I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
oozey mess
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occasionally subtle
Monterey Bay Aquarium
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we're not kids anymore.
izzy's playlists!
tannertan36
Discoholic 🪩
AnasAbdin
todays bird
$LAYYYTER
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Product Placement
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Three Goblin Art
Love Begins
Origami Around
Sade Olutola
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#tbt Zen Tangle
A photo posted by Margarita (@urbanpopartist) on Apr 14, 2015 at 12:18pm PDT
#creativesprint Day 14/b: “Zentangle,” another practice I learned today in art ther, tho a technique that I’ve informally employed in notebook margins since grade school.
A photo posted by Margarita (@urbanpopartist) on Apr 14, 2015 at 12:18pm PDT
Coming soon... siblingsfor.life
Would I Be More Popular If I Lost 20 Pounds?
For my Data, Metrics, and Visualization class in my Masters of Design for Social Innovation program at the School of Visual Arts, I was assigned to collect data over the course of two weeks to answer a question about my life I’m curious about. So, I decided to explore whether I would be more popular if I lost 20 pounds. By way of two nearly identical OKCupid profiles, one featuring an original photo of me and one photoshopped with a thigh gap, thinner arms and other omissions, I set out to collect data in the forms of daily visitors, likes, and messages.
And I got answers.
According to the two visualizations above measuring cumulative likes over the two weeks as well as likes-per-day, while both accounts accumulated likes in the mid-200s, yes I would garner tangibly more popularity if I lost 20 pounds.
However, with great popularity comes great responsibility…or something. I decided to visualize the message data, including a qualitative breakdown of whether a message was sweet & respectable or scummy & ratchet. While the skinny account received only 3 more messages than the original account, it had more than double the scummy messages. So, while being skinnier would mean being more popular, it would also mean attracting more scummy approaches.
Talking about this with a classmate, she told me about how her experience using Tindr in Ecuador was radically different from that of her friend. While her friend bleached her hair blonde and struck a typical Tindr pose, my classmate did not. The types of messages her friend got were Grindr-esque while the latter had more substantive approaches. One could posit that this was because her potential suitors had to appeal on a deeper level, assuming that she was not just a party girl. Her friend ended up dropping Tindr pretty quickly since she was not happy with the type of attention she was getting…
This Sunday and Monday 9/27-28 I'm making art live at the UN Foundation's 6th annual Social Good Summit 🌈🎨🎤🎥 This year's convening of world leaders, new media and tech experts, grassroots activists and voices from around the world takes place at a pivotal moment in the dual movements to combat extreme poverty and to address climate change. STAY TUNED!#2030NOW #madeleinealbright #lavernecox #victoriabeckham #tonyblinken#jimmywales #charlizetheron #morganspurlock #pattismith #queenrania#siennamiller #bankimoon #ashleyjudd #adriengrenier
Got my mind on my thesis and my thesis on my mind.
--> The entire letter.
#artweallone
A photo posted by Margarita (@urbanpopartist) on Feb 25, 2015 at 8:35pm PST
My diet as logged by my search history.
It's been 11 years since Yeze gave us The College Dropout. A while back I wrote an essay for Tablet Magazine on how his music and ethos made me stronger.
...As I entered college in 2004, Kanye’s debut, College Dropout, was released. Kanye, who also arrived in Chicago as a kid with his single mother, was an artist and good student in the suburbs. Kanye’s father was a former Black Panther and his mother an English professor and chair at universities, and his upbringing was under similar auspices geared toward rebellion and education as the way up. Like his politically conscious predecessors, he refreshed popular thought with newly relevant questioning of loudly preached common sense on wealth, education, and individual empowerment beyond class. What worked for me was the palimpsest-like layering of social consciousness and sex, fresh production and classic samples. That he was making bank proved that he was a trustworthy mentor, as good a guide to the American landscape as I’d find...
Read more at tabletmag.com.>>
Graduation: Advice from Kanye to Jewkrainian Immigrants going for the Good Life
Then after putting together the Chernobyl exhibit for KGB Bar in 2011 to the soundtrack of Graduation, I documented direct lessons reflected in both the series and the soundtrack.
(Originally published on August 31, 2011)
GOOD MORNING: ON THIS DAY WE BECOME LEGENDARY, EVERYTHING WE DREAMED OF
But you graduate when you make it up outta the streets
From the moments of pain look how far we done came
Haters sayin you changed, now you doin your thang
Individualism often gets a bad rap. But there’s nothing more American than prioritizing yourself so that you can best serve your values, whether those are bling, money, power. or giving back to your people. Another inherent feature of individualism is the responsibility to also never impose your personal beliefs on anybody else. For Sovjews, embracing individualism is to grasp at the potential available in this most recent displacement of the tribe. It is up to us as individuals torecontextualize themselves in the bigger picture, to take risks, become vulnerable, and go for the throne.
CHAMPION: DID YOU REALIZE THAT YOU ARE A CHAMPION IN THEIR EYES?
I don’t know I just wanted better for my kids, and I ain’t sayin we was from the Projects
…
When it feel like livin’s harder than dyin, For me givin up’s way harder than tryin
…
Cause who the kids gon listen to? I guess me if it isn’t you
Kanye directs appreciation to the generation that sacrificed their individualism to give him opportunities, and acknowledges that with empowerment, someone in his shoes can effectively change his original circumstances. On Late Registration, Kanye shouted his gratitude to his supportive mama:
My mama told me go to school, get your doctorate, somethin to fall back on,
You could profit with, but still supported me when I did the opposite
Now I feel like it's things I gotta get, things I gotta do,
Just to prove to you, you was getting through
Immigrant children grow up with a unique perspective, absorbing new possibilities and figuring out where to best do their business. Personal considerations about education, spirituality, and careers are no longer regulated by the state, as they were for our parents. Coming from an entirely different sociopolitical terrain does not mean that concerned parental advice is any less present. In the race up the ladder, choosing the most sturdy climb was not only recommended, it was demanded. It’s that same fearlessness that Kanye exhibited that sways a person to actually disobey the matriarch and her clan in order to prove that they have already been equipped, by their familiar critics, to become champions.
STRONGER: THAT THAT DON’T KILL ME CAN ONLY MAKE ME STRONGER
Work it harder make it better do it faster, makes us stronger
More than ever ever after, our work is never over
…
I ask cause I’m not sure, Do anybody make real shit anymore?
…
There’s a thousand you’s there’s only one of me
I’m trippin I’m caught up in the moment, right?
…
And she’ll do anything for the limelight,
And we’ll do anything when the time’s right
Daft Punk’s Harder Better Faster Stronger is the perfect mantra to keep someone with Kanye’s or an immigrant’s drive to continue accelerating.
More lyric analysis over at the original post.
CONSUME MORE MEDIA NOT LESS Acrylic on canvas and collage, 24x18 2011
1 Book & Film I Can't Do Without
If I had the luxury of packing for a deserted island stranding, I should hope I'd remember to bring my water-damaged and graffitied copy of Unbearable Lightness of Being and the film and audio recordings of Easy Rider to make sure that I don't lose myself.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
TULOB, a foundational book along with The Giving Tree and Mr. Rogers' television program in shaping my understanding of creating healthy systems for loving relationships.
Every family has its own logic systems for making reciprocal relationships that endure time. Most are messily constructed in subconsciouses, with tradition upholding their structures, patched up with individual neuroses.
Boy was I lucky that Mr. Rogers interrupted the Soviet Jewish immigrant logic in my Skokie household when I was a kid. The temporary life is about suffering mentality that kept our grind going in constructing our American lives was complemented by Mr. Rogers' everybody-deserves-love-and-respect ethos that I adopted in my thinking early on. By using conscious interventions, I was able to get through the passionate and roudy interactions by understanding them in Mr. Roger's contexts—defining a proper setting and outlets for anger as defined by a wider system beyond those apartment walls.
That's the kind of intervention that TULOB provided me when I was 19 studying abroad in Prague with my then many-years boyfriend. The disorientation of changing our national system was a great platform to evaluate our happiness in the system of our relationship, and the added framing by Kundera's story set our filters to evaluating our individual longterm pursuits of happiness within the rules of our relationship.
With Soviet Prague as a backdrop, characters manage to construct or attract to beautiful circumstances as they define by their current selves. They are tangibly a product of their environment, culture, and personal dispositions as we all are.
It must have ultimately been TULOB that gave me permission to consider myself before the system of my longterm relationship, seeing through Tomáš the thousands of ways I was free to frame my own pursuits in love and freedom, and seeing aspects of the unapologetically free and selfish Sabina as I could identify Tereza's mousy insecurity bound by dependence on comfortable, self-sacrificing commitment.
That complicated nature of individuals navigating toward their higher selves together, separately, and within the larger constraints of a totalitarian system is true beauty to me, painting the adaptation, resilience, self-awareness and outright courage required to embark on every single person's true pursuit of happiness. Thus, the book counters the unbearable lightness of being in its roots of suffering. Perhaps this book ultimately allowed me to evolve my Russian Jewish family's "life is about suffering" mentality to "life is about pursuing happiness despite suffering."
So beyond the function of a book containing bound words on paper conveying relatable characters, TULOB is also a tool I use to gauge my own acclamation to reality within varying systems. What is love really? Is this love? Is the discontent we feel part of love or is it a superficial nuance of this system I am in now?
Thus, I suppose TULOB serves the same function as my installation in our group show with Kevin O'Callaghan: a leveling tool using the concept of Aristotle's golden mean—the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency—to find a balance between selfishness and selflessness.
Easy Rider
This road movie captures the freespirited story of individual and collective pursuits of happiness that are infective to the work ethic I apply to my own pursuits. Magically too, popping the Easy Rider soundtrack on a record player or on Spotify creates aural wavelengths that also replay the film's spirit in my everyday activities as an artist.
Again, this medium is a self-contained tool for recalibrating my own life in the context of my greater lifelong pursuits of happiness. Another example of a pop culture tool that steered my work ethos was Kanye's Graduate album during the construction of my 2011 art series/campaign Propaglasnost: The Transparency Projects for the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl. (I wrote about that pairing over at Tablet Magazine at the time.)
The popularity of this film that is so personally important to me also does work to "restore my faith in humanity," that despite all our differences, a whole lot of people can get on board with the themes of personal freedom deemed important in Easy Rider.
That theme of freedom (from a specific place, insular group of people beyond a travel companion on a similar journey, current cultural morals rooted in conservative traditionalism) tempered by contemporary American circumstances is another example of beauty rooted in ugly reality, exuding the same mission of a film noir, tragic heroes falling victim to the underbelly of brokenness caused by the loyalty of the greater public to broken systems instead of rebuilding to fit real life. It signifies a loyalty to one's own pursuit of happiness, instead of adopting the shame and guilt prescribed by contemporary values. So beautiful how Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper capture this in their film, that is so obviously a project headed by the artist conceiving the story.
The Provisional Identities of Mitchell Square Park, Washington Heights
"...and this is the way that cities must then be designed--not for predictable, monolithic sectors of the population (for these are often but mirages, projections of the viewer rather than a true representation of a city), but for various different and competing tastes, opinions and outlooks. The identities of our city spaces, like those of its inhabitants, should be multiple, diverse, dynamic; energetic, ephemeral, and hybrid." -Iain Bourden
A photo posted by Margarita (@urbanpopartist) on Feb 4, 2015 at 7:06am PST
TRUST THE ART
Art like good writing is created in the subconscious, drawing on instinct. Design is the conscious editing process, imposing consistent rules to communicate in a way that activates an audience’s subconscious strategically. Artist presidents must do both.
A photo posted by Margarita (@urbanpopartist) on Feb 3, 2015 at 8:06am PST
10 Projects, revisited
Last week I posted a list of 10 things I wished I created as assigned for my Design for Social Innovation Thesis course. Maggie Breslin examined my list, remarking that a couple of themes are "Beauty in relationship to tragedy; boiling down to the essence. One question she posed to me was, Why do you think the universal pursuit of happiness is buried in most people?
Be your own boss #hatersgonhate
A video posted by Margarita (@urbanpopartist) on Feb 1, 2015 at 1:39pm PST
With great freedom comes great responsibility. When it comes to the pursuit of happiness, we spend a lot of time procrastinating that responsibility to ourselves. And often, even our closest friends expect loyalty to others over loyalty to ourselves, when in reality folks might be more useful to the world around them if positioned in a more dope situation. Mapping your course to profound euphoria requires exploration, and that kind of self-examination can be scary. But if we keep our eyes on the prize, our capacity to be legendary, then it makes the countless hours hustling and scheming and pitching all the more worth it.
Haters will say that you have no right to be better than them, that you haven't earned that confidence. But I often look to Kanye for the empowerment of the individual. Specifically, When I think of competition, it's like I try to create against the past. I think about Michelangelo and Picasso. You know, the pyramids."
It sounds ridiculous from afar, but once you internalize it, Kanye's Kanfidence becomes a mantra that keeps you positioned in your mind's eye as a tsar of your fate, the boss of your enterprise. "I am Warhol! I am the number one most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh. Walt Disney, Nike, Google." On his Yeezus tour, he proposed that nobody has the omniscience to declare that you are unworthy of categorizing yourself with those greats.
Why, why, why, why, why
Last week's list contained 10 projects I wish I'd created, curated to include work that I felt made the kind of impact I would like to work towards. Examining deeper why I chose Keith Haring's Crack Is Wack wall in Harlem from 1986, I'll try an exercise Maggie recommends in which I pose a series of whys to dive deeper into why I'm so impressed.
Why did you choose the Crack is Wack wall?
I really like how Haring can communicate heavy topics in the simplest, most accessible way—stick figures.
Why?
I think the most important role that art has is to get us to stop believing and start thinking about issues that really affect us, and Haring is able to facilitate that kind of reflection to a wider range of people given the simplicity of his medium. It's just like Helvetica's role in Switzerland when it replaced a gaudy German font on all legal documents in order to democratize access to the legal system.
Why?
With great freedom comes great responsibility; If you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything. If those are a given, then the artist's ability to connect folks to those internal missions is a responsibility in itself.
Why?
Maybe that's not what rings true for all artists, but I feel most empowered when I am facilitating creating on the part of others, reminding them that they are valid filters for the world they see around them, the universe that they come from. I call myself an artist, and I insist that everyone else is an artist too and should connect with that instinct-like ability to distill truths from the realities and surrealitiies observed.
Why?
"I'm like a vessell, and God has chosen me to be the voice and the connector." Another Kanye-ism, which I really love, though I do not believe in the exclusivity it conveys. Rather, we are all filters, and the more we are empowered to practice using our voices to translate universal truths, the more iterations each of us will have and the more seasoned. We should all be as cocky as Kanye, empowered enough to keep our greatest ideas alive through confident transmission to folks we trust. Ultimately, the work we do through our art should theoretically "make the world a better place."
Timeline
So what are some milestones in the history of Haring's construction of the Crack Is Wack wall that eventually became the Crack Is Wack Playground?
1978: Build Up
As posted on the sign in the park,
In 1978, Haring came to New York with a scholarship to the School of Visual Arts. The graffiti he saw throughout the city immediately appealed to Haring's artistic sense of spontaneity and the possibilities for political messages. Soon Haring began using building facades and subway walls as canvases for his own graffiti art. Most of his subway graffiti was benign, as it was done in white chalk on the blank black background of unused advertising panels. Though Haring was arrested several times for illegally spray painting building walls, Haring continued to create his distinctive murals. Haring believed that art should be accessible to everyone, and his philosophy is reflected in both the simplicity of his figures and the public medium through which he chose to express himself. As his signature chalk outlines of interlocking bodies grew in fame, Haring gained the respect of the international art community and the appreciation of the public. One interpretation of Haring's work holds that he is suggesting how diverse groups of people can live together in harmony.
Mid-80s: Inspiration
As published in the Huffington Post article, Keith Haring's 'Crack is Wack': NYC's Most Famous Mural?
How Crack is Wack came to be is not well-known. Nor is the fact that the mural is not the original version.
Benny was one of the major catalysts for Crack is Wack. Benny was Haring's young, gifted studio assistant in the mid-1980s who became addicted to crack. Haring and the rest of his studio were close with him and they tried everything to help him kick his addiction. This was, according to Haring, an incredibly distressing experience for everyone involved. Benny had no health insurance, so they initially called cocaine hotlines and Benny started to see a counselor, but that didn't work. Haring's studio also went to emergency rooms to try to get him into a guided program, but no hospital would take him.
Around this time, Haring often drove past a handball court located in a small park near the Harlem River Drive. The court was clearly visible from the highway but abandoned. Nothing fenced in the court and no one played on it (because if you did, the ball would just go onto the highway). According to Haring, the location seemed a perfect spot to paint. It was almost identical to a highway billboard.
The subject for the painting quickly became crack. (In Haring's words, "Inspired by Benny [who was eventually cured], and appalled by what was happening in the country, but especially New York, and seeing the slow reaction (as usual) of the government to respond, I decided I had to do an anti-crack painting.")
Haring painted Crack is Wack without asking for permission. One morning, during the summer of 1986, he drove a rented van -- loaded with some ladders from his studio and some new fluorescent orange paint he had bought -- up to Harlem to paint.
He finished the entire mural in one day.
1986: Painting
Haring paints the mural on the handball courts off Harlem River Drive at 127th.
Haring painted this playground's mural on October 3, 1986 to call attention to the damage drugs can inflict on community welfare. He continued to create murals, sculptures, drawings, and paintings until he died of AIDS on February 16, 1990, at the age of 32. His artwork is highly prized throughout the world. The Keith Haring Foundation, which Haring created shortly before his death, continues to educate the public about Haring's life and work and raises money for children's and AIDS charities.
1986: Post-painting
From the HuffPo:
This peace was short-lived. As Haring and his crew were taking some last-minute pictures and smoking a joint, a cop car drove up and one of the policemen started harassing them. The cop asked if Haring had permission to create the mural, and obviously he didn't. Haring was then arrested and handed a court date. He faced a fine and potentially jail time.
In the next days and weeks, the mural was quickly picked up by the news media, not because of Haring's arrest -- no one knew he had been arrested -- but because of the newsworthiness of crack cocaine and Reagan's "War on Drugs" then in the United States. Haring explained: "Every time the news did a story on crack, they would flash to the [mural as a visual]. NBC [even] did a public service announcement using it as a background."
Close to the court date, the New York Post contacted Haring and asked if they could take a picture of him in front of the mural. In the process of taking it, they learned about Haring's arrest and were shocked. They had no idea he was going to soon be in court and had been arrested for making the mural. The next day the Post ran an article about Haring and the mural with the information that he could go to jail for a year.
People immediately came to Haring's defense. The topic even made the evening news, which prompted Mayor Edward Koch -- who was both anti-crack and anti-graffiti -- to have to consider the issue. Koch commented that "we have to find somewhere else for Haring to paint."
Haring eventually was fined only $100. After the court date, the Parks Commissioner wrote to Haring to apologize to him and offer any help he could provide, since the mural was actually Parks Department property, not city property.
Roughly a week later the mural was vandalized. Someone in the neighborhood turned it into a pro-crack mural. And then, according to Haring, to deal with this, some "busy bee in the Parks Department" took it upon themselves to paint over the entire mural in gray without consulting his supervisors. So Crack is Wack was then gone.
Upon learning that the work had been painted-over, the Parks Department commissioner called Haring and apologized (again). He then asked if Haring would consider repainting the piece with his department's assistance.
Haring then repainted Crack is Wack -- though differently than the original version.
1995 Restoration
To ensure that the message of Haring's mural will continue to reach parkgoers, Parks and the Keith Haring Foundation restored the mural in July 1995. Another restoration project followed in 2007.
Sources
NYC Parks.gov
Wikimedia Commons
Huffington Post
Highlighting paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks of the Bronx Zoo
Music to make art by