Roundup: Dallas urbanism and the shootings, a graffitist apologizes, essays on gentrification
A city’s urban history as a backdrop for social unrest. An artist rethinks an iconic civil rights flag. And a memorial for a key L.A. patron brings out the art world. Plus: Orhan Pamuk on museums, swiping left and right for art, building the border wall as sculpture and reimagining L.A.’s freeways as gardens and air filters. Here’s the Roundup:
— Architecture critic Mark Lamster looks at how downtown Dallas became a crime scene — and how the layout of the city has reinforced racial and economic inequity. While Citylab tracks the city’s segregation and violence, borne out in historic issues such as policing and housing.
— In the early 20th century, the NAACP in New York would hang a flag from its building any time a man was lynched. Now artist Dread Scott has updated it for 2016, planting a flag outside a Manhattan gallery to mark police killings of blacks.
— Gemini G.E.L. co-founder Elyse Grinstein died last week. Her raucous memorial on Friday afternoon brought together the L.A. art world.
— Andre Saraiva, known as Mr. A, the French graffiti artist who tagged up a boulder in Joshua Tree National Park, has expressed contrition over painting on protected landscape.
— The journalistic spat over Jean-Michel Basquiat’s death. (Weisslink)
— Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize laureate, issues a plea to museum leaders to create “small and economical museums that address our humanity.”
— New York’s Frieze art fair shrinks by a day. Possibly related: Artlist, the Internet service for secondary market sales, has shut down.
— A sound installation designed by NASA will land at the Huntington in San Marino this fall. This looks like it will be very cool.
— A pair of artists have built a piece of wall on the U.S.-Mexico border — and sent Mexico the bill for $14,635.42 to cover their materials and labor.
— From the Department of Wild Stories: A prison farm, some LSD and the disputed landscape that artist Peter Doig says he never painted.
— Thinking about how to preserve video games for posterity.
— Akira Kurosawa’s hand-painted storyboards.
— San Francisco’s Galería de la Raza is denied a long-term lease on the space it has occupied for more than four decades.
— London Mayor Sadiq Khan says no additional public funds will be used on the Garden Bridge — throwing the future of the much-ballyhooed project into question.
— Kelefa Sanneh explores the urban phenomena of ghettoization and gentrification — and how one can condition can slip into the other. Some of this touches on themes explored by Justin Davidson in a 2014 piece that asked, “Is Gentrification All Bad?” All of this gets at the challenge of creating mixed neighborhoods that serve the needs of various economic classes.
— Architect Michael Maltzan reimagines the 134 Freeway in Pasadena as a site of clean energy production. And Stoss Landscape Urbanism reimagines the spur of the 2 Freeway as a park and water filtration system. (I love these redos of public infrastructure. A nice companion piece is architect Rene Peralta’s proposal for turning the Tijuana River into a solar farm.)
— “They are discarding history, only to replace it with something newer, crasser, and more disposable.” Curbed’s Andrea Lange reports on the controversial displacement of Manhattan’s historic Four Seasons Restaurant from the Seagram Building. Architectural Record also weighs in.
— Domus has some terrific shots of the fantastical sculpture park created by the artist and poet Edward James in Mexico.
— I am in love with the Los Angeles Conservancy’s historic places map. <3<3<3
— And because Monday should begin with a parade of loincloths, demons and very big hair: the best-worst heavy metal covers of all time. (Boing Boing)
Find me on Twitter @cmonstah.
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