Add-art.org, a FireFox add-on that replaces advertising on websites with curated art images, is featuring an exhibit curated by our friends at Groundswell titled “Our Fire and Our Tenderness.”

“Care is a way of asking questions about the longevity and influence of social movements. I’m interested in how we take care of one another, establish new social relations based around those values, and still maintain a culture that’s antagonistic. To say that in a more complicated way, maybe, it’s a way of addressing a set of concerns that focus mostly on the practical delineations of who is involved in the self-reproduction of social movements, but also involves some affective, and moral considerations.

This show focuses on care as maintenance, a very practical question about production and perpetuation, and one that only slightly touches on the questions about affect and morality. Here, the art itself is maintenance labor, or makes caring labor visible.

While these actions look similar and even seem banal, they offer unique questions about caring labor. Services United interrogates human-cultivated energy, in the form of electricity, to find the value of the work, and to dig deeper into the possible historical contingencies of how we do caring labor. Material Exchange’s DIY Coat Check sets an expectation of care, and asks what might happen when it’s unmet; how far caring mechanisms can extend or be extended is at stake in the process. Other artists include Environmental Services, Natasha Wheat, Mike Wolf, Jane Palmer and Marianne Fairbanks, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, and Hideous Beast.

This theme is also the subject of a forthcoming journal edited by the Groundswell Collective. [http://blog.groundswellcollective.com/journal/]”

Go to Add-Art.org to read more on David Morgan and Groundswell’s latest exhibit, and while you are at it, learn how to install Add-art.

Paper Tiger TV, a volunteer video collective that works to challenge the control of mainstream media, recently traveled to the Gulf Coast to document the aftermath of the devastating BP oil spill. The trip has so far resulted in interesting video clips and photos that speak to the importance of alternative, open information sources. David McDononough’s photo essay of the trip is particularly intriguing. It reveals powerful art produced in the area in the aftermath of the spill, and also demonstrates the power of art (in this case, his own photographs) in educating and informing the public.

Additionally, PPTV is producing a series of short videos about the spill. So far, they include a frank and informative interview with ocean conservationist Jean Michel Cousteau and a unique video project that streamed live video of the spill directly from the BP website for two days. PPTV reminds us of the importance of art in documenting our lives and the world around us.

Check out more of their work and get involved here.

On June 24th 2010, the all-American sneaker Keds announced its sponsorship of the Whitney Museum of American Art. In celebration of this sponsorship, Keds launch of the KedsWhitney Collection that will feature designs by celebrated conceptual artist Jenny Holzer printed on the iconic Champion® style shoe.

Holzer, who has exhibited work during the famed Whitney Biennial, is known for using words and political phrases in a range of media such as LED signs, stone benches, T-shirts and grand-scale light projections in public spaces. For the KedsWhitney Collection, she has created a fresh take on the Keds classic Champion® silhouette by drawing inspiration from her own designs. Jenny Holzer’s limited-edition styles will feature a phrase from one of her signature text series, Survival: PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT applied to the Champion®, expected to retail in the range of $70 – $75 per pair. The shoes will be available at select Bloomingdale’s stores nationwide and online. The good part: All Keds’ profits from Jenny Holzer’s line will directly benefit the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Usually a skeptic of corporate intentions behind cause-related marketing, it was odd to find myself raving in full support about this particular project. Most likely my admiration for Holzer’s work and the many visits to the Whitney have naturally made me an easy target for this particular product. Although I have never bought into any other cause-related marketing campaign before, I truly believe in this unique and utterly brilliant collaboration.

Given the three strong corporate players, this project has the potential to reach new audiences, promote Holzer’s work, generate funding for the Whitney Museum- and, most importantly, bring art into people’s everyday lives. I also enjoy the fact that having dozens of people boasting punchy Holzer phrases across the U.S.  fits neatly into Holzer’s overall artistic intent.

Keds will continue the collection in the Fall with artists Laura Owen and Laura Owens and Sarah Crowner, also two Whitney Biennialists. A portion of the sale profits will also go to the Whitney Museum. The more I think about the project, the more I like it. So, mark your calendars for the release on July 8th,2010 —I have a feeling these sneakers are going to be museum-worthy.

Toward the intersections of art, space and structure, and new media:

1) “Beyond the obsolete models of artist or author as genius and their fetish objects, what collective and collaborative practices are inventing new terrains and flows?”

In Autonomedia’s new book Critical Strategies in Art and Media: Perspectives in New Cultural Practices Ted Byfield, Steve Kurtz, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Claire Pentecost, and Peter Lamborn Wilson with the likes of Franco (Bifo) Berardi, Marco Deseriis, Rene Gabri, Brian Holmes, McKenzie Wark, Felix Stalder, and others gather to explore such questions.

2) “It was John Ruskin who claimed that the ‘measure of a city’s greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces.’ Looking around the London landscape – the 200-strong herd of fibreglass elephants currently roaming the streets, Banksy’s signature graffiti, the production line of fourth plinth sculptures – it’s hard to imagine the city even registering on Ruskin’s fastidious scale of “greatness’.”

In, State of the Art/Art of the State: Public Art in the UK Alexandra Coghlan explores the role of public art in a cities image and reputation.

3) “Two recently published books – Louis Moreno and John Alderson’s The Architecture and Urban Culture of Financial Crisis and Sarah Glynn’s Where the Other Half Lives – assess the damaging impact of financialisation on built environments and urban housing. In his double review, Owen Hatherley identifies architecture as a prime casualty of neoliberalism’s de facto Non-Plan.”

*Above Image: photo by Albert Renger Patzsch

The U.S. Social Forum begins this week. From June 22-26 non-profit organizations, artists, activists, socialists, anarchists, and capitalist social change entrepreneurs alike will be gathering from around the country in Michigan’s own Motor City. What will commence is a week of workshops, people’s assemblies, seminars, lectures, camaraderie, alliance building, and general social change brainstorming. Needless to say, Detroit will be serving as a venue for one of the largest change-makers assemblies to date.

The USSF website states, “The US Social Forum (USSF) is a movement building process. It is not a conference but it is a space to come up with the peoples’ solutions to the economic and ecological crisis. The USSF is the next most important step in our struggle to build a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history.”

With well over 20,000 people registered, the forum is looking to be a powerful, moving, and productive event.

Our very own Donald Russell will be attending this year as a Provisions Library delegate. As well, our friends at the Floating Lab Collective will be partaking in a plethora of events, interventions, performances, and workshops across the forum and the city proper, including the exchange of a Floating Lab currency with others at the forum, collaborations with poets for a projection project and a tentative ride on a grease powered bus through Detroit. Click here for Floating Lab’s Twitter feed, which will be updated frequently throughout the week on their highlights, thoughts, and adventures.

Provisions Library and Floating Lab will likely be attending many of the following workshops throughout the week:

Art Is Change: Art & Creative Practice for Cultural and Political Transformation

Reclaiming Place, Restoring & Sustaining Living Communities

Off Grid and Unplugged: Sustainable Lifestyle Choices & Renewable Resistance

Community Currencies, Microcredit, and Banks: The Banco Palmas Model

Ending Mountaintop Removal

Creative Think Tank

Creative Organizing: Using Puppetry and Performance to Move Your Campaign

And many more

Click here for a full list of workshops at the Forum.

If you are not able to make it to Detroit this year, you may be able to catch some of the action at the USSF audio and video feeds.

In response to the vast amount of poverty and struggle within Detroit, a direct result of capitalist failure and crises, Detroit itself has become a quickly transforming hub of grassroots and progressive social movements; however, there is much work to be done. One of the coolest aspects of this year’s USSF are the Work Projects and Work Brigades: “Leading up to the forum, hundreds of folks are coming in Work Brigades to support and work with Detroiters, from gardening to healing, screen-printing, exchanging organizing methods & retrofitting houses. During the forum there will be Work Projects where folks can go into the community and get their hands dirty making real-life, needed improvements here in Detroit which will last long after the Forum.”

As well, individuals will be able to partake in socially conscious tours of Detroit: “Detroit is a living historical center. We will be doing tours of the gardens of Detroit, labor tours, movement tours – there are so many ways to see this amazing place you will be in.”

Detroit, as one of the most economically devastated metropolises in this country, might not seem like an ideal canvass for positive thinking or change making at first glance; however, one needs to take note of, not a supposedly terrifying absence of capital flow, but the birth of social movements within Detroit, which have arisen in the chasm created by the abandonment of industry and the powers of capitalism therein, despite the concurrent struggle therein. Over the past couple of years, Detroit has slowly become a center of alternative community, economy, and green movements and is now serving as the birth place of a powerful and unified national force of social movement: another Detroit is possible, another world is possible.

Giving us a break in variation from the excessive, sometimes nausiating, dome of advertisment in New York’s Times Square, Creative Time has provided us with a thoughtful exhibit.

AT 44 1/2 Creative time presents video art on the HD screen in Times Square: “From June 15–July 15, Creative Time will present one video each by emerging artists Rob Carter, Graeme Patterson, and Allison Schulnik. The artists freshly mine the possibilities of stop-motion animation, which has been used in filmmaking for over a century. By constructing detailed microcosms of paper and clay, the artists in this series transport us into the kinetic worlds of a city experiencing exponential growth, a discrete memory of youthful contention, and a strange, alien planet. Simultaneously, the analog—and extremely time- and labor-intensive—process by which these worlds are rendered comes into stark contrast with the overwhelmingly digital landscape of Times Square.”

Click here for more on these pieces

Rob Carter, Metropolis:

Graeme Patterson, Grudge Match:

Above, Allison Schulnik, Forest

Tonight, tune in and join in on Basekamp’s weekly conversation on “plausible art worlds.” This week’s guests: The Machine Project. The Machine Project is a group of artists who run a non-profit artist’s space in L.A., dealing with the investigation of art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food.

T.M.A. is best know for their “A Field Guide to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art” – a day long exhibit of interventions and events within the context of the traditional museum.

If you are not in the proximity of Basekamp (Philadelphia), you can join via Skype. Skype name: basekamp.

Christian Boltanski speaking with Anthony Hayden-Guest:

I have had very few ideas in my life. And I think an artist must not have too many ideas. If you work in fashion design you must have a lot of ideas. If you are an artist you must repeat and repeat. But when you become older you are going to repeat in a different way. I think most artists have some kind of problem in the beginning. And we try to speak about those problems. We can do these in different ways but they are the same problems. I had one type of question when I was very young. I had another type of question when I lost my parents. And I also had another type of question becoming older. But if I had [only] three types of questions in my life that is enough. That’s a lot.

See Boltanski’s monumental installation, No Man’s Land,  at New York’s Park Avenue Armory through June 13th.

Yesterday, Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare launched a new public art project as part of Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth program.  It commemorates Britain’s colonial trading history in Africa and the East Indies as an opening for dialogue and celebration of today’s multi-culturalism.