meadowsland - Tumblr blog

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: The #spinrewriter7 launch date is just around the corner! Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review | Spin Rewriter 7.0 Bonus https://t.co/TDBKbZZKsW

The #spinrewriter7 launch date is just around the corner! Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review | Spin Rewriter 7.0 Bonus https://t.co/TDBKbZZKsW

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 10, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

ON THE WALL BETWEEN TWO CULTURES, A MURAL

BY ZACH MORTICE

Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, detail with Baby Boom. Image courtesy of SPARC Archive.

Murals, wherever they’re deployed, can be sites of cultural empowerment, protests aimed at the dominant culture, commemorations of heroes, or simple, subversive proclamations of existence.

 In their ability to reappropriate neglected space on a large scale, murals can be defining elements of landscape design. To thousands of landscape architects who will be in Los Angeles this month for the ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO, Oct. 20-23, this will be good news: The Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA—Latin American and Latino Art in LA festival of thematically linked art exhibits will feature six installations that show how murals reshape our environment and tell hidden stories of marginalized cultures.

This year’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, led by The Getty, focuses on the intersection of Latin American and Latino American art and culture in Los Angeles.

Judith F. Baca, photograph of The Great Wall of Los Angeles. A view of Judy Baca and mural makers meeting at the 1940s section titled David Gonzalez in progress. Photograph courtesy of SPARC Archive.

 Of the mural exhibits, the most engaged with landscape architecture is The Great Wall of Los Angeles: Judith F. Baca’s Experimentations in Collaboration and Concrete, at the CSU Northridge Art Galleries, which opens October 14. The Great Wall of Los Angeles mural, more than a half mile long, has been the work of the Chicana artist Judith Baca since 1976, when she first enlisted local neighborhood youth to assist her in bringing it to life. Still a work in progress, the mural traces the history of Los Angeles, Southern California, and America from prehistory to the 1950s, with a keen eye on ignored and underserved populations. It’s a Howard Zinn-style focus on “suppressed histories,” says Mario Ontiveros, an art professor at CSU Northridge who curated the show. Along the way, the mural pays tribute to early LGBTQ fights for equality, women’s roles in supporting the war efforts during World War I and World War II, the forced assimilation of Native Americans, and dust bowl refugees’ flight to California.

Judy Baca with The Great Wall of Los Angeles, detail with The Birth of Rock and Roll, summer 1983. Image courtesy of SPARC Archive.

Ontiveros’s exhibition is partly composed of documentary photos, but also includes drawings and notes from research community meetings that reveal Baca’s process. Still actively working on the mural (which is expected to be nearly a mile long when complete), Baca collaborated with Ontiveros on the exhibit.

When the mural began, Ontiveros says, there was little gallery and museum support for Chicana artists. Largely excluded from mainstream exhibition venues, Baca received a disused concrete flood channel from a local public art nonprofit (the Social and Public Art Resource Center) as her canvas. And while painting the Tujunga Wash drainage canal (a tributary of the Los Angeles River) in the San Fernando Valley, she and her team had to build sandbag barricades to keep flowing water away.

Mural makers crew, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, detail with Japanese Internment, summer 1981. Image courtesy of SPARC Archive.

The mural has since become a catalyst that has changed people’s relationship to the canal, which is now lined with trees, more attractive and accessible, and part of a greenway trail. The infrastructure related to Los Angeles’s concrete-entombed inland waterways is a ripe topic for landscape design lately, and one focus of Baca’s work. Growing up and working in Los Angeles, Baca took note, Ontiveros says, of the ways development and capital prioritized “hardening the arteries” of the city, and turning the river into “concrete scars.”

“The idea of the environment has been central to her work for over 50 years,” he says.

Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, detail with Charles Chaplin and Thomas Alva Edison, 1978. Image courtesy of SPARC Archive.

The long arc of the mural’s history demonstrates more than a few intriguing aesthetic transitions. In early phases of the mural, each image was mostly self-contained. But in later sections, images and eras overlap, sometime with surreal or magical realism twists. In the World War II section of the mural, Japanese American infantry emerge out of flowing blue U.S. flag stripes whipping through the sky, while Asian Americans sent to internment camps shuffle into the horizon. Later on, Dodger Stadium descends onto Chavez Ravine like a UFO, displacing a vibrant Latino community. These bold and broad visual metaphors that tell stories from overlooked points of view in a formerly overlooked place become far more than paint on a wall. “The beautification project,” Ontiveros says, “becomes a space of empowerment.”

The five other Pacific Standard Time mural exhibits are:

Ken Gonzales-Day, Danny, mural by Levi Ponce, Van Nuys Blvd., Pacoima, 2016. © 2016 Ken Gonzales-Day.

Surface Tension by Ken Gonzales-Day: Murals, Signs, and Mark-Making in L.A., at the Skirball Cultural Center, is a wide survey of more than 100 of Gonzalez-Day’s photos of Los Angeles murals.

Emigdio Vasquez, El Proletariado de Aztlán (Detail), 1979. Acrylic on plaster. 8′ x 40′. Chapman University Art Collections. © Emigdio Vasquez Art. Photo: Jessica Bocinski.

My Barrio: Emigdio Vasquez and Chicana/o Identity in Orange County, at Chapman University, is the first comprehensive exhibition of Vasquez’s work. The prolific Orange Country muralist’s paintings combine mythic Mexican and Mexican American history with gritty social realism. The artist’s son, who helped restore one of his father’s murals, will unveil a new mural on the Chapman campus, and Vasquez’s art will be shown along with related work by contemporary artists.

California Mexicana: Missions to Murals, 1820–1930 at the Laguna Art Museum, looks at the role the visual arts played in transitioning California’s national identity from Mexico to the U.S. with paintings, posters, prints, and film.

Prometheus 2017: Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco, at the Pomona College Museum of Art, asks four contemporary artists to reinterpret José Clemente Orozco’s 1930 Prometheus fresco at Pomona College.

¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/o Murals Under Siege, at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, tells the story of eight murals in Los Angeles that have been threatened, censored, and demolished.

Several more exhibits find ways to look at Latino culture through a landscape design lens beyond murals:

Lineage Through Landscape: Tracing Egun in Brazil by Fran Siegel, at UCLA’s Fowler Museum, traces the plantcentric liturgy and ritual of West African-derived religions, transplanted into South America by the slave trade. Porcelain flowers and textured fabric weavings compile layers of cultural memory.

Jose Dávila: Sense of Place (at West Hollywood Park, 647 N. San Vicente Blvd., West Hollywood, California), hosted by LAND, is a large-scale modular public sculpture that will be disassembled and reconfigured in several Los Angeles landmarks, architectural sites, parks, and open spaces over the course of nine months, before being reassembled.

The U.S.–Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility, at the Craft & Folk Art Museum, asks a multidisciplinary group of artists and designers to consider the border as physical infrastructure, the subject of imagination, and as a site of cultural production.

Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based design journalist who focuses on landscape architecture and architecture. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram. 

from Landscape Architecture Magazine https://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2017/10/10/on-the-wall-between-two-cultures-a-mural/

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: Spin Rewriter 7.0 We are going to be running a special starting OCT 12 for the launch. #spinrewriter7

Spin Rewriter 7.0 We are going to be running a special starting OCT 12 for the launch. #spinrewriter7

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 9, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: Spin Rewriter 7.0 Need help with content. #spinrewriter7 launches Oct 12 https://t.co/JlPnV95jrx

Spin Rewriter 7.0 Need help with content. #spinrewriter7 launches Oct 12 https://t.co/JlPnV95jrx

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 9, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: Launching soon on Oct 12! #spinrewriter7 https://t.co/RfjOUUKZTf Spin Rewriter 7.0

Launching soon on Oct 12! #spinrewriter7 https://t.co/RfjOUUKZTf Spin Rewriter 7.0

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 9, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: Big discounts on #spinrewriter7. Don't miss your chance to grab this great product. https://t.co/A1IWyq8Fzz Spin Rewriter 7.0

Big discounts on #spinrewriter7. Don't miss your chance to grab this great product. https://t.co/A1IWyq8Fzz Spin Rewriter 7.0

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 9, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: Excitement building for the #spinrewriter7 launch on Oct 12th. Check us out for a free trial run! https://t.co/5YJa0bgelp

Excitement building for the #spinrewriter7 launch on Oct 12th. Check us out for a free trial run! https://t.co/5YJa0bgelp

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 9, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: Spin Rewriter 7.0 #SpinRewriter7 drops Oct 12 with some great bonuses...don't miss out. https://t.co/pfaDrY1LFl

Spin Rewriter 7.0 #SpinRewriter7 drops Oct 12 with some great bonuses...don't miss out. https://t.co/pfaDrY1LFl

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 8, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: Spin Rewriter 7.0 #spinrewriter7 free trail and free bonuses https://t.co/PcdaXtkmpj

Spin Rewriter 7.0 #spinrewriter7 free trail and free bonuses https://t.co/PcdaXtkmpj

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 8, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: Spin rewriter 7.0 coming soon. Don't miss the free trial and discounts! #spinrewriter7 https://t.co/Fz8hZr8XEQ

Spin rewriter 7.0 coming soon. Don't miss the free trial and discounts! #spinrewriter7 https://t.co/Fz8hZr8XEQ

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 8, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: Looking forward to the launch of the new software .... Spin Rewriter 7.0 Oct 12th #spinrewriter7 #spinrewriterreview

Looking forward to the launch of the new software .... Spin Rewriter 7.0 Oct 12th #spinrewriter7 #spinrewriterreview

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 7, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: Spin Rewriter 7.0 Hope you are onboard with the #spinrewriter7 launch.... Dont miss out... https://t.co/JdB1VZlCSG

Spin Rewriter 7.0 Hope you are onboard with the #spinrewriter7 launch.... Dont miss out... https://t.co/JdB1VZlCSG

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 7, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: #spinrewriter7 launching Oct 12! Get the early bird bonus Spin Rewriter 7.0 https://t.co/hQDLSG2Zrv

#spinrewriter7 launching Oct 12! Get the early bird bonus Spin Rewriter 7.0 https://t.co/hQDLSG2Zrv

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 7, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: Don't miss the launch and great discounts! #spinrewriter7 https://t.co/He5Byo0xer Spin Rewriter 7.0

Don't miss the launch and great discounts! #spinrewriter7 https://t.co/He5Byo0xer Spin Rewriter 7.0

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 7, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: Check out this review of #spinrewriter7. Very excited for the release. Spin Rewriter 7.0

Check out this review of #spinrewriter7. Very excited for the release. Spin Rewriter 7.0

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 6, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

@SpinRewriter7: Spin rewriter 7.0 is the best article spinner out there. #spinrewriter7 Be ready for the release on Oct 12. https://t.co/xL10w6nYRl

Spin rewriter 7.0 is the best article spinner out there. #spinrewriter7 Be ready for the release on Oct 12. https://t.co/xL10w6nYRl

— Spin Rewriter 7.0 (@SpinRewriter7) October 6, 2017

from http://twitter.com/SpinRewriter7 via Spin Rewriter 7.0 Review website Spin Rewriter 7.0 Demo

[meadowsland]

GROWING OBSESSION

BY TIM WATERMAN

The colonial past and the horticultural present take tea at London’s Garden Museum.

FROM THE OCTOBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Just upstream and across the River Thames from the long, neo-Gothic bulk of the Palace of Westminster, which contains the houses of Parliament and the tower that contains the bell Big Ben, are two venerable buildings that have been added to since the Middle Ages. One is Lambeth Palace, the official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The other is the old church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, now the home of the Garden Museum.

The Garden Museum’s main focus is British gardens and gardening, including not just the most elaborate and vaunted ones, but also a more intimate history of smaller gardens. Featured in particular are those of the middle classes, which have given Britain the sense of being a “nation of gardeners.” For landscape architects with an interest in either stately or domestic gardens in Britain, the museum, which has been recently redeveloped and now includes a building addition, two newly redesigned gardens, a superb café, and an expanded collection, will be a delight. Rather than serving, as a botanical garden might, to narrate garden history through garden spaces, the Garden Museum’s collection gives a more personal-scale view through tools and ephemera that help relate the space of the garden to the space of the imagination and desire. The museum fits compactly into the space of a historic neighborhood church and the tightly bounded urban churchyard.

The Garden Museum opened in 1977, following the church’s deconsecration, but it had come perilously close to demolition—its creepy, boarded-up dereliction made it suitable for use as a location for the supernatural horror film The Omen. It was saved by the efforts of garden enthusiasts Rosemary and John Nicholson, who were drawn to the place because of its association with the great 17th-century plant hunters and naturalists John Tradescant the Elder and his son (the Younger), who are both buried in the churchyard, alongside William Bligh, himself a plant hunter, and whose ship, the Bounty, uncomfortably crammed full of potted breadfruit plants, was the site of a famous mutiny. The Tradescants’ elaborate tomb, once in the churchyard of St Mary-at-Lambeth, what is now the site of the museum’s new extension and its courtyard, is adorned with reliefs of exotic Mediterranean landscapes, and on one panel, a deeply carved many-headed hydra and a skull—a memento mori. The hydra would become a metaphor, in the 1700s, for the multiple insurgencies of piracy, mutiny, and slave rebellion faced by the British Empire in the early days of globalization.

The plantings by Christopher Bradley-Hole play nicely against a foil of yew. Photo courtesy of the Garden Museum.

The museum, in fact, is full of such reminders, and the English garden in modernity—since the 1600s—is itself a record, not just of a love of beauty, nature, and design, but of a violent history of conquest. Plant hunting is now a much more gentle quest, and the fruits of vigorous global botanizing, courtesy of Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones of the celebrated Welsh nursery Crûg Farm, are visible in Dan Pearson’s design for the new Sackler Garden. Dan Pearson is a celebrated British plant designer and horticulturist whose practice employs a number of landscape architects. Pearson’s courtyard garden, barely 1,000 square feet, replaces the staid knot garden that once occupied the churchyard around the tombs, and it is framed by a light but confident bronze-clad addition by Dow Jones Architects. The bronze cladding echoes the scaling bark of the vast London plane trees that ring the museum, and some of the apparent lightness of the structure may be attributed to the fact that it had to be built without foundations, due to the roughly 20,000 bodies that have been interred in the churchyard since before the Norman Conquest.

One wonders if the roots of the plantings mingle with bones. If so, it’s heartening to think of the death below springing into life above. Some of the new addition around the courtyard of the Sackler Garden covers the old churchyard, but not the tombs of Vice Admiral Bligh and the Tradescants, which now visually anchor Pearson’s design. Plantings have an Anglo–Dutch sensibility, arising from the continuing conversation between British designers such as Pearson and the powerful influence from the Netherlands, particularly Piet Oudolf.

Among the plants, Ficus carica ‘Ice Crystal’ is one of the stars here—it is literally starry—its striking palmate snowflake-starburst leaves spangling away in one corner. Everywhere plant forms are celebrated. There is no distracting variegation, so one is given the luxury, for example, to contemplate just what a softly unearthly hue of green is Melianthus major, or just how starkly alert the stems of Equisetum are. Plantings are in succinct drifts—just large enough for an appreciation of the massing, but not so much as to become a monoculture. Plant forms are accentuated by these tight groupings. Plant heights are seemingly random, but the courtyard is small enough that low spots frame vistas punched through. From the new Garden Café inside the new extension, those views are to an educational kitchen and a classroom—the Clore Learning Space—where city kids can get their hands on plants, soil, earthworms, and food, though not all at once. “Many children in this neighborhood haven’t seen a worm or touched a plant,” says the museum’s director, Christopher Woodward. All these rooms have clean, elegant glazed walls facing the courtyard. The café has glazing on two sides, and Pearson’s plantings continue in a narrow strip before the street. One dines amid the plants.

At the main entry to the museum, the old church door, is another garden created by the minimalist designer Christopher Bradley-Hole. When I visited in August, the garden was incomplete, with gravel where there will soon be Croatian limestone. The space is formed by two elongated lozenges, edged round with waist-high clipped yew hedges. The outline of the space is traced out with bright LED strips at the base of the hedge. The use of such lighting has already lapsed into cliché owing to overuse, and here, as in so many other applications, any sense of mystery or shadow is sacrificed. Though the space is generous and its expanse of reflective stone will light up the heavy shade under the plane trees, it is both bland and static, and small areas of perennial planting near the door lack the verve of Pearson’s choices.

Planting plan. Image courtesy of Dan Pearson Studio.

There is continuity, at least, from the lighted outline of the garden to the museum interior, where strip lights continue up the stairs and along the balconies. Visitors’ faces are uplit as they gaze at the exhibits. As in the courtyard, where the building must not intrude upon the historic remains, the museum is a freestanding installation within the old church structure that must not touch the walls. As a result, the structure, of blond wood, twines and floats through the arches and recesses. The collection housed in the museum was originally composed of vintage tools, which over the years expanded to include garden ephemera. There is now an archive (which includes the records of the British garden designers John Brookes, Beth Chatto, and Penelope Hobhouse) and a growing selection of books, artworks, plans, and drawings. Highlights include Humphry Repton’s 1793 Red Book for Sundridge Park in Kent and Dominic Cole’s general layout plan for the Eden Project. The design drawing display is limited, but there is much else to delight garden enthusiasts.

At the end of the church is a gallery for temporary exhibitions (this autumn there will be one dedicated to Repton), and opposite, where the altar once stood, is now a small room with an idiosyncratic miscellany on display called the Ark Gallery. It is a reference to the Tradescants’ private museum by that same name, once one of London’s wonders and a classic cabinet of curiosities. Some of the items are on loan from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and include such items as a Native American ball club, elk skulls, a statue of Saint Fiacre, the patron saint of gardeners, and, most bizarre, a hoax object called a “vegetable lamb.” This was purported to have been a plant that fruited sheep. The “lamb” is, in fact, pieced together from nascent, fuzzy fern fronds. The miscellany might seem random, but it helps to see how the garden was viewed as a collection, or a naturalist study by the Tradescants rather than primarily as a designed or aesthetic space.

Standing in the Ark next to a portrait of Tradescant the Elder with some of his collection of exotic seashells, I ask Woodward whether the museum will have international appeal. “The thing about plants,” he replies, “is they’re as local as the flower in your eye or as distant as a breadfruit.” The Tradescants believed that all the dispersed plants of Eden could someday be collected in a botanic garden. What better place to contemplate the cosmopolitan nature of the garden, and the darker side of conquest, than a museum at the heart of a former empire.

Tim Waterman lives in London and teaches at the University of Greenwich and the Bartlett School of Architecture. You can follow him on Twitter @tim_waterman.

  from Landscape Architecture Magazine https://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2017/10/06/growing-obsession/