Walker Art Center design director Andrew Blauvelt discusses the art exhibition Some Assembly Required, which was was shown at the Walker Art Center as well as the Yale Center for Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut. This excerpt was broadcast January 9, 2007 on 88.1 WESUfm, Middletown. In it, Blauvelt discusses the prefab movement, the process of curating, and the importance of mission integrity to small organizations.
Andrew Blauvelt on designing marketing materials:
“If you’re a small organization and you know what your mission is, then that mission needs to be communicated at every level. You really don’t have the luxury of missing something. You only have so many shows, you only have so many communications vehicles that you use.”
… At the Walker, we’re interested in innovative art, you know, innovation contains risk. If you’re not willing to fail, then it’s not really innovative.”
Back in the year 2000, I was asked to produce an event called the Hygienic Cabaret, an off-shoot of the Hygienic Art Show in New London. A group called the Guerilla Poets wrote me and said they were interested in performing. The Hygienic Cabaret is mostly local, and these guys were from Boston, but they seemed interesting so I offered them free beer and a couch to sleep on.
Many beers, a few broken plates, one drawn-and-quartered babydoll, and two standing ovations later, Janaka (who is an undertaker, in addition to being a poet) told me about his plan to revolutionize the American grieving process. A line from his poem elegy pretty much sums it up:
“The Leopard People of Sierra Leone carry their dead in a bag; whenever they feel sorrow, they cut off a piece and eat it.”
Eight years later, Janaka is still making waves with Black Ocean, a literary/multidisciplinary movement that is hard to define. Black Ocean just released Holy Land, a book of poetry by Rauan Klassnik. If it is half as good as Dear Al Qaeda, it’s worth a look.
As lifelong fan of live performance, and a more recent fan of podcasts, I could not be more excited that The Moth, a not-for-profit storytelling organization, has just launched a weekly podcast.
I am especially looking forward to hearing Malcolm Gladwell, who spoke eloquently (as usual) on the subject of race and I.Q. in a New Yorker podcast in December.
Since this is my first non-audio blog entry, I thought it fitting to highlight the first blogger I knew personally, Douglas Wolk. Douglas has been blogging at lacunae.com since circa 1999. He was the first friend I made on the internet, which was a little intimidating back then!
Douglas knows a zillion people, is very curious about a lot of things, and makes all kinds of quirky connections that he writes about to share with others. Through his blog and his friendship, he has directly or indirectly inspired me to: read comics, cook, write, and take pictures. His latest blog, Mincing Up the Morning, will no doubt introduce me to some new music and hopefully inspire me to be better about remembering birthdays (sorry, Bill!).
