California

Carpet shop signage, West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles 

South African Embroidered Panel at the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles 

Mexican Human Skull Mosaicwork, LACMA, Los Angeles 

Jenny's, Chinatown Alleyway, San Francisco 

Ricky Henderson Planter Mosaic, Temescal, Oakland 

 San Francisco Botanical Gardens, Golden Gate Park

Night palms in Westwood, Los Angeles 

Chris Burden and Me, LACMA, Los Angeles

Scenes from my time in California, September 2014.

Some Thoughts on Grassroots Archives

Photo scooped from the PUBLIC>ACTION Facebook page.

A couple weeks ago, I attended an open discussion about archiving printed matter at OCAD University, as part of the month-long Public Action residency at their Student Gallery organized by Professor and print-y artist Shannon Gerard and masters student Mary Tremonte.  The roundtable was facilitated by Maggie Flynn, an interdisciplinary artist.  I am happy that Maggie thought to invite me (despite the fact that we had never met!).  It is crazy how much I miss out on, in large part because I'm not on Facebook and don't get the memo about a lot of events around town.

A bluurb about the discussion presented the following questions:

Leave aside for a moment the images of dusty boxes and stacks of paper that cling to the word “archive”. For this discussion we'll think about archiving as any act that preserves accumulated knowledge and collective memory. How can the process of archiving past or present social movements give direction or even instruction for future action? Can collected information serve as a conduit for action? How do we keep track of movement and change in the communities we are a part of? How can processes of archiving reflect the values of the activity being documented?

Up until recently, I worked at a (wonderful) museum.  I also helped run a zine library for over two years, am a longtime record collector, and do some independent curating.  Recently, I served as a consultant with a historical society as to how they could best display and care for their collection of ethnic costumes, photos and printed matter-- my first post-school independent work as a curator/museum professional.  I am only now realizing how much I am 'at home' in archival processes and practices and truly enjoy and am excited by the prospect of a making a life of this kind of work.

Chucking around ideas and experiences of archiving, particularly within the context of activism and grassroots activity made me think hard about the work I've done, specifically the successes and failures of the projects I've been involved with.  I thought I'd unpack some of my thoughts on this in light of this roundtable talk, as well as some of the ideas and points made by others during the discussion.

The Virtues of Autonomy?:  This is a topic I struggle with a lot and it is something I brought up almost immediately during the discussion.  The word 'archive' immediately brings about ideas of authority and institutionalization.  What does it mean to archive independently, outside of the confines of the institution? Alternately, what sort of freedoms or advantages (ie: financial, a built-in audience) do academic and civic/municipal national archives afford archival projects, and those doing the archiving?

I have often claimed that something that makes the Toronto Zine Library (where I was a volunteer librarian/collective member for just over two formative years in their history) special and sets them apart is that, unlike many zine libraries (especially locally), it exists outside of the umbrella of an educational institution.  While this may set them apart, could this be fairly referred to as a strength?  The TZL was (is still, I think) dynamic in that all volunteers had very different backgrounds and experiences, and existed within a broader local community instead of an insular institution.  However, it was severely hindered by a profound lack of money when I was a volunteer.  At the OCAD discussion, I admitted that the TZL had $100 stolen from the library once, and the impact was pretty devastating.  To most organizations, $100 is chump change.  The fact that $100 could either be considered admirable-- that we were able to make a small amount of money stretch-- or pretty damn sad.  If we had more money or put more effort into securing funding (private or from a funding body), we could have reached more people, and likely done more with the collection and the space.

But am I being lazy/uncritical by assuming that 'autonomous' archives are more virtuous than institutional ones?  How can institutional archives be maximized in terms of their reach?  In what small ways can they be liberated?  Does it matter?  How can grassroots archives be more sustainable and perhaps more ambitious?  Again, does this matter?

Processes of Archiving as 'Emotional':  This can apply to anyone who collects or has experienced attachments to souvenirs or keepsakes.  This also makes me think of the meaning of the word curate-- it means "to care," after all.

Learning About vs. Learning From Archives:  One OCAD educator present at the discussion brought up this important point that resonated with me.  We learn about all sorts of archiving projects, but how often do we learn from archives-- the material that is archived, and other people's experiences of archiving?  (If I misinterpreted his point, someone please enlighten me...I'm sure there is much more that can be said about this...)

The Digital Black Hole vs. The Crisis of Space:  In this day and age, what is the bigger boogeyman? Personally, I can't decide...

The Pragmatics of Radical and Conventional (?) Archiving:  Facilitator Maggie expressed the desire to unpack how radical archivists can archive their own archiving processes (!).  A good point of discussion for sure. Burnout is a reality in activist circles and in DIY endevors that take up a lot of time, energy and effort.  As people float in and out of a particular project, how is important knowledge preserved?  How can past experiences be learned from?

Archiving as 'A Sort of Dreamtime':  What a beautiful idea.  This relates back to the idea of archiving being 'emotional.'  This reminds me of how laborious, meditative art processes bear fruit, providing one with a dreamtime through which to have free thoughts and make new, unexpected discoveries.  Perhaps the same can be said about the process of archiving?

I would be eager to hear anyone reading this chime in on these matters.  The exciting thing about open discussions is all the enthusiasm, ideas and experiences people have to share.  However, I tend to get hung up on the pragmatics of archiving, and the roadblocks that get between archives and accessibility, sustainability, and their ability to 'function:' a term that is up for debate, for sure.

Patti Smith and Beat Nation

Patti Smith, from her exhibition Camera Solo 

Last week was a luxurious one in that I managed to find the time to take in two art shows in two days.  I went to the preview of Patti Smith's photography exhibition, Camera Solo, at the AGO.  The next day, I braved the snow and embarked on a rather hellish walk to Harbourfront to check out Beat Nation at the Power Plant.  Boy, was it ever nice to spend a few hours outside of my own head (which is constantly consumed by thesis work), looking at the work of other artists.

The Patti Smith show was an interesting one for a few reasons.  The exhibition was gorgeously installed-- a clean and uniform installation of small photographs with nice touches like ephemera placed sparingly on weathered wood tables, persian rugs, church pews facing a video projection, and a huge Italian fishing net in the middle of the main gallery. Despite the exhibition's pitch-perfect style, a telling moment for me was when I took in a photograph taken by Robert Mapplethorpe of Patti-- not the iconic one of her on the cover of Horses, but another one of her looking long-limbed and awkwardly confrontational...in other words, it was pure Patti.  After drinking in this photograph for several minutes, it became obvious just how artless Smith's photographs were in comparison.  The exhibition reminded me of my ambivalence towards Patti Smith's work, whose artistic career has been (in my humble opinion) rather uneven.  The thing is, you'd never guess it from all the attention she has been showered with.

Jordan Bennett, Turning Tables (2012)

Continuing the theme of intersections of art and music, Beat Nation: Hip Hop as Indigenous Culture at the Power Plant was worth the walk.  I especially loved Jordan Bennett's Turning Tables (pictured above), which plays Bennett's voice learning his native tongue, Mi'kmaq.  Also really stirring were two of the exhibition's video works-- 10 by Dana Claxton and Nicholas Galanin's Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan Part 1 and 2.  Recommended!

Rochester Trip

Took a quick trip across the pond to Rochester, New York last week.  The weather was sort of craptastic (mostly cold and damp), but it was a really cool trip nonetheless.  Rochester is a tiny city, with lots of neat art deco/art moderne architecture.  The Kodak Building, the firehall on Chestnut Avenue and this old Chevrolet dealership (?) turned coffee shop in downtown Rochester's east end were highlights, for sure.

While I was there, I managed to take in a lot of art in both expected and unexpected places.  I went to the George Eastman House (Eastman was founder of Kodak, which is based in Rochester) which is a museum of photography and film situated in an old ivy-covered mansion.  There was an exhibition up which featured a number of photographic medallions from the early 20th Century such as the one above (scooped from the George Eastman House Flickr page).  There was another small exhibition called Ballyhoo, which focused on promotional materials and signage from the golden age of film and was particularly neat.  The one thing that irked me about Eastman House was it's lack of wayfinding information-- after leaving, we realized that we had missed two of the museum's exhibitions entirely.  Rats!

One of our other stops was the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, which had a great show up called Work It: Artists Address Labour and Unemployment.  It was nice to see pieces from Kathryn Clark's Foreclosure Quilt series up in this show, which I had only previously seen through images online.  Also got to meet the gallery's plucky Director, who introduced himself and chatted for a while.  Nice dude!  Don't think that's ever happened to me in Toronto...!

Our first night there, we ventured into the amazing abandoned Rochester Subway tunnel with the friend we were staying with armed with only a single flashlight and about $10 (goes a long way in the U.S.) worth of alcohol . Apparently people go down into the tunnel all the time to explore-- there was a ton of graffiti down there.  The above patch was particularly unusual.

This trip to Rochester made me miss Baltimore quite a bit, and reminded me how much smaller American cities have to offer.  Canadians generally want to go to places like New York City and San Francisco on vacation-- understandably so, but smaller American cities seem to really have their own unique identity and a slew of neat things to check out that can be found pretty easily.  I'm looking forward to going on more quick and dirty trips like this just south of the border in the future-- next up is Detroit, hopefully.

Slow Art Day at the Textile Museum of Canada

I am proud to announce that the Textile Museum of Canada has invited me be their host for Slow Art Day 2012. Haven't heard of Slow Art Day?  Don't worry, I hadn't either until they asked me to help them out with it...

Slow Art Day is a worldwide event that will take place around lunchtime on April 28th.  Guests are invited to pay admission to their local participating museum and take their time looking at four or five pre-selected objects from the museum's current exhibitions.  After an hour or so, guests will then gather somewhere for lunch and casually discuss their thoughts about the work.  The point is to take some time to unplug, relax, enjoy yourself, and appreciate some glorious examples of art, craft and creative genius from around the world.  The point is also to gather and talk about art-- no experience required!

On the 28th, we will be viewing objects from the TMC's current exhibitions: Portable Mosques: The Sacred Space of the Prayer Rug and Perpetual Motion: Material Reuse in the Spirit of Thrift, Utility and Beauty.  For more information on these exhibitions, check out the Textile Museum's website.   Objects will be announced to registrants within the next week or so.

After viewing the objects, guests will meet on the TMC Mezzanine for lunch and discussion.  I was thinking in addition to bringing your own lunch, it would be nice if everyone could bring something edible to share with the group potluck-style, if possible.  Also, feel free to bring along any textiles or objects you own that employ reused materials in an interesting way for discussion and admiration.

Preregistration is required-- you can do this here:

http://slowarttmc2012.eventbrite.com/

Hope to see some of you there!  Also, please spread the word!

Image: Indigo Robe from Nigeria (detail), 20th Century

Columns and Swoops

Somewhere along the line-- during my time in the States, most likely-- I turned into an architecture gawker. In the States, I went to museums and felt that I could admire the architecture without having my enjoyment of it be tainted by a certain degree of bitterness about the politics and astounding prices that are par for the course among (many, but not all) Toronto institutions.

Looking at these photos, it dawned on me how cool it would be to make a big series of pictures like this. I'm hoping to make it out to the DIA in Detroit later this month, so we'll see if I can add a new photo to the pile that soon.

Fox Court, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
Looking up at the Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC
Central Court, The Walters, Baltimore, MD

Museozine

I completed my latest zine exactly a week ago, making my collective zine output total a whopping four zines-- two were collaborations, and two were my own-- in 2011, the official year of the Revenge of Print.  Looking back, I feel that I did well...I did my part for the revenge!  Print was one of my first loves. Needless to say, I hope it is here to stay.

While this zine came to fruition mere days into 2012, I consider it a '2011' zine because so much of its research and construction was done in 2011.  In a nutshell, Museozine is a zine of interviews with friends of mine-- all wonderfully creative young people who craft, make music and make art on their own terms-- about their museum experiences.  These interviews started off as casual research I was doing for my job at a small Toronto museum last summer.  The interviews were, in some cases, so honest and joyful and surprising that I felt like I just had to publish them in zine form as a way of honoring and preserving them.

Some of my favourite moments in the zine include the following quotes:

"When I was a young kid I loved to sit upside down on the couch (legs up the wall, head hanging down over the end of the seat) and look at the living room/kitchen upside down and fantasize about how cool it would be to be able to walk around in a house that was upside down.  Really upside down, but defying gravity so everything would stay in its place, and to walk in the front door and try to navigate around the house that way and see all the familiar objects in this whole new way.  I did this a lot.  It was a bit of an obsession.  There's my dream museum-- my childhood home upside down."  --Elaine B.

"If I could create my own museum it would be quite a bit like my own apartment, except much, much bigger...everything from old print (magazines, comic books, fanzines, old books) to old toys, various pop culture items, guitars and music gear, and-- probably most importantly-- vinyl records."  --Matt H.

"I think a hobo museum would be cool.  It would have a riding the rails simulator, and a hobo camp staffed with historical re-enactors like Black Creek Pioneer Village, and maybe a folk singer from the 20s or 30s.  Although this is changing, museums tend not to represent the lives of people on the margins of history."  --Patrick M.

Today, headlines about millions of dollars in funding for culture and research being cut from both the municipal and the provincial budget over the next year were splashed across Toronto papers.  Sad when you consider how much museums have captured the imaginations of the people I interviewed.  Most of these interviews referred to childhood museum experiences, which, for the case of many, happened in the 1980s, before the massive culture funding slashes and economic recession of the very late 1980s and early 1990s.  There is currently an accessibility problem among Toronto's museums.  I hate to think that the current economic climate and recent cuts will make the current problem (or crisis, even) of local museum accessibility--and not to mention cultural funding-- even worse.

For lots of impassioned writing on the topic of public access to museums and cultural institutions, check out Toronto critic and arts writer Leah Sandals' always engaging blog, Unedit My Heart.

16 Museums

For a zine that I'm working on which should be done later on today, hopefully!  More on this later...

The Feedback Quilt Project

I'm going to step back in time a bit to post some documentation of a participatory activity I designed for the TMC that was up in the museum for the month of August. The quilt was part of a larger project I did for the museum, doing qualitative research about visitor engagement and satisfaction. Inspired by some of the ideas in Nina Simon's book, The Participatory Museum, I thought I would make an in-museum project that would serve as something of an interactive guestbook. Here is a short summary I wrote about the quilt that explains it a bit more. I'm happy to report that by the end of my contract on August 19th, the quilt was almost completely done!

The purpose of The Feedback Quilt Project is to create a participatory visitor feedback activity for the museum space. Its goals are to collect and preserve visitor content, to create a more interactive museum environment, to educate visitors about a particular material practice (quilt structure and construction) and to become a “town square,” essentially creating an alternative portrait of our visitorship.

A 3-colour hourglass quilt structure (http://quilting.about.com/od/blockofthemonth/ss/cal-hourglass-quilt-block_2.htm) was mapped out on an 8’ X 4’ piece of Foamcore with a 1/2", dark-coloured masking tape. The board was mounted to a wall facing the 2nd floor elevators and stairwell. The activity requires that visitors answer at least one of three questions:


1. Describe your ‘Fantasy Museum.” 
2. What keeps you from going to museums? 
3. What do you want out of a museum for textiles? 


Each question has a corresponding coloured “quilt block” sticky note. Using a dry-mounted, colour-coded quilt legend, visitors placed a sticky note with their response in the appropriate position on the quilt template, almost like a large paint by numbers or cross-stitch kit. In doing so they are building a large quilt form together, and the more questions they respond to, the more the “quilt” starts to take shape. The quilt form was chosen as a basis for the activity due to the connections between quilting, community and communication.

Responses to this activity were revealing.  Many people took the opportunity to spill their guts about what they felt museums were and weren't giving them as visitors.  Many focused on the price and hours of operation of museums not being accessible.  A few came up with truly amazing ideas for fantasy museums-- a museum of smells, a snowglobe museum, a "museum of everything in the entire world." I came away from the project at the end of my contract realizing that museum visitors will reveal a lot to you if you make the effort to stray away from the same old prescribed questions, such as "are you a return visitor?" and "how did you hear about our museum?"

My sincerest thanks goes out to the museum for giving me the chance to basically make art and talk to enthusiastic museum-goers and textile fans all summer.  Funnest job ever!

For more documentation of the quilt, check out the TMC's fantastic Facebook Page.

AVAM, Baltimore

Between the earthquake and the hurricane, I managed to make it out to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore late last week. Lots of amazing work there and lots to think about. Their current exhibition What Makes Us Smile? was full of happy-sad work by a wide range of individuals, from outsider artists to Patch Adams, M.D. I loved the beaded Alfred E. Neuman headboard by Patty Kuzbida. It was also a unique pleasure to see the work of a Toronto friend in a huge museum show in a totally different city-- Rev. Aitor of The Misanthrope Specialty Co. had some of his infamous Unflattering Portraits in the show, and seeing them there was like seeing a familiar (ugly) face in a crowd of strangers.

After seeing the exhibition, Ben said that it was great that a museum like this exists because the things on display were "things he would have wanted to make when (he) was a kid." In saying this, he was referring to art made out of salvage, and a huge model boat made out of toothpicks (!) in particular. In so many words, I think he was implying that the work at the AVAM might encourage people to make things just for the sake of making them or follow a creative impulse that might initially seem odd or "pointless." This is an important thing for artists to keep in mind too-- there is nothing wrong with just making for the sake of making, or doing something "just because you want to." After all, experiments are the mothers of invention.