Blog
First spring stems
Rhubarb from the organic farmer’s market on Kollwitzplatz and chives from our garden.
Rabid?
Two of the small, slightly crazed looking rabbits who appeared at my house at Easter.
Coop Creativity
Bringing together local artists, designers, writers and musicians to mentor inner-city high school kids, Coop Center for Creativity is a budding after-school program based at Coop High School in downtown New Haven. In the program’s first year, the director asked me to help use design to draw kids to the very first workshops — and later, to help showcase their work in the community.
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Neighborhood Plant Discussion Center
Urban Plant Research is my ongoing collaboration with Sara Bouchard. In August 2007, we installed a temporary neighborhood plant discussion center at Open Source Gallery, a community gallery in South Slope, Brooklyn.
As artists-in-residence at Open Source, we hosted visiting neighbors during regular open hours and many participatory events. Neighbors young and old joined us in exploring, documenting, tasting, and singing to the plants in the neighborhood. While doing so, we discussed urban gardening, city trees, edible weeds, and life for plants and humans in the city.
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Ruppiner Feingebäck
I was asked to support the comeback of a centuries-old family-owned bakery and cookie company in Germany, designing a new cafe, logo and look.
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U8 Plant Quiz
In three stations on Berlin’s U8 subway line, the New Society for Visual Art presented an art exhibition using the billboard spaces behind the subway tracks. My collaboration with Sara Bouchard, Urban Plant Research, was selected to participate in the exhibition, titled “Glück Gehabt” (“that was lucky”).
Sara and I have been collecting images and observations of plants in urban spaces since 2007. We see these plants, whether they are struggling to survive in the manmade environment, or thriving despite the odds, as a way to start a conversation about how we as humans share city space — and to nudge people to take a second look at their surroundings.
In this spirit, I used the images we had collected to create the U8 Plant Quiz, turning our billboard space into an interactive urban game. We featured photos of six plants that we had spotted near stations on the U8 line with a multiple choice quiz.
People could pass the time waiting for the subway by reflecting on the neighborhoods around the U8 line and try to guess which station each plant was from. They could also go online to complete the quiz for a chance to win the photo of their choice, in keeping with the exhibition’s theme “that was lucky.”
This became the our first of many interactive community projects working as Urban Plant Research. For more, please see our project website, urbanplantresearch.org.
Article on "Berlin Half-Stories"
I was asked to write several pieces about emerging artists and designers for INMYX, an online magazine. One artist I chose to profile was Mónica Naranjo Uribe, whose work I was delighted to stumble upon at an art school open house in Berlin. Here is the piece.
The first thing that strikes you about the Berlin in Mónica Naranjo Uribe‘s drawings is the quiet, muted color. In the dusty-pastel palette that marks all her work, reminiscent of faded wallpaper or striped ice cream, she shows the streets, storefronts and subway cars she saw during the year that she spent in this city, creating the book Berlin Half-Stories.
Unlike the countless other young artists drawn to the city as an exotic unknown, Uribe came to Berlin in a kind of return. Though her parents are from Colombia, they were living in Berlin temporarily when she was born. But she grew up in Colombia, studied and worked in graphic design there. Then, in 2007, she was awarded a grant by the DAAD to return to her birthplace and draw.
From the moment she arrived in Berlin, Uribe says, she was struck by a singular impression of the city: a stillness, a calm, the opposite of the crowds and bustle she had expected of a major metropole. She captured this stillness in over forty small, square drawings in her fledgling book.
The images in the book were first collected with a camera during her travels through the city and brought back to the small dormitory room that was her home and studio during the one-year project. With gentle pencil strokes, she drew just the parts of the pictures that mattered to her. Superfluous cars and clutter disappeared, leaving people, dogs, peeling posters, tram tracks, worn buildings. What remains is unmistakably Berlin, but also unmistakably hers: a city of soft grays, browns and vanillas, of millions of people living side by side, each wrapped gently in his own solitude.
Project website: www.half-noise.com/project/berlin-half-stories/
First published in INMYX magazine, November 2008
Yoga Lotos
The Yoga-Schule Lotos is a true neighborhood and family business. Larissa and Thomas Gärtner founded their friendly, affordable yoga school in Berlin as a young couple living in a small apartment adjacent to the school. Several years, two babies, and a marriage later, they moved their home and their school to the rural area around Lake Strausberg, near the German-Polish border. Along the way, I worked with them to revamp their website so that it could grow and change gracefully with them.
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Firehouse 12 Records
Firehouse 12 is a labor of love. Jazz lover Nick Lloyd transformed an old firehouse in downtown New Haven into an audiophile’s jazz club and recording studio. The amazing sound and excellent recording equipment draw musicians who might not otherwise have come to this small city. Meanwhile, the modern yet welcoming spaces draw people who might not otherwise have taken a chance on new jazz.
After Firehouse 12 launched its own record label, Nick and his wife, painter Megan Craig, asked me to collaborate with Megan on two album designs.
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