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Sarah Sze, Designing a Subway Station'''

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Sarah Sze, Designing a Subway Station'''

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Virginia
I chose this film clip because I have spent some time in NYC when my daughter was studying Art History at Columbia University.  We would go to galleries and museums, but what about public art?  This installation was made of tiles and was technically difficult to install. The artist wanted the feeling of diving down through a surface almost like when you dive into water.  The walls have density juxtaposed with emptiness.  In the mezzanine she shows how things move through space using the gesture of a piece of paper. It is as if the paper is floating through air.

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Virginia

These are collections gathered from Chicago's south side.  The artist notices that the content of objects from every day life is changing.  His collections are a way of tracking black space, about forgotten people, and "the void".  He takes an old hardware store, perhaps usurped by a big box store, and studies its contents.  He catagorizes things like glass lantern slides and makes them into artwork. He is preserving black life from the 1990s with his bound editions of Jet magazine made into a large artwork, silently inviting future generations to read these collections of past lives.

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Kammy
https://art21.org/watch/extended-play/nick-cave-thick-skin-short/
Art making is a healing and creative tool and salve salve to express and emotionally process our extraordinarily complex and diverse life experiences. From trauma to ecstasy - art making makes experience, shared, communicated, witnessed, heard, processed, made anew, transformed.... Art making is therapeutic for the maker, the viewer, the community...

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Theaster Gates: This artist believes that collections give us insights as to how people or institutions see the world. He takes everday collections - books, hardware items, records, and  then catalogs these objects in a permanence even as the phenomena of  everyday is constantly changing. He also talks about it being another way to look at black space/forgotten things/a void. I love his last line, "It's the thing and the thing that makes the thing."  Kelly

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Buffy
This artist worked in photography, and materials that are meaningful to him.  I am not sure what shea butter is but I know it is in a lot of the lotions I've seen. It looked like he made sculptures out of it.  How did it not melt?  He also used wax, specifically black wax.  I thought his combinations of materials looked very interesting and almost conflicted.  I think it would be very soothing to work with wax like material, I love to play with it like a fidget.  His perspective on his subject matter is very different from mine and I find it enlightening to see his work. It feels like a gift when someone shares their feelings and connections to meaningful objects and experiences in their life through their art.

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Jen
Watch this one, folks. He's amazing. He is an American sculptor and photographer, and not sure what to call his other art. But as a very young man, he became interested in new artists incorporating old processes into their work. So he was already a talented photographer (you HAVE to see his photos with feet) who followed this path:
He became interested in19th century photographic processing materials, started using them, became interested in materials in general, started working in wax and pouring and manipulating wax, then sought ownership of new materials that other artists hadn't used before. He describes himself as high-strung and sought a material to work with that would feel cleansing. He remembered the shea butter his mom brought from Africa and rubbed on him as a kid ("We were rubbing Africa on ourselves").  He now takes things that feel familiar (plants, books, mirrors) and seeks to help his viewer occupy the objects and look at them through different filters.

He feels that his "blackness" (as he describes it) has had a strong effect on his work, but is clear that it is not the sum of what his work is.

What does his experience and artwork show us about the role of art in the world?  The transformative nature of creating art leads to new investigations, leads to innovation, and ownership. It's like the mind mapping/connection making we have been doing all week. Art is the perfect vehicle for thought.

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https://art21.org/watch/new-york-close-up/daniel-gordon-looks-back/
Aileen
Artist makes objects from paper, creates a still life or portrait, then photographs it. His wife is a sculptor. Role of art - teaches perseverance, things don't always come easy. He talks about asking himself questions, constantly pushing himself to try new things, be inventive, experiment, and failure is okay. These are attributes/attitudes that helps one succeed in anything not just art.

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This artist was invited to do the artwork in a new NYC subway station. Her art is a representation of movement. Her 2 dimensional work is modeled after transportation and movement.

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Artist Sarah Sze tackles her most public and challenging installation to-date as she designs an immersive artwork for the Second Avenue Subway in New York City. "Subway stations are one of the most democratic places that you can find," says Sze, who was one of four artists commissioned by MTA Arts & Design to create work for the new stations along Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Sze's Blueprint for a Landscape (2017) treats each of the three entrances and the connecting mezzanine at the 96th Street Station as an opportunity to examine and amplify how we move through space. Incorporated into the piece are manipulated photographs of sculptural works and the New York City landscape, as well as intimate hand drawings enlarged many times over. Sze credits the Italian Futurists and Russian Constructivists as inspiration for the resulting juxtapositions.

"They were obsessed with this idea of the acceleration of the experience of time, mostly through transit," says the artist. "As a place of transit, I wanted all of the different entranceways of the subway station to mirror how we move through space. It's this kind of speed of movement-these transitions into different kinds of environments that we take for granted and we do repetitively."

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Credits

Producer: Ian Forster. Consulting Producer: Nick Ravich. Interview: Ian Forster. Editor: Morgan Riles. Camera: Tim Ciavara, Adam Golfer & John Marton. Production Assistant: Dana Notine. Artwork Courtesy: Sarah Sze & MTA Arts & Design. Music: Jared C. Balogh & Sunhiilow. Additional Footage Courtesy: Metropolitan Transit Authority. Special Thanks: Alcalagres, Mike Barnett, Lester Burg, Bridget Donlon, Estudio Cerámico & Trent Reeves.

Art21 Exclusive is supported, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; Art21 Contemporary Council, and by individual contributors.

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Licensing

Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.

Sarah Sze builds her installations and intricate sculptures from the minutiae of everyday life, imbuing mundane materials, marks, and processes with surprising significance. By arranging domestic detritus and office supplies into fantastical miniatures, she builds her works, fractal-like, on an architectural scale. Whether adapting to a site or disrupting the urban fabric, Sze's patchwork compositions mirror the improvisational quality of cities, balancing whimsy with ecological themes of interconnectivity and sustainability.

"I thought, here's where I can really explain the idea of how things move in space. Just do something very simple. One gesture... like the gust of wind when a train comes."

Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

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Designing a Subway Station, Sarah Sze - Art21

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Michelle
An artist that is fascinated with class, identity, culture, excess wealth, and his physical disability. He uses textiles as part of the historical content of his art to challenge notions of identity. Some of his work explores the juxtaposition of nature and culture (as in the impact of oil drilling in Nigeria has decimated the flora in that area).

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"My work, all along, has been a critique of Empire," says Yinka Shonibare MBE, adopting the honorific title of Member of the Order of the British Empire, with willful irony, as part of his name. Shown in his London studio, Shonibare is working on his first series of drawings in twelve years, taking as his subject climate change. The artist is also on hand for the installation of a retrospective of sculptures-headless, "post-racial," mannequins dressed in vibrant costumes-at the MCA Sydney.

Acting as the protagonist in two photographic series, Shonibare explores personal themes of leisure, excess, mortality, vanity and physical disability. The final work in the segment is a masked ballet that recounts the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden. "Power creates excess," he asserts, while playfully admitting, "I also, actually, would like to have the trappings of wealth myself, even though I may be criticizing it."

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Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.

Stay inspired this summer with Summer of Shorts, featuring ten new films premiering across ten consecutive Fridays throughout the summer.

Known for using batik in costumed dioramas that explore race and colonialism, Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA) also employs painting, sculpture, photography, and film in work that disrupts and challenges our notions of cultural identity. Taking on the honorific MBE as part of his name in everyday use, Shonibare plays with the ambiguities and contradictions of his attitude toward the Establishment and its legacies of colonialism and class. In multimedia projects that reveal his passion for art history, literature, and philosophy, Shonibare provides a critical tour of Western civilization and its achievements and failures.

"My work, all along, has been a critique of Empire."

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Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA)

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In this interview, conducted in October 2008 at Shonibare Studio in London, Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA) talks about his collaborative process, his vision for an artist's residency and community (now called Guest Projects), and the meaning of failure.

ART21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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Nick Cave:  Thick Skin As a black man, Nick endured racial profiling.  Instead of lashing out, he creates "sound suits" that hide gender, race and class.  

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Nick Cave:  Thick Skin As a black man, Nick endured racial profiling.  Instead of lashing out, he creates "sound suits" that hide gender, race and class.  

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