The Art Assignment

We accepted J. Morgan Puett's art assignment and gathered some friends together to host our own Scramble Scrabble Dinner.

We went to ArtPrize and met up with Minneapolis based artists Carolina Borja and Amy Toscani. Their exhibit this year invited the audience to destroy the large-scale handmade piñatas that they had spent hours constructing. And now it’s your turn to make and break.

We spent a week in Grand Rapids absorbing everything that was ArtPrize 2015, the world’s largest art competition. Here’s a taste of what we found.

Today we meet with artist and musician Nathaniel Russell. Nat's work plays with the divide between real and imagined, making posters and flyers for events that may or may not exist. His assignment asks you to make a fake flyer and share it with the world too.

Son Lux invited you to collaborate with him by responding to a piece of his music, and you all delivered in as many forms as possible.

We continue our stay at Mildred's Lane and talk to it's Director and Ambassador of Entanglement J. Morgan Puett about it's origins, it's goals and how her installation art practice influences her vision for the site.

This week we’re at Mildred’s Lane, a 96-acre site in rural Pennsylvania founded by J. Morgan Puett. Mildred’s Lane is an experiment in living - it's a space where Morgan and her friends collaborate on projects, practice creative domestication, and pay closer attention to every aspect of daily life.

We’re talking about your responses to Tameka Norris’s assignment to Become Someone Else and how both internal and external change are a constant and inevitable reality in our lives.

This week we visit Lenka Clayton, another Pittsburgh based artist whose work finds meaning in ordinary, everyday objects. For her assignment, she asks you to partner with someone and recreate a lost childhood object, using their memory of the object and the materials you have around you.

So you look at a work of art and think to yourself, I could have done that. And maybe you really could have, but the issue here is more complex than that -- why didn't you? Why did the artist? And why does it have an audience?

This week we meet with Jon Rubin, a Pittsburgh based artist whose practice often focuses on cultural exchange, pushing us to imagine other people and their lives more complexly. For his assignment, he asks you to do the same by bridging the gap between you and your neighbor.

You probably made rubbings in elementary school, but Kim Beck views rubbings as field recordings. She wants you to take a snapshot of a particular place by making a rubbing of the ground you're standing on.