3 posts tagged “graphic art”
Nicolas Lampert and Jesse Graves came to town to lead a mud stencilling action for the Wisconsin Books to Prisoners campaign to end the Department of Corrections bad habit of denying prisoners from receiving used books from the outside. The ostensible rationale is to prevent contraband from entering prisons. But that makes no sense at all since mailings are examined anyway, and newly purchased books are allowed but present the very same threat. Moreover, the refusals seem to be arbitrary and inconsistent. And we're not even talking about books being sent by individuals; these are books coming from bookstores that sell or donate used books. And nevermind the fact that (as any book aficionado can tell you) good condition used books are hardly any different than newly purchased versions.
Anyway, it was a well-coordinated action. The super-organized Sarah Quinn got the whole thing going.
Then the twenty (give or take) people divided up into five teams, each with an assigned area, moving out from the UW campus.
Before heading out, Jesse Graves, the young artist who first perfected the roofing paper technique, gave us a quick demonstration.
Jesse, Nicolas, and myself formed one team: the smallest crew! We hit the sidewalks in front of the Memorial Union and then went up State Street. The streets were alive, it being a football Saturday–and homecoming, no less!
We made our way up the street, laying down a few stencils here and there, ultimately aiming for the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. When we got there, we saw that one of the other crews beat us to the site; the sidewalk in front of the museum already had a nice, rad image laid out in mud. We went across the street, aiming for the federal courthouse. And there, too, the quicker crew beat us to it. But their image had been deliberately stomped out. Later we got the story. Some petty dictator security guy came out of the courthouse and harassed the activists. Our people didn't back down; it's only a little dirt, they pleaded, and went on with the project. By the time we got there, the earlier work was more than a little smudged. Of course, we put down another.
But what I really wonder is, was that security guard (one of the people from the other crew thought the guy might have been, in fact, a U.S. marshall, but who knows) heavily influenced by the bas relief wall design on the side of the Overture Center, directly across the street from the courthouse? Because there seemed to be, after the guy's footwork job, some aesthetic relationship between the two art works.
And speaking of World War II, check out this video I shot the other day, over at Lewis Koch's East Side work studio.
Lewis Koch shows WW II posters from Dan S Wang on Vimeo.
On Thursday I made it to the opening of the Just Seeds' exhibition in the Union Art Gallery on the UWM campus. The Union Art Gallery is one of the most difficult exhibition spaces I know of. The room footprint is highly irregular, the wall surface is that indestructible gray-tan pebbly Seventies concrete, and the ceilings are about twenty-five feet hight. In other words, it'd be a wonderful space for some really ambitious soft sculpture. But for 2-d work, it is sometimes a challenge to simply keep the space from completely overwhelming the art work. The fifteen Just Seeds members triumphed over the space and produced the most natural-feeling installation I've ever seen in that gallery, the conceit being a gallery representation of a crumbling highway overpass. That is to say, what Milwaukee will be one of these days.
