Performers at Play
Summer Residency at Carnegie Museum of Art
Summer 2019
Carnegie Museum of Art x slowdanger x City of Play
Providing inspiration at the Intimate Subjects evening event.
Summer of 2019, I was in residence at the Carnegie Museum of Art, letting their collection and active exhibits inspire me and guide the art I make. The residency was called Performers at Play - it was the first movement, theatre, and ceremony residency the museum had hosted in many years. It was healthy boundary-pushing for the organization, because human motion and frivolity is at such odds with the priceless, no-touch nature of so many of the objects there.
Over the course of the residency, I designed "A Feeling in the City", a social ceremony that occured at the Carnegie Museum of Art. It was an interactive event, and a meaningful one, somewhere between arts-and-crafts and meditation. It ran three times - twice during regular museum hours, and once during the Intimate Subjects event night.
A Feeling In the City is empathy practice, in spaces that exhort it. The art considers a wide spectrum of human sense-making. The contemporary exhibits at the museum traced designed experience, from shared social spaces in cities, to some of the most personal and close objects we each use.
The first round of "A Feeling In The City" paper lanterns, inspired by the views in the Pittsburgh Anthology room at the Carnegie Museum of Art. The lanterns are physical gifts created by the A Feeling In the City process. From left to right, a copper lantern, a mill scene, five doors within the museum, and a rowhouse captured in the Charles "Teenie" Harris archive. FIre safety advocates worry not: the flames are LED tealights.
Here’s some of my thinking in September, as the Residency was winding down, and the final events were nearing.
My residency at the Carnegie Museum of Art has been a productive one! The few weeks of August flew by. I've been diving into the artistic history of the city, within the Museum's wall and across the city itself, centering my work around the Museum's current exhibits. The theme which has wedded this work together has been the linguistic connections between breathing, light (especially candle-flame), and new thought. Beautiful ideas live on. If you nourish one, it will grow, and you will be nourished by it in turn. Museums like CMOA are important repositories for the sublime objects we've inherited. The ways of seeing the world which the museum's collection engenders are rare and valuable technologies of thought. I hope that "A Feeling In the City" helps visitors bring those ways of seeing home with them. I want the inspiration to stick.
Operations Manual
One of the flyers for A Feeling In the City stayed up for many weeks on a phone pole in Lawrenceville, much to my delight.
My summer residency at the Carnegie Museum of Art was a wonderful experience, and, excellently, a paying gig. The product of that residency, A Feeling In the City, is a very small & local lantern festival, best expressed by being re-enacted: at the Carnegie Museum of Art, other civic institutions, in neighborhoods, classroomes, homes.
A Feeling In the City is a papercraft-and-LED crafting ritual, designed to formalize and document inspiration one encounters at a cultural institution. It can be used as an educational tool, a public encounter, a welcoming-table for a larger event, and more.
I've put the whole project together into a Project Report and Operations Manual, found here. I'm releasing the whole thing into the public domain, today, forever. I've already been appropriately remunerated for this work - its best and highest use now is to be given away as easily and directly as possibly. From Appendix IV: Licencing Structure:
Pursuant to Andrew Carnegie’s “Free to the People” vision for his institute, and the artist’s own wishes, this project report, operations manual, and digital art are hereby released into the public domain, to be used and reused as the institution, the artist, and the public see fit.
As of October 1, 2019, A Feeling In the City has
No Copyright.
You'll find all seven lantern templates from the summer residency, information on how to re-enact the lantern-making interaction, vendor info, and more.
Assembling lanterns in the gallery halls of the museum.
