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Public Art Plan: Maryland Parkway

3/5/2015

And here we go. The Maryland Parkway Public Art Urban Design begins by Clark County seeking an urban environment design team to plan, think, and conceptualize how public art can be a "physical and experimental" focus on the baked thoroughfare between Charleston Boulevard to Russell Road. Besides looking for a way to "unify and beautify" Maryland Parkway, the goal is giving the public a way to have "high quality interaction with public art” while considering local history and social meaning. It leaves little wiggle room for a team applying public art aesthetic of an afterthought by fulfilling the bid with generic decoration. DEADLINE: Application Deadline for submissions is 5 p.m. on Friday, May 1, 2015. More details in the RFP.

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Sponsors: : A partnership between Clark County Parks & Recreation, University of Nevada Las Vegas, City of Las Vegas, Urban Land Institute Nevada, and the National Endowment for the Arts; with the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, Maryland Parkway Coalition, Metro Arts Council, Public Education Foundation, and Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Link to Ink: March is here and so am I edition

3/4/2015

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From December 2014: Art Saves in the 18b Arts District. Artist unknown.

It’s been the final days for this blog operating under the Arts Writers Grant Program's resources to explore regional public art, street art and murals. Those who know the timeline of the grant have asked if it will go on. In short, yes. I may not be in the field as much, or talking about what's inside galleries. but there is a backlog of posts and images to share, and things that are shaping up will be important to follow. Thanks for reading and following along on Twitter and Instagram. Now, back to some posting.

First Friday is this week, March 6. Preview Thursday, as you would expect, is tonight. First Friday’s theme is the element of chance. The R-J's F. Andrew Taylor has more.

Las Vegas Weekly on "Composition" at Wasteland Gallery with artist Jska Priebe.

Los Angeles Times art critic David Pagel describes Thomas Burke's (UNLV alumni, BFA '02) works as treats Op (Art) as a springboard into something bigger and bolder and more muscular than it was the first time around. A great deal of oomph, and even more delicacy, are palpable in 'Dutch Jailbreak' his rollicking exhibition of eight new paintings at Western Project" in Los Angeles. I LAT

Details on exhibitions, screenings, and general mayhem now in the current newsletter from UNLV Fine Arts.

First-ever London exhibition by Brazilian duo, Bicicleta Sem Freio who "have crossed over from graphic design and illustration to muralism and back again." They are Life Is Beautiful veterans and it can be said Las Vegas was an early testing ground for them. I ArtSlantLondon

In my search engine was the phrase "artists that draw neon facades." Whomever it was, go to JerryMisko.com.

ELSEWHERE

The current market for contemporary art has its own distinctive insanity, says Hyperallergic.

Also at Hyperallergic, "The Border Again" features L.A. and T.J with work that has a "nuanced perspective on the border."

Marfa Texas is an “unusual town in an unusual place even by Texas standards. Part cowboy town, part artist colony, and increasingly all hipster haven.” Columbia Journalism Review.

When Raul Valdez left Vietnam, he studied the messages in Mexican Muralism. Now 66, he looks back at his regional legacy I Texas Observer

MTV taps Dabs Myla to design movie award set I KVOA

Bansky hoax in Phoenix I AZ Central

Barstow approves budget for a mural to add to their Main Street portfolio. There was resistance. I DesertDispatch

Clinton portrait has shadow of a blue dress I ArtNet

Jerry Saltz is a digital vandal I NYT

I refuse to call tags on Joshua Tree rocks art. Call it jerkism I HuffPo

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Small Scale Public Art With Big Ideas

2/28/2015

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Rare plants and animals are the theme in Tatiana Hantig's proposal for ZAP I Courtesy of the artist.

Local artists gathered at Cambridge Recreation Center Friday to share their Zap7 utility boxes proposals with Clark County Commissioners Mary Beth Scow and Chris Giunchigliani, Nevada Energy, and each other. Their designs ranged from abstraction to illustration, works in graphic forms to experiments with text-type imagery, showing the immediate impact of funding and opportunity.

The artists presented big ideas on how art can reside in public space. Each took their turn to talk about exploring environment and traffic patterns, scaling image to structure, or adapting design for foot traffic or anyone waiting for public transportation. Some renderings showed a direct response to strip mall or parking lot architecture within the sightline of their appointed metal square sculpture. A little footwork brought out deep thinking.

It may have shown how Nevada Department of Transportation’s (NDOT) interpretation of public art missed the onramp to great works. Granted, the scale is bigger and there’s a complicated infrastructure to negotiate, but the the 3 percent set aside for landscaping or enhancement (sometimes cited as high as 5 percent) would have been a well-budgeted public art process, not expensive decoration.

And NDOT isn't afraid to accept the works on the Interstates as public art. In a 2012 RGJ article “Public art’s link to Northern Nevada’s economy,” new works along the I-80 and U.S. 395 were covered. It said:

Among the pieces of public art folks might recognize are the cantilevered coffin that hides a gas manifold near the downtown movie theater, perforated gates at West Street Market and 15 sculptures near Interstate 580 and Fairview Drive in Carson City that capture frontiersman John C. Fremont’s exchanges with indigenous people living here.

(Paolo ) Cividino explained how the I580 sculptures change based on the viewer’s elevation.

“On the Fifth Street bridge, they’re invisible,” he said. “As the elevation changes your relationship to the sculptures, they begin to become somewhat more solid, like a ghost effect. And as you pass them, they become solid and there’s something magical and then they’re gone.”

He thinks public art increases the level of sophistication of a community.

Someone was thinking on behalf of Nevada of the north. In Southern Nevada, there's a generic reading in the repetitive imagery with the replication of indigenous rock art, called “Sculptural Applique,” by landscape architects. Even the supplementary flat iron animals are not any more ambitious than garden gnomes, and the vendor declared would be the most photographed art in Las Vegas next to the welcome sign (Which is improbable since most only see them traveling at 60 miles per hour and the adjacent roads forbid parking or stopping). The same for Springs Preserve’s giant roadrunner, gray fox and Gila monster that work as signs, not public art. It’s also an undocumented invasion unless captured by someone riding shotgun with a camera.

That doesn't mean NDOT preparation and research wasn't robust, as seen in their paper trail that shows how they partnered with the Landscape Architecture and Planning Program at UNLV during the master planning to gather expertise and research on the "I-15 Corridor Plan." NDOTs use of landscape architecture, as internal thinking or farmed out to bidding firms, limited real public art foresight. The report read:

NDOT specified that the composition of the consultant team was to be truly multidisciplinary, with landscape architects, civil engineers, planners, designers, graphics professionals, a professional facilitator, and a web designer.

No word of an artist.

Having one or two could be helpful when making art. With minimal instruction and short window the artists selected by ZAP found visual interaction between neighborhood, and history, and experience. The outcome will be intimate storytelling.

It almost happened, by accident, at East Craig Road near Nellis Air Force Base. The landscaping forms a graphic of jets in flight. From a car it is read as an abstraction, fulfilling how roadside décor works as a traffic calmer. From above it is site-specific, and in its way, an accessible response to land art in the deserts of Nevada.

E. Craig Road at I-15 I Google Maps

That thought could have been applied other interchanges with vast parcels. Near McCarran Airport, LAS in letters with flight paths leading in could readable by plane, or be an actual reference to Blue Diamond Hill Gypsum Mine. An overpass that bears the name of an imploded casino could have been had been landscape shaped in the lost silhouettes of structures, so they appear as ghosts in the road.

Viewership would not just by car or plane. Anyone planning a trip with Google Maps would see the graphic symbols as alternative way-finders.

After a decade of ZAP there are enough boxes that demonstrate how artists approach a simple box as public art. NDOT and landscape firms may want to take a tour of the new work that will be completed by early April. They may find someone to help design something, or hired to be on a panel, and help create more than the desert enigma made of rusted iron and concrete reliefs.

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RFP: Mural in Cultural Corridor

2/27/2015

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GoogleMaps

There’s a search for an artist to design a mural, then lead volunteer painters to complete it. The sponsors, a partnership with the Las Vegas Natural History Museum, the Neon Museum, and Zappos, hope it will convert the former Ukulele Lounge on Las Vegas Blvd into a visual marker for the Cultural Corridor. There is a small honorarium and supplies will be provided. The deadline is 5 p.m, Monday, March 16. Details, dimensions and requirements are also in the RFP I Cultural Corridor Mural Project

ADD MARCH 4: A Facebook post with this call-to-action for artists is saying the deadline was extended. As of this afternoon the March 16 deadline still stands.

ADDED MARCH 17: Deadline has been extended to March 20.

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Links to Ink: Outside Las Vegas

2/27/2015

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BANKSY

There's new high profile street art from Banksy, who says on his website that Gaza is often described as 'the world's largest open air prison' because no-one is allowed to enter or leave. But that seems a bit unfair to prisons — they don't have their electricity and drinking water cut off randomly almost every day." It comes with a two-minute film.
BBC I NPR I NYT I BANKSY

Self-produced videos are also calculated ways to distribute destruction of art. ISIS militants destroy antiquities in Iraq and sends out video.
CNN I NPR I Hyperallergic

The city of Sacramento and its NBA team want to commission a sculpture by Jeff Koons for new downtown arena. At $8 million it will be the most expensive public art piece in that city’s history.
ArtForum I FOX40

North Seattle mural honoring Native Americans took 12 years to create and one night to deface.
King5

In 1938, Talladega College commissioned artist Hale Woodruff to create murals telling the story of the Amistad. A traveling exhibition organized by the High Museum in Atlanta showcases the Talladega murals, now on view at the Smithsonian.
PBS

How toons are invading contemporary art in two ways.
ArtReview

Artistic murals and “street art” are subject of “The Unexpected Project: Festival of Murals” set for September in Fort Smith. Time Record. (The news source for Fort Smith, Western Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma).

REVIEW: "20 Years Under the Influence" and "SLANG Aesthetics!" a new solo show by Robert Williams.
Los Angeles Times I LA Weekly

REVIEW: "Mr. Rand didn’t invent branding, but he did it as well as anyone ever has or is likely to, a point driven home in an entertaining and enlightening way in “Everything Is Design: The Work of Paul Rand” at the Museum of the City of New York."
NYT

REVIEW: “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” at MoMA.
NYT

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Public Art Plan: Maryland Parkway

Link to Ink: March is here and so am I edition

Small Scale Public Art With Big Ideas

RFP: Mural in Cultural Corridor

Links to Ink: Outside Las Vegas

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