some words that help get at what we're scratching at.

city making

"the answer instead, i suggest, is located in the city itself. a primary city function - the primary city function - ought to be the cultivation and reproduction of the city's traditional form of human association. ...the present degree of suspicion and fear that characterizes american metropolitan areas is an unacceptable basis for american life. there should be no neighborhood in america that outsiders can't visit because they feel - legitimately feel - they don't belong."

-gerald frug, from "city making: building communities without building walls"

progress

"it was only as these old shops began disappearing that i realized how much i had counted on them - that this layered, frayed, and quirky beauty underlined my own life. new technology is usually pitched to us as an improvement. but progress is always an exchange. we gain something, we give something else up. i'm interested in looking at some of what we are loosing."

-zoe leonard (analogue)

solving problems

"we will never solve the problems of cities unless we like the urban-ness of urban life."

-elizabeth wilson

two way street

"the only way to change our environment is to actually involve ourselves in it. we should not be afraid to put ourselves out there and speak our minds openly in order to change this community and to also be changed by it."

-barry, general sculptural studies 2007 & student organization leader at mica

jane jacobs

"there is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the mask of pretended order - achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and be served."

- jane jacobs, from the "life and death of great american cities."

wake up the neighborhood

"reading that reminded me that i love detroit because of all you ferdinands who live here. you view buildings as vessels rather than "developments." you appreciate detroit not just because of what it used to be or could be, but because the city has a special power and you feel plugged in. that's what you capitalize on. you recognize that far too many of our architects and urban planners — supposedly creative thinkers — are dreaming up lofts and paving over green space. and in the absence of globally minded government leaders, you consider artists visionaries. you literally take matters into your own hands, rebuilding your home or your neighborhood. in the scorched earth, you see potential for life to flourish again."

-rebecca mazzei, from the article, "wake up the neighborhood" in detroit metro times

interdisciplinary & interconnected

"there is a growing understanding that addressing the global crisis facing humanity will require new methods for knowing, understanding, and valuing the world. narrow, disciplinary, mechanistic, and reductionist perceptions of reality are proving inadequate for addressing the complex, interconnected problems of the current age. this divisive, compartmentalized thinking fosters alienation and self-focused behavior."

- bohm

social

"'i'd noticed over the years that certain students, the braver ones, were looking for connections... the normal way of making art wasn't satisfying them. in my own life as a freelance illustrator, i was looking for something with soul and meaning. it all became a timing thing--the history of art had marched down the road, and the students with these [social] sympathies were coming together.' (ken krafcheck, director of mica's master of art in community art progam)

perhaps it has to do with the sheer frustration artists are feeling, not just with the isolation of conventional esthetic expression, but also with the worn-out rhetoric of overtly political art. the chasm between america's poor and privileged classes has never been wider--a fact that's abundantly evident in baltimore city. what good does it do to work social messages into art if the art is hidden away in galleries?"

-from "the big picture", a city paper article by tom chalkley

city as canvas

"take a big step back - or up, rather - and there it is: terra firma, home, all she wrote. an unbelievably wonderfully ground that we affect daily in so many ways, unthinking. is absentmindedly picking the leaf less significant than building the bridge? the man in the felt suit, the person walking home with honey and fat, even the person selling pencils on the corner: everyone and more, influence this ongoing creation, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes too noticeably. is there some plan, some communal direction, or is there not? regardless, this is the canvas of our lives."

-alex castro

the new art

"pollock... left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of 42nd street. not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sign, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by the present generation of artists. not only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first time, the world we have always had around us but ignored, but they will disclose entirely unheard of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies; seen in store windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents. an odor of crushed strawberries, a letter from a friend, or a billboard selling drano; three taps on the front door, a scratch, a sigh, or a voice lecturing endlessly, a blinding staccato flash, a bowler hat - all will become materials for this new concrete art. young artists of today need no longer say, “i am a painter," or "a poet" or "a dancer.” they are simply artists. all of life will be open to them. they will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. they will not try to make them extraordinary but will only state their real meaning. but out of nothing they will devise the extraordinary and then maybe nothingness as well.

-allan kaprow's essay "the legacy of jackson pollock" (1958)