MORNING DISCUSSION: REIMAGINING

Sometimes a city seems so finished. We often think that there isn’t possibly anything we could do to change, embellish, or repair a city. But many artists do just that. They intervene into the city, invited or uninvited, and try to imagine it in a better way.

Artist Mel Chin changed an ordinary house in New Orleans into a bank vault where people worked inside on a project to help the city recover from Hurricane Katrina of 2005. Spencer Finch puts color in buildings that connect to the weather or landscape around it. Mierle Ukeles wanted her city to be more aware of the people who did the cleaning. She washed the outside steps of the art museum as a way to put the janitors and cleaning people into peoples’ minds and repair the ways in which they thought about city workers.

TODAY’S PRACTICE: REIMAGINE A PLACE

Find a place in the city that you would like to decorate, repair, or change in any way. Show a teacher. We’ll take a photo of it and you can rework your idea over the photo later. If you want, you can take it back to the place tomorrow and post your idea for its revision.