[Peace-discuss] Re: [Peace] street artist, curator, author, activist Josh MacPhee at Unit One 2/17-2/21

[John W.]

We bandy the word "activist" around so liberally.  Everyone, it seems, is 
an "activist", or tacks "activist" on the end of their personal 
"resume".  Does any of you ever stop to wonder what an "activist" really is?



At 03:50 PM 2/12/2008, Laura Haber wrote:

>please forward widely:
>
>
>Street artist, curator, author, activist, Josh MacPhee will be a 
>Guest-in-Residence at Unit One/Allen Hall 2/17-2/21. He will be presenting 
>and discussing the work of artists and activists, leading workshops, or 
>screening films each night of his residency. All events are open to the 
>public and take place in the South Rec Room of Allen Hall, 1005 W. 
>Gregory, Urbana. His Opening Program, "Making Art in a World Gone Wrong", 
>is Sunday, Feb 17th at 7pm. See below for his full schedule.
>
>
>About Josh MacPhee:
>Josh MacPhee is a street artist, designer, curator, author and activist. 
>His first book, Stencil Pirates: A Global Survey of Street Stenciling was 
>published in July 2004 by Soft Skull Press. He is currently co-editing a 
>book of radical political graphics and a collection of writings about art 
>and anarchism. A street stenciler and poster maker for over a decade, 
>MacPhee also runs a radical art distribution project as a way to develop 
>and distribute t-shirts, posters, and stickers with political content. For 
>8 years he has curated the Celebrate People's History poster series, a 
>collection of inexpensive educational posters focused on suppressed and 
>little known histories of social justice movements. MacPhee also 
>collectively organizes agit-prop cultural actions with ad-hoc groups of 
>artists under various organizational names such as "Department of Space 
>and Land Reclamation" and "Counter Productive Industries."
>
>Sunday, February 17
>7:00pm - Opening Program: MAKING ART IN A WORLD GONE WRONG
>Josh MacPhee will give an introduction to his art and activist work, which 
>connects themes of radical politics, organizing, privatization and public 
>space. He will talk about and show images of his work with collectives and 
>cooperatives of other artists (Justseeds, Street Art Workers, the 
>Department of Space and Land Reclamation), of shows of political art he 
>has curated (Paper Politics: An Exhibition of Socially Engaged 
>Printmaking, Graphic Work: Imaging Today's Labor Movement), and of books, 
>posters and zines published (Stencil Pirates, Realizing the Impossible, 
>Pound the Pavement) to create dialogues around issues at the heart of 
>changing the world for the better.
>Monday, February18
>7:00pm - PRINTING AGAINST THE GRAIN: ACTIVIST PRINTMAKING FROM 1960's TO NOW
>In the 1960's, just as Andy Warhol was reinventing silkscreening as a fine 
>art tool, printmaking was also being reinvented elsewhere for very 
>different purposes. Activists, organizers, revolutionaries and political 
>artists were using silkscreening, stencils, and block prints to create 
>cheap, eye-catching and easy to distribute political posters. From French 
>students and workers in 1968 to Chicano community workshops in the late 
>60's, Italian and German Autonomists in the 70's to Act Up in the 80's, 
>printmaking has taken a sweeping democratic turn in the last 40 years. 
>While looking at over a hundred images, we'll follow the political, social 
>and aesthetic development of this activist printmaking.
>Tuesday, February 19
>7:00pm - CELEBRATING PEOPLES HISTORY: A HANDS-ON PRINTMAKING WORKSHOP
>The Celebrate People's History poster series is an on-going project 
>producing posters that focus around important moments in "people's 
>history." These are events, groups, and individuals that we should 
>celebrate because of their importance in the struggle for social justice 
>and freedom, but are instead buried or erased by dominant history. These 
>posters are posted publicly ( i.e. wheatpasted on the street, put up in 
>peoples' home and storefront windows, and used in classrooms) in an 
>attempt to help generate a discussion about our radical past, a discussion 
>that is vital in preparing us to create a radical future. Josh will give a 
>short presentation about the posters, and then we will create our own by 
>drawing, block printing and stenciling! 
><http://www.justseeds.org/artists/celebrate_peoples_history/>http://www.justseeds.org/artists/celebrate_peoples_history/ 
>
>Wednesday, February 20
>7:00pm - TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR VISUAL LANDSCAPE
>Taking Control of Your Visual Landscape is both a basic history of street 
>art, and a presentation about how our visual environment controls our 
>social space from the top down, and ways to contest it. We begin with a 
>discussion of how corporations and the state use our visual environment to 
>create a monologue of control, and how this monologue frames our thoughts 
>and behaviors. A slide show will be presented displaying an extremely 
>broad array of styles and techniques of intervening in this system, 
>spanning across both decades and continents. These images provoke our 
>imaginations as to what a real public dialogue on the street might look 
>like and show how possible it is.
>Thursday, February 21
>7:00pm - CREATE! OCCUPY! RESIST!: SHORT FILMS FROM AROUND THE WORLD
>A collection of short films about how people are using amazingly 
>innovative art, culture and media to change the world. A moving image tour 
>of global resistance, from occupied television stations to no climate 
>change camps.
>Laura Haber
>Program Coordinator of Unit One
>University of Illinois
>68 Allen Hall (MC 050)
>1005 W. Gregory
>Urbana, IL 61801
>(217) 244-2317
>lhaber at admin.housing.uiuc.edu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20080212/150eea3f/attachment.html