Thursday, February 22, 2007

Save the Date!

Thursday, April 5, 7:00 PM

The UrbanArt Commission will host public artist Tom Otterness at a lecture at the University of Memphis Rose Theater, 470 University Ave.

Tom Otterness, a high profile public artist whose amusing cartoon-like figurative sculptures have been seen lining the city streets of New York and many metropolitan cities, will conduct a public slide lecture and begin a dialog on the importance of public art, focusing on how college and school campuses across the nation have embraced public art.




This program is being funded by an ABC Grant from the Memphis Arts Council.

2 comments:

Anita said...

Will this talk be available as a podcast maybe to download?

I would be interested to hear his experience / anecdotes & how the colleges and school campuses have embraced public art and what benefits they perceive it to have, i.e. is this enhancement. creation of new use of space etc


In britain we have had public funding for art for some time. One of the big issues with getting this funding is the benefit to the community, audience participants etc.

There seems to be a certain shift & what seems to be happening now is that while organisations / schools etc value art / public art it seems to be in relation to transferable hard skills e.g. skills gained through workshops.

There still seems to be an issue in recognising / valuing what has become known as soft skills or the more intangible developments i.e a change that happens thorough people's experience of art.

Also be interested in anyone else's comments, feedback or experience / thoughts on this.

Cheers

UrbanArt said...

Oh that would be so great if we could, but unfortunately we don't have funds for that. We will be doing podcast audio tours of our public art projects next spring in conjunction with our 10th Anniversary!