There is no shortage of art critiquing humankind’s abuse of the earth today. While these works help illuminate the problem, they don’t actually solve it. But what if artists could use their know-how to engage in a practice that actually brings about real change?
That’s the theoretical question behind the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI), a group that hopes to crack 21st-century energy challenges by encouraging collaboration between artists and architects, scientists and engineers. On its website, LAGI states one of the simplest problems facing renewable energy today is the fact most residents don’t want an ugly (albeit sustainable) power plant within view of their homes. Founding Co-Directors Elizabeth Monoian and Robert Ferry explained in a 2010 essay on the subject:
[We] may be wise to question the ability of advances in renewable energy technologies to reach their greatest potential if their physical forms continue to exist entirely outside of aesthetic and cultural considerations. This question is reinforced by the fact that the process of harnessing renewable resources such as the sun and the wind often requires that energy generation facilities be located in more visible locations.
To tackle this challenge, LAGI throws a biennial design contest that invites interdisciplinary teams to submit workable designs for “public art installations” doubling as eco-friendly power plants. This year, participants were tasked with creating a design for Refshaleøen, a former shipyard in Copenhagen now experiencing urban regeneration. Three hundred proposals from 55 countries were submitted, and LAGI announced the winners last Friday. Here are some of the proposed designs.
The settlement comes after Tate prevented an artist who exposed sexual harassment by one of its largest donors from co-curating an exhibition.
Let’s be honest: On a best bathrooms list, no one wants to be number two.
The Newark Museum of Art Presents Jazz Greats: Classic Photographs from the Bank of America Collection
Photographers Antony Armstrong Jones, Milt Hinton, Chuck Stewart, Barbara Morgan, and more capture a breadth of legendary and local musicians and performance artists. On view through August 21.
Advocacy groups are pushing for a 5% royalty in resales, which would pertain even after the artist dies, in which case the funds would go to their estate.
This week, the Getty Museum is returning ancient terracottas to Italy, parsing an antisemitic mural at Documenta, an ancient gold find in Denmark, a new puritanism, slavery in early Christianity, and much more.
Art and photographs, publications from the 19th and 20th centuries, manuscripts, posters and more are set to cross the auction block on August 18.
The absence of an explicit framing of American art, in all of its diversity, as a visual culture of empire distorts and hampers our ability to understand — and reimagine — our social world.
The gap between the material body and the psychological one, which we all too often take for granted, is one of the underlying themes of Hiro’s exhibition.
David Rios Ferreira and Denae Shanidiin join forces to bring awareness to the plight of Indigenous women and girls, and LGBTQ+ individuals.
Metrograph’s series The Process features films that were either directed by Robert M. Young or made with the help of Irving Young’s postproduction facility.