During my visit to Austin for the AT&T Austin Half Marathon, I paid a visit to the Austin Museum of Art (AMoA). Both of the current exhibits were outstanding!
The first, America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, was a collection of the artists' collaborative works, 1985-1995. Their public art projects and private installations used conventional materials in new, thought-provoking contexts. For example, in the piece pictured below (courtesy of the museum's Web site), marble used to construct famous buildings and monuments is placed geographically (as if on a U.S. map) in the place corresponding to the quarry in which it originated - to show how natural resources end up far removed from their original sites.
I was extremely impressed by the museum's "Austin Responds" program which allows visitors to the museum to build community around what they've seen. I guess even the art world -- or perhaps especially the art world -- has caught on to the "user-generated content" craze. For example, in the America Starts Here exhibit, visitors could call a number and record their reactions to particular pieces. AMoA did something even more interactive with the Andy Goldsworthy exhibit -- visitors were invited to make their own Goldsworthy-esque creations, photograph them, and send them to the museum. A montage of the submissions is now on view in the museum as well. (For those not familiar with Andy Goldsworthy, the British environmental artist and sculptor, click here.)
Sticking with the user-generated content theme, the other exhibit was entitled the Paper Sculpture Show. Visitors are given design templates created by a 29 international artists and invited to make their own artistic creations out of them. Several workspaces are available and stocked with scissors, glue sticks and tape. Once you're finished, you place your work up on the wall with everyone else's and it becomes part of the exhibit. I was a little intimidated at first by some (though not all) of the creative work already on the walls, but once I got going, I really enjoyed myself. Here's a slideshow of the before, during and after photos of my first (and likely only) museum-exhibited work, entitled "Flip Chart." (For a closer look at the work, click on the link below the slideshow to view the photo album at Webshots.)
AMoA: The Paper Sculpture Show
For more on these exhibits and the AMoA's other programs, visit their web site: www.amoa.org.
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