New American City: Artists Look Forward Arizona State University Art Museum September 9, 2006 - January 7, 2007 Few models exist for the future of metropolitan Phoenix. According to urban planners, geographers, community leaders, economists and activists, what distinguishes the Phoenix area from other cities is its youth, astronomical growth, geographic limitations, desert environment and its active arts community. The city has a growing cultural infrastructure with artists living and working throughout the city. The downtown art scene draws thousands of visitors each month in addition to weekly art walks at the Scottsdale galleries, and contemporary art exhibitions open regularly at non-profit spaces across the Valley. Artists are playing an active role in envisioning the city's future, developing clusters of studios, co-ops and galleries and revitalizing neighborhoods in the process. New American City: Artists Look Forward will explore the role of artists and the art being produced in this context. What is the role of art and visual culture in the city's current development, and in its future? The exhibition will feature approximately twenty artists who live and work in Maricopa County. Their work demonstrates a marked level of experimentation and investigation, exploring media, processes and styles to comment on the here and now. The artists imagine the possibilities of art as we imagine our city. About Matt Moore's Farm Projects Over the past few years, in an effort to deal with, and better understand, what the eventual loss of the farm to development will mean to Matt and his family, the artist/farmer has been creating large-scale projects on his family farm. He has tried to visualize what it will look like and how it will be used once the family no longer has control of the property. His current project is his largest to date. The family has sold a large acreage of land that is now under development as a housing subdivision. As the property was being sold, Matt obtained the city plans for the site. On an adjacent property, which is still owned by the family, Matt is recreating, in crops, the entire subdivision, complete with homes and streets. Arizona State University Art Museum Tenth Street and Mill Avenue, Tempe, AZ 85287-2911 tel: 480.965.2787 e-mail: asuartmuseum@asu.edu Hybrid Fields Sonoma County Museum September 16 - December 31, 2006 ...Hybrid Fields presents socially engaged art that inhabits a hybrid space where art and life, art and agriculture converge. Through the use of humor, metaphor, fictive narrative, research, actions, and interventions, the artists explore the sociopolitical and cultural implications of agricultural transformations. Their work asks, where will we grow food in the future? And how? Can we preserve our agricultural past and feed a hungry planet? As new technologies expand our capacity for producing more food, faster, through mechanization, hybridization, and genetic engineering, these artists are questioning the environmental and social impact of such practices. Incorporating the roles of expert, designer, scientist, composer, citizen, facilitator, educator, and provocateur, these artists expand the context for contemplating such issuesÑincluding how far food travels from the field to the supermarket, the loss of unharvested crops, the conversion of farmland to housing, and the lack of biodiversity that commercial farming brings. The work is dialogic, lyrical, relational, and informational, and it includes installations, paintings, photographs, and performances designed to inform, provoke, inspire, compel, humor, and engage an audience in ways that traditional media do not. These artist practitioners who address real-world issues through an ecological lens see our food system as the frontier for our survival. They inform us about food miles, food justice, food cycles, and land use, and present artworks that demonstrate the principles of the international Slow Food movement, linking pleasure and food with awareness and responsibility. Around the world people are coming together to preserve biodiversity in crops and to promote locally grown foods. The work in Hybrid Fields provides a mirror for society to reframe motivations and desires and to invent new realities that incorporate aesthetics as a visioning tool. In the hybrid space where art meets life, we can view the fields of art and agriculture with a sense of invention and possibility. Sonoma County Museum 425 Seventh Street, Santa Rosa, CA 95401 tel: 707.579.1500 Matthew Moore: concerning development University of Southern Mississippi Museum of Art February 23 - March 18, 2006 "...Even though the fragility of societies worldwide verifies the earth as a tenuous platform for existence, expansion persists in landscapes that may not sustain continued, or even past development. With these realities we have to ask: how can humanity progress in an ecologically sustainable manner that can address more of our responsibilities, rather than our abilities?" University of Southern Mississippi Museum of Art 118 College Drive, Hattiesburg, MS 39406-0001 tel: 601.266.5200 "Regarding the Rural" MASS MoCA, North Adams, Mass September 24 - January 1, 2005 Among contemporary photographers, several are working to breathe new life into a distinctly American genre: rural photography. The act of documenting people and places in rural America is not new - during the New Deal era, government organizations such as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) sponsored photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to record the impact of the Great Depression on rural communities. The resulting photographs, which were widely distributed in newspapers and magazines, served as a way to "introduce Americans to America" as well as drum up support for New Deal rural programs. While the political and social context has changed, this tradition continues today in the work of William Christenberry, Matthew Moore, Julie Moos, Paul Shambroom, and Alec Soth, the artists that comprise MASS MoCA's newest exhibition Regarding the Rural. Mass MoCA 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA 01247 tel: 413.662.2111 e-mail: info@massmoca.org "reGenerations: Environmental Art in California" A Tender Land exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts October 9, 2004 - January 30, 2005 Opening Reception: Saturday October 9, Noon-6 pm Unlike their predecessors, whose works are most often proposals for large-scale environmental restorations or photographic documentations, a younger generation of artists creates sculptures or installations that often effect environmental change directly, or draw attention to significant transformations that have occurred in the environment. Many of these works are site-specific outdoor installations that draw attention to environmental disruptions that would otherwise remain invisible. (read more) Armory Center for the Arts 145 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91103 tel: 626.792.5101 e-mail: information@armoryarts.org Read more in the Exhibition Archive >