Sep 17 2008
Every day, it seems, brings fresh news and fresh images of 
Global Warming‘s mounting impact on humanity (and human activities), local ecosystems, and the global ecosystem. Just coming across my desk are images of Global Warming refugees appearing in the nation’s capital.
These refugees provide dramatic images underlinign “how global warming is making polar bears homeless by causing the sea ice they rely on to melt, threatening many polar bear populations with extinction.”
Aug 28 2008
Public art, particularly sculpture in public spaces, is the most democratic of art forms: no admission required, you just have to go and look at it.
Today, a few pics of perhaps the most obscure public work (because it is generally submerged)–Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson. Constructed in April of 1970, it extends into Great Salt Lake in Utah, and is a bravura work. Although the lake covered it for about 30 years, by 2004 it had re-emerged due to drought.
For nearly three decades Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” lay underwater in the Great Salt Lake. Since 1999, as drought has lowered the water level, this famous American earth sculpture — a 1,500-foot coil of black basalt rocks — has slowly re-emerged. Now it is completely exposed; the rocks encrusted with white salt crystals are surrounded by shallow pink water in what looks like a vast snow field. [snip]
“The trip to see the artwork brings people to a place they would not normally experience,” said Nancy Holt, Smithson’s widow and executor, who lives in New Mexico. “The ‘Jetty’ is a vortex that draws in everything in the landscape around it.”
NY Times
Below the fold are some pics I found at photobucket, plus a nifty video.
Open thread: be excellent to each other. And remember: don’t REC the pony party!
Feb 02 2008
It was an audacious project: 7500 saffron-orange gates covering 23 miles of footpaths in Central Park. A work of art some 25 years in the making, with an estimated total cost of $21 million, paid for by the artist. And it had the whole city talking.
Feb 02 2008
It was an audacious display: thousands of saffron-orange banners in a gray, February Central Park, a work of public art that took decades to complete.
Billowing in the wind, clouds scudding across the sun so that when they passed, the banners glowed.
The reviews may have been mixed, but the project had the whole city talking, and art lovers flew in from all over to see it.