Photo by Roger Edwards

Photo by Matthew Pillsbury

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What you see in the video above is San Francisco-based Obscura Digital’s six solid weeks of content development, countless hours of production, and invaluable cultural awakening coming to life on the exterior surface of Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi.

This 17-minute long show of architectural projection animations replayed every 30 minutes for 5 days starting on November 29, 2011 to mark the 40th Anniversary of the United Arab Emirates National Day. The experience brought together over 1,000 people from all over the world and from the most modest to the most extravagant backgrounds—a very appropriate tribute to the values that Sheikh Zayed built the Mosque and the UAE on.

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By co-opting a time zone as its title, the multi-venued, collective event called Pacific Standard Time demonstrates its dynamic breadth and depth. Beginning with the post-war year 1945, it encompasses exhibits that span 35 years to 1980. The shows, exhibits, and events explore not simply art, but politics and social movements as expressed by activists, artists, community leaders, filmmakers, and musicians from different social, economic, and racial groups. The events are sited all over Southern California, from the  Watts Tower Arts Center in Downtown Los Angeles to San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art, East to San Gabriel Valley’ Pomona College’s Museum of Art and North to San Fernando Valley’s Cal State Northridge Art Galleries. The venues range from museums, art and film galleries to street festivals and music theatres.

The Lifted X (1965) image via pacificstandardtime.org

Yet viewing this merely as a series of aesthetic exhibitions trivializes its import and impact. Between 1945-1980, Los Angeles was the site for some of the most powerful, controversial, and historically significant social and political movements in the country, movements that reverberated far beyond its borders. Pacific Standard Time maps those dynamic political, social, and artistic expressions. From Black Power rallies and crackdowns by the police, to protests on Free Speech, nuclear power, and the rights of locally-born colored men and women, Los Angeles has been a location of profound change. Many of these exhibits document the movements that wrought those changes.

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We have heard it all before—more times than we’d like to, in fact—the recession of 2008 has changed the face of design forever. As in all great paradigm shifts, there are winners and there are losers, and in this brave new world, it seems, the winners are those who are willing to work together.

Design collaboration has seen a steady increase in recent years. Some companies are looking for a partner to share the burdensome costs of research and development; while others are clamoring to create new and exciting products that will differentiate them in a tight-squeezed market.  All are searching for ways to move beyond choices and patterns that have gotten them to the point they’re at now.

We’ve seen Nike and Maharam team up to crate a small run of premium material sneakers in 2010.  And this September, socialite Lilly Pulitzer and fabric producer Lee Jofa announced a new textile collection they created together.

But while these and similar partnerships have been mostly about creating appealing new products, one new collaborative effort has stood out among them, simply because it created a new product category: roller shades that bring fine art into a room.

Just last year Hunter Douglas Hospitality and Farmboy Fine Arts came together for a new endeavor: turning a basic window shade into the focal point of a room. Read more…

Nineteen Rooms for September 11, by Jill Magi; part of InSite: Art+Communication

In our September issue, we closely consider the task of memorializing both Ground Zero, and the events of September 11, 2001. Philip Nobel wonders if the official memorial at ground zero sufficiently addresses the memory of the event, while a photo essay documents the DIY and ad hoc monuments around the city—raw expressions of New York’s grief.  But for the tenth anniversary of the attacks, institutions and individuals are finding their own ways to explore and come to terms with the memory of the traumatic event:

Ten Years After 9/11: Remembrance and Reconciliation Through Poetry, by Poets House; part of InSite: Art+Communication

InSite: Art+Commemoration
Through October 11, New York
The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council invited artistic and community response to a decade of recovery and change in Lower Manhattan. You can find their listing of performances, poetry, and ideas on their web site, which also acts as a repository of some of the artistic works. Read more…

As the white winter sun poured into Gaspar Saldanha’s cloud-level window in Manhattan, the grandson of Paulo Werneck, artist and artisan of mosaic to Brazil’s most iconic architecture, the younger designer told the story of his famous relative. As he talked, I was soon diving like a Minoan mosaic swimmer into a warm azure and royal blue Paradise.

Paulo Werneck, the man credited with inventing Brazil’s Modernist mosaic aesthetic and re-introducing the art to his country, brought lightness and spatiality to architecture, as did Oscar Niemeyer who often collaborated with him. The two notably introduced playful and bright expressions into crowded, industrial urban environments, inventing new definitions for public buildings unseen before.  Werneck’s aesthetic was informed by both nature and technology: undulating underwater and air currents and clouds like you’d see in “The Jetsons” intersect the modern geometric art influences of Calder. Like Corbusier, Werneck was a painter first and so the language of impressionists, the pointillism of Seurat, the lyricism of Picasso, the pastels of Puvis de Chavannes, and the magic of Dubuffet were all channeled with a heavy dose of Brazil’s unique flavor to help define the country’s modernist movement from the 1940’s through the 1960’s. But the artistic sensibility of Latin  American  social movements are at play here too.

Unfortunately for most of us, the South American mosaic tradition of the Mayans and Pre-Columbian Aztec masks are excluded from our visual memory of mosaic. We see the 4,000 year history of the medium as a time-lapse mosaic of Euro-centric images, patterns and scenes from Egypt, Byzantium, Greece, Roman, Renaissance cathedrals, Islam and more recently from Gaudi to outsider artists, Raymond Eduardo and America’s Isaiah Zagar. Werneck’s revival of this tradition and the current revival of interest his work, may well help us to flesh out that history. Read more…

Individuals send messages about themselves that they feel are important and set a mood through the way they personalize their homes – they make certain sorts of experiences more likely than others. Organizations also convey information and produce psychological effects through the design of public environments. HOK’s New York office is a place that works because it effectively uses its design, and particularly its art collection, to encourage desired conversations.

Photo: Eric Laignel

The art pieces and photographs used throughout the HOK office represent applied branding, while the views of exemplary architecture framed by the classic modernist windows in the space are integral to the office’s design. All three elements matter and have a significant influence on visitor experience, but the art and photos are the focus of this discussion.

During an interview, Rick Focke, the Director of Interior Design at HOK and lead designer for the New York office, explained in detail how the office’s designers used 8 to 9 pieces of purchased art and a collection of photographs and models from client projects, to put viewers in the mood for productive, thoughtful conversation. The art intrigues viewers and leads them to wonder what is being expressed in the piece, as HOK wants to inspire visitors of its offices to be inquisitive, alert, and questioning. Read more…

The work of Sheila Hicks is a feast for more than the eyes. As writer Véronique Vienne found out in writing a feature article on the artist for Metropolis, Hicks’s brilliantly colored loops, tangles, weaves, and tassels produce an instantaneous, visceral reaction. You can sample the splendour of the textile installations on pages 78-85 of our June 2011 issue, or here. But we couldn’t resist offering up some more images of Hicks’s art, and a video of her speaking in her characteristically intuitive way at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum last month:

(click on images to enlarge)

Trapeze de Cristobal (1971) (detail)
Wool, linen, cotton; 129 15/16 X 783/4 inches
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Read more…

The 2011 TED Prize-winner is the artist who goes by the tag, JR. His enormous photographic installations obscure the facades of buildings, overlay streets, and sometimes collage to cover clusters of buildings in one massive broken image.

While some shy away from calling his work “street art,” I don’t see any shame in this—especially given the clear social justice objectives inherent in the imagery. It presents the faces, literally but never as cliché, of invisible and overlooked peoples. In this way, it is street art in the best sense of the term. You walk into the street and there it is and it has something to tell you. It takes buildings and turns them into indexes of shame, embarrassment, nobility, hope—whatever you might associate with the everyday struggles of the displaced lower-classes. Read more…

It is going to be a while before Jean Nouvel’s celebrated National Museum of Qatar blossoms in the desert. But in the meanwhile, an architecturally modest museum with a far more ambitious mission is ready to open its doors for the New Year. The Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art aims to be a new pan-Arab center for culture and creativity, showcasing the work of modern artists from the region.

The Mathaf, pronounced MAT-haff and simply meaning “museum” in Arabic, is the third large museum project to be announced in Qatar in recent years. The expansive Museum of Islamic Art, which opened in 2008 in a building by I. M. Pei, is concerned with history – its collection dates from the 7th to the 19th centuries. Jean Nouvel’s desert rose will mostly be a Qatari exercise in national pride. The earliest pieces in the Mathaf’s collection, however, date to the 1840s. This is a museum primarily concerned with Arab modernity, considering through art some very complicated questions of identity, values and geography. Read more…