Youth Arts Project, North Park Main Street and the Cultural Worker have joined forces to develop a neighborhood initiative called ART @ the Core: Building Community. Art @ the Core uses art as a catalyzing force for positive change. Our goal is to increase access, engagement, and participation in the civic process through cultural development. We seek to identify and utilize community resources to build sustainable, representative, inclusive processes that support and expand constituencies that enhance the cultural and economic vitality of the community. See VIDEO of David Krimmel and his Community Wheat hARvesT. Read/See more of ART@theCore

Meet the Press

A panel discussion about how the arts are covered by the media in San Diego. Watch the Video

SNAPSHOTS: Changing Perspectives in the San Diego Art Scene

Panel Discussion with Philly Joe Swendoza (Art Rocks!) Robert Pincus (SD Union Tribune) Patricia Frischer (SD Visual Art Network) David White (Agitprop Gallery) Katherine Sweetman, moderator (Director, Lui Velazquez) Kevin Freitas, coordinator (Art as Authority.). Watch the video.

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