Fuse Magazine turns 35 this year, and to celebrate, its new edition reviews several decades of the most stirring authorship contributed to Canada’s foremost critical periodical on art, culture, and politics. Seventeen pieces from their archives, including interviews, features, and reports – including works by such writers as Deborah Root and bell hooks – as well as six artists’ projects, comprise an issue on solidarity and how it enables political action.
Highlights from this issue include:
Join Groundswell at the launch party, tomorrow evening, at Toronto’s Feminist Art Gallery (FAG).
Disclosure: Fuse Magazine’s new editor, Gina Badger, is a friend and fellow art worker.
(Susie Husted is a Boston-based social justice activist. Her relationship with the Foundry dates back to 2005 when the Foundry invited her and other Boston Social Forum organizers to speak at a social forum teach-in for NYC artists.)
New York City’s Foundry Theatre sets a rigorous standard for artist and activist collaboration. In 2010, they re-imagined their city through a intense series of public forums exploring topics from the policing of sex and gender to isolation and injustice in the workplace, and produced five new theatrical works this spring for their NYC…Just Like I Pictured It festival including an adaptation of the 1937 labor musical Pins & Needles in collaboration with FUREE, Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, running at Brooklyn’s Irondale Center through July 9.
Boston will have a chance to experience the Foundry’s unique theatrical vision this summer and fall with the production How Much is Enough: Our Values in Question, exploring the fundamental concepts of value in our communities. Partially inspired by reading Marx’s Capital, playwright Kirk Lynn, and Foundry artistic director, Melanie Joseph, have developed a production requiring an interactive audience for each rehearsal – giving the Boston public a unique opportunity to help create and shape the play before it officially hits the stage. Check the ArtsEmerson website for August rehearsal and September show dates. (For NYC folks, email the Foundry for July rehearsals in Manhattan.)
How Much is Enough is the Foundry’s third collaboration with Austin-based Kirk Lynn after 2006’s Major Bang, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dirty Bomb, and 2001’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, an adaptation of Marcus Griel’s cult classic of the same name.
Founded by Melanie Joseph in 1994, the Foundry’s productions have been critically recognized and honored with eight Obie Awards and three Drama Desk nominations for “Unique Theatrical Experience.” In 2000, The Foundry received the Ross Wetzsteon Obie Award for its “overall contribution to the Off and Off-Off Broadway community” as a theater that both “fosters new envelope-pushing work and that engages artists in the thorniest issues of the world we inhabit” and most recently received the 2011 national Peter Zeisler Award in recognition of “innovative practice and dedication to freedom of expression.”
Kirk Lynn is a playwright-in-residence at the University of Texas at Austin, and co-founder and Co-Producing Artistic Director of the Austin theater collective Rude Mechanicals. Kirk’s original scripts include Pale Idiots, Cherrywood, Requiem for Tesla, and El Paraiso: An Humiliation of Pleasures.
(Susie Husted is social justice activist inspired by projects exploring art and activism in the Boston area including those of the LPC and Rough Mountain Studios.)
Longtime Boston radical bookstore, Lucy Parsons Center, has purchased its own storefront after more than forty years of operation. They are moving on up to 358A Centre Street this summer.
Before this move, LPC had been at the same home for more than a dozen years. 549 Columbus Ave has seen hundreds of local, national and international radicals gather for organizing meetings, potlucks, book talks and much more over the years – and thanks to the building owner, the tradition will not stop once LPC moves to its new home in Jamaica Plain next month.
The building owner at 549 Columbus Ave has turned down offers from major chain stores, deciding instead to rent to Justin Francese and Danielle Connor from Rough Mountain Studios. The two collaborators are turning the site in a social justice and mission-drive artists collective. Planned as combined work, inspiration, collaboration and gallery space, 549 Columbus Ave has not seen the last of the radicals yet!
Joining Rough Mountain Studios at Columbus Ave are Quilted (Ben Mauer, web development), Golden Arrows (Nerissa Cooney & Alex Hage, graphic design) and Kelly Creedon (documentary photography & multimedia production), but space is still available for other interested artists!
An Open House for friends and potential collaborators will be Monday, July 11th, 6-9:00pm.
Contact Justin and Danielle at CreativeCoopSpace@gmail.com for more information!
Boston’s Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) recently joined with local youth to co-design Let’s Flip It, a campaign to interrupt social patterns that contribute to youth violence, specifically the violence that can occur when youth wear hats with team logos to rep their blocks.
Now in phase two of the project, DS4SI is seeking two artists or artist teams interested in flipping the dynamic of block-vs-block violence in Boston. Two separate commissions have been established for this summer, both of which involve designing interventions in direct collaboration and consultation with youth, the results from which will be deployed in public. Each commission will be awarded at $3,000, and the deadline for applications is June 20th, 2011.
Click the image above left to download DS4SI’s call for interventions performing or investigating a gesture, an idea, or a feeling that youth use, yet inherited from somewhere or someone else. Click the image above right to download the call for work that reimagines the message behind Letʼs Flip It.
Disclosure: The Studio is one of our closest allies in Boston, and we’ve worked together on many projects.
Nadia Plesner, the Dutch artist who Louis Vuitton has repeatedly sued for her depiction of the designer’s logo in her work, has prevailed in the most recent copyright infringement lawsuit.
The brand’s most recent offensive targeted Plesner’s painting, Darfurnica, with a €5000 a day fine for each day it remained on her website. The court’s ruling waives the fine and frees Plesner to show both Darfurnica and Simple Living, the other work that first caught Vuitton’s ire.
Eyeteeth has further details on the lawsuit, as well as the artist’s reaction.
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