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(Boston, MA —- Dec. 2, 2015) This February, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens a comprehensive survey of the artist Walid Raad (b. 1967, Lebanon), a pivotal figure in contemporary art whose work investigates the ways in which we represent, remember, and make sense of history. Walid Raad, on view from Feb. 24 through May 30, brings together over 200 works across various mediums—including photography, video, sculpture, and performance. Informed by his upbringing in Lebanon during the civil war (1975–90) and by the socioeconomic and military policies that have shaped the Middle East in the past few decades, Raad’s work is dedicated to exploring archives and photographic documents in the public realm, the role of memory and narrative within discourses of conflict, and the construction of histories of art in the Arab world. Walid Raad, which originated at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is organized by Eva Respini, the ICA’s Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.  Following its presentation in Boston, the exhibition will travel to the Museo Jumex, Mexico City (Oct. 13, 2016–Jan.14, 2017).
 
The exhibition focuses on two of the artist’s long-term projects: The Atlas Group (1989–2004) and Scratching on things I could disavow (2007–ongoing).  These two distinct projects are united by the question: How does war affect bodies, minds, and cultures?

Under the rubric of The Atlas Group, a 15-year project exploring the contemporary history of Lebanon, Raad produced photographs, videotapes, notebooks, and lectures that related imaginary stories. The stories were inspired in part by real events and extensive research in Lebanon’s various archives and elsewhere.

Raad’s recent work has expanded to address the Middle East region at large. His ongoing project Scratching on things I could disavow examines the recent emergence in the Arab world of new infrastructures for the visual arts—art fairs, biennials, museums, and galleries—alongside the geopolitical, economic, and military conflicts that have consumed the region in the past few decades.

The exhibition also features a series of live, in-gallery performances by Raad (see description and dates below). 

The Atlas Group (1989-2004)
It was with The Atlas Group that Raad established the brilliantly daring artistic methodology that he employs to this day. The project was established in Beirut in 1989 to preserve, study, and produce audio, visual, literary, and other documents that shed light on Lebanon’s history. Each of The Atlas Group documents is attributed to a source who, like the organization, is fictional. None of the “documents” produced by The Atlas Group is wholly imaginary: these photographs, texts, and videos are borrowed from original sources, such as newspapers, or from Raad’s own street photography. But when Raad rephoto­graphs or scans them and mediates their presentation through story lines, literary titles, narrative wall texts, and engaging performances, they move into the imaginary realm. Raad calls these hybrids “hysterical documents.”

The Atlas Group’s various characters are all seemingly involved in absurdly exhaustive tasks like recording sunsets (I only wish that I could weep, 1997/2002) or locating every car bomb detonated during the civil war (My neck is thinner than a hair: Engines, 1996–2001). Violence is rarely pictured in The Atlas Group archive, which focuses instead on peripheral details like the purported gambling habits of fictional historians during the civil war (Notebook volume 72: Missing Lebanese wars, 1989/1998).

A number of The Atlas Group works are attributed to Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, including Notebook volume 72: Missing Lebanese wars, Notebook volume 38: Already been in a lake of fire (199½003), and Miraculous beginnings/No, illness is neither here nor there (1993/2003). Dr. Fakhouri, an esteemed, recently deceased, imaginary historian of the Lebanese wars whose papers were donated to The Atlas Group, lends the project authenticity. Civilizationally, we do not dig holes to bury ourselves (1958–59/2003), is a series of small black-and-white photographs purportedly taken by the scholar during his first and only trip to Europe, in the late 1950s. These self-portraits capture the lone Fakhouri lounging in hotel rooms, reading in cafés, and viewing the tourist sites of Paris and Rome. The images, repurposed from family snapshots, actually feature Raad’s father.
 
Let’s be honest, the weather helped (1998/2006) comprises images of notebook pages featuring black-and-white photographs that Raad himself took in Beirut during and after the civil war. These images of pockmarked buildings and bombed-out neighborhoods are overlaid with different-sized colored disks that map bullets and shrapnel, again collected by Raad after bombings and battles when he was a child in Beirut. The colors are linked to the national origins of the ammunitions and form a more expressive and poetic image, rather than one that is purely meant to document. The weather, referenced in the title of the work, is a recurring motif in The Atlas Group; the banal staple of small talk, it is neutral, unpredictable, and acts as an equalizer, circumscribing the direct address of violence.

In making his own documents, along with their accompanying narratives, Raad has created the documents that he felt these experiences and situations deserved; the documents he wished someone had created all along.

Scratching on things I could disavow (2007-)

Scratching on things I could disavow, which Raad began in 2007, is an interrelated series of photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, and performances. While each of the series within this larger body of work stands individually, taken together they constitute an examination of how art history is being forged within the new infrastructures for art in the Arab world.  Why are the Sheikhs and Sheikhas in the Arabian/Persian Gulf building massive new museums?  To answer this question, Raad visited and documented the emerging museums, galleries, art fairs, and public collections, and found himself asking another question: How has art in the Arab world been affected physically and otherwise by the wars of the past century?

Scratching on things I could disavow is marked by narratives of absence and withdrawal—the shrinking of works of art, for instance, or empty museum spaces with un-enterable doorways. In this body of work, Raad seems more like the narrator of a play, creating scenarios wherein works of art are no longer fully available to be seen, read, or experienced.
 
Blank walls, polished floors, and empty doorways become active players in Section 88: Views from outer to inner compartments (2010 and 2015), the title of both a video and a sculptural installation. Raad devised a set of doorways that are fashioned from wood and mimic the architectural style of Western museums of the 19th century. This set-like quality is enhanced in the ICA display with theatrical lighting that casts strong shadows. 
 
Another work, Section 139: The Atlas Group (1989–2004), also uses museum architecture and infrastructure in innovative ways.  This work—a maquette of a never-realized Atlas Group retrospective— recognizes the need for new modes of display and content formation in areas with histories of conflict and trauma. In Section 139, Raad has faithfully re-created his own artworks, down to the videos, which play in a model-size version of a white-cube gallery space. The accompanying text explains that in 2008, after agreeing to exhibit in a chic new gallery in Beirut (in the neighborhood of Karantina, site of one of the deadliest massacres of the Lebanese Civil War), Raad found that his works had become inaccessible to him, shrunk down to 1/100th of their original size.  
 
Scratching on things I could disavow encompasses an entire constellation of the ephemera that accompany the production and display of art in today’s accelerated art economy. Appendix XVIII: Plates 22–257 (2008–14) is a series of photographs drawn from documents of real exhibitions and art activities in the Arab world: books, catalogues, posters, invoices, and invitations. One such work in the series, Plates 22–24: A History of Venice IV (2009), is drawn from promotional materials for the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 2007, the first time Lebanon was represented with its own national pavilion there.
 
Performance is the central axis around which Scratching on things I could disavow revolves—indeed the overall body of work includes a perfor­mance, Walkthrough. Scheduled regularly throughout the run of the ICA exhibition, Walkthrough takes the form of a gallery talk, accommodating 40 visitors who sit on the stools that the museum’s educators use to seat attendees at their lectures. Raad’s presentation style ranges from sober investigator to psychotic telepath, as he recounts some of the economic and ideological motives behind the cultural boom in the Middle East, but also some of the fantastical situations he found himself in along the way.

Performance Schedule
 
Tickets are required for the Walkthrough performance. A limited number of same-day performance tickets will be available at the museum on a first-come, first-serve basis. The performance is 55 minutes long and is free with museum admission.

Wednesday, February 24, 2PM
Thursday, February 25, 7PM
Thursday, March 17, 6PM 
Friday, March 18, 1PM
Saturday, April 9, 2PM
Sunday, April 10, 2PM
Thursday, May 12, 7PM
Friday, May 13, 1PM
Saturday, May 14, 2PM
                                              
About the artist
Walid Raad was born in 1967 in Chbanieh, Lebanon. In 1983, he left Beirut for the United States, where he attended high school and college. Raad enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he studied photography and Middle Eastern studies and earned his PhD in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester. Raad frequently returns to Lebanon, and is deeply involved in the artistic community there. He currently lives in New York, and has been an Associate Professor of Art at The Cooper Union since 2002. Recent exhibitions of Raad’s work in Europe have been met with enthusiasm and critical accolades. Solo exhibitions have been held at Museo Madre, Naples (2014), Carré d’Art, Nimes (2014), the Louvre, Paris (2013), Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, (2011), Kunsthalle Zürich (2011), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010), and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006).
 
Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated 192-page scholarly publication with a major essay by the exhibition curator Eva Respini, and contributions by art historian Finbarr Barry Flood and Walid Raad, that surveys nearly three decades of Raad’s practice in a variety of mediums. Essays by Respini and Flood place Raad’s art in the international context of contemporary art making, and a special eighteen-page visual contribution by Raad provides insight into his practice. 192 pages, 216 illustrations.
 
This exhibition is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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This exhibition is curated by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 
 
The Boston presentation is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. 

Support for the Boston presentation of Walid Raad is generously provided by Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest.

Individual support accounts for more than 60% of the ICA’s annual operating budget. We couldn’t do what we do without your support.

The ICA strives to bring contemporary art and ideas to audiences of all ages in Boston—and we couldn’t do it without support from donors, support that accounts for more than 60% of the annual operating budget.

It is thanks to our contributors that the ICA is able to serve as a platform for thought-provoking conversations and ground-breaking exhibitions, such as this fall’s highly acclaimed Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957.

Black Mountain College, a small liberal school founded in 1933 outside Asheville, North Carolina, has had enormous influence on the post-war culture of the United States—and shares certain similarities to the ICA. Like the progressive college, the ICA has been resolute in its embrace of the art of its time, confident in the belief that a progressive plurality of the arts is essential to a thriving cultural and civic life. The ICA—like Black Mountain College—insists on the centrality of artistic experience in preparing students and audiences of all ages for full participation in our democratic society. Now, nearly a century after the founding of the college and of the ICA, experimentation, collaboration, risk, failure, and experiential learning—key tenets of both institutions—are central to conversations in education reform, workforce development, creative economies, and innovation.

Please consider a 100% tax-deductible donation to ensure that undertakings like Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957—as well as free programming such as talks and tours, Play Dates, and digital media courses for teens—are realized. 

Can’t get enough BMC? There’s more to explore – right here in New England!

The Gropius House

Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius originally designed the Gropius House, a historic New England landmark, as his family home when he moved to Massachusetts to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Gropius was a former collegue of Black Mountain College educator Josef Albers and they had a close connection. Gropius’s daughter Ati attended Black Mountain College; two of her artworks are included in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957.

The Gropius House was designed along Bauhaus principles, with an emphasis on efficiency and simplicity of design. Located at 68 Baker Bridge Road, Lincoln, MA, 01773.

The Josef Albers Fireplace at Harvard Law

The Harkness Graduate Center at Harvard Law was designed by the Architects Collaborative (TAC), a group headed by Walter Gropius. Using $40,000 received from an anonymous donor, Gropius brought several of his former Bauhaus colleagues on as collaborators in the project, including Josef Albers. The influential Black Mountain College teacher, who was strongly influenced by patterns and imagery he saw on trips to Mexico with his wife, Anni, as well as by her work in weaving, designed an abstract pattern for the brick module at the back of the Harkness Center’s commons fireplace. While at Harvard you can also see prints, weavings, and design objects by Josef and Anni Albers at the Harvard Art Museums.

Harkness Graduate Center was completed in 1950 and was first modern building on the campus. The main Harvard Law School campus consists of 19 buildings and is located at 1585 Massachusetts Avenue, on the northwest corner of Harvard Yard, bordered by Massachusetts Avenue and Everett Street. The Harvard Art Museums are a short walk away at 32 Quincy Street. 

Buckminster Fuller’s Grave

Located within beautiful Mount Auburn Cemetery lies the grave of Buckminster Fuller—architect, inventor, developer of geodesic domes, and Black Mountain College teacher. You can find it on Bellwort Path, a walking path on a hill between Spruce Street and Walnut Avenue. Fuller’s grave is marked with his name, engravings of a rose and a spherical object, and the phrase “Call me trimtab.” A trimtab is a miniature rudder attached to a boat’s primary rudder: it can be used to stablize a ship—or change it’s course. Fuller took this as a metaphor for the possibilities of influence of the “little individual.”

Robert Creeley’s Grave

Pay pilgrimage to another Black Mountain College virtuoso at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Poet, author, and Massachusetts native Robert Creeley was also laid to rest in this graceful cemetery. While at the college, Creeley wrote numerous important poems that illustrate his investments in syntax and in the events of everyday life as a source for poetry.

Mount Auburn Cemetery, an active cultural site and tourist attaction, was designed as the first rural cemetery in the United States and an experimental garden. Located at the Watertown-Cambridge line at 580 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.

 

 

The progressive liberal arts college was a utopian experiment: interdisciplinary, communal, non-hierarchical, and unlike anything else in the United States.

The teachers and students at Black Mountain College came to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains from around the United States and the world. Some stayed for years, others mere weeks. Their education was unlike anything else in the United States. They experimented with new ways of teaching and learning; they encouraged discussion and free inquiry; they felt that form in art had meaning; they were committed to the rigor of the studio and the laboratory; they practiced living and working together as a community; they shared the ideas and values of different cultures; they had faith in learning through experience and doing; they trusted in the new while remaining committed to ideas from the past; and they valued the idiosyncratic nature of the individual. But most of all, they believed in art, in its ability to expand one’s internal horizons, and in art as a way of living and being in the world. This utopian experiment came to an end in 1957, but not before it created the conditions for some of the 20th century’s most fertile ideas and most influential individual artists to emerge.

Try your hand at colorful code-making as students at Black Mountain College did.

Appropriate for: Creative minds age 6 + up

A rebus is a word puzzle. Pictures of things that sound the same as syllables or letters in the words are combined with words to create one-of-a-kind messages or stories. For example: Re +  bus.png.

The rebus message project is inspired by Lorna Blaine Halper’s letter to her parents from the ICA exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957. In her letter, Halper uses familiar symbols and pictures she has drawn to keep in touch with her family. Deciphering Halper’s letter is not so easy! For more inspiration, take a peek at the rebus letter examples below created by artists visiting the ICA then create your own rebus messages. Or create rebus stories and poems!

Materials Needed

(Use what you have on hand already.)

  • Paper (unlined or lined papers of all kinds are fine!) including practice paper
  • Pencils and erasers
  • Drawing tools and coloring materials (crayons, color pencils, markers, pens, gel pens, etc.)
  • Envelopes and stamps (to mail your rebus message!)

Directions

  1. Using practice paper and a pencil, write out in words what you want your message to say.
  2. Then brainstorm the ways you can change some of the words in your message using symbols and pictures. (Hint: Words like “and” already have a symbol to represent them:  “&.”  Words like “the” or “at” can be written out in letters. There’s no “wrong” way to create a rebus message, you can decide!)
  3. Once your first copy is complete, work using another piece of paper to turn your message into a rebus! (You may also choose to write a letter, story, poem, or sign using the rebus style.)  For example, your parent might create this sign:

    bee.png  + brave and bee.png  + have!
     

  4. OPTIONAL: Use an envelope and a stamp to mail your letter if you choose. Invite the person to whom you send your rebus message to create a rebus response message and mail it to you.

Come and see the artworks that inspired the rebus letter project in the exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, on view at the ICA through January 24, 2016.

Join us the last Saturday of every month (except December) for Play Dates, when kids activities from art-making to film screenings to dance demos fill the ICA. Admission is FREE for up to 2 adults per family when accompanied by children ages 12 and under. Youth 17 and under are always admitted free to the ICA. 

This project was created by ICA Family Programs Coordinator Kathleen Lomatoski, with support from Julia Cseko, Bianca Marrinucci, and Cathy McLaurin.

© 2015 Department of Education, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

 

With humor, charisma, devotion, and a keen sense of formal complexity and information design, Paul Laffoley’s work ran through all manner of theories of everything.

The great Boston artist Paul Laffoley died on on Monday, November 16. I’d seen his work over the years, and had always been an admirer. He loved some of the same 20th-century utopian, cross-discliplinary thinkers I do, and he made beautiful, strange, and complex works in response to their ideas. His mandala-like paintings, architectural models and plans, and assemblage-like sculptures are a welcome, deeply informed response to an increasingly formulaic approach to integrating theories and their authors into artworks. Poised between manifesto, illustration, architectural plan, devotional painting, cosmic model, and expressive tool, Laffoley’s works were part of a larger system of thought that drew from mathematics along with some of the most progressive ideas about being in the world. Though he had major retrospectives recently, and early encounters with some of the late 20th century’s most important thinkers (Frederick Kiesler, Andy Warhol, for instance), he produced his work both outside art centers, and outside of their strictures and camps. 

Upon my recent return to Boston, his work was on my mind. Former ICA Mannion Family Senior Curator Jenelle Porter left a Laffoley catalog (produced by the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, organized by Luis Croquer) in the office I now occupy. She made sure I saw it, and we talked about our mutual interest in his visionary work. And my good friend and colleague Tina Kukielski had recently made Laffoley a central part of an exhibition she organized at James Cohan Gallery in New York.

On a very rainy, dark Saturday afternoon this fall I walked by Kent Fine Art on 11th Avenue in Chelsea, and remembered they were showing Laffoley. The bright, beautiful exhibition brought together work from the 1960s to the present, and included a range of painting and sculpture. With humor, charisma, devotion, and a keen sense of formal complexity and information design, the works ran through all manner of theories of everything. The show was overwhelming and calming by equal measure. I’m so happy I saw it. 

Here is an obituary, followed by his full biography, from Kent Fine Art. RIP one of Boston’s finest. 

The influential photographer on sex, love, loss, inspiration, and why she relies so heavily on the “family” she’s created.

“I’m not modest about it. I think in the 80s I created a sea change in photography. I gave people permission to show their own lives as valuable and as valid as all the other documentary of people they didn’t know. And I think I opened a door.”

Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face, a 2013 documentary directed by Sabine Lidl, turns the camera on one of the most influential photographers of her generation, known for intimate, unflinching portraits and documentation of her friends that brought counterculture to life.

Following Goldin around Europe as she prepares work and meets with some of the friends she’s immortalized in bathtubs and squats, the film provides a window into Goldin’s sometimes chaotic life, her thoughts about her parents, love, sex, loss, inspiration, and why she relies so heavily on the “family”—artists, lovers, gay men—she’s built across continents and decades.

“It was never about marginalization,” she says. “We were the world.”

Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, featured in the film, was shown at the ICA in This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s in 2012. The permanent collection includes ten of her photographs.

Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face screens at the ICA Saturday, November 14 at 6:30 PM as part of the Boston Jewish Film Festival. 

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John Cage and Pierre Boulez weren’t as different as some might think.

I will never forget the typically grey evening when, as a wide-eyed freshman composition student at the Cleveland Institute of Music, I walked into Harkness Chapel on the adjacent campus of Case Western Reserve University to hear a live interview with the reigning king of contemporary music, Pierre Boulez. I remember the raspy, soft tone of his voice and how we paid rapt attention, aware of both his connection back to the old world of the late 19th century and everything he had done to bring music to where it is today. Afterward, however, my classmates and I were disappointed with the master’s half-hearted response to a question on the state of American music. He mentioned a few things about Elliott Carter, then briefly touched on the experiments of John Cage, implying that they were eventually fruitless. A few years later, during the centennial celebrations of John Cage, I began to read the correspondence between Cage and Boulez, and understand the complexity behind Boulez’s comment. This concert, presented by the ICA in collaboration with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and exploring music written by each of these composers during their extensive correspondence, brings that period to life.

To many of us entranced in contemporary and 20th-century music, the fact that John Cage and Pierre Boulez extensively corresponded tends to come as a shock. In the second half of the 20th century, when my teachers were in school, Boulez was the dominant voice in contemporary music, leader of the camp of composers who stood for a nearly mathematical approach to the control of composition that stemmed from the 12-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg. Boulez founded IRCAM in Paris, the largest center for the study of electro-acoustic music in the world, as well as the premiere contemporary music ensemble, the Ensemble Intercontemporain. In most American academic institutions, if a young composer was not writing in the highly structured, complex method of serialism spearheaded by Boulez, they would generally have little luck earning an academic job or finding performances among an inner circle controlled by these polemicists. To other composers of that generation who wished to pursue fresh directions, the voice of John Cage was liberating. His use of chance and indeterminacy removed the ego from music that had caused these issues in the mainstream camp. Cage’s experimentation with other art forms, along with his desire to push what was possible in art and music, allowed a younger generation to feel free to write whatever they desired. Eventually, composers associated with Cage, such as Terry Riley, would begin to experiment in another direction, and Minimalist music would emerge, “saving” the discordant music of much of the 20th century.       

At least that is what many people of that generation would have you believe. In fact, there is an astonishing amount of freedom in the heavily controlled music of Boulez, and a relentless amount of control in the chance and indeterminate compositions of John Cage. Realizing this, their fruitful relationship begins to make more sense. Between 1949 and 1954 the composers were in extensive contact and were excited about each other’s new ideas. Both had been incorporating ways of confining music to strict hierarchies, and in addition to their own work, much of their correspondence dealt with informing each other of the experiments in the musical avant-garde in their respective countries.

Boulez was a proponent of total serial composition, a method of composition by which every perimeter of sound production (pitch, rhythm, articulation etc.) is set into a predetermined series that dictates which events must come before others. A simple example would be if a six-pitch series were A, D, C, B, E, G; one would have to employ each of these pitches in order, either as a melodic linear material, or as a harmony, before repeating the series. The process becomes much more complex when you apply modifying operations to the series, or use series of different lengths to control rhythm vs. pitch, etc.  

As Cage began to study Zen Buddhism, it led to experiments in indeterminacy and chance. In writing Music of Changes, Cage reached musical decisions by consulting the I Ching, or “Book of Changes,” an ancient Chinese divination text, and applying these results to charts of sounds, durations, tempi, densities, and dynamics. The music is freely written, without any metric system to divide the music into separate numbers of measures. It was at this point that the two composers reached unprecedented disagreements. Boulez agreed that an element of freedom needed to be introduced into strict systems of composition, and he countered Cage’s interest in chance and indeterminacy with what he called “aleatoric music.” In this type of composition a particular element is left to the performers’ control, for example in the aleatoric piece Jeux Venetiens by Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski, the conductor chooses, in an improvisatory manner, which groups of predetermined, fully notated music are played, often producing a dense sound mass. In contrast, much of Cage’s later chance music requires the composer to plot out the work in the same way that he himself wrote Music of Changes. Thus, a performer will receive a type of chart, and will be required to roll dice and conduct other chance operations in order to produce a personal score used to realize the work. Essentially, it seems that Boulez found this total lack of control disagreeable and the friendship between the two cooled. However, the discordance between them, just as their musical differences, has been overdramatized by history.

As such, this concert at the ICA is a representation of the de-polarization of the contemporary music community, as a program like this would have seemed impossible in previous generations.

—Jesse Limbacher is a composer, performer, and presenter based in Boston. He is currently interning at the ICA.

 

Help recreate a run-down church in Braddock, Pennsylvania, as a “work of art, a center for creativity, and a place for new beginnings.” 

Since 2007, our friend Swoon, the artist and activist who last showed at the ICA in 2012, has been working to reinvent a rundown church in North Braddock, Pennsylvania, as a “work of art, a center for creativity, and a place for new beginnings.” 

Swoon, whose work often dovetails with social and humanitarian projects, fell in love with the church, slated for demolition that year, while working on an art installation in the former steel town (also poignantly depicted in the work of LaToya Ruby Frazier).

Working with the local community, the artist collective Transformazium, and more than 70 artists, Swoon founded the Braddock Tiles print project, which plans to provide the church with a much-needed new roof by creating 20,000 ceramic tiles—by hand. To do so, they’ll build a working ceramics studio in the church and hire and train local young people to create the tiles. Ultimately the church will open as a community center and Braddock Tiles will will function as a local business making and selling interior and decorative tiles and partnering with artists to release signature editions. 

One of the foremost street and activist artists working today, Swoon is deeply engaged with social, humanitarian, and community-building efforts in both art and life. Past projects include sailing SWOON boats created from reclaimed materials with groups of artists and friends during the 2009 Venice Biennale and collaborating on sustainable building in Haiti in the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Support the Braddock Tiles Kickstarter—ending Nov. 12—and get a Braddock tile, a limited-edition artwork, or a tour of Swoon’s studio, or provide one of the kilns that will make the business possible.