Public Art Lab

I am creating an art institution that creates a new relationship between the public and the artist.  There are many other institutions that exist within NYC, but not like this one.  For instance, Art in General is a non-profit organization that helps produce new work.  Creative time is dedicated to public art.  There are also museums like Moma and the New Museum that exhibit high art.  This institution pulls these ideas into one place and introduces the public in a whole new way.  The public is now made part of the process, and the building can be seen as a laboratory for testing and producing public art.  The building is a giant canvas filled with voids and surfaces where artists are invited to create and test their ideas.

The public program has been divided into three zones: the pay galleries, the free areas, and the artist/education workshops.  The pay galleries help support the institution financially and will hold curated shows.  The free areas serve as attracting points to draw the public through the building so they will encounter the art and can be used as test subjects in artistic experiments.  The artist zones serve to unite the different groups of people in collaboration around the artwork.

The public will be drawn into the building by pulling the public park onto the site from the Chrystie side.  Along the way, they would encounter labs and voids, both testing grounds for new art.  These lab zones serve as connecting elements between the free people, the pay people, and the artists, themselves.

Museum of Translation

The act of translation is a complex but necessary process that is inevitably tied to questions of authenticity and agenda.  The Museum of Translation explores these complexities between a continuously rotating pair of languages that illustrate diaspora narratives.  Through a play of angled solids and voids, the two sides of the museum are negotiated by “translators” that frame a variety of understandings of translation as the visitor travels both through and between languages.  The experience of the museum should provide critical spaces for consideration of types of translation so that the two sides, though distinct, start to overlap and exchange through these areas of translation.

Below are select images from the project.

 

Translating Museums

 

The semester began with a study of museums.  How does a museum frame its information? 

museum study

abstract studies

site research

program diagrams

El Museo del Barrio