#public-art

[shencomix]

[typhlonectes]

"Elk Centaur" by Francois Lelong

Stevens Point Sculpture Park, Wisconsin, USA

[tanookitalez]

the undying love of mickey mouse

[sacramentohistorymuseum]

We are often asked if multiple ink colors can be used on a single impression. In this video, Jared letterpress prints a phrase about museums showing that 6 ink colors is possible. The phrase “Museums are not neutral” was printed with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple ink using our Washington hand press. The wood type used is 15 line pica in size and the typeface is French Clarendon.

Our museum, like all museums, is not neutral. People often argue that museums should be neutral or that museums can’t be “political.” However, museums actually are cultural institutions that originate from colonial acquisition and they are about power. History is often written by the victors. It is important for museums to focus on multiple sources and perspectives, especially historically underrepresented groups. Promoting diversity is important to understanding a more holistic history of events.

[climbdraws]

We watched the Devil die that day. We watched him die 9 times

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[mikurinkuwu]

neru's secret origin is finally out

[peejalien]

Happy Mickey Mouse is mine day

[shencomix]

[beebfreeb]

Louisiana Meshi!!!! Thistle will be at the crawfish boil.

[hell0mega]

people are drawing Steamboat Willie Mickey doing all this crazy shit and whatnot, but you could always do that. you can do that now, with current Mickey, just fine. it's fanart and it's legally protected. hell you could take Disney-drawn Mickey and put a caption about unions or whatever on it and it would still be protected under free speech and sometimes even parody law.

what is special about public domain is that you can SELL him. you could take a screenshot and sell it on a tshirt. you can use him to advertise your plumbing business. people have already uploaded and monetized the original film.

you could always have Mickey say what you want, but now you can profit off it.

[randanopterix]

Luffy gets some new kicks

[miamaimania]

Illuminate the Mundane: Werner Reiterer's Street Chandelier (2006-12)

[hinamie]

self-indulgent sukuna sheet

[sovietpostcards]

"The Last Trolleybus" by Mikhail Kugach (1964)

[bluegiragi]

learning moment (part 2)

early access + nsfw on patreon monster!AU masterpost