Lee Tusman
Lee Tusman creates urban, socially-based art projects as a curator, installation artist and photographer. He is Creative Director of Hidden City Philadelphia and a curatorial member of Little Berlin art space.
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(via Technically Philly)
Crowdfunding isn’t just for money: help build the Hidden City Festival from the ground up by donating your time, chairs, water coolers and more. (Cash is welcome, too, of course.)
The month-long celebration of Philadelphia’s history, public spaces and local art is using the notion of crowdfunding to get people involved.
The festival goes from May 23 – June 30. You can get tickets here.
To be clear, it’s not exactly a novel concept to solicit help from event goers, but there’s something about using the imagery of crowdfunding (that bar that shows how much money has been raised) that makes it easy to understand how much help is needed and how you can contribute. It practically invites you to help out.
Flying Kite media interviewed me about the upcoming Hidden City Festival I curated.
If you’re bragging about Philadelphia and its unique charms, be sure to add the upcoming Hidden City Festival to the list. This is something nowhere else has — it’s ours and it’s amazing.
The first iteration took place in 2009, when founder Thaddeus Squire and his team opened up some of the city’s inaccessible architectural gems to the public. They transformed those abandoned and underused spaces into canvases for art installations and performances. Over 10,000 people showed up to explore the sites, which included the Metropolitan Opera House, the Royal Theater, Shiloh Baptist Church and Disston Saw Works.
Round two for the festival has been years in the making. This time they’re doing things a little differently, focusing more on interactivity and community. The five-week-long extravaganza — kicking off May 23 — will feature nine sites, with opportunities to meet the artists, docent tours, walks, concerts and discussions. A variety of passes (daily, weekend, festival-long) are available; Thursdays are free.Dave Kyu also received an Asian Arts Initiative Social Practice Lab grant (along with the project HOT TEA that I’m doing with 3 collaborators). Check out his project Sky Write as he attempts to create a message to write in the sky above Chinatown North/Callowhill/Eraserhood/The Loft District in Philly.
What message would you write in our neighborhood sky? Here’s your chance to have a say, by being a part of the Write Sky project by Dave Kyu.
Applications due by May 31, via email to davejkyu@gmail.com or via mail to:
WRITE SKY PROJECT
C/O Asian Arts Initiative
1219 Vine Street
Phila, PA 19107(via Asian Arts Initiative)
I’m collaborating with 3 other artists (my partner Kathryn Sclavi, Laura Deutch and Katya Gorker) on a mobile tea cart in the Chinatown North/Callowhill neighborhood of Philadelphia. It’ll serve as a site for art actions, conversations, DJ concerts, field recordings, a bookmobile, and more. Check it out.
We’re rolling out HOT TEA today from 3:30-5! Join us and special guests Ginkgo and Melinda Ocelot! near 11th and Wood, we’ll be roving so if you don’t see us, just trek around there nearby and listen for us. Free delicious tea and free sunshine.
From my punkarcade tumblr I manage with Sarah Brin, I recently wrote about Twine (which lets you make text adventures like Choose Your Own Adventure books) and how easy and compelling they are, and the rise of a huge community of new DIY gamemakers.
What the hell is Twine? You may have seen me mention it in past posts. Twine is easy-to-use software that lets you make choose-your-own-adventure style stories quickly, easily, and able to be uploaded anywhere online. There’s a huge community of users, all kinds of experimental games, and you can sit down and write your first game in a few minutes without any previous experience.
Twine’s become recently popular as it’s been championed (and has a how-to guide) by Anna Anthropy, author of Rise of the videogame zinesters that’s a manifesto and mini-manual for DIY videogame creation. Anna loves that all kinds of people, including and especially those brand new to games and many who have not been part of the videogame industry, are now able to create games from their own perspective. There’s a gallery of Twine games here, created in Twine! Great article on Vice’s Motherboard about Twine here. One of the things I find interesting is that this turns videogames back into the early lineage of Zork and other super-early videogames. And reminds us that games are about making choices, and giving your players choices to make. It’s pretty amazing that in an era of intense graphics capabilities that something as compelling as a great story can be so transformational.
We’ll try to profile some great games here. Send us ones you’ve made in twine, or your favorites.-LT
Coming soon to a mailbox near you!
If you would like to receive the fourth card of this 5-card collectible series join our mailing list, http://www.publicartarchive.org/content/join-our-mailing-list.
I curated Skullphone History Museum at the Riverside Art Museum a few years ago. Still one of my favorite skreet artists. Still think I should get a skullphone tattoo!
(via 10 Years of Wooster:Skullphone | Wooster Collective)
Oh, Skullphone, that’s who puts up those scary posters. Now we know.
The Museum of Everything
Museum of Everything in Paris (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless indicated)
PARIS — For a brief time, a former Catholic seminary on Paris’ classy Boulevard Raspail was overtaken with a psychoanalyst’s jubilee of art from self-taught creators who worked in secret or seclusion, in mental asylums or hospitals, or just from their own particular perspective of the world. The Museum of Everything is a traveling exhibition started by British filmmaker James Brett in 2009 that’s been widely successful in its unique curation of overlooked art.
As a native Los Angelino, I consider one of the city’s gems to be the Watts Towers. Completed in 1954 by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia, a construction worker without any art training, he would come home after work and slowly but surely (it took him 33 years) build “17 interconnecting sculptures adorned with intricate mosaics.” He used steel rods and pipes for the main supports and embedded pieces of porcelain, tile, bottles, and sea shells.
According to the LA Times, when the city of Los Angeles finally found Rodia’s masterpiece, the head of the municipal Building and Safety Department wrote this in a memo: “Personally, I think this is the biggest pile of junk outside a junkyard that I have ever seen.”
Quite the contrary, no? The Watts Towers have come to signify something very special to the city and since 1990, were designated as a Los Angeles landmark.
Over the years, tiny cracks and weather conditions have deteriorated the towers. In 2011, the Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs contracted with LACMA to help with maintenance and restoration.
Read here for more on how the restoration of The Watts Towers is coming along.
- Heidi
I love this project.-LT
Last Thursday, March 7th, we transformed Civic Space into a tattoo shop for one full day. This was the final event in a project we co-hosted with Portland’s Jason Sturgill called Windsor is Forever. In the spirit of Jason’s Portland project Art is Forever, Windsor is Forever became a community-driven art and tattoo project that gave Windsor residents an opportunity to make a permanent mark on themselves. It also gave us an opportunity to discover what Windsor might look like as a set of icons. We found out which objects or symbols were important to Windsor residents, and which could begin to tell a story of what Windsor was and will be. Windsor is Forever allowed us to connect with artists from the area and help create something that would last forever. This project demonstrated that Windsor is very important to many people, and for some, it is an integral part of their identities. Civic Space was transformed from a multi-use studio space to a sterile and appropriately-lit tattoo parlour in a day. This wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work of everyone who played a part in making Windsor is Forever a reality. The commitment from those involved and the participants themselves was incredible.
Saying Goodbye to a Brooklyn DIY Architectural Marvel
The Broken Angel House
Most of the coverage you’ll find about the Broken Angel House, a handmade architectural marvel in Clinton Hill, starts the story in 2006, when there was a small fire that set off all the trouble.The intensified activism of the 1960s fueled by the Vietnam War and struggles over class inequality, women’s rights, and black liberation drove the rapid growth of the underground press. Between 1965 and 1969, the five indie counterculture newspapers scattered across the United States multiplied to over 500 around the country, representing and communicating the voices of feminists, the Black Panther Party, gay activists, psychedelic aficionados, and other social movement groups with their art and design as radical as their messages. Rebel Newsprint: The Underground Press at Interference Archive in Gowanus is digging into this historic period with over 100 newspapers from across the sixties underground.
The exhibition of ephemera is curated by Sean Stewart, the editor of On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S. (2011), and was drawn from his own collection, with yellowed and folded issues of newspapers like the bilingual community publication Basta Ya started in San Francisco in 1969, the experimental San Francisco Oraclepublished from 1966 to 1968 out of Haight-Ashbury that reflected the area’s psychedelic scene in trippy rainbow ink and spiritual poetry, and the sexual revolution sourced Screw: The Sex Reviewco-founded by pornographer Al Goldstein. Most of the newspapers are held in plastic and suspended from the walls of the Interference Archive’s small space, a cascade of counterculture messages like “End the War Now,” “Don’t Mourn, Organize,” and “All Power to the People” blaring out from vibrantly hued cover art and rapid fire text.
For the community of Makoko of Lagos, Nigeria, life on the water is nothing new. Prone to flooding, residents have dealt with encroaching waters for generations by building houses on stiltsand using canoes as their main source of transport. Nigerian-born architect Kunle Adeyemi has a vision for the city of 250,000 people that involves constructing a group of floating structures that have better access to sanitation, fresh water, and waste disposal. His first endeavor would be to build a three-story school held afloat by plastic drums.
Mobile Structures!
Smithsonian American Art Museum Acquires the Life’s Work of an Imaginary Soul Singer
Between 1968 and 1977, Mingering Mike released around 50 albums, each with its own hand-drawn album art, and played sold-out shows around the world. Yet if you haven’t heard of the prolific soul and funk singer, it’s because he was entirely fictional, but the art was real and has just been acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
An Appreciation for the Often Hilarious, Usually Horrible, World of Bad Graffiti
Who cares about bad graffiti or street art? The spray paint scrawls of ill-chosen tag names (“Piggy Nasty,” “Pony Tail,” “Tricky Trout, Jr.”), reckless vulgarity (penises and boobs drawn on absolutely everything), and sad drawings that barely shape into the animal, face, or whatever they’re trying to be, who cares about all that? Usually these aerosol-on-concrete creations just fade into our visual background without a second glance, but artist Scott Hocking has recognized them for the masterpieces of mediocrity that they are in a photography book appropriately called Bad Graffiti, released in December 2012 by Black Dog Publishing.
The record store experience currently inhabiting Recess gallery’s Soho space feels like any other vinyl hub: bins of albums to flip through in the center, staff picks on the walls, a turntable rotating with scratchy music. Yet this one has a surreal twist: the only thing in stock here is the Beatles’s White Album, and the store doesn’t sell any of them, it only acquires more. A project of New York and Shanghai-based Rutherford Chang, We Buy White Albums includes nearly 700 copies of the 1968 double-LP first edition of the White Album, all the personal collection of Chang. Each album is marked with a distinct serial number on the bottom corner of the starkly designed cover by Richard Hamilton, a totally white cover that’s readily attracted the wandering drawings of (possibly stoned) listeners, the visible stains of coffee cups, and some mold. (via Helter Skelter! A Record Store that Only Stocks the White Album)
Catch my post and listen to the recorded accumulation of 1x100 copies of the White Album on my music site Jewish Noise, here.
I wish I had seen this exhibit at Clocktower last July!
A new exhibition at the Clocktower, entitled Prisoner Fantasies: Photos from the Inside, is in keeping with the idea of art being made in unusual places. Sixteen 4×6 photographs, the outdated size we associate with 1-hour photo labs, have been collected and installed by the artist and critic Dave Adler, with curatorial assistance by David Weinstein and Alanna Heiss.Prisoner Fantasies is a series of snapshots taken by prison inmates of their fellow prisoners. Posing for their portraits, the inmates themselves stand alone in front of idyllic landscapes painted by prisoners on canvas or cinderblocks.
These photographs, referred to as “click clicks” on the inside, are like personalized postcards, taken for and sent to family and friends on the outside. Though the photographs are practical in concept and are not necessarily made to have “artistic” value, these photographs inadvertently question the assumptions we make about the identity of people in prisons. Adler’s installation of “click clicks,” so different from the familiar mug shot, is a unique look at the people who inhabit our prisons. If you didn’t know otherwise, you might have a hard time placing the men standing so causally in front of an imagined place, smiling happily, if momentarily, for the camera. (via Prisoner Fantasies)
Michael Jackson fans scare me in their extreme devotion. Two and a half years ago my wife and I were in Budapest and happened upon a memorial to MJ that covered a tree in a small city park. We encountered a woman sitting in front of the tree, looking very sad and listening to Michael Jackson songs on her phone. The date of our visit was shortly after the one year anniversary of his death, but we could not understand why fans chose this location. This article explains that the park is across the street from the hotel that Jackson stayed at three times during visits to Budapest. Okay!
Walking around Budapest today, I was surprised to see that not only does the memorial still exist, but the tree is covered in more stuff than ever. More details of the things fans have left here.Yes! I love Ooga Booga and miss living in LA so I could go there often! Music From Saharan Cell Phones is great. I backed them on kickstarter and am looking forward to receiving their new vinyl album. You can listen to all of the tracks online for free as well.
We are done with inventory and back open for business! To kick off the new year we have a record release party this Thursday evening for Volume 2 of Music from Saharan Cellphones! Christopher Kirkley who compiled the album will here, DJ’ing top Saharan cell-tunes! This Thursday January…
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- RT @HiddenCityPhila: Hidden City Festival Starts today! 9 sites, 10 projects. Thursdays are free! Sites are open 12-7PM THU, FRI, SAT, SUN …
- We open 9 sites for 6 weeks, brought to life with participatory art projects, tours, talks, performances and more http://t.co/wBtPbwTO1qMay 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Hidden City Festival opens tomorrow for 6 weeks after yrs of planning. Here's my opening weekend picks! http://t.co/JhSTylMby2May 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @phillydotcom: .@HiddenCityPhila Festival epitomizes socially engaged art and helps bring new life to fallen Philly relics http://t.co/m…May 21, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @penns_landing: We're excited for the @HiddenCityPhila 2013 Festival. Especially the project along the river at Fort Mifflin http://t.co…May 21, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @HiddenCityPhila: Rabid Hands working late into the night at Hawthorne Hall in University City. 60 hrs til Hidden City Fest opens! http:…May 21, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @kg_ubu: The New Yorker's four-sentence dismissal review of Warhol's "A" from 1969. Some things never change: http://t.co/pSEq88TYmp (vi…May 15, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @stabert: Chatted with creative director of @HiddenCityPhila Festival. Mark your calendar for this remarkable event: http://t.co/7DiHnkU…
- RT @HiddenCityPhila: Flying Kite interviews Lee Tusman about Exploring Philadelphia's exquisite underbelly at the Hidden City Festival http…
- RT @HotTeaCart: Don't forget we have a mobile bike parade today. 2-4PM decorate yr bike/drink tea at 1219 Vine St. Asian Arts Initiative. 4…
- @DorkMorph zzzzzzzzzzzzipppppppppideeeedooooodaaa
- @DorkMorph keep em coming
- RT @HiddenCityPhila: Hidden City's Creative Director Lee Tusman on NPR @MarketplaceAPM talking about bringing attention to vacant spaces ht…May 08, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- no but seriously, please come to my art festivalMay 08, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- America, I just used the word porn when interviewed on NPR Marketplace. not sure if i should be tweeting this. "ruin porn" !!!!May 08, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- I'm on NPR right now! - Abandoned buildings get starring role in social media http://t.co/RFGWUgoo09
- RT @LaughingSquid: Steven Soderbergh Posts Suspense Novella ‘Glue’ on Twitter, One Tweet at a Time http://t.co/RiIg0wSYRUMay 06, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @HotTeaCart: We're rolling out the HOT TEA cart at 3PM-5PM today and distributing books on our free bike/bookmobile. We'll be somewhere …
- RT @Babycastles: It's almost time! No Quarter is TONIGHT at 7pm: https://t.co/DzOIStcyWfMay 03, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @HiddenCityPhila: Hidden City Festival volunteer have already hauled wood while walking along the Delaware, scrubbed down surfaces... ht…
