6.30.2010

Publisher swipes Alec Soth concept for book cover


Alec Soth, Peter's Houseboat, Winona, Minnesota, 2002

After chronicling Nike copping Christian Marclay's concept and AT&T borrowing Jeanne-Claude and Christo's style, here's another one from the ripoff files. It's every big as egregious, although closer to home. St. Paul-based photographer Alec Soth blogs that in 2006, the publisher Little Brown and Co. (owned by Hachette Book Group) contacted him about the possibility of licensing his 2002 photo Peter's Houseboat (above) for a book cover. They wanted to buy rights to the image and to photoshop in a child, and they provided a mockup of what the cover would look like (below left).

Soth declined. Now, three or so years later, while browsing at a chain bookstore, he discovered they'd knocked off the image anyway (below right).

"Now I hear that Winter’s Bone became a movie and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance," Soth writes. "I can’t wait to see the poster."

Coming in September: From Here to There: Alec Soth's America, at the Walker Art Center.

6.28.2010

6.25.2010

Send your wishes to artist Rivane Neunschwander


For Rivane Neuenschwander’s New Museum exhibition A Day Like Any Other, the Brazilian artist is inviting online and in-person visitors to write down their wishes, which will be printed on ribbons hung on the wall for museum-goers to take. On the installation Eu desejo o seu desejo / I Wish Your Wish (2003):
Visitors are invited to select ribbons printed with a wish to tie around their wrists. When the ribbon falls off, tradition has it that one's wish will be fulfilled. Visitors may write another wish and place it in the empty hole. This work of art is based on a similar practice that takes place at the church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim (Our Lord of the Good End) in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
Share your wish.

NYC backpedals on ghostbike removal policy


Ghost bike for Andrew Morgan, East Village NYC by Neil Fein, Flickr

Yesterday I linked up a story about how the New York Sanitation Department was planning to get rid of "eyesore" ghostbikes, the white-painted memorials to cyclists killed by cars. Via commenter Tskross comes news that they reneged, after pressure from the families of dead cyclists. The new policy, as reported by the Daily News:
"A memorial bicycle (ghost rider) will only be removed ... if the memorial bicycle meets the derelict bicycle criteria," the department said in a statement Monday. That means if the memorial bike is in bad shape - missing tires, handlebars, or pedals -- it still may be clipped from its post.
So the key is for families and friends to maintain memorial bikes: fair enough. As Tskross says, "score one for decency."

Where art goes, marketing follows: Maurizio Cattelan and Nike's 22-man foosball table


"We love playing foosball here in Italy. We usually play it 2 vs. 2," reads text at the website of Milan's Nike Store. "Well, at Nike Stadium Milan we play it 11 vs. 11." It's the "the largest foosball table on the planet," enthuses the blog Mademan, making the same claim Gizmodo did about a 22-person table Amstel fabricated a few years.

But leave it to advertisers to oversell -- and to think they came up with the idea first.

Beating them all to the punch by well over a decade is Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who in 1991 created a 22-player table, called Stadium. He was tweaking the spectacle of sports, but at times he injected other ideas as well. The photo above shows the table in use by a soccer team Cattelan formed. In the early years of concern over a spike in immigration in Italy, he recruited Senegalese men on the streets of a small town near Bologna and asked them to be on his team, which actually played tournaments ("[M]y guys were always losing. It was bad"). He writes that the team name, emblazoned on the front of uniforms he had made, is a Nazi slogan:
It's a fake company. It's a word that comes from the German. It means "go home." It's the only memory I have from the war because my father and my grandfather were always saying "rauss." And you can still see this word on the streets in Italy — with the " ." So it's a ghost that's still around.

6.24.2010

Photo series: Brenda Paik Sunoo's "Jeju Grannies of the Sea"


Brenda Paik Sunoo:
The women divers of Jeju Island (known as haenyeo) are unique and rare workers. For centuries, they have harvested seaweed and shellfish at depths of 20 meters, holding their breath for as long as two minutes without any equipment other than their rubber suits, masks and nets. The Korean women divers of Jeju Island have faced the tempestuous tides of history and struggle for economic survival. Their intimate relationship to the land and sea, their shaman beliefs, and their communal village life have kept them protected from modern pressures. In return, many of the haenyeo live a life of purpose and resilience well into their 90s. They illuminate a steady, fearless course and most of all, an enduring legacy.
Via Another Bouncing Ball.

Bits: 06.24.10


Julie Mehretu, Berliner-Plätze (detail); full-sized image

• Heart as Arena on artist Dread Scott's Tuesday performance in front of the NY Stock Exchange, where he burned money: "During the performance, a couple curious traders had come over to see the action. They seemed mildly amused. This was a joke, really. They obviously felt at home. After it was all over they went back inside for the afternoon and ushered the Dow down 148.89 points. Burn." Via Hyperallergic.

• Episode 2 of Bravo's "Work of Art" in animated-GIF form.

• Among the revelations in Tyler Green's series of interviews with retired photography curator Weston J. Naef on the Corcoran's Eedweard Muybridge exhibition, the belief that many works attributed to Muybridge weren't actually shot by him.

• A Q & A with Sam Wainwright Douglas, director of Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio, the late great architect whose work combined a commitment to the poor and to aesthetics. The documentary screens for free at the Walker on July 1.

• Calatrava reveals plans for new Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro.

• Artist Eine does the entire alphabet, one letter at a time, on London storefront shutters.

• Dubbing them "eyesores," New York's sanitation department says it plans on removing ghost bikes -- memorial bikes painted white and chained to posts near sites where cyclists have been killed by cars -- due to a "handful" of complaints. A public hearing on the topic is scheduled for July 20.

• "Replace ad space with graf space": Here's how to have your graffiti art projected across Europe via digital display.

• Minneapolis exhibition: Guillermo Kuitca: Everything —Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980-2008, opens Saturday at the Walker.

• New York gallery show: The Mass Ornament, curated by Minneapolis' John Rasmussen (Midway Contemporary Art) and including artist Jay Heikes, David Zink Yi, Gebi Sibony and others. June 25–August 13 at Gladstone on W. 24th.

A gallery of 18th-century Japanese monsters.

Wendell Berry withdraws donation of his papers to university over Big Coal ties

Poet Wendell Berry is ungifting his writings to his alma mater, the University of Kentucky, over its plans to name a basketball players' dormitory after the coal industry. Said Berry, who taught at the university:
“The University’s president and board have solemnized an alliance with the coal industry, in return for a large monetary ‘gift,’ granting to the benefactors, in effect, a co-sponsorship of the University’s basketball team. That — added to the ‘Top 20’ project and the president’s exclusive ‘focus’ on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — puts an end to my willingness to be associated in any way officially with the University.”
Read Berry's "How to be a poet"

6.22.2010

Paired: BP graffiti and Huang Yong Ping's Amerigo Vespucci


The way this anti-BP graffiti in Chicago extends from the wall to the ground and forms the outline of the United States reminds me of Huang Yong Ping's sculpture Amerigo Vespucci, which does the same thing. Of the latter work, Huang wrote:
An Italian-bred bulldog, the Neapolitan mastiff (mastino napoletano), is used here as a metaphor for Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian who documented the discovery of the American continent and after whom America was named. This bulldog’s urine forms the geographical outline of America in an instantaneous and accidental way. Here the line between the wall and the ground represents the world’s longest straight border (the United States–Canada border). Its fluidity implies extensiveness and overflowingness. It is an example of all “limits” and “borders.”

6.21.2010

"I blame everyone for everything": Teabagger street art?


GammaBlog finds this bit of street art, a filled-in version of the Office of Blame Accountability's form, which seems politically appropriate, given the shotgun-like ire of some in the political realm these days.

Bits: 06.21.10


Graffiti by Homer in Kiev via Rebel Art

• Despite the efforts of righting hardliners, The Cove, an Oscar-winning hidden-camera documentary about dolphin hunting in Japan, will screen at six theaters starting July 3, with 16 more venues to be added later. Here's the trailer.

• Via Unbeige, news that the new Transformers movie will be filmed at the Calatrava-designed Milwaukee Art Museum.

"I M Pi" graffiti.

• Bad at Sports interviews artist Mark Dion.

• RIP Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer Jose Saramago and Sudanese activist and former NBA player Manute Bol.

• Graffiti du jour: Posterchild has been doing "Indian Head" stencils, based on the iconic old TV test pattern.

• Minneapolis exhibition: Ordinarily Here, a group show featuring artist Jenny Jenkins' embroidered gang tags, at the Weisman through Oct. 10. [Review]

• Buffalo exhibition: The Art of War, featuring Trevor Paglen, Walid Raad, Martha Rosler and others who address "global conflict through conceptual art," at CEPA Gallery through Aug. 22. Buffalo Rising offers a preview.

• Ridgefield (Conn.) exhibition: Fritz Haeg: Something for Everyone, which aims to reconnect "people with people, and people with plants and animals," Jun. 27, 2010–Jan. 2, 2011, at The Aldrich. More info here.

• Via GOOD, a PSA for Ghost Bikes.

• At the International Whaling Commission meeting in Morocco, officials weighing whether to lift a 24-year whaling ban hear evidence that whales and dolphins "can feel and suffer as humans do."

• As BP CEO Tony Hayward spent the weekend at an elite yacht race in England, the AP reports that the company has paid fewer than 12 percent of claims filed by victims of the BP oil spill.

6.20.2010

Graffiti: "fu bp"


New guerrilla stencil on the Krog Street tunnel in Atlanta reads "fu bp." CNN guy in ominous voice: "The question is: Is it obscene graffiti defacing property or angry protest art?"

6.17.2010

Bits: 06.17.10


Ai Weiwei's Field at Art Basel, 2010, via Art Documents

• Curator-critic Hans Ulrich Obrist's The Gold of Their Bodies: a Conversation Before Death, featuring his conversation with artist Ashley Bickerton, to be illustrated as a graphic novel. Drawn by Ignacio Noé, it depicts the pair as they work their way through "the red light district of an anonymous Eastern metropolis."

• London street artist Robbo says he isn't Banksy. That's because this 89-year-old grandmother is. Also: Banksy's iconic rat-with-suitcase stencil on a meter box is stolen in Australia.

• The New York Times' look at freelance curators in Europe highlights friends Max Andrew (formerly of the Walker) and Mariana Cánepa of the Barcelona-based "curatorial office" Latitudes. Thanks, Kemi!

• Utne on dissident art in Zimbabwe.

ROLU's Matt Olson curates a selection of artists for Culturehall: Maryanne Casasanta, David Horvitz, Sam Falls and Emilie Halpern.

• London exhibition: Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, Tate Modern, through Sept. 5.

• San Francisco exhibition: Clare Rojas: We They, We They, Museum of Craft and Folk Art, through Sept. 12. Also, at the Bolinas Museum (Calif.), Rojas' Together at Last, and Barry McGee's Leave it Alone, on view June 19–Aug. 1.

• New app: In conjunction with the Hirshhorn/Walker Yves Klein retrospective, an iPhone app of the same name, Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers.

Andy Kaufman on a Portland realty sign.

BP GOP tee.

6.14.2010

A tree grows in Chile's national soccer stadium


New York–based, Chilean artist Sebastian Errazuriz's Memorial of a Concentration Camp (2006):
A 10-meter magnolia tree is planted in the center of Chile’s National Stadium where dictator Pinochet in 1973 imprisoned thousands of political prisoners who were tortured and killed. After planting the tree, the stadium doors are open to the public as a park; offering a space to stop, look again, and remember. An impossible, cathartic soccer match played before 20.000 people, closes the project after a week of activity.
Via Rebel Art.

Bits: 06.14.10


Christoph Gielen, Untitled Arizona VII (2010)

Hall & Oates is boycotting Arizona over its immigration law, SB1070. Others joining the Zack de la Rocha–organized "sound strike": Los Lobos, Cypress Hill, Pitbull, Rage Against the Machine, Kanye West, Sonic Youth, Carlos Santana, Willie Nelson, Joe Satriani, Tenacious D, Shakira, Massive Attack.

• New York workshop and dinner: Cross(x)Species Adventures with Natalie Jeremijenko and Mirhir Desai, June 19 at Eyebeam. The event introduces "the use of molecular gastronomy in service of ecosystems design. Like the web 2.0 of the food systems, the Cross(x)Species Adventure Club develops participatory, DIY, and multi-platform food systems to improve environmental health and augment biodiversity ... where food is a medium of art, adventure, pleasure and agency." (You can see why I quoted rather than paraphrased that.)

• Audio: Bad at Sports interviews Creative Time curator Nato Thompson (who also curated a favorite of mine, the 2004 MASSMoCA exhibition The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere.)

• Video: Twin Cities Indymedia publishes an hour of new footage shot by filmmaker Iara Lee aboard the Gaza Freedom Flotilla during the recent attack by Israeli forces.

• Minnesota exhibition: Dean Ebben -- Trails and Parallels, at the St. Johns University Art Center, Collegeville, through July 22. (Installation shots here.)

• While Paddy Johnson gives props to a portrait done by Minneapolis' Miles Mendenhall on last week's episode of Work of Art, artist Ross Bleckner tweaks auctioneer Simon de Pury's comment that "in a split second I can tell whether a work of art is great or not." He cites the late Louise Bourgeois, who slogged nearly unrecognized in the arts until she was in her 60s: "De Pury should remember that some things happen slowly, and not all artists—or their work—can be recognized as 'great' or 'genius' in a split second. Art is about slowing down time, and thinking—neither of which television does very well." And: Jerry Saltz completes the circle of mediation.

• Minneapolis Institute of Arts director Kaywin Feldman to head up the Association of Art Museum Directors.

• The Wire graffiti du jour: "Omar's comming."

• Metallica's "Enter Sandman," the swing version.

Jerusalem stencil: "Soldiers aren't cookies"


Photo by Mekron, used with permission


These stencils -- which read "Soldiers aren't cookies" in Hebrew -- have been spotted in Jerusalem: Flickr user Mekron says he found the one above in central Jerusalem, while this one has a more specific ID of Hillel Street. Mekron didn't have more context for the work or who's behind them, but only says it's an antiwar stencil.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of the message. One Flickr user translates the text as "War isn't cookies." That is, it's not a cake walk, a piece of cake, easy as pie. But the more direct read is that, like cookies chewed up and spat out by a hasty ravenous monster, soldiers are victims of war, too. In spite of the fact that, as an institution, the IDF is one of the world's best-funded, most sophisticated fighting forces, the individual soldiers are, well, fragile. The sentiment brings to mind a speech by Haruki Murakami I often quote here. He used an egg and and a wall in a metaphor for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. One way to read the metaphor, he says, is that unarmed civilians are the eggs, while tanks, guns and white phosphorus shells are the wall. But he also offers a more nuanced interpretation:
Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others - coldly, efficiently, systematically.
Via @craftivista.

6.09.2010

Smoke, ghosts and money: Murad Khan Mumtaz's dollar-bill paintings



Works from Murad Khan Mumtaz's "Torn with fire" series, reproduced with permission from the artist

In Pakistani artist Murad Khan Mumtaz's series "Torn with fire," ghosts appear to materialize on the faces of U.S. dollars, bomb clouds expand to engulf the currency's face, and expanses of black or white blur out the intricate details of the bills. But while such imagery -- and interventions into the top symbol of American capitalism -- is decidedly political, the Lahore-born, Columbia University–educated artist was reluctant at first to make the kind of work he detests: sociopolitical art. In a fascinating two-part interview with ART on AIR's Peter Brock, he tells of how the haunting project came to be.

Long mastering the painstaking art of Persian and Indian miniature painting, he found himself applying tiny dots in a "meditative and almost an escapist exercise" to make "cloud forms." Then his professor, artist Kara Walker, tried to push him out of his comfort zone. "What embarrasses you in art?" he recalls her asking.

"What kept coming up is the sociopolitical," he said. "That's one thing I've been running away from and almost detest."

Through the project, which was on view in the just-closed 2010 Columbia MFA thesis show at the Fisher Landau Center for Art, explored ways to subvert the bills -- and the idea of political art that's so popular in the west -- and "make it more contemplative." His artist's statement says that "through the slow and disciplined application of tiny dots (pardakht) and lines (tipai) Mumtaz transforms the bills into uncanny objects whose ambiguous imagery is at once meditative and foreboding, nostalgic for a lost past and steeped in premonitions of losses yet to come."



In doing so, he navigates between modernity and tradition, melding an ancient, delicate artform with a symbol so of-the-moment it's called "currency." He says he was also thinking about instability, in his personal life and in the economy, while working on the series, and his imagery of ghosts, smoke and clouds reference that: they're "almost invisible, neither air nor water, but something in between."

On one hand, he tells Brock you have bills, something "as material as you can get... and yet you have that technique and that image which sorts of transcends that, transcends materiality."

There's another tension as well, between lasting beauty and the crass immediacy of commerce: "Beauty with a capital B being something that is timeless... When you say the word 'dollar bill' it becomes something very sort of base. And yet, the bill itself has been made so beautifully."



And this is where he gets even more political. In the exacting process of miniature painting, he came to realize the deeper significance of the dollar bill as medium.

"It started out just making the cloud form and using one's own technique on the bill, then I realized that the dollar bill itself has such a history of its own, and such a weird history which is linked with imperialism, with white supremacy, with a sort of white power. Those things started to seep in unconsciously."

Implicit in that history is war, he adds. Mumtaz says he's influenced by two Lebanese creators, artist Walid Raad and writer/filmmaker Jalal Toufic. Toufic, he says, writes that ghosts are "the aftermath of war, but anyone who has gone through war is, in a way, a ghost or is part of the undead. They have already seen death. And people who carry out war, and people who drop the bomb, for example, that person is also part of the undead."

"That became very fascinating for me, because, you know, the dollar bill itself is a driving force for war, for imperialism. And that connects back to the notion of the ghosts appearing out of the dollar."

Bits: 06.09.10


From the series Mimesis, by '70s photographers Barbara and Michael Leisgens

• Seriously, click here to see the entire Leisgens series. I love it.

• Damien Hirst: jeweler and deck chair impressario.

• Australian activists rally to protect a Keith Haring mural, a 1984 piece in Melbourne that's reportedly the world's last remaining large-scale piece painted entirely by Haring's hand.

• The LA Times' Christopher Knight eviscerates Sarah Jessica Parker's new show "Work of Art," which debuts on Bravo tonight, as "vacant television piddle." (It features Minneapolis artist Miles Mendenhall.)

• Tyler Green writes up the Minneapolis Institute of Arts' acquisition of the arresting 2008 Doug Aitken video work, migration, a 24-minute film made of footage of wildlife (an owl, fox, and deer, among others) apparently coming to grips with finding themselves in banal hotel rooms. It's on view through Aug. 1 in the excellent exhibition, Until Now: Collecting the New (1960-2010). Also worth seeing in the show: Swoon's mixed-media piece, Alixa and Naima (2008), which depicts the Brooklyn-based street artists of the same name.

Tarkovsky's Polaroids.

• Chris Jordan's E. Pluribus Unum (2010), a 21-square-foot laser etching on aluminum that "depicts the names of one million organizations around the world that are devoted to peace, environmental stewardship, social justice, and the preservation of diverse and indigenous culture." Via Provisions Library.

• Chicago has a new arts journal: 127 Prince.

• Video: BP spills its coffee.

6.04.2010

Bits: 06.04.10


Hong Seon Jang, Forest (2010), tape on black chalkboard

• Designer Emmet Byrne blogs on former Bogota mayor Antanus Mockus, whose governing style was creative, open and poetic. Said Mockus, who was defeated in his re-election bid last week: “While I was the mayor of Bogotá, I received occasional death threats. Therefore, I had to use a bullet-proof vest. I made a hole right where my heart is. The hole was in the shape of a heart. I believe this kind of gesture, gave me indeed more protection.”

• RIP Tobias Wong: The 35-year-old designer who gave us a Karim Rashid book shaped like a pistol, designer air sickness bags and a gold-plated McDonald's coffee stirrer, died Sunday of an apparent suicide. His prankish critiques/celebrations of consumer culture seem to be embodied in his tattoo. He made permanent an aphorism signed on his forearm by Jenny Holzer: "Protect me from what I want." Via Emmet.

• While artist Marina Abramovic told the Wall Street Journal she was "completely destroyed" by her just-completed 736-hour epic endurance/performance art work, she tells MOMA's PS1 blog what she learned about her body in the process: "I learned that in your body you have so much space and you can actually move inside that. There is space between organs, there is space between bones, there is space between atom and cell, so you can actually start training yourself to breathe a kind of air into that space. And then I understood that the pain is actually not having space, it’s when organs and everything press inside, so by breathing air you can make the pain just disappear."

• Artist Ap Verheggen's scultpure atop an Arctic iceberg -- created to "demonstrate the inextricable link between climate and culture and visualize what the consequences of that link" -- has melted to such a degree that the ice chunk has sunk.

• Minneapolis exhibition: What Remains, featuring work by Jill Auckenthaler, Mara Baker, Margaret Pezalla-Granlund, Kathleen Griffin, Leslie Kelman, Hong Seon Jang (whose work is pictured above), Wil Natzel and Scott Nedrelow, opens June 5 at the Soap Factory.

• Washington exhibition: In honor of self-taught artist Jimmy Mirikitani's 90th birthday this month, a link to the Smithsonian show that features his work, The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942-1946, on view through Jan. 30.

Half Letter Press' publication of a limited edition booklet on the late Minnesota-based conceptual artist Don Celender reminded me of his various projects, from baseball cards featuring artists to his dying request -- that, at his memorial service, friends read from his book Mortal Remains, in which he asked 400 artists and writers what they want done with their remains after passing away. A sample: New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast said she wanted her body compacted into the shape and volume of a bouillon cube (if you have trouble with the how-to part, check with the military, she suggests) then buried in the ground beneath a small tombstone marked with a Minnesota-appropriate epitaph, “Don’t mind me.”

• In case you haven't heard such a thing today, the sound of a toilet flushing: Yoko Ono on Ubuweb.

Wilco sponsors Little League teams.

BP's new ad campaign


As BP rolls out more ads about its efforts to clean up its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, parody ads abound, from Greenpeace's contest to a new spoof that likens the company logo to a certain bodily orifice. But after viewing The Big Picture's profoundly affecting images of oil-choked birds in the Gulf, I figured a more sober, minimal (and quite obvious) approach was in order.


Video: Spiral Jedi


A clip of Robert Smithson running on his famed Spiral Jetty gets a Star Wars update, a digitally added light saber. YouTube user terminalsite writes:
I asked Teddy to "Star Wars Kid" it for me. Just as the original footage of a kid caught on video goofing around with a broomstick was altered by countless anonymous animators by added light sabers effects, Teddy has inserted a light saber into Smithson's hand.
(Thanks, Jake!)

6.03.2010

Bits: 06.03.10


Mural by Liqen, via Sweet Station

Supertramp, London-based art group Lehman B's mobile art project, "explores the practicality of microsized living and downshifting as urban flowmads." Photos of the project here.

• A Detroit gallery that removed a site-specific Banksy work, possibly without permission, is getting threats. Bad at Sports reports that the piece, stenciled on a cinderblock wall at the former Packard plant, has "now been removed from display after the gallery & work had been reportedly threatened with defacement or destruction (I would imagine the gallery more then the work)."

• On Ubuweb: Video of Francis Alÿs' 2002 project When Faith Moves Mountains.

• One of Todd Lamb's Notes from Chris, left on a public wall: "MEET ME AT THIS SUBWAY STOP TOMORROW AT 4PM IF YOU WANT A QUEEN SIZED MATTRESS. WE'LL GO TO MY MOM'S HOUSE AND GET IT. IT'S BRAND NEW. EXCEPT FOR SOME CAT HAIR. BRING A COUPLE OF BUCKS FOR SOME GATORADES OR SNAPPLES OR SOME FRITOS. -- CHRIS"

Trailer and interview: Bas: Beyond the Red Light, Wendy Champagne's documentary about Indian girls freed after being sold into prostitution, features the girls practicing bhangra dance and discussing their lives.

• Via Flavorpill, a tour of the Mojave Air and Spaceport, presumably the same airplane graveyard where artist Huang Yong Ping found the fuselage that became his Bat Project IV.

• Jonah Brucker-Cohen on the new generation of media art for iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch.

• Minneapolis exhibition: We Work Here, "an exhibition about art, economics, and community," opens June 5 at Intermedia Arts.

Call for workshop proposals: As part of Futurefarmers' Minneapolis residency, the Walker's looking for artists/hackers/tinkerers to create a two-day workshop around the notion of "voice box." Deadline: June 25. And, oh yeah, the Walker's Open Field launches tonight.

• The latest from Princess Hijab.

• Your moment of Louise Bourgeois singing 22 children's songs.

Observatory turned into R2-D2


Student pranksters at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., converted the school's Goodsell Observatory into the Star Wars droid recently. But little harm done: everything seems to be draped, so no defacement occurred.

Via MinnPost > Julio Ojeda-Zapata.