Moore+reflects+on+the+Artworlds+class

I had to put this in -- it's a related project from Houston in 2009, and it's great -- on Wikipedia, and described thusly: "The Houston Alternative Art chronology was originally compiled by Caroline Huber and The Art Guys for the exhibition catalogue No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston, which was published by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) to accompany the group show of the same name. The exhibition was on view at CAMH, located at 5216 Montrose Blvd., in Houston, TX, May 9-October 4, 2009. Co-curated by Toby Kamps and Meredith Goldsmith, No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston featured projects by twenty-one Houston artists using the city as inspiration, material, and site. This chronology documents Houston’s alternative art scene."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Alternative_Art

[All the new stuff is at the bottom of this page...]

First, my thanks: Teaching this course has been an unexpected boon in this my first full-time teaching job. I am grateful to Dr. Linda Hightower for approving the course -- it took guts to buy this "pig in a poke"!

I am grateful to the members of the Art News list serve* in Atlanta, a group of intelligent opinionated artists and art bureaucrats (often one and the same) whose commentary has been a welcome background noise to my teaching.

click on artnews, and follow the instructions.
 * To subscribe/unsubscribe to the ARTNEWS List Go to [|http://www.pd.org],

Teaching Art History to Make It
The "Art Worlds of Atlanta" is an attempt to actualize in pedagogical form certain ideas snipped from the work of Howard Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and Paolo Freire. While that makes the enterprise seem impossibly grand, the truth is much simpler and more modest.

As has become clear over the course of the 2005-06 academic year through the researches of the class and myself, the artworlds of Atlanta have been meticulously constructed -- and reconstructed -- by complex and interrelated groups and interests all very particular to the city itself.

The course I taught privileged the role that artists and art students have played in the construction of the worlds of visual art. That has been the line of inquiry I have continuously prodded the students along, although it may not be readily apparent from the content of the site.

The records of the pasts of the art worlds of Atlanta are full of recurring stories, problems, personalities, strategies all familiar from more recent years. (For this, see Carlyn Gaye Crannell's "In Pursuit of Culture: A History of Art Activity in Atlanta, 1847-1926," UMI dissertations, Emory Univ., 1981; this book should be in print.)

The more recent problem, which I believe is most particular to our postmodern age, is that of gentrification -- that is, the erasure of the neighborhoods in which artists have traditionally lived. This process is occurring wiith increasing rapidity, making artists worldwide nomads in their own communities.

In October of 2006 I spoke at "Trans: The Visual Culture Conference" at University of Wisconsin-Madison about the "Artworlds of Atlanta" course. The text of that paper is here. In February of 2009, I spoke at the College Art Association session on pedagogy about this artworlds project and another, "USF Arts Tampa Bay," which my classes made in '07-'08. I should post that paper... But I made a webliography for it -- that is here.

Hello! It's Spring of 2007, and I have come across this course -- an artistic project, really -- being run by the English artist Nils Norman at different locations around the world called "The Exploding School." It's at http://www.dismalgarden.org/, with a full list of readings and links, resources for working on the problems of gentrification and sustainability, and an example of the way in which artists can look at urban development. There is a splash page picture that says it all, showing Rudolph Giuliani on a bench with the urban critic Richard Florida. The severed head is Walt Disney...

And, while the problems of artists in the contemporary regime of gentrification could fill an entire other wiki, here is a nice succinct account from Block magazine, Brooklyn, an online article comparing Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the Mission District of San Francisco by Dakota Kim, June 2006: [|"History of Artistic Communities & Gentrification in Two Popular American Neighborhoods"]