Project Selvage Voting!

Spoonflower's Project Selvage textile contest is under way. Vote here: http://www.spoonflower.com/contest_voters/new?contest_id=78

The winner will receive a design contract with Michael Miller Fabrics.

Scavanger Artists with a Message

In the last few days I have received emails from my dad and a friend sharing with me several amazing artists who use repurposed materials. Artist and educator Victor Kobayashi was featured in the Hawaii Star Advertiser. He makes beautiful mosaic ceramic art incorporating found objects. His works are at the Koa Gallery in Honolulu. The Koa Gallery is honoring Kobayashi with the 2011 KOA Award, a lifetime achievement honor for dedication to the arts. The award is accompanied by an exhibition; Kobayashi's "New Alchemy, Zen & Art" is showing at the gallery through April 14.

The National Parks Traveler featured the work of Richard James who has collected discarded bottles along the shore at Point Reyes and had created a dramatic site specific installation with them. More images of these bottles are at Donald Kinney's blog.

Konsfack

A few days ago I visited Konstfack , University College of Arts, Craft and Design. It is an amazing space. The school is in a converted Ericsson factory.Shibori exhibit at Konsfack. Video below:

Sweden visit: a workshop on Urban Tools

I am in Sweden this week for a design workshop series titled Urban Tools at The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Kungliga Konsthogskolan. In the presentation Artistic Strategies with the As Found, I shared my use of repurposed materials and collaborative art experiments in both my fine art and in my teaching. It is very exciting to be here and meet Mr. Arvind Gupta who is leading the workshops. He has a wonderful site called Toys from Trash which I have referred to in various projects. My father, a commercial toy designer who grew up on Maui making toys from trash, also presented. Michael Dudley, a professor at the Royal Institute of Art, also gave a very interesting presentation, Papanek's Imperative, on Victor Papanek. The graduate students in this program have a week to create small scale solutions using found materials. Here is an excerpt from the course description:
This workshop has a two fold aim - to explore needs in the urban environment that could be enabled through a "middle scale" of tools or toys, while simultaneously investigating the "left-overs" in society that could be reused, re-evaluated or filled with new purposes. We will explore these possibilities by building of full-scale prototypes of models during the workshop week.

Explore and identify the present and new needs or functions in the Indian or Swedish urban context and propose small-scale urban solutions for them. Use only found materials to construct the full scale models of your ideas. Work in groups of two to four people.

Student work above. A little figure inflates when you place items in the recycling can.

It has been a very inspiring and educational visit for me so far. The other guest speakers have been fabulous. Mr. Gupta had such an engaging participatory presentation as did my dad and yesterday Alexander Kulanski's lecture, The Urban Playground, introduced us to his thought provoking work using site specific materials. He is work is in very public spaces, engages the public in innovative ways that invites us to reflect in different ways upon urban spaces.

Donor Circle for the Arts Pitch, Part 2

Backstage at the Dragon Theater: Ms. Kim Mesa of the Alum Rock Education Foundation and Ms. Arlene U. Illa, 5th Grade teacher of Cureton Elementary in Alum Rock, San Jose, CA.

On Wednesday, I was a part of the Donor Circle for the Arts grant presentations for the final round of grant applicants for 2011. It was a very nerve racking and exciting privilege to be there among the other artists and arts groups. My digital textile banner project was the very last presentation of the night! Each grant proposal pitch was to be limited to three minutes. Kim Mesa, Arlene Illa and I practiced over an over in the lower lobby of Palo Alto's City Hall before we headed over to the Dragon Theater to join the other presenters. Here are photos I took back stage of Kim and Arlene waiting.

I think we did a pretty good job. We at least stuck to the three minutes which was a challenge and I was grateful to have them with me to share the You Are Here Banner Project vision.
For the grant pitch we wore scarps of fabrics from a past digital textile project and I had the dramatic prop of an 8 foot by 2.5 foot street banner. The Redevelopment Agency of San Jose loaned two banners to me for the presentation. I will be using them again in a presentation to the Alum Rock Village Business Association on Monday.

On Tuesday, I was lucky to meet Stephen Yeager who works for the city and he installs every single street banner in San Jose. That is over a 1,000 banners citywide! He told me that the banner program has been in place for 22 years and that there are only two neighborhoods that take advantage of banner funds set aside for the community business associations: Alum Rock and Japantown. I actually know the talented designer of the Japantown banners. She is Tamiko Rast of Rasteroids. On Tuesday, Steve Yeager took me on a tour of the storage rooms of the city banners. I was surprised to learn that they are stored in storage rooms built into the Market Street Garage in downtown San Jose. It was cool to see all the banners rolled up and store neatly in these facilities. I enjoyed the visual texture of the tight rolls of banners.

Project Selvage

I just received an email notice that Spoonflower is teaming up with Michael Miller Fabrics to present Project Selvage, a competition in which the winner will go on to sign a contract with Michael Miller and produce a collection of fabrics to debut at the Fall Quilt Market in October 2011. The theme of this competition is baby boy prints. They are accepting entries from today through March 24th. On March 31st, they will announce the 75 finalists chosen by judges from Michael Miller and Spoonflower and you'll have a chance to vote for the designs that will go on to the final round.

Michael Miller Fabrics has nice contemporary designs, but the contest site does not reflect the artistry or sophistication and whimsy of their collections. It was kind of a turn off to see the goofy illustration on the project site. The project homepage would look a lot better without this image. At any rate, having conducted an online textile project last year, I am interested in seeing how this project goes. I think it may be a wonderful opportunity for artists to enter in the profession of textile design.

Amazing Flash portfolio

I was blow away by this website. An amazingly elegant and simple brush stroke feel to it...it was created in 2006 using Flash....a great example of tools serving the idea and not the other way around!

http://www.jonathanyuen.com/main.html