ARTS FOR LIVING

Kim Förster & Common Room (Eds.)

Arts for Living offers an alternative, multifaceted history of an iconic cultural institution, The Abrons Arts Center. Located in New York City’s Lower East Side, the center was designed by Prentice and Chan, Ohlhausen, and built during the crisis-ridden 1970s as a community art center with educational facilities for a local low-income population. A rare interview with architect Lo-Yi Chan that elucidates the design process as well as essays by Alan Moore on the East Village art scene that arose out of the 1970s fiscal crisis and Kim Förster on pedagogical programs in architecture for youth in New York are accompanied by a color-photo essay by Jason Fulford depicting the current social life of the arts center. Designed by Geoff Han, and including original archival documentation, Arts for Livingis an important architectural case study of a public space designed to foster commu- nity life in a multiethnic, changing neighborhood.

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MARTIN BECK

An Organized System of Instructions

James Voorhies (Ed.)

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University sought to cultivate its position as an iconic modernist building, school and exhibition venue. Drawing on the exhibition histories and academic pursuits of the famed 1963 Le Corbusier building and both Martin Beck’s 2014–16 exhibition, Program, and the accompanying catalog, An Organized System of Instructions presents the explorative strategies—interventions, installations, events and displays—that the Carpenter Center used to build, organize and engage its audiences. The illustrated hardcover publication explains these strategies—or “episodes,” as Beck calls them—together with essays by Keller Easterling (scholar and professor of architecture, Princeton University), James Goggin (art director, graphic designer and professor, RISD), Alex Kitnick (art historian and critic, NY), James Voorhies (past Carpenter Center director and current dean of fine arts, CCA), on physical infrastructure, communication strategies, curricular principles, visitor tallies, building usage and welcome rituals in this critical reflection on the activities the Carpenter Center used to create an exhibition of education in both its pedagogical framework and public outreach.

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KORRIE BESEMS

A Contrived Past

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BosBus

Mobile Nature Reserve

Tom Matton, Vincent Kuypers and Wim Timmermans

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CARING CULTURE

Art, Architecture and the Politics of Public Health

Markus Miessen and Andrea Phillips

In an intensive series of texts from a symposium called Speculations on the Cultural Organization of Civility, this book examines changing political uses of the concept of care in democracies. Includes case studies of artistic and design interventions within health and social care institutions and broader essays and interviews from curators, artists, politicians, architects, and healthcare professionals. The first volume in the Actors, Agents and Attendants series.

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Cascoland

Interventions in Public Space – Drill Hall, Johannesburg, South Africa

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CITY [UN]ARCHIVED

Katharina Stadler & Data Chigholashvili (Eds.)

How do personal archives link public and private space, the individual and the collective? Do they contribute to a critical discussion of the future? city [un]archived is a project book of photographs, maps and writings assembled by artist collective Tibilisi InSights. Using the disputed borders and fractured identity and people of Tibilisi, Georgia, as their laboratory, the collective opens up the larger global discussion on the role of geography and systematization in shaping present-day city living. Each chapter is devoted to a project and essay by one of the members of Tibilisi InSights including artist/activist Tamuna Chabashvili, social anthropologist/artist Data Chigholashvili, architect Gvantsa Nikolaishvili, conceptual artist Katharina Stadler, media artist Lado Darakhvelidze, Nini Palavandishvili, Amsterdam-based artist Giorgi Tabatadze and Berlin-based artist Sophia Tabatadze. Photographs and texts running throughout the book are intended to be cross-referenced.

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CLUB DONNY #8

With an ever-increasing number of people migrating to metropolises worldwide, urban environments are the only known world for many. But as anyone who has ever watched a hawk nest on a New York City window ledge, or a coyote saunter down the streets of Beverly Hills would know, humans share a fair amount of urban space with the inhabitants—both flora and fauna—of the untamed natural world. Note: Please use ISSN:1879-7466-8 to order. Such is the idea behind Club Donny, a whimsical, thought-provoking bi-annual magazine functioning as “a strictly unedited journal on the personal experience of nature in the urban environment.” A full-color, unbound portfolio of photographs on folded pages (essentially a stack of double-sided A-3 posters), the format allows readers to flip through in self-determined sequences. Each issue also includes several texts relating to the Club’s romantic theme; the whole effect has the documentary weightlessness of one of Ed Ruscha’s early books. But more than just a magazine, Club Donny is also a website (www.clubdonny.com) that invites readers to engage by submitting their own work online and participating in a conversation about life, nature and the urbanized backdrop. The site’s best feature is a page of worldwide projects—gardens, green roofs, nurseries, museums, agricultural festivals and other websites—that involve people and nature.

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CLUB DONNY # 9

Samira Ben Laloua, Frank Bruggeman & Ernst van der Hoeven (Eds.)

Club Donny is a biannual magazine on the personal experience of nature in the urban environment. Contributors share views on common use and contact with the city and the associated perception of nature, offering a podium for observations, coincidences, stories and encounters to bring forward the incongruous meaning of nature. Club Donny# 9 launched as a part of the “Mapping Fleuvoland” project, which documents the re-wilding of a nature preserve in The Netherlands—from the Museum De Paviljoens, Almere. Includes 14 photographs in poster format, articles, and contributions from Annick Kleizen, Jan van Adrichem, Maarten Feenstra, Marcel van der Meijs, Petrovsky and Ramone, Wilfried Nijhof, Wouter Sibum, Yasuyuki Takagi and Yeb Wiersma, among others.

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COMMUNIST GUIDE TO NEW YORK CITY

Yevgeniy Fiks

The Communist Guide to New York City was first published in 2008 by author and Russian-born conceptual artist Yevgeniy Fliks to accompany his exhibition and walking tour. Its current re-release takes the form of an historical document presenting a fascinating collection of 76 images of buildings, public places and sites throughout New York City connected to the history of the American Com-munist Party beginning in 1919. Documented are buildings that housed various Communist Party headquarters, including their current offices on West 23rd Street, residences of important American Communists such as John Reed and W. E. B. Du Bois, sites where organized strikes and demonstrations took place and court houses where American Communist leaders were tried during the McCarthy reign. Accompanying images are detailed captions and maps marking the locations throughout New York City. Essays by Olga Kopenkina, Kim Förster, and Yevgeniy Fiks. An independent poster accompanies this engaging softcover catalog that reassesses socialist concerns as we again face extreme division between the rich and poor in America.

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