Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is an organization that engages the homeless population of Los Angeles through performance strategies. LAPD’s current touring project, Agents and Assets, 2001-, recreates a House of Representatives hearing on the importation of drugs into the United States in the 1980s by Nicaraguan contra rebels with the CIA's complicity.

John Malpede founded LAPD in 1985. Malpede is an eminent performer, director, and activist who often uses governmental, legal, and media sources as found texts. In 2002-05 he performed as Antonin Artaud in Peter Sellars’ production of Artaud’s For an End to the Judgment of God, in Vienna, Rome, London, Brussels, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 2004, he directed RFK in EKY, a site-specific regional recreation of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 inquiry into poverty in Appalachia. Malpede has received the Bessie Creation Award from Dance Theater Workshop, New York; San Francisco Art Institute's Adeline Kent Award; and a Theater LA Ovation Award, as well as numerous government and foundation grants. He has taught at UCLA, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, the Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance, and the California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco.

220 Glimpses of Utopia:

http://www.lapovertydept.org/utopia-dystopia/

In a series of workshops LAPD asked 220+ people from in- and outside Skid Row what Utopia looks like to them. Each group translated these visions into slow motion movement and together they created a line of movement on the sidewalks that extended the 10 blocks from the heart of Skid Row to City Hall. Every person in the chain contributed something of their own vision and movement; and because the chain of caring, profound, loving movement extended throughout the community, it made clear that any true Utopian vision is one that includes and cares for everyone. "220 Glimpses" is a means of articulating the humanity of several hundred people, and injecting it abruptly into the city through the medium of movement. At 4 pm, 15 minutes of beautiful movement quite surprisingly filled the air, expanding everyone's reality, taking the edge off the city at rush hour.

Further Resources:

Writings from 220 Glimpses participants:

http://radiofreeradio.net/220index.html  

Longer Article about 220 Glimpses of Utopia:

http://radiofreeradio.net/laurafullerpage.htm

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Liz Collins is an artist and designer, recognized internationally for her use of machine knitting to create ground-breaking clothing, textiles, and 3-D installations. www.lizcollins.com

After five years as an independent designer of seasonal ready-to-wear collections in New York City, Collins returned to her alma mater, Rhode Island School of Design, as an Assistant Professor in the Textile Department. In addition to teaching, Collins currently designs knitwear under her own label, which she sells at trunk sales and select boutiques in New York and Tokyo. She also collaborates with other designers, producing signature knit pieces and collections for them.

Jane D. Marsching is a digital media artist based in Boston, MA. She is currently Assistant Professor at Massachusetts College of Art in Studio Foundation. She received her MFA in photography from The School of Visual Arts, New York City, in 1995. Recent exhibitions include: the ICA Boston; MassMoCA; North Carolina Museum of Art; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Photographic Resource Center, Boston, MA; and Sonoma Museum of Art, CA. She has received grants from Creative Capital, LEF Foundation, Artadia, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Artists Resource Trust. With Mark Alice Durant in 2005, she curated The Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal, at The Center for Art and Visual Culture, Baltimore, MD; a catalog of the exhibition was published in June 2006 with essays by Marsching, Durant, Marina Warner and Lynne Tillman. She is represented by Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston, MA.

Arctic Listening Post

Arctic Listening Post explores our past, present and future human impact on the Arctic environment through interdisciplinary and collaborative practices, including video installations, virtual landscapes, dynamic websites, and data visualizations.

Further Resources:

Arctic Listening Post Website

Imagination and Wonder in the Face of Climate Change Jane D. Marsching's artist statement

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Jae Rhim Lee is currently a lecturer in the Visual Arts Program at MIT and a consultant for the City of New Orleans Office of Recovery Management. Her work draws on interests in psychology, environmental sustainability, eastern religion, and disaster management. Previous work includes customized beds, sleeping tools, and bodily waste recycling units which address the need for self and ecological sustainability. She is currently working with mycologists to develop a new hybrid mushroom which will remediate bodily toxins, facilitate decomposition, and support new plant growth.

The MIT FEMA Trailer Project: Timeline and Armadillo.

The timeline was researched and produced by: Jason Rockwood, Priyanka Shah, Maryann Chu, and Jae Rhim Lee.

The Armadillo is a transformed FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) Trailer. Once intended to house families in the Gulf Coast displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the MIT FEMA Trailer Composting Station and Vertical Garden was designed and built by students in the course Advanced Projects in the Visual Arts: The MIT FEMA Trailer Project--Gina Badger, Colin Kerr, Samuel Kronick, Christopher Taylor, Kari Williams, and Lucille Ynosencio. The course was taught by teaching assistant Caitlin Berrigan and instructor Jae Rhim Lee, Visiting Lecturer in the MIT Visual Arts Program.

The goal of the FEMA Trailer Challenge is to formulate feasible,  
socially conscious, and innovative alternative uses for the 94,000+  
surplus FEMA Trailers, new ideas for formaldehyde remediation, and  
alternative housing solutions for FEMA Trailers.

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Leon Johnson is a convergent media artist and educator, born and raised in Cape Town South Africa. He is the proprietor of The Long Bell Press, founding member of Creative Material Group, and director-in-residence at The Berwick Institute in Boston. He is the recipient of a Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant and a Yaddo Residency Fellowship. He will lead a workshop in Berlin this summer for the Transart Institute, where he is faculty in Interdisciplinary Studio + Theory.

BLUE HAMMER: A Trans-Historical-Post-Colonial-Dinner-Theatre-Burlesque

Conceived + Produced by Leon Johnson + Creative Material Group

ReMEMEBERING WILDE

In 1912 a memorial, sculpted by Jacob Epstein, was erected on the site of Wilde's grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Soon after, a visitor to the tomb outraged by what he considered to be the continuance of Wilde's perversity, took a hammer to the sculpture and obliterated the penis on the underside of the hovering sphinx. In the summer of 2000 we traveled to perform a ceremony entitled, reMEMBERING WILDE. I commissioned Rebecca Scheer to produce a sterling silver prosthetic, which was attached to Wilde's shattered crotch. Text fragments are excerpted from Wilde's letter to Lord Alfred Douglas written from Reading Prison and dated January-March, 1897. The letter has come to be known as De Profundis. Creative Material Group toured the United Kingdom in the summer of 2002 with a 40 minute video-based production of this performance that includes an electronic score by Jeffrey Stolet and a libretto by John Schmor, performed live by Matthew Woodburn.

Further Resources:

Leon Johnson: Public Engagement Associate Page

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Josh MacPhee is an artist, curator and activist living in Brooklyn, New York. MacPhee spent nine years as an artist and activist in Chicago, Illinois where he established a distribution system called Justseeds in order get his political art projects out to the public. In 2007, Justseeds was collectivized, and now is owned and run by a cooperative of 25 artists living in 17 different cities. Josh MacPhee is the author of Stencil Pirates: A Global Study of the Street Stencil (Soft Skull Press, 2004), which is dedicated to stencil street art; Realizing the Impossible:Art Against Authority (co-edited with Erik Reuland, AK Press, 2007), and most recently Reproduce and Revolt (co-edited with Favianna Rodriguez, Soft Skull PResss, 2008). MacPhee is also the curator of the politically charged printmaking exhibition, Paper Politics, which has been touring North America since 2004 and includes an international group of over 200 printmakers. 

Celebrate People’s History Project

The Celebrate People’s History poster series is an on-going project producing posters that focus around important moments in “people’s history.” These are events, groups, and individuals that we should celebrate because of their importance in the struggle for social justice and freedom, but are instead buried or erased by dominant history. Posters celebrate important acts of resistance, those who fought tirelessly for justice and truth, and the days on which we can claim victories for the forces of freedom. These posters are posted publicly (i.e. wheatpasted on the street, put up in peoples’ home and storefront windows, and used in classrooms) in an attempt to help generate a discussion about our radical past, a discussion that is vital in preparing us to create a better future. The project has also built a loose network of artists interested in creating radical public art as well as showcased the work of lesser known artists that want to create culture that is functional, carries a social message, and doesn’t get buried at the bottom of the heap of the mainstream art world. CPH is distributed through Justseeds/Visual Resistance Artists' Cooperative.

Further Resources:

Just Seeds Collective Website

http://www.justseeds.org/artists/celebrate_peoples_history/

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Pam Hall is an interdisciplinary artist working across, and sometimes in between, the boundaries of medium and discipline.  She makes visual art,  constructs installations, works with language, and is engaged in film,  video, and most recently, performance. She works alone (inside and outside of her studios), and collaborates with others (sometimes individuals, sometimes communities). Based in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada, she travels extensively to pursue the creation and presentation of her work, and to teach graduate students in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College in Vermont. Her work has been shown throughout Canada and internationally, and her most recent community-engaged installation- A Wish and a Prayer, was shown at the Brown-RISD Hillel Gallery and at New Urban Arts in Providence last year. For details and images of her work visit www.pamhall.ca

Just Fish: Making Knowledge about Fishing Practice

Between 1997and 2000, Hall was the only artist member on a national
interdisciplinary team examining ethical issues in the Canadian marine
fisheries crisis. Building on more than a decade of working in and about the small boat inshore fishery of Newfoundland, she worked with scholars from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to examine an ethical approach to the public policy issues of sustainable development in the fishery.

Traveling to undertake research in the British Columbia fisheries on Haida Q'wai (the Queen Charlotte Islands) she produced work which made visible the voices of practicing fishers on both coasts of Canada in the dialogue about the future of the fisheries. JUST FISH: Ethics and Canadian Marine Fisheries  was published in 2000, by ISER, (The Institute of Social and Economic Research at Memorial University) and represents the results of this three  year interdisciplinary research project which was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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The National Bitter Melon Council (NBMC) is an entity run by an artist collective (Hiroko Kikuchi, Jeremy Liu, Andi Sutton, and Misa Saburi) that is devoted to the cultivation of a vibrant, diverse community through the promotion and distribution of Bitter Melon. Supporting the use of Bitter Melon for its myriad health benefits and culinary possibilities, the NBMC celebrates this underappreciated vegetable through the production of creative and stimulating food-focused projects that highlight the foreignness of Bitter Melon, instigating situations that, through bitterness, create an alternative basis for community. Bitter Melon is a truly unique and bitter ingredient that is not yet well known in the United States. Advocating the appreciation of this vegetable across cultures and cuisines, the NBMC believes that these Bitter Melon focused- events can bring whole communities together through a single shared experience -- that of bitterness. (www.bittermelon.org)


Meyers Bitter Survey
The Meyers-Bitter Survey is a performance documentation project that takes the form of a 48-question survey using yes/no questions that apply examples and discoveries from the NBMC’s experiences, social-research, and events to involve people in the participatory exploration of the emotion of bitterness and the concept of community, identity, and belonging. For the Meyers-Bitter Survey, the NBMC created their own questions categorized by four different emotional states: bitterness, pride, humility, and peace. These emotions were identified based on the NBMC’s definition of bitterness (Loss with Attachment) as the grounding principle. From there, they identified the 3 other emotional terms based on the concepts of Loss/Gain and Attachment/No Attachment to create a bitterness emograph. Like the Myers-Briggs personality test, after completing the survey participants will receive their own unique Bitterness Acronym.

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Sheryl Mendez is the photography editor and researcher on the book, Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, and a founding member of The Crimes of War Project (www.crimesofwar.org). Mendez is also a member of Offline Media, a NGO media organization for independent Iraqi photographers, filmmakers, journalists, authors, and artists. Offline Media supports the production of new works in film, theatre, and literature as well as media coverage on issues related to asylum. Mendez is also a contributing photojournalist to World Picture News. US News & World Report, New York Bureau's Editor of Photography. Prior to this, she worked for Magnum Photos as Editor of Story Development and field research.

Navigating the Space between Home and Exile, is a booklet and website that projects personal stories from those living in Iraq into a global forum through the use of technology and the internet.

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Steve Lambert recently made international news with the The New York Times "Special Edition," a replica of the grey lady announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news.  He is the founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, lead developer of Add-Art (a Firefox addon that replaces online advertising with art) and has collaborated with numerous artists including the Graffiti Research Lab, and the Yes Men.  Steve’s projects and art works have won awards from Rhizome/The New Museum, Turbulence, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, and others. His work has been shown at various galleries, art spaces, and museums both nationally and internationally, and was recently collected by the Library of Congress. Lambert has appeared live on NPR, the BBC, and CNN, and been reported on in multiple outlets including Associated Press, the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper's, The Believer, Good, Dwell, ARTnews, Punk Planet, and Newsweek. He is a Senior Fellow at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York, and teaches at Parsons/The New School and Hunter College. Steve studied sociology and film before receiving a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 and a MFA at UC Davis in 2006.  He dropped out of high school in 1993.

The NY Times Special Edition

aka the Fake New York Times, Spoof New York Times, The New York Times Hoax, Iraq War Ends, Because We Want It, The Massive Power Shifting Excercise, The End of the War of the Worlds, The Good News, etc.  A collaboration with The Yes Men along with 30 writers, 50 advisors, around 1000 volunteer distributors, CODEPINK, May First/People Link, Evil Twin, Improv Everywhere and Not An Alternative.

80,000 newspapers replicas of the New York Times dated 9 months in the future distributed on November 12, 2008 announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,a revitalized transit system was being built, a nationalized health care system implemented, a federal maximum wage law making it's way through the legislature, and 14 more pages of good news.

http://visitsteve.com/work/the-ny-times-special-edition/

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Holly Ewald is a studio and community artist who works in a variety of media, including artist books, collage, monoprints, mail art and installation. She received a BA in Art from University of Oregon and an MFA in Painting from Brooklyn College. Her collaborative work has been published in River Styx 56, the visual word, Resurgence Magazine, The Penland Book of Handmade Books, and Community Performance, An Introduction. Her work received an education award from the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission and a Clearwater Award from The Waterfront Center in Washington DC. She is a founding member of Voices and Visions of Village Life, an organization that initiates and supports creative, community-based humanities/arts projects with adults and children.

Ewald’s main goal, as a community artist, is to enable others to explore, reflect on and visually respond to personal stories and to share these stories with others. The exploration of sites in Pawtuxet Village and South Providence, as spaces with multiple layers of history and human relationships with the natural environment, is a foundation of her art. Her recent work pulls together artists, neighbors, schools and local government to address environmental and health concerns in creative and celebratory ways. For the past two years, she has cultivated relationships with communities that border Masapaug Pond and the site of the former Gorham Silver Factory in South Providence. The second annual Mashapaug Pond Procession is scheduled for June 6, 2009.

Voices and Visions of Village Life

For several years, Ewald has collaborated with folklorist Michael Bell on community projects in Pawtuxet Village, where they both live. Their most recent collaboration, “Languages of the Land: A Dialogue with Salter Grove,” is a visual and sound installation representing the history of a public park, told through the physical landscape and different cultures that have interacted with the landscape. As visitors walk through a lifesized book of suspended images formed with five foot by two foot collaged archival digital prints, they hear the voices of both long-time residents and newcomers sharing their experiences of this waterfront site.

In developing the installation, Ewald photographed the park, researched its history and and interviewed local residents about Salter Grove’s past and their personal experiences in the park. To involve local communities, which has been as aspect of her art for many years, she gave visitors to Salter Grove disposable cameras and collected images of their favorite spots or views, which informed her final imagery. During a weekend cleanup of the park, participants selected a “treasure” from the collected trash. These artifacts add a tactile element to the installation.

The thinness of the collaged paper prints allows the landscape and the silhouettes of timeless figures to be seen from both sides. Thus, the shadows of the past haunt the landscape. The movement of the book pages echoes the fragility, yet constancy, of this treasured spot. The landscape is always there, yet changing, affected by even the slightest movements. Ewald and Bell are now translating the installation into a handheld book, which will include their reflections on the collaborative process.

Further Resources:

Voices and Visions Website

http://www.voicesandvisions.org/installationvisuals.html

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This exhibition is co-sponsored by RISD | Public Engagement and the Nelson Mandela: Honoring His Legacy initiative.