No Longer Empty

Through March 2012 the Children’s Museum of Art (CMA) asks the public to send in their photographs of art in public places to a public online photo library. The library is a piece of CMA’s current exhibition Make Art (In) Public. The project asks individuals to see themselves as artists and the photos they produce as art. Make Art (In) Public encourages contributors to publicize their interactions with art as an expression of personal taste and as an act of conscious viewing. 

The artist JR established a precedent for Make Art (In) Public with his internationally recognized project INSIDE OUT, a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. With the help of JR and the INSIDE OUT team, the public is encouraged to become artists: first by expressing themselves in front the camera, and second by pasting the large poster of their image on a public wall. Not only are our photos shared with the community where the posters are pasted, but also they are uploaded to the website with the thousands of others, and people from around the world can view this photo wall. Public Art, created by the public and publicly shared worldwide via the Internet. 

The CMA Exhibition Make Art (In) Public highlights the work of several artists who create and have created public art, like Keith Haring, Christo and Jean-Claude, Tranquil Yanqui and others. The exhibition is carefully curated to make children see and appreciate the various forms of art and styles of Public Art. The exhibition is meant to inspire youth and is a launching point for a personal exploration of for making public art. As part of this exhibition CMA invites us to participate in their public art exhibition of public art photos Make Art (In) Public. This site is an archive of public art and exposes people to images that they would not have access to seeing unless they were in the same place. This project promotes the conscious act of looking, because it invites us to look out our surroundings more closely and capture what we see. It promotes individual artistic expression, because the inexperienced artist makes creative decisions about subject and composition. The photographer artist captures a moment or time with lens of a camera, documenting his or her experience and ultimately our culture. And Finally this project promotes connection, because these images are shared posted and shared worldwide. Art is everywhere and we along with CMA encourage you snap a shot photo next time you see a piece of public art that grabs you. Instead of saving it for yourself as a keep sake, go to www.makeartinpublic.com and make art public.

The spirit of the project compliments No Longer Empty’s mission to redefine public art through temporary site-specific exhibition. However, our methods diverge. For Make Art (In) Public, the exhibition sites are collected and viewed on individual screens. At No Longer Empty, artists, educators, scholars and the public gather onsite to create a cultural/ educational hub around the site and the art within. Sure, at No Longer Empty there is (plenty of) behind-the-scenes online work, but the success of our exhibitions depends on the physical presence of individuals. The question is then---what does each method have to offer the other? No Longer Empty hopes to learn from the success of Make Art (In) Public when we work on digital/physical synergies in future exhibitions.

By Audrey Wachs and Julie Bell