Since the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the people of the United States have worked to tame the Bitteroot Mountains of Idaho and Montana, but the rushing rivers and wandering wolves still retain the air of the wild.
Landscape
An expanse of earth, adorned, improved, contoured, designed, and experienced. Architecture, travel, design, culture.
Diego Rivera and the Fall and Rise of Detroit
Viewed today, Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” murals might have prefigured Detroit’s downfall, but also envision a renaissance. It harkens to the earth, the races living and working in harmony, where sections of the city have been cleared of distressed neighborhoods and allowed to regrow with food crops, grasses and trees.
Alan Kirby: Technology and Consumer Fanaticism Killed Postmodernism
Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. Sophisticated technology, globalized market economics, consumer fanaticism, fatalistic anxiety, and conformism have created a new paradigm he calls pseudo-modernism.
Suburban Sprawl: Serpentine Sameness from the Skies
Helicopter photos by Christoph Gielen reveal the beautifully-designed patterns and shapes of our auto-dependent homes on the range, walking not preferred, neighbors as yet uncontacted, wildlife unwelcome, sustainable future in question.
Day of the Dead Ofrendas: Calavera Fashion Show and Walking Altars
Short poems, anecdotes, mocking or reverent tributes, called calaveras or “skulls,” are given to celebrate public or private figures. In Los Angeles, for the last seven years Tropico de Nopal Gallery has taken the custom into the realm of performance art-fashion show-walking altar display.
Detroit Heidelberg Project – Renaissance Through Urban Art
An urban conceptual art installation called The Heidelberg Project, named after its street location in the formerly central core of Detroit, Michigan, transforms a neighborhood first devastated by the 1967 riots, plagued by unemployment, poverty, financial redlining, racial segregation, then abandoned, burned, and largely demolished but for a few homes set among open grassy fields.