New Strategies Lab!

Don’t miss our closing event with Marsha parilla! Dance for social justice Friday, 6-8pm !

New Strategies for New Atmospheres

Open Dojo / Studio Hours: Monday-Friday (January 28th-February 1st), 4-6pm
Workshops: Monday-Friday, 6-8pm
ALL FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC (intergenerational, elders, families, teens and children welcome)
At DS4SI: 572 Columbia Rd, Dorchester (Upham's Corner)

Part dojo / Part studio / Part workshop series
This week-long creativity lab will be part dojo (come work out--your ideas!), part studio (come try out new materials!) and part work shop series! It will be a chance to dive deeper into the design and strategy of holding spaces that build capacity and imagination for communities and community-based organizations to take on the new normal. The lab will bring together community organizing groups, artists and other radical thinkers in a container that challenges them to try out new ways of holding space, enacting social healing, and imagining new social arrangements that could challenge the status quo.

Why a New Strategies Lab?
In 2018, the scale of systemic attacks on immigrants, the environment, young people, Muslims and public systems at large has been devastating.  We believe what we are seeing now is the new normal—not individual moves that outrage us and demand protest, but a systemic move towards heightened repression, state violence, terror and hatred towards communities of color. When we respond to each new atrocity with the force it deserves—but with the approach that each atrocity is an individual one—we become emotionally drained and too worn out to imagine new solutions. To move away from a case-by-case treatment towards more sustainable practice-building, DS4SI will create a space that builds the capacity of local organizing groups and artists to find more creative and commensurate ways to address this new reality. We want to create the conditions that will help us collectively strengthen our efforts—emotionally, spiritually and strategically.

All free!
The New Strategies Lab is generously funded by the Hyams Foundation so all workshops are free!

We look forward to seeing you!
DS4SI team

Department of Public Imagination Show & Tell

Please join us to celebrate our three DPI Artists-in-Residence and their community partners! Food, conversation and an informal chance to learn about the creative work they've done over the past year.

Info Session July 8th: ExpressingBoston Public Art Fellowship

DS4SI and the Boston Foundation partner to offer new public art fellowships!

The ExpressingBoston Public Art Fellowship program will offer selected artists a 9 month fellowship with DS4SI between October 2014 and June 2015. The fellowship is aimed at supporting artists in thinking through and testing new ways to do their art practice in public spaces, in ways that increase the authority which artists and community members feel to claim public spaces in their neighborhoods.  Artists will receive a stipend of $5,000 and up to $2,000 for materials for their participation in this community of practice.

This fellowship is open to artists who are engaged in a wide definition of art and public art. This includes both temporary and permanent art, as well as traditional and nontraditional arts such as (but not limited to): culinary arts, dance, street theater, performance art, music, photography, fashion, body art, game design, graphic design, poetry, fine arts, social practice, puppetry, jewelry, graffiti, fabrics, ceramics, etc.
 
Funding priorities include supporting artists who live and/or work along the Fairmount Cultural Corridor (map) and whose art represents one or more of their community’s rich history, cultural traditions, identities and assets. We look to gather a diverse community of practice across cultural background, age, experience, gender and art practice.

For more information and to apply, go to: http://bit.ly/ExpressingBoston2014  You can also learn more at our information session on July 8th, from 5:30-7pm.

Many thanks to the Boston Foundation for their support for local artists and the ExpressingBoston Public Art Fellowship.

Public Kitchen Team Selected

We're super excited to announce our Public Kitchen art commission winners. We have an all-star local team, including Nadine Nelson of Global Local Gourmet along with Nerissa Cooney and Alexander Hage from Golden Arrows. Rounding out the squad is Aziza Robinson, who we're excited to have back at the Studio to coordinate art commissions and Studio events.

Keep an eye out for this crew! (From left: Alex, Aziza, Nerissa, Nadine)

Thanks to all of our commission entrants and finalists!

More William Forsythe

And we are feeling William Forsythe!

We saw this video at ICA Yvonne Rainer Post Modern Dance

I've Lived: Post-It Notes for Neighbors

image via candychang.com

Finnish designer Candy Chang’s installation in Brooklyn explores the price of housing, owner/renter mobility, and location. Over the course of one week and several rainstorms, Candy collected data on participants’ homes: their size, location, cost, and duration of occupancy.  She publicly displayed these before aggregating the data into infographics reflecting the city’s housing strata.

Her work yields potential avenues for our thinking about Life Lab to walk.  Where she sought to uncover a community narrative, she found a suitable format for engagement.  The Post-its contain much information, are accessible to anyone who has played Madlibs or done grammar homework, and are easily disseminated and logged.

Wanting to dig more deeply into the ramifications of housing costs, DS4SI’s job is to visualize the same data in real time, while maintaining a participatory format.  There are questions of exchange that we’d need to explore – how to solicit and instantly display the information (exchange between source and result) or how to productively interact with participants (an exchange of labor).

An obvious difference between Life Lab and I’ve Lived is the latter’s emphasis on history.  Chang looks at the occupants’ time spent in the neighborhood and the data yields lessons about mobility, suggesting that lifetime residents are considerably advantaged over renters.  Life Lab frames issues in a sense of urgency.  It says real people have x, y, and z going on in (y)our neighborhood, and publicly creating ideas together will help us intervene.

A successful deployment of Life Lab could bridge this difference if we give some thought to foregrounding the context in which we place the installation.

I’ve Lived was part of the Windows Brooklyn exhibit that paired artists with storefront windows in Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens June 14-22, 2008.

Mapping the "Scratch and Sniff" Experience of the City

image via nytimes.com

Check out this guy's map!

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/08/29/opinion/20090829-smell-map-feature.html?emc=eta1

Scents and the City
By JASON LOGAN
New York secretes its fullest range of smells in the summer; disgusting or enticing, delicate or overpowering, they are liberated by the heat. So one sweltering weekend, I set out to navigate the city by nose. As my nostrils led me from Manhattan’s northernmost end to its southern tip, some prosaic scents recurred (cigarette butts; suntan lotion; fried foods); some were singular and sublime (a delicate trail of flowers mingling with Indian curry around 34th Street); while others proved revoltingly unique (the garbage outside a nail salon). Some smells reminded me of other places, and some will forever remind me of New York.