nocommercialvalue.org

Dear NoCommercialValue friends,

This week we continue with the second installment of the “Art + Service” show . Our guest curator Eric Leshinsky has prepared an intriguing selection of images, text, audio, video and websites that will help you delve deeper into this topic. Read on and explore…

Curator Statement:
Service-based artwork is not a new phenomenon but, as I write this, it does seem to be rapidly gaining a wider following. Just a few days ago, the City of Baltimore, through a guest jury that included curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, awarded its annual $25,000 Sondheim Prize for Visual Arts to not an individual artist, but a collective of artists named the Baltimore Development Cooperative whose work seems partially aimed at providing free social services to existing and emerging communities. This is just one anecdote to suggest a growing willingness for society to appreciate, or simply accept, a strain of art-making that is often not object-based, not comercial, and could easily be confused with the professional practices of other disciplines outside of art. But aside from its value as a conversation-starter about how art is made in the 21st century, the relationship of art and service is also a major intersection (something like where Fifth Avenue and Broadway meet in New York City) in the ever-evolving and complex relationship between art and architecture. As a practicing architect whose practice is always treading the line between art and architecture, notions of “service” have provided a welcome means of steering the conversation about these two fields away from the physicality of their existence: it’s not about what artists and architects produce, but rather how they produce and why they produce. I hope the following exhibits will help expand this discourse and I welcome your feedback.

Curator Bio:
Eric Leshinsky is a Baltimore-based architect and designer whose practice includes urban research, building projects, exhibition/event design, site-specific artworks, graphic design, journalistic writing and teaching. He is an adjunct faculty member of the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation and collaborates frequently with other artists, architects and designers. His recent projects have included an exhibition design with Baltimore-based artist Ryan Patterson for the Humane Metropolis conference in Baltimore and ongoing investigations into adaptive urban systems with Baltimore-based architect Fred Scharmen. The Museum for Missing Places, a project that he created and curated for 6 months in 2005-2006, is currently being re-exhibited through its original website, www.missing-places.org, as part the 2009 exhibition “NO ZONING: Artists Engage Houston” at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. More information about his work can be found at www.leshinsky.net

Comments? Ideas for a show? We love to hear from you. Write to us!

Regards,

Amir Husak
Prem Sooriyakumar
info@nocommercialvalue.org