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There are 33 rules — and they really are all you need to know to make a life for yourself in art. Or 34, if you count “Always be nice, generous, and open with others and take good care of your teeth.” And No. 35: “Fake it till you make it.” — Vulture
Some of his benches have become part of the fabric of the city — sat on and rained on, captured on Google Street View and even vandalized. Scrawled in tidy handwriting on one bench was, “i love it, thank you,” punctuated by a small heart.
His greatest frustration is that whoever is removing them is leaving bus riders with no place to sit. The benches and their removal get at one of the more byzantine corners of transit bureaucracy in Los Angeles.
— Los Angeles Times
Realizing he had no place to rest at the bus stop near his Eastside home while recovering from a knee injury, this anonymous Los Angeles artist took matters into his own hands and began installing benches at neglected bus stops around the area, Carolina Miranda writes. Unsurprisingly, some of his... View full entry
“As a teenager I became very interested in street-dance culture and was active on the Scandinavian breakdance scene,” the artist Olafur Eliasson tells his friend and collaborator Anna Engberg-Pedersen in our new book, Olafur Eliasson Experience.
This admission is a slight understatement. In 1984, the nascent artist’s three-man troupe, Harlem Gun Crew, actually won the Scandinavian breakdancing championships.
— phaidon.com
Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson discusses his teenage breakdancing years in relation to how he thinks of architecture and space. Eliasson links the body awareness of moving through an urban landscape in dance to his development in spatial thinking as an artistic practice in design and... View full entry
After the tragedy, [a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va.] and another honoring Stonewall Jackson were shrouded, but only temporarily. Around the country, similar monuments have been removed. In some cases, only their pedestals remain.
We asked artists to contemplate these markers of our country’s racist and violent history — the space they take up, physically and psychically — and imagine what should happen when they are gone.
— The New York Times
Around the US many statues and monuments celebrating racism in our country's history have been removed, either partially or fully. The question currently remains on what we as a culture should do concerning the spaces these historical monuments inhabit[ed]. The New York Times asked artists to... View full entry
Mixed media artist Michael Velliquette has been making imaginary architecture models. A prolific artist who favors paper as his medium, his latest is a series of carefully detailed installations. Using hand-cut paper shapes, Velliquette assembles countless pieces of paper into complex forms... View full entry
In 2016, the Berlin-based US artist Ryan Mendoza and Rhea McCauley, the niece of Rosa Parks, teamed up to save the civil rights activist’s Detroit home from demolition. Now, the structure is heading to another block: the New York auction house Guernsey’s, where it is due to be auctioned tomorrow (26 July) with an estimate of $1m-$3m. — theartnewspaper.com
Park's house is part of the 700-lot of African American Historic & Cultural Treasures up for sale at the New York auction house Guernsey’s. McCauley initially bought the house for just $500 back in 2016 reaching out to Mendoza to help preserve the house. In 2017 the structure was safely... View full entry
The caption to the photograph reveals that this isn’t New York at all, of course, but Sweden: a life-size replica of Harlem in a forest in the west of the country, near Gothenburg. The asphalt and snow are real enough, but nearly everything else is fake. The streets are void of people and cars; the store fronts are life-size photographs, printed on canvas and hung on steel frames. Welcome to the Potemkin village: a place of clones, impostors, facsimiles, frauds. Maybe don’t plan to stay. — The New York Times
Why is there a life-size replica of Harlem in Sweden? This bizarre space turns out to be a test track for self-driving cars. Why Harlem? Even Austrian artist Gregor Sailer who photographed the space doesn't know. Sailer traveled around the world to capture 25 of these false architectural... View full entry
Lebanese artist Jad El Khoury has long been creating interventions in Beirut’s urban landscape to draw attention to these symbolic sites of warfare [...] Khoury has now taken on the imposing Murr Tower for a two-month installation: ‘The Burj El Murr soars from Beirut’s skyline, filled with scars, constantly provoking the city’s residents, whose past is shadowed by war, and present is spent dealing with those harsh memories.’ — theculturetrip.com
Artist Jad El Khoury's temporary installation Burj El Hawa (Tower of Air) inhabits a 34-story skyscraper in Beirut, known as Murr Tower or the Beirut Trader Center. Using brightly colored curtains found in a typical Beirut home, Khoury transforms this empty building which was used as a... View full entry
Artist Guido Zimmermann's Cuckoo Block series present a brutalist take on the traditional cuckoo clock design. Based in Germany, Zimmermann's pieces are largely inspired by local brutalist housing blocks found in Frankfurt and Berlin. He has also ventured out to create clocks based on notable... View full entry
Fjordenhus (Fjord House) is the first building designed entirely by Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann with Studio Olafur Eliasson. Located in Vejle, Denmark, Fjord House is set to open on June 9th. The structure rises out of Vejle Fjord and can be accessed through Havneøen (The Harbour... View full entry
A 30m-tall Gothic cathedral built of branches and twigs that was set alight on Saturday (17 February) causing controversy in Russia. The burning took place at Nikola-Lenivets, a rural artists’ colony 200km south of Moscow, and was the culmination of pre-Lenten carnival festivities known as Maslenitsa. The event is often likened to the US Burning Man festival. — theartnewspaper.com
Artist Nikolay Polissky, founder of Nikola-Lenivets, creates impressive land art installations to burn for Russia's Maslenitsa festival each year. This Russian folk tradition is celebrated during the last week before Lent and traditionally ends with the burning of a scarecrow. This year, the... View full entry
Photographer Francois Prost's recent photo series, Paris Syndrome, reveals just how far China's "duplitecture" went in the city of Tianducheng. Pairing images of China's replica city with its Paris equivalent—side by side it can be initially unclear which is the original. ... View full entry
Photographer Gerco de Ruijter is widely known for his work focusing on grids and other signs of human-imposed geometry on the landscape. His latest work explores instances in the North American landscape where the Jeffersonian road grid is forced to go awry due to the curvature of the Earth. His... View full entry
At the 2016 Venice Architectural Biennale, Ban and Choi presented a scale model of a 13-kilometer (about eight-mile), garden-lined bamboo walkway meandering between North and South Korea, elevated to protect visitors from ubiquitous DMZ landmines. Along its length would be towers for viewing nature and, every kilometer, open-air “Jung Ja” meditation pavilions designed by different architects and artists, including several reserved for North Koreans. — Los Angeles Times
With support from Shigeru Ban and others, artist Jae-Eun Choi envisioned a garden-lined bridge called "Dreaming of Earth" that would meander through the Korean Demilitarized Zone, which has ironically grown into one of Asia's most significant wildlife sanctuaries. The initial proposal, which Choi... View full entry
Australia-based artist Joshua Smith expresses his love of decrepit urban spaces by recreating them in 1:20 scale. Building all of his miniatures from scratch, Smith designs every element himself. The artist's work is built on his past experiences as a stencil artist and gallery director. Inspired... View full entry
