CategoryNews

New kinds of canvases: Collaborative Community Canvas, Year 2

Ahead of this year’s project, I’m so excited to share the results from last year’s “Collaborative Community Canvas”—a second iteration of an invitation to create in a shared site, hosted as part of Yale School of Art’s Open Studios. In its second year, 2023, I added a paper wall to exist alongside the canvas one, and stretched snippets of last year’s...

Experimentation results: Collaborative Community Canvas, Year 1

Saturday, April 9 & Sunday, April 10, 2022353 Crown St. Courtyard, New Haven CTHosted as part of Yale School of Art’s 2022 Open Studios I work in communications at the Yale School of Art by day, and as part of our first public event since COVID—Spring 2022’s Open Studios—I hosted the first in a series of projects I’m calling the “Collaborative Community Canvas,”...

enabling art’s democratization through a reimagining of public space

An introductory note: The following is my artist statement, submitted as part of my PhD application in the winter of 2020 to the Institute of Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Now that I’ve successfully completed my first semester (😅), I’d like to share this text with you all here in an attempt to better contextualize the work I’m doing online through the Arrow...

Sculptural Infrastructure, Cosmic Altar: Nathaniel Donnett installs “Sub-woofer” for the city of New Haven

From the sidewalk, you might see it from across the street. It looks like it’s supposed to be there, a bit of straightforward wooden fencing that might contain an electrical box or some other public utility. But if you look closely you’ll notice the solitary panel in deep blue, and if you cross the street you’ll see the wood is patterned and that together, the whole of this object stands as an...

Fixing the story we tell ourselves: Why all Confederate monuments must come down

The summer before I started eighth grade, my family moved from a suburb of Hollywood, Florida to Fairhope, Alabama — and on my school calendar, Martin Luther King Jr. Day suddenly become M.L.K. / Robert E. Lee Day. I was a little confused, because didn’t these two historical figures stand in direct opposition to one another? Also, wasn’t this new guy technically a traitor? I could sense, but...

Kerry James Marshall’s “A Monumental Journey” Envisions a More Just America

Today Kerry James Marshall unveiled his largest public sculpture to date: a 25-ton, 30-feet-tall pair of stacked intersecting cylinders, its base inscribed with the names of the twelve Black lawyers—11 men and one woman—who established the National Bar Association in Des Moines in 1925. “The monumental journey is to become truly modern,” Marshall told ARTNews. “It is to escape the dependency on a...

Untouchable: Diana Al-Hadid’s “Delirious Matter” & #MeToo

When I visited Diana Al-Hadid’s Delirious Matter in Madison Square Park, it was hot, lunchtime, and crowded. Made more crowded by the fact that most of the lawns were off-limits, declared as “resting” and forming protective barriers around four of the six sculptures in the exhibition. I was just glad at least one of the three works I was really here to see—collectively...

About the Author

Lindsey

Lindsey Mancini is an arts accessibility activist and digital strategist studying the essential connectedness—or disconnectedness—between art and community.

She currently works in communications at the Yale School of Art, and teaches as an adjunct professor of contemporary art at Eastern Connecticut State University. In 2017 she earned an MS with distinction in the history of art & design from Pratt Institute, where she wrote her 80-page thesis on street art theory. Lindsey is currently pursuing a PhD in Visual Arts, Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.