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...
The First of For Freedoms’ 50 State Billboards Debut in Missouri & Maine
Thoughts & Prayers Expected: Matador’s ‘Gun School Zone’ Sign Removed Within Days in Denver
“Beyond the Streets” Goes Beyond Museums: Curator Roger Gastman on Exhibiting Independently
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...