ArtSake

You’re strolling around your city, and you see this cartoon-inspired painting.

Then you see the attached note saying the painting is free, with one catch. So you take the painting, follow its instructions, and with that… you’ve joined Bren Bataclan’s Smile Boston Project.

We asked Bren Bataclan, a street artist like no other, to guest post and describe his effort to use his paintings to lift the corners of a few mouths in cities across the map.

This month marks the fifth year anniversary of Smile Boston Project. I still can’t believe that I am now painting full-time and that the street art project is now global. When I first started in the fall of 2003, I thought that my project would last for just a couple of weeks.

I began painting these cartoon characters that I have been drawing since I was a kid back in the Philippines during the summer of 2003. Back then I was one of those unemployed ex-dotcommers affected by the economic crash (that was nothing in comparison to today’s crisis). I had plenty of time that summer to get to know my childhood imaginary friends again and explore painting them on canvases (they were just rendered as drawings prior to this venture). I premiered my cartoon inspired acrylic paintings during CAOS (Cambridgeport Artists Open Studios) and to my surprise 49 out of 56 paintings sold during that summer!

The practical thing to do after such a successful show was to look for a job. My confidence was skyrocketing, and I was just truly elated. I would have won over anyone at any interview. Instead, I poured back the money I made during CAOS into my very first street art project. I grew up in San Francisco, and so I was exposed to a lot of graffiti. Though I was (still am) a huge fan of street artists, I was not the type of kid who would spray paint a wall. And so an idea came to me while in bed at 2 AM in the morning a few days after CAOS… Why not leave paintings for folks to take for free all over Boston? I didn’t want to vandalize nor to wait for a gallery show. So I decided to use the city as my exhibit space.

Aside from wanting to do my own street art, my other goals were to expose people to art who normally do not go to galleries or museums and to give original art to folks who may not be able to afford them. I also thought that giving away my pieces would be a great way to thank Boston for purchasing so many paintings in just two days.

I also wanted to see more smiles in New England. I was in the Midwest for grad school prior to moving here to teach at UMASS Amherst, and I was missing the warm interactions and eye contact. I complained about the lack of smiles in Boston for almost a decade. But that all changed when I saw Bostonians smile when they saw my paintings. In many ways, this was the catalyst for the Smile Boston Project. I told myself to stop complaining and to be proactive. And so for five years, I have been leaving paintings for folks to take for free with a note saying, “This painting is yours if you promise to smile at random people more often,” across the country and around the world. Below are feedback and photo samples from my recent Smile Chicago Project.

Know what? After doing Smile Boston Project for five years, I was proven wrong. Bostonians are friendly– they are just different from the Midwesterners or Californians. I’ve since ceased to complain. How can I not? I feel the love here in Boston… I am a full-time artist during this economic disaster! What more can I ask for? This is the best job I have ever had.

With that in mind, I am altering my street art project for a while. Instead of leaving my smile-related note, I will now tape a different one saying, “Everything will be alright.” I can’t think of a better way to uplift peoples feelings than to give free paintings during the Wall Street Blues. Look out for free paintings this month because I will be leaving them all over Boston and NYC!

Responses from the recent Smile Chicago Project:

I’m a 19 year old college student who lives in Chicago… I was out on a jog when I stumbled upon one of your paintings. I glanced at the bench in disbelief. I had heard of this project before and couldn’t believe my luck. I had a problem though. I had just started my run and still had about a mile to go. Do I take it and risk ruining it by clutching it tightly? Or do I leave it and if it’s here on the way back it’s meant to be. I made a deal with myself. Smile at everyone on the rest of my run and if it’s still here you can take it. If it’s gone, at least you smiled. Well I imagine I looked pretty funny sprinting down Columbus with a smile plastered on my face, but when I got back it was still resting just where you left it. I was so happy. I snatched it up and skipped home… My older brother and I are going on a backpacking trip around the world this summer. We’ve scrimped and saved enough to just get by and maybe be able to eat every once in a while. But I’ll be sure to smile at every one I see. Thanks for all your great work. I admire your strength and determination to spread love and respect in the world. Laura

Dear Bren, I was running some errands in the rain today when I spotted one of your paintings (the cutest little blue guy, sporting a big smile and a pair of red antennae). I stood there a minute and read and re-read the note, making sure it was really OK to take it–and then yoink! it was mine. Not only that, but then as I kept walking down the street, I smiled at someone who (now that I see your photo on the site) might have been you. Thank you for the painting, and for putting a smile on my face! I will keep up my end of the deal! What a wonderful way to put good energy into the world. I feel so lucky. xo Anne

Thank you for brightening my return to work on this rainy Chicago day!! I will take very good care of my whimsical little guy. And, ironically I AM a SMILER!!! and I will definitely pay it forward over and over again. Susan

Images: Bren Bataclan, UNTITLED (2008), 24 in x 36 in; Bren Bataclan and his paintings (photo by Yuri V.); Laura from Smile Chicago; Anne from Smile Chicago; Susan from Smile Chicago. Bren Bataclan and filmmaker David Tamés collaborated on a documentary film about the Smile Boston Project. Watch a preview. A book featuring Bren’s work, The Smile Project, is forthcoming from Ginko Press.

If only the walls could talk.  Well apparently they will at the Worcester Art Museum starting this Thursday.

The provocative artist-activist collaborative THINK AGAIN (David John Attyah and S.A. Bachman) are at it again. Working in the longstanding tradition of agitprop artists, they have created a new work called Actions Speak. Upon receiveing their comission, THINK AGAIN rolled up their collective sleeves and completed a 67′ long mural at the Worcester Art Museum(WAM) as part of the Wall at WAM series. Action Speaks is the 7th project in the WAM series.

Debuting the week before the presidential election, THINK AGAIN’s Actions Speak aims to promote dialogue between art and public response as well as between global reality and local action. The project combines text, photography, drawing, etching, sculpture, and digital design. And apparently it is also the first Wall at WAM project to utilize both the museum’s interior wall and exterior façade (where a projection will be on view after dark during public evening hours on the 3rd Thursday of each month).

Image:  Wall at Worcester Art Museum: “Actions Speak, detail” by THINK AGAIN (David John Attyah and S.A. Bachman) 2008, inkjet on paper, 17 x 67 feet. (FY99 MCC Photography Fellows)

Photo Credits: Images courtesy of The Worcester Art Museum

Using little more than some plastic bags and tape, street artist Joshua Allen Harris has created an amazing array of inflatable animal sculptures.

Art moves
Massachusetts art and artists are criss-crossing the proverbial map.

James Hull, of Green Street Gallery and Laconia Gallery, makes the move to the New England School of Art and Design, where he’ll take over as gallery director. Matthew Nash shared the story on Our Daily Red, blog of the funky online art concern Big RED & Shiny. Speaking of Mr. Nash, he has an interesting take on LEF Foundation’s shift to focusing on independent film and the impending end Contemporary Works Fund.

Surely the loss of this reliable source of funding will have broad impact, but any arts community that cannot survive the loss of a single funding source should be asking some tough questions of itself. We need to seek other avenues for generating revenue, create interest and support for the contemporary art throughout New England, and bring in outside investment. The end of the CWF will usher in a new era for arts funding in New England, that is certain. Are we up to the task?

Full article.

Salvatore Scibona (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ‘06) is on the move to share his new novel, The End. If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll remember his fascinating discussion of the book here, and he’s been touring to continue that discussion in such far-flung places as Ohio, New Mexico, and Washington. Martha’s Vineyard residents will have the chance to hear him read as he joins poet Justen Ahrens for an event at West Tisbury Free Public Library on Saturday, August 30, 5:30 PM.

Over in Boston-town, the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy is closing in on its October 4 Inaugural Celebration. The Greenway and UrbanArts Institute currently have a call for entries to all Massachusetts artists for existing sculptures and installations to be exhibited in the Greenway October 1-November 2. Three to four works will be chosen based on quality, durability, and suitability. Selected artists will receive a $1000 stipend. Deadline is Friday, August 22. Official notice here.

Plays with New England or local themes are encouraged in the call for entries for Culture*Park’s 7th Annual Short Plays Marathon. The deadline isn’t until October 15, so you have plenty of time to cook up your 10-20 minute masterwork. Full details here. The Marathon (which will take place Saturday, November 22 in downtown New Bedford, MA, is sponsored in part by the New Bedford Cultural Council.

Fiction for President
Elsewhere on the map: a California bookstore asked young readers to weigh in on what fictional characters they’d like to run for president. Made me wonder what characters from Massachusetts-based authors might make good leaders of the free world. Commander-in-Chief Joey Pigza (from author Jack Gantos)? President Anastasia Krupnik (Lois Lowry)? Hail to the Chief… Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (MT Anderson)?

And then, there’s this: could a closer reading of Jay McInerney’s 20-yr-old Story of My Life have forecast the John Edwards affair?

See, it’s all in the art, people. Keys to the secrets of the presidency, the country, and the heart.

Image: Mary O’Malley, Imagined Landscape #2 (2004), ink on paper, 9 in. x 12 in. Mary is among the artists exhibiting in Drawn to Detail at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, August 30, 2008–January 4, 2009.

Two teen artists in Lowell have created a baseball-themed work of public art (seen above), to be unveiled at today’s (8/6) Lowell Spinners game. The work is dedicated to the memory of Joann Weber, a baseball and art enthusiast, and was created in partnership with the Revolving Museum.

Speaking of public art: St. Paul, MN aims to quell road rage with art that confuses the rage right outta you. Consider the image to the left, from the Art of Traffic Calming project of the City of Saint Paul Public Works and Public Art Saint Paul.

Confused? Less anxious? More aware of the environment around you? Consider yourself artfully/traffically calmed! (It’s an intriguing idea. But before we run out to erect signs like these in Massachusetts, we’d be wise to keep in mind our track record with puzzling images.)

Rigoberto Gonzalez, one of the panelists in this year’s Poetry Artist Fellowships review, has won the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award (as reported by the Critical Mass blog).

Jeff Warmouth (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ‘05) will be among the artists showing works that “push the medium” in Electric Shadows, An Experimental Film Festival at the Axiom Gallery, this Friday, August 8, 8 PM.

If you missed Joan Wickersham (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ‘08) speaking about her book The Suicide Index on WBUR’s “On Point,” catch it here. (And a friendly reminder that Joan will read at Porter Square Books this Thursday, August 7, at 7 PM.)

The Filmmaker Magazine blog posted an intriguing summary by Noah Harlan of 2.1 Films about digital distribution/exhibition models for independent film, from the Sundance Producers Lab. A taste:

We refer to these systems (Snag, Hulu, youtube, etc…) as online distributors but in fact they are not. They are online exhibitors… Some are destination sites like youtube, some send the content to you (Netflix’s box) and some allow you to move the movies around (Snag) but at the end of the day they are exhibitors. The consequence of that is that you, as the producer/filmmaker, are now the distributor… This means that the films that most need these self-distribution models (small movies) are going to have an additional cash burden placed on them at the time of production. This is an obstacle to the small filmmaker really making it in the new revenue marketplace.

Full post includes some possible upsides.

Images: Public artwork by T. Stover and Toai Thach; an “art sign” from the Art of Traffic Calming Project of the City of Saint Paul Public Works and Public Art Saint Paul.

The Roxbury Film Festival, an annual festival celebrating the work and stories of people of color (and a gig that opens tonight, by the way), landed an unlikely partner this year: the Massachusetts Division of Insurance. The Division will be on-hand 8/1 to answer consumer questions about the state’s new competitive car insurance system - and is a festival sponsor. (Just goes to show that out-of-the-box thinking can serve you well at every step of the artistic process.)

Speaking of out-of-the-box… the sci-fi/fantasy/horror lit mag Weird Tales is sponsoring a short story contest based on spam. Judging from the subject lines in my own spam box this morning - “Robotic skin for cosmetic purposes,” “Tests time machine,” and “Aliens land in Ohio: watch the video” - this contest can’t help but spawn some powerfully wacky stuff. So how about it, Massachusetts’ finest literary minds?

Our fellow state arts agency Rhode Island State Council on the Arts has announced a new call for public art to be installed in the Dunkin’ Donuts Center in downtown Providence (currently under renovation). A total of $420,000 has been designated for the acquisition of public art. Submission is open to all visual artists.

In one of those neat intersections of disciplines that we ArtSakers love so well, literary type Bookdwarf blogs about a soon-to-be-published book she’s reading on the rarefied world of contemporary art:

Right now I’m in the middle of Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton. The title says it all. Each chapter covers an area of the art world–-judging the Turner Prize, a Christie’s auction, the Basel Art Fair, the editorial offices of Artforum, an art school crit, an artist’s studio, and the Venice Bienale. There’s so much I don’t know about the art world. I’m finding myself enjoying this book more than I expected with all the behind the scenes stuff.

Today’s Boston Globe editorial compares the current state of public art in Boston to other U.S cities. The piece sites the Brooklyn Bridge Waterfall Project as one example of a successful contemporary public art project.

Check it out. Imagine what a waterfall installation could do for the Tobin!

Brooklyn Bridge Waterfall image from http://dumbonyc.com/

Maurice J. Tobin Bridge sans waterfall.

Tobin Bridge image from celebrateboston.com

There is some interesting work to be seen in Boston and beyond says UrbanArts Director Ricardo Barreto. He was recently a guest on NPR’s Radio Boston with David Boeri talking about the state of public art in Boston. You might want to listen to what Ricardo has to say about this very complex topic.

Meanwhile, each year, approximately 8,000 people from the village of Inakadate in the southern Minamitsugaru district in Aomori, Japan, take the idea of public art and create their own magnificent temporary art work by planting different varieties of rice. The rice field art lasts until the September harvest.

Mary Sherman (Painting Finalist ‘04) is currently a Fulbright Senior Scholar and artist-in-residence at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei, Taiwan, and she sent us a fascinating update on her projects there. While in Taipei, Mary is running a workshop called “Here, There and Everywhere” collaborating with students and faculty from Taipei National University of the Arts, as well as local artists, to create an exhibition at the Kuandu Museum (running July 11 to August 31). Below are posts from Mary’s KdMoFa Collaborative Workshops blog, detailing projects by two of the artists teams participating in the workshop.

TEAM D

Mary Sherman / Pan Ping-Yu / Fujui Wang /Tao Ya-Lun/ Chang Ling/Josef Bares

Starry Night (on Mars)

When we were all showing each other our work, the idea of a shooting star came up; and everyone instantly locked onto it. Then, when we met again at the museum, we decided that we would create a sky - complete with shooting stars and a cosmic atmosphere. At the same time, we talked about how we all have the same sky above us; but we are culturally different and as such our myths and tales about the stars differ. However, what does seem universal in these stories is that they represent a projection of our desires, resulting in our interest to also make a star manual that would be open to everyone’s own cultural interpretation.

***

TEAM C

Chong Yi-Kei / Fan Sih-Ci / Ho Tsan-Wen / Lin Shin-Mei / Chang Feng-Shih / Huang Po-Chih

Crack Down 2.2

All our work, on some level, is an investigation of fragments of the human body or personality. Our investigation is undertaken to better understand the complexities of both these fragments and their role in understanding ourselves and those around us. For this exhibition we have decided to switch from our more usual visual format to focus on the sound of the human voice. We, thus, have created a dialog of disembodied voices so that the audience also can experience what we believe - that such a fragment of ourselves can convey a great deal.

See more images from the collaboration.

Here Comes the Sun

Along with her work in Taipei, Mary collaborated with Italian artist Rudi Punzo on another project, a massive public art performance in partnership with Shanghai’s Zendai Museum of Modern Art. Here Comes the Sun featured 800 hand-printed Kongming lanterns, launched into the sky in a carefully choreographed sequence to spell “here comes the sun” in ASCII programming code. A sound design accompanied each launch.

The text “here comes the sun” (along with its obvious debt to the Beatles) is a rough translation of a Chinese blessing, a tribute to Chinese citizens following the recent earthquake disaster. Mary and her collaborator invited the public to add their own messages being sent to the heavens.

Mary Sherman is the founder of TransCultural Exchange. As an artist, she has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad, including New York, Seoul, Vienna, Chicago, London, and Venice.

“Starry Night (on Mars)” by Team D, KdMoFa Collaborative Workshops, Taipei, Taiwan; “Crack Down 2.2″ by Team C, KdMoFa Collaborative Workshops, Taipei, Taiwan; Artists prepare to launch Kongming lanterns, “Here Comes the Sun,” Zendai MoMA, Shanghai, China; Mary Sherman works with artists to prepare lanterns for “Here Comes the Sun,” Shanghai, China; Another view of “Here Comes the Sun,” Zendai MoMA, Shanghai, China