Projects Archive : Page 3 of 4 : Placemaking

S.S. Palo Alto Project

Barbara Benish, UCSC Social Practice Arts Research Center and SeaCliff State Park in Aptos, CA, UC Santa Cruz

The S.S. Palo Alto ArtPark is proposed as an aethetically enhanced public space on the California coast, engaging transformative education, inspiring environmental awareness, and promoting ocean sustainability. Joining Art and Science, we hope to set a precedent in social responsibility and ocean advocacy worldwide by uniting all 28 internationally renowned marine institutes and labs of the Monterey Bay for the first time. As a conceptual project, students and artists are challenged to research new processes to engage the public in creative change. Dialoging with California’s State Parks, our “catalogue of ideas” offers sustainable solutions to a precarious economic and environmental situation. It is a symbolic place to visually bring together our private and public selves. Located off of Seacliff State Beach on the West Coast of the U.S., the park is already an eco-friendly attraction to four million annual visitors, and the sinking WWI military ship, a magnet.

Focusing on sustaining the unique marine life of the surrounding Monterey Bay, with the beloved ‘Cement Ship’, as it is locally referred to, will provide an educational, recreational, and artistic platform for students and researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, spearheaded by our association with the Social Practice Arts Research Center . The 400 foot long pier leading to the slowly sinking Ship , which is now becoming a new reef, will be filled with imaginative kinetic and solar sculptures, installations, and interactive modules of information . All artworks are completely safe and non-obtrusive to the delicate balance of the surrounding eco-system, and are made with natural, biodegradable materials or otherwise non-toxic systems.

10-12 international artists have been invited to create the initial works of art at the site, along the pier, on the beach head and with an interior space at the California State Parks Visitor’s Center nearby . All access to the ship itself is closed. Viewing will be possible for miles up and down the coast, by sea and from the cliff avove. Pressing environmental issues will be addressed in the various projects, including: alternative potable water sources/desalination plants; marine debris and fish entanglement ; ghost nets and fishing line; agricultural (toxic) runoff; endangerment of the local marine life due to chemical and plastic pollutants; PoPs presence in the food chain; ocean acidification, red tide, and coral reefs; climate change and rising sea levels; clean alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power; overfishing and sustainable solutions; oil drilling and sonar testing; and tourism and natural marine habitats.

Our team is composed of artists and environmentalists, marine biologists,

scientists, sea explorers, architects, activists, designers, and engineers. Working in tandem with colleagues at UCSC, in both the Art and Marine Science Departments, as well as the local research labs of the Monterey Bay, this is an ongoing project which can grow into a permanent “living lab” in the future for students and general public alike. We are proud to work with the UN Safe Planet Campaign which works towards a toxic-free future, specifically the PoPs presence now found increasingly in the human body.

Art represents the creative spirit of humankind, and the positive force of new ideas, technology, imagination. This project echos the mandate of California State Parks, which includes providing recreation, promoting preservation, and fostering imagination. It will be at no cost to the State Parks system, but conversely, will hopefully contribute to raising much needed revenues.

Establishing an environmentally friendly sculpture garden near the SS Palo Alto is positive momentum which California needs to take the lead in public awareness about our oceans that are in critical health. Blue, which covers 70% of our planet, is the color that gives every human on the planet oxygen to breathe. Art creates a paradigm shift in how we perceive and experience that planet. Time is running out.

Santa Cruz Migrant Working Community Poster Project

Enrique Leal with the Western Service Workers Association and the Little Giant Collective, UC Santa Cruz

This Placemaking project involves two partnerships, one with Western Service Workers Association in Santa Cruz (www.wswaba.org), an organization that provides cooperative assistance and networking for low-income workers by providing emergency food, clothing, non-emergency dental care, preventative medical care, child care assistance, job referral, legal assistance, as well as information and referral services. The second partner is Little Giant Collective (www.littlegiantcollective.com) , a group of printmakers in Santa Cruz that promote the graphic visibility of processes through which citizens have a voice in public policy decisions while denouncing exclusionary tactics that undermine the right to participate in the democratic process.

The project will address migrant working communities in the Santa Cruz area, by travelling to their worksites, homes and community spaces. For the migrant community the sense of “place” or home is the thing most absent. In creating these small, local, print media works, we will provide them agency and a grounding to place. They are meant to be graphic reminders to a more humane life where their voice is heard and vision recognized. In making visible the basic information, in Spanish, this will provide a temporary place of refuge and hope, via the artworks that they themselves will create. As a Spanish speaker who has lived in different cultures, this topic is particularly relevant to me as an artist and educator.

This project will give not only basic techniques in the screen printers graphic arts and social activist tradition, but also bring information and access to the resource network available to this community: health care/aid, counseling, emergency care, and access to legal assistance. Based on some of the traditions of the Graphics Arts Division of the Workers Projects Administration of the Roosevelt era New Deal, when artists were given work that went out into the communities and held content of social relevance, our activities will serve the newest generation of migrant workers in the United States. As we know, they are now facing the most severe living situations and surveillance, with basic living conditions often at a minimum. In reaching out to these communities, that for generations have provided the rest of the country with our main food production, this info-graphics may help to alleviate some of their suffering. We will provide a small transportable “art-station”, able to travel on wheels and go out into the fields, into neighborhoods, or local churches, and unfold to be able to provide materials and inks for creating on the spot posters and graphics via simple silk-screen techniques. These will be water-based and non-toxic. Each community and workshop will be able to narrate their own stories, own questions and answers to vital information and access necessary resources for their health and well-being. These works on paper will be the visual documentation of a generation in flux, crossing borders and seeking a better life.

Temperature Check

Sophia Lev, UC Santa Cruz

Undergraduate art major, Sophia Lev proposed an interactive, collaborative performance and lecture/discussion series. She hosted monthly events on campus to ‘check the temperature’ of a given site as part of an ongoing collaborative performance that creates space for discussion and reflection about the relationships between students, natural space, and this institution. This project physicalizes the distance or closeness between people and land through hyperbolizing a relationship of care in order to prompt discussions about stewardship, neoliberal environmentalism, and the use of nature on the UCSC campus to naturalize authority. “Temperature check” is used in political organizing as a way of gauging how groups of people are feeling. We will be taking the temperature of the earth using long thermometers held with with our mouths. The thermometer and the act of insertion into the earth become an abject extension of the body, and creates create confusion as to whose temperature is being taken. This will be used to acknowledge and hyperbolize the emotionality of the earth through extending a physical barometer of health. It hyperbolizes the sentience of land by treating it with the same regard we treat human bodies. This project embodies and amplifies the connections between physical bodies and earth bodies to think about the physical distance between people and land by exploring reciprocity and the mutual expression and experiences of distress in the context of global climate change.

The metaphor of a temperature check is a ripe one to employ when thinking about land spaces and sites as sentient agents with political stakes that are intrinsically implicated in student and community members lives and emotional/physical health. This project comes out of a direct experience and observation of UCSC and Santa Cruz city as spaces that offer a liberal, ‘green’ image ripe with metaphors of questioning authority, counter culture, and dissent, yet the lived experiences of students reflect a vastly different relationship with both land and authority. Though situated amongst a ‘natural’ landscape, the estrangement of student life from the city creates a chasm in community and belonging. This project attempts to make space for students, professors, community members, artists, organizers to not only have conversations about their experiences and relationships to land on this campus. This will be mediated through Temperature Checking. She will be hosting a Temperature Check each month at a different site. For example, we might check the temperature of one of the sinkholes on campus, host a lecture by a geology professor, and facilitate a conversation about the implications of sinkholes in threatening the omnipresence of UCSC. Projects that confront the authority of the UC are often stifled, suppressed, and undermined. If the UC claims to be a counter-culture institution, it must actually support and uphold projects that offer a critique of power and authority.

A Working Lens

Glenda Drew and Jesse Drew, UC Davis

A WORKING LENS (A.W.L.) is a project of Class Conscious Photographers, a collective of photographers who document the lives of working people, as participants in the broad movement for social, racial and economic justice. The project is a text and photo installation that looks at the contributions made by workers during the coronavirus crisis, who we all depend on to maintain our common social infrastructure during this pandemic. In their voices, presented in text panels and the signs held in protests, people in the photographs speak to the reality of their lives, and the contradiction between calling workers “essential” while they can’t pay rent, afford healthcare or confront injustice. We note that these are conditions that existed before the pandemic, and will likely continue afterwards as well. The participating photographers in the A.W.L. exhibit put these images and voices – of truck drivers, warehouse workers, market vendors, recycle workers, baristas, food servers, subway cleaners, retail workers and other “essential” workers – into this public space to challenge viewers to take some action beyond appreciating the efforts and risks these workers are making. The photographers are (alphabetically) David Bacon, Glenda Drew, Jesse Drew, Najib Joe Hakim and Antonio Nava.

A Working Lens (A.W.L.) was installed in the public space outside the gallery walls at the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis, CA.

View article about the project from the Davis Enterprise.

Friendly Hacking for Belonging

Thomas Maiorana, UC Davis

This project will be situated in Oakland, California with the intent of fostering a sense of belonging through alterations of space. The project centers around two key sessions. During the first session, we will work with our students and local Oakland Community Members to develop ideas for how to make public art or infrastructure interventions that foster greater belonging. The second session will be a building session where the ideas are created and installed. Lake Merritt, Dimond Park and one of the East Bay Regional Parks are all possible sites. Our work is inspired by yarn bombs.

Renter’s Rights/ Renter’s Wronged: Accessible Legal Information for Rural Tenants

Tracy Manuel with Shah’ada Shaban, Anderson, Daisy Jimenez, Olivia Kotlarek, Jiwon Choi, John Mahmood, Ana Petraglia, UC Davis

Major cities attract much attention in California’s housing crisis, but people in rural areas are also threatened by displacement. While recent State bills attempt to address these problems (including SB 329’s tenants’ rights protections and AB 1482’s rent caps), much of this legal information has yet to reach the vulnerable populations most affected by housing precarity. While free legal services exist to help rural tenants navigate the complexities of rental housing and evictions, these resources are often thinly spread over wide geographic areas. Because of this, legal misinformation is rampant. Bad advice passed between neighbors and friends can cause tenants to unknowingly make mistakes that result in unnecessary indefensible evictions, credit report penalties, and added difficulties in finding a new place to live.

Approachable legal information can minimize these impacts. This project, in collaboration with Legal Services of Northern California (Redding), seeks to make community legal education accessible for tenants in rural Northern California. Through posters, handouts, and web materials for legal offices and other resource centers, this project uses appealing information graphics and plain language to help tenants understand their rights and their options when faced with potential eviction. By providing sound legal information in a way that is clear, friendly, and easily shareable, the project helps people maintain housing and stay at home in their communities.

Kaleidoscope D

Daniel Tran, UC Davis

By combining art and ecology in public landscapes, Kaleidoscope D cultivates experiential, contemplative connections to nature and makes them more commonplace for everyone. Accessible, everyday kaleidoscopic and microcosmic views of natural phenomena like metamorphosis, migration and indigeneity cultivate new perspectives, empathy, and hope in the face of our uncertain and interconnected future.

Kaleidoscope D is a lightweight geodesic sculpture that repurposes irrigation tubing to act as a flexible trellis for the native riparian California Pipevine (Aristolochia californica), the sole host plant for the California Pipevine Swallowtail Butterfly (Battus philenor). It is a public sculpture that acts as a butterfly sanctuary that would be situated between the Tri-Coops Community Garden & the Sprocket Bikeway.

Atomic No. 17: Downplaying the Insidious Effects of Chlorine-Bleach-Containing Products in the Cleaning Industry

Susana Barron, UC Davis

The adverse health effects experienced in the cleaning industry while using chlorine-bleach-containing products vary from skin irritations, irreversible eye damage, chronic upper respiratory problems and death. Air ventilation, other compounds in the environment, and protective gear are some of the determining safety factors, but the marketing strategies that manufacturing companies use give little to no indication that potential health problems can arise. The disconnect from these toxic chemicals and the marketing strategies used is becoming even more problematic with the recent push to market these toxic products on social media platforms where a false sense of trust is created and consumers are susceptible to influencer fraud which has the potential of having the same harmful effects as “fake news.” My project consists of a video installation that provides an unfiltered view of these highly volatile and reactive chemicals and how recent marketing strategies are leading to misrepresentation and abuse of trust. The video is projected on a screen constructed with white spray bottles as a way to counter the messaging format used by the manufacturing companies. With their presence, the cleaning bottles become characters standing in front of the screen to help disrupt the highly choreographed marketing content that’s created for these toxic substances.