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Our friend brianjohnjensen's first solo show "Ascendant" at Parasol Projects was an inspiration! We were so honored to play a small part in making this beautiful personal collection public.

“Ascendant” features 30 prints from photographer Brian John Jensen. Taken over the past 15 years the show is a travelogue of places visited, long shadows cast, golden afternoons – with a sense as well of timelessness -- moments of change, of energy, of transformation occurring.

Special thanks to Parasol Projects, we adored the space and, as always, your team was a pleasure to work with. If you’re curious about doing your own pop up show you should check out their awesome galleries here: www.parasolprojects.com

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Sunday is the biggest climate march in history, join us in posting a video challenging your friends ‪#‎marchwithme‬

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#marchwithme

Are you going to the People's Climate March?

At last year's climate rally the lack of diversity both in the crowd and onstage was disappointing. This situation is DIRE and we need all our communities to be there. We think sometimes all it takes to make something inclusive is an invitation, so …  

What if we create the biggest invitation to the biggest climate march in HISTORY happening NEXT weekend in NYC!? How? By putting together a video invitation from all of you - prominent climate activists, community leaders, artists, students, kids, supermodels, and superheros.

Then, we coordinate a social media blitz - a challenge asking our friends to #marchwithme, re-posting the videos and asking our friends to invite their friends <<and on and on and on!>> Keep a look out for specific social media instructions in the next few days!  

Together we can TURN OUT NYC to march on the UN two days before a meeting of world leaders to address the climate crisis.

Here's what we need from you:

email hello@space-made.com with a quick video of you saying, "March with me."

Shoot it on your phone horizontally and get it to us no later than this FRIDAY

include links to your Twitter and Instagram handle in your email

PS. Feel free to share this call far & wide!

Make the movement inclusive

Make your voice heard

#marchwithme

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$250 Grant Available for Artists Responding to #Ferguson

Space-Made is offering artists a $250 grant to respond to our partner's, Design Studio For Social Intervention, call for work. Read guidelines below and send proposals to HELLO@SPACE-MADE.COM with the subject like "Ferguson Grant" by Sept. 30, 2014. Emails should include a clear project description (less than 250 words), timeline, and images and/or links to at least 3 samples of your work. 

Whose problem is this?

An emergency pedagogical intervention into social distance and race

As we watch the public responses to deadly police attacks in Ferguson, New York City and too many other places, we see almost no leadership coming from the white community or other communities of color. This despite the fact that time and again, the state-sponsored killers are white. We recently spoke with some white undergrads to see what they thought about the attacks. Many of the students were deeply concerned, but did not see a role for themselves in challenging the situation. They did not see it as their struggle, in part because it doesn’t happen to them, but largely because it has been framed as a “black issue”. They also stated their desire to defer to black leadership for this same reason. 

While their heart and politics were in the "right place” (or close), their way of thinking about the problem is a problem. We have much more than a “black problem”. We have a government that sponsors institutions to practice violence against black and brown communities, systematically, with our tax dollars. We have leading media outlets and politicians justifying these tactics through blame journalism—finding ways to blame the unarmed victims rather than the killers or the larger systems at work.  And fundamentally, we have a serious social problem that is erroneously entering our collective political consciousness as a “black problem”. “Whose problem is this?” intends to question the thinking that allows us all to think of this wave of sanctioned brutality against black bodies as a black problem.

We seek to create temporary spaces / social interventions that provide conceptual conditions for people whose thinking is keeping them from action and distorting their sentiments. This intervention can’t think "at" its publics. It has to make it possible for conceptual movement and new kinds of thinking, new gestures, new proximities, new frames, etc. It should do this without leaving those who encounter it feeling shame for ways of conceiving this situation they've simply inherited.

Our hunch is that we need architectural structures with diagrams, spatial arrangements and interactive elements. We are asking for artists, commissioners and art organizers to either put a call out or to make social interventions happen directly. We want to inspire and compel other socially engaged artists to do the same.

 Design considerations:

As people encounter your pedagogical object / intervention, it should draw connections that aren’t obvious under the kinds of thinking and feeling which make this situation a “black problem”. It should not interrogate the situation in Ferguson but have ways for people who encounter it while making links to other episodes of violence, other violent systems, other victims of violence, other relationships to violence, etc.  It could, however, interrogate the related systems impacting the lives of black youth and communities, like the school-to-prison pipeline, and media / discursive representations of the problems. For example, it could ask us “Whose problem is it that the New York Times colluded with portraying Michael Brown as a thief?” And it could ask us “whose problem is it that the man who killed Michael Brown is not in the frame of the problem?” It should make that regularity of this pattern of relations and choreographies a problem. It should also ask us, “whose problem is it that large parts of our population don’t see this as their problem?” And it should do this kind of work without words or language.

Our hunch is that the content should include images and diagrams. It should have very little to any text outside of the question, “Whose problem is this?” And last it would be a tremendous benefit if the object could reflect back the kinds of social distancing, community and place-breaking that these incidents are creating between communities in our everyday lives. It should, if possible, “make public” what’s happening between publics as we distance from, draw closer to, or depart from the situation and the meta-situation.

 Interventions should be flexible enough to install, breakdown and reinstall in other locations. They should be somewhat easy for other interventionists to riff off of or duplicate, as part of our intention is for this pedagogical scaffolding to have its own legs. 

The design elements we'd like to see stay constant in the interventions are:

The question (Whose problem / fight is this?)

Wood

Diagrams

Images

Quotes

Space

Little to no use of colors (natural wood, canvas, black text and one color material)

 For more information, contact Kenneth Bailey, kdb@ds4si.org

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We believe art can enable some of the most oppressed to be the most magnificent leaders and change makers. That's why we hope you'll join us in supporting Brittanie Richardson's kickstarter campaign to develop an arts camp for young survivors of sex slavery in Nairobi. Special thank you to Brittanie for providing an opportunity, on the heels of so many thoughts and prayers for young women in Nigeria, for us all to do more than watch and wait ... but to put our money where our mouths are, and try not to leave any girls behind. >> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/898632450/art-and-abolition-summer-arts-camp

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We Are The Youth is now available for pre-order. Secure your limited edition copy now! 

What readers are saying -- 

"This book is magnificent: hard to read at times because of the pain so honestly shared, and completely uplifting when you realize the strength and beauty of this next generation. I can't wait for the voices in this book to run the world. We'll be in great hands. Oh, and there's a GLOSSARY! I wish more books came with glossaries."

-Baratunde Thurston. Author, How To Be Black. CEO Cultivated Wit. Proud ally.

"We Are The Youth brilliantly illustrates the complexity, beauty, and diversity of LGBT youth. This book captures the heart and soul of what it means to negotiate sexuality and gender identity in today's world."   

-Danah Boyd, It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

"This is such an amazingly beautiful and timely book." 

-Jacqueline Woodson, Miracle's Boys

"This book moves far beyond the normative trope that “it gets better” for young LGBT people. The poignant and powerful voices captured here demonstrate with full force that our young people have so much to teach us about how much has changed since the rise of lesbian and gay liberation in the mid-20th century – and about how much remains unchanged." 

- Stephanie Gilmore, Ph.D., Groundswell: Grassroots Feminist Activism in Post War America

"It’s important for queer youth to tell our stories so the world can see we were here, and this is how we lived our lives."

-Kaden, We Are the Youth participant

"A generous opportunity in todays moral climate, to look into the eyes of the youth, learn their stories, feel their dignity, vulnerability & grace."

-Morley, activist singer-songwriter 

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Laurel & Diana at our studio approving the final layout of wertheyouth.

We partnered with frequent collaborator, photographer Laurel Golio, and her journalist partner Diana Scholl, in order to amplify their existing online effort We Are The Youth. We’re helping them determine an innovative and provocative presentation of stories, informed by our experience navigating new media, zine culture and mainstream media formats. 

The book will be a collection of portraits and stories chronicling  lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth in the United States. The project  addresses the lack of visibility of LGBT young people by providing a space to share stories in an honest and respectful way.

Since June 2010, We Are the Youth has profiled more than 80 young people across the United States. The profiles have been displayed at the Brooklyn Museum, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, the Fresh Fruit Festival and the GenderReel Festival, and have been featured in media including The British Journal of Photography, Change.org, Buzzfeed and The Huffington Post.

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Studio visit! Yesterday we hung out with mojuicy who illustrated interruptmag's issue 2 awesome cover. Order yours here today!

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The peculiarity of ‘our place in the world’ isn’t to be confused with anybody else’s. The peculiarity of our problems aren’t to be reduced to subordinate forms of other problems…in these conditions, it will be understood that we cannot delegate anyone to think for us; to do our searching, to make our discoveries; that we cannot accept that anyone at all, be he our best friend, answer for us.

Aime Cesaire

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Artist Adalky Capellan's inspiration for The House of Spoof comes from Pico Iyer: “Home is not a place you sleep, it is a place where you stand.”