“Arts as Antidote for Academic Ills” @nytimes - George Lindemann

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

The artist Chuck Close giving a private tour of his show to students from Bridgeport, Conn.

By
Published: December 18, 2012

Stationed in front of one of his large self-portraits, the artist Chuck Close raised his customized wheelchair to balance on two wheels, seeming to defy the laws of gravity.

The chair’s unlikely gymnastics underlined the points that Mr. Close was making to his audience, 40 seventh and eighth graders from Bridgeport, Conn.: Break the rules and use limitations to your advantage.

The message had particular resonance for these students, and a few educators and parents, who had come by bus on Monday from Roosevelt School to the Pace Gallery in Chelsea for a private tour of Mr. Close’s show. Roosevelt, located in a community with high unemployment and crushing poverty, recently had one of the worst records of any school in the state, with 80 percent of its seventh graders testing below grade level in reading and math.

Saved from closure by a committed band of parents, the school was one of eight around the country chosen last year to participate in Turnaround Arts, a new federally sponsored public-and-private experiment that puts the arts at the center of the curriculum. Arranging for extra funds for supplies and instruments, teacher training, partnerships with cultural organizations and high-profile mentors like Mr. Close, Turnaround is trying to use the arts to raise academic performance across the board. “Art saved my life,” Mr. Close told the children. And he believes it can save the lives of others, too.

So now he was giving a pizza party and answering a question about why he started to paint.

“I wanted people to notice me, not that I couldn’t remember their faces or add or subtract,” he said, referring to the learning and neurological disabilities that set him apart from his classmates when he was growing up in Monroe, Wash.

A terrible writer and test-taker, Mr. Close used art to make it through school. Instead of handing in a paper, he told the children, “I made a 20-foot-long mural of the Lewis and Clark trail.”

Starting in Pace’s large central gallery, where his giant portraits of other artists like Philip Glass, Paul Simon and Laurie Anderson looked on, Mr. Close told the group that “everything about my work is driven by my learning disabilities.”

Born with prosopagnosia, a condition that prevents him from recognizing faces, Mr. Close explained that the only way he can remember a face is by breaking it down into small “bite-sized” pieces, like the tiny squares or circles of color that make up his paintings and prints.

“I figured out what I had left and I tried to make it work for me,” he said. “Limitations are important.”

With Mr. Close were a few other members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, which helped develop the Turnaround program. One of them, Damian Woetzel, a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet who is a mentor to two other Turnaround schools, picked up on his theme.

“In dance we limit ourselves, as well,” he said. “There are five positions and everything comes from that,” he added, quickly demonstrating the basic ballet poses.

Filling out the cultural spectrum were the Broadway producer Margo Lion, a chairwoman of the committee, and the musicians Cristina Pato, Shane Shanahan and Kojiro Umezaki, all members of the Silk Road Ensemble, an international collaboration founded by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who is also a committee member and a mentor. One by one, they entered from different doors, startling the students with an impromptu concert featuring a tambourine, a gaita (a Spanish bagpipe) and a Chinese flute.

Clapping and stamping in time to the music, Mr. Woetzel soon turned the gallery’s open space into a dance floor. A couple of students whipped out phones to record the proceedings, while others raced across the room to avoid getting pulled in as participants. One reluctant dancer, captured by Rachel Goslins, a filmmaker and the executive director of the president’s committee, rolled his eyes and mouthed “Oh my God” as she circled him around the floor. Other students joined hands and began dancing as Ms. Lion and the school principal, Tania Kelley, her head flung back, swung each other around.

Mr. Close swerved through the crowd in his wheelchair.

“I never danced before,” Carolyn Smith, 13, said excitedly when the music stopped. “Usually I sing.” Carolyn was the lead in the school’s production of “The Wiz” last year. A brain tumor had caused her to miss so much school that her literacy teacher initially wanted her to turn down the part and focus on catching up, Ms. Goslins said. But being in the play — and reading and memorizing the script — helped her reading skills so much, Ms. Goslins said, that the literacy coach later told her, “I’m a believer.”

The afternoon offered a series of firsts for many of the students. Most had never seen such instruments, heard of Mr. Simon or Mr. Glass, or even visited Manhattan.

“It’s pretty cool to be in New York,” said David Morales, 14, who later asked Mr. Close about his technique, explaining, “I like how he makes it, how it comes all together.”

David, like the other Roosevelt students, had studied Mr. Close’s work in class and met him when he visited the school last month. So Mr. Close patiently answered questions.

“Is it easy to make these pictures?” (Well, it can take a while, Mr. Close replied.)

“How do you know what colors to use?” (Trial and error.)

“Can you draw? (Yes.)

“There is no artist who enjoys what he does every day more than I do,” Mr. Close told the group, setting off applause from the students. Repeating advice he often gives to young artists, he said: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up for work.”

When the bus arrived for the return trip, Ms. Pato and Mr. Shanahan again took up their instruments, this time to lead a parade of clapping students and teachers out the door.

Carolyn Smith, a pink rose in her hair, paused at the doorway and turned to Mr. Close. “I had a blast,” she called out. “Bye, Chuck. See you later.”

"When a Ticket-Taker and Turnstile Aren't Enough; Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center" By Julie V. Iovine - WSJ.com

[botanic]Albert Vecerka / Esto

Aerial view of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's new Visitor Center, designed by Weiss/Manfredi architects.

The firm's virtuosity and elastic approach to design are on full display at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center, which opens this Wednesday. A sinuously shaped structure, half-bermed into a hillside with a green roof of crew-cut grasses, the center combines architecture and landscape (plus some heavy-duty engineering) with the mobile harmony of a ballet.

Which is also to say that it doesn't photograph easily or lend itself to a single impression or "take." Seen from its Washington Avenue side, the Visitor Center presents a modestly elegant concrete-and-glass façade with a twice-pitching copper roof to blend in with other Brooklyn Botanic Garden buildings along the street, such as the rather grand McKim Mead & White Administration Building. On the parking-lot side, the Visitor Center drops any notion of formality with the curvaceous glass walls of two pavilions adjacent but not touching—like two swirling eddies—luring the visitor along a glass-covered path wending inexorably into the gardens.

The 480-foot-long larger pavilion contains orientation exhibits, offices, a catering kitchen and a leaf-shaped event space. Aerial views clarify its tadpole-like shape and the way it undulates along and merges with the hillside, while the smaller, more rectangular-shaped pavilion containing the gift shop faces the street.

The experience of strolling through the entire center is seductively baffling, and never more so than when climbing an exterior stair that runs up the larger pavilion to an overlook on the garden side. It's a climactic moment because at the entrance plaza the building seems to be a one-story structure, but from the top of the stairs you find yourself on an unexpected terrace passing under the green roof and meandering toward terraced gardens on the hilltop itself with far-flung views of the entire 52-acre garden.

When did visitor centers become such orchestrated events? Time was when a ticket-taker, turnstile and stack of brochures with maps—pretty much what greeted visitors at this spot in years past—were sufficient to the task of welcoming the uninitiated. Today's increasingly ubiquitous visitor centers serve a much more ambitious purpose: to demonstrate with instant legibility the DNA of the host institution. Architecture, graphics, program announcements, the gifts in the gift shop and even the tiles in the bathroom—here colored with pixelated plant images—must all telegraph the same core message.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, entering its second century, is hardly a novice at branding, but at the new Visitor Center it is exercised with comprehensive aplomb. On the entry plaza, even before one buys a ticket, the sustainable landscape lessons begin with two planting beds—sprouting black gum trees, wild hyacinth and water-loving grasses—that are sunk into the pavement and operate as storm-water basins channeling overflow to the nearby Japanese garden pond rather than into New York's sewer system. Similarly, the green roof (designed, as were the rain gardens and other landscape elements, by HM White) is no small engineering feat. With a pitch of up to 27 degrees, it requires complicated networks of special soils held in place with cleats and geo-nets involving drip irrigation systems woven into capillary fabrics, and other impressive techniques with specialized vocabularies known only to au courant gardeners. It almost goes without saying that such a state-of-the-landscape building is heated and cooled geothermally.

The $28 million Visitor Center is one of three entrances to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where some 725,000 people visit a year. It makes no grand architectural statement, preferring to realize in every possible detail the message and the mission of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden—even the paneling inside was harvested from a Ginko on the site. And that calls for a collaborative partnership of the highest order.

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

via online.wsj.com

Swiss Hit...#ABMB featured in @redbulletin @abmb #art

The city of vice is now the city of culture, thanks to Art Basel Miami Beach. In 10 years, the slick art fair has transformed Miami and spawned a lasting creative legacy.

The once-neglected Wynwood area is now bursting with galleries and colorful warehouse walls painted by...

http://www.redbullusa.com/cs/Satellite/en_US/Article/Art-Basel--Swiss-Hit-021...

 

 

U.S. Dept of @Interior Approves #Christo ‘Over the River’ #Art Project in #Colorado. #Eco impact?

Fascinating and challenging art project with serious environmental challenges.

via nytimes.com

The artist plans to install fabric over the Arkansas River.

By 
Published: November 7, 2011

DENVER — Federal regulators on Monday approved a $50 million installation of anchored fabric over the Arkansas River in southern Colorado by the artist Christo, whose larger-than-life vision has divided environmentalists, residents and politicians for years over questions of aesthetics, nature and economic impact.

Christo

The artist's drawing of the project, which will include eight suspended panel segments totaling 5.9 miles along a 42-mile stretch of the Arkansas River.

The project, “Over the River,” will include eight suspended panel segments totaling 5.9 miles along a 42-mile stretch of the river, about three hours southwest of Denver. Construction could begin next year, pending final local approvals, with the goal being a two-week display of the work as early as August 2014.

“Drawing visitors to Colorado to see this work will support jobs in the tourism industry and bring attention to the tremendous outdoor recreation opportunities,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said. “We believe that steps have been taken to mitigate the environmental effects of this one-of-a-kind project.”

Christo, 76, said in an interview that the project had already made history for its interconnection of art and public participation, with a federal environmental impactstatement that drew thousands of comments.

Christo’s projects — from the wrapping of the ReichstagParliament building in Berlin in 1995 to “The Gates,” a meandering path of orange awnings through Central Park in New York in 2005 — have often generated heated debate in advance of their creation.

“We are elated,” Christo said. “Every artist in the world likes his or her work to make people think. Imagine how many people were thinking, how many professionals were thinking and writing in preparing that environmental impact statement.”

Permits are still needed from Fremont and Chaffee Counties, the Colorado Department of Transportation and the State Patrol. But Christo emphasized that those agencies had been working with the federal government all through the environmental impact study and were involved in shaping the mitigation measures included in Monday’s decision.

Federal officials said that “Over the River” could generate $121 million in economic output and draw 400,000 visitors, both during the construction — which could become its own tourist event — and the display itself.

Points of contention and controversy ranged from road safety in the narrow canyon highway through the installation zone, which extends from the towns of Salida to Cañon City, to potential impacts on wildlife, especially on the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep that habituate the Arkansas River canyon and are Colorado’s state mammal.

In May, the Colorado Wildlife Commission, an advisory panel to the state’s Division of Parks and Wildlife, urged federal officials to reject Christo’s proposal, specifically citing its concerns about the sheep, and whether the chaos and traffic of construction could keep them from crucial water sources. A local opposition group complained in August that federal regulators were being unduly swayed by Christo, and that phrases like “artistic vision” in the impact study, rather than neutral terms like “proposed project,” suggested a predisposition to let him have his way.

The decision announced Monday spelled out measures to protect the sheep, including restricting activity in lambing season and a Bighorn Sheep Adaptive Management Fund, paid for by Christo, who is covering the full cost of the project via the sale of his work.

 

@WhiteHouse says no evidence of #extraterrestrials #aliens

WASHINGTON -- Sorry, E.T. lovers - the White House says it has no evidence that extraterrestrials exist.

The White House made the unusual declaration in response to a feature on its website that allows people to submit petitions that administration officials must respond to if enough people sign on.

In this case, more than 5,000 people signed a petition demanding that the White House disclose the government's knowledge of extraterrestrial beings, and more than 12,000 signed another petition seeking formal acknowledgement of an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.

In response, Phil Larson of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy wrote that the U.S. government has no evidence that life exists outside Earth, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted any member of the human race.

"In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public's eye," Larson wrote.

But he didn't close the door entirely on a close encounter of an alien kind, noting that many scientists and mathematicians believe that, statistically speaking, odds are high that there is life somewhere among the "trillions and trillions of stars in the universe" - although odds of making contact with non-humans are remote.

It's not the first petition to force the White House to engage on a somewhat off-beat topic since the "We the People" webpage was unveiled in September. The White House also has been forced to explain why it can't comment in response to a petition demanding "Try Casey Anthony in Federal Court for Lying to the FBI Investigators" (because it's a law enforcement matter).

And various petitions demanding legalization of marijuana have gathered more than 100,000 names, to which the White House argues that marijuana is associated with addiction, respiratory disease and cognitive impairment, and legalizing it would not be the answer.

The White House also has addressed topics including gay marriage and student loan debt.

When the website debuted, the White House promised to respond to any petition that garnered 5,000 or more signatures within 30 days, but it's now raised that threshold to 25,000.

 

via miamiherald.com

Important press release in case you missed it...