OPEN SPACE

……………………………………………………………"That bottle keeps its blink on its side red from horizon." Clark Coolidge………………………………..

Left: Kevin Killian, Adrienne Skye Roberts, Eric Heiman.  Right: Anu Vikram. MIA: Julian Myers

You can see they weren’t a thousand percent keen on having me take their picture when we all got together the first time to meet that pretty afternoon last April, but hopefully I will be forgiven for posting these now.  I want to say a million times THANK YOU,  & offer  STANDING OVATION to our fantastic first group of columnist-bloggers, whose official term now comes to a close: KEVIN KILLIAN! JULIAN MYERS! ADRIENNE SKYE ROBERTS! ERIC HEIMAN!  ANURADHA VIKRAM!

We couldn’t have been sure—I mean we, my colleagues and I  @ SFMOMA—what would happen if we brought in outside writers, asked them to write about  the Bay Area, and then more or less handed over the keys to the machinery. Museums just aren’t normally in the business of such figure-it-out-on-the-fly, and while I had a good idea of a brief for the columnists when we started, none of us—not the writers, not the museum—knew exactly what would fly & what might sink. The result—various, vigorous, intelligent, and dynamic conversation, including the many contributions of an ever-growing readership (thank you)—has been better than I could have imagined or hoped. I am very grateful to all the writers not only for their  fierce,  often funny, and always smart & deeply engaged writing, but also their grace & good humor while we hammered out some kinks technological and philosophical. I’d also like to thank my colleagues at the museum for like grace under pressure and for supporting the project so thoroughly.  (Probably more bumps in the road ahead. Just so you know.)

And I hope this isn’t the last we hear from these writers, either, and expect that it isn’t: the guest-columnists program is by rotation, and we’ll bring in a new group every few months, but alumni are encouraged to continue  writing if and as or when they wish, on into the future, as they see fit.

At any rate, onward! I’ll introduce you to the new columnists next week.

xxoo

SS

In response to my recent post “This land wasn’t made for you and me”, my fellow columnist, Anuradha Vikram asked me for examples of humanizing green building projects to compare to my critique of both the San Francisco’s Federal Building’s “public” plaza and the houses built by Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation (MIR) in New Orleans that I wrote about back in June. Over the past couple of days I’ve been trying hard to think of green building projects in the Bay Area that incorporate a functional shared public space.  Due to my lack of expertise in architecture, I’d like to open up Anu’s comment as a question for others to respond to:  What are good examples of humanizing green building projects in the Bay Area?

In contrast to building projects previously discussed, I’d like to briefly mention The Heidelberg Project started by Tyree Guyton in Detroit, Michigan. Back in 1986, East Detroit struggled to recover from the aftermath of the Detroit riots and faced a depleted economy and racially segregated neighborhoods. Guyton, a resident of Heidelberg Street since the age of 12, began cleaning up his increasingly abandoned and blighted neighborhood with an enclave of children who lived nearby. With the materials they gathered from the vacated residences and lots, Guyton and the neighborhood kids collaborated to create art environments and installations in the vacant lots, on street posts, and the facades of homes. The city of Detroit resisted, of course, demolishing a portion of the project in 1991 and then again in 1999.  However, The Heidelberg Project persisted and now operates as a non-profit arts organization, hosting a series of year round workshops and educational programs for schools and youth in the area.

Clearly, the context of The Heidelberg Project and the public plaza of the San Francisco Federal Building or MIR differ greatly and the comparison is a stretch, at best. However, I mention The Heidelberg Project as a way to push the possibilities of our collective spaces and as an example of a community-driven public art project that not only functions in the context of an urban neighborhood facing poverty and disenfranchisement, but employs the creative reuse of material and space—a thread that runs through many of my recent blog postings.

On that note, I look forward to hearing from Open Space readers about green building projects and public spaces in the Bay Area.