 of what we do, then we kind of prep, so I have my black grayout only because I can remember the questions I threatened to ask you. And then we'll open it up for a larger discussion. So you want to start and say what you do? No, you start. Oh, I start. Okay. Because your images are up. Oh, my images are up. Well, it'll be fun if you talk through a line. We're going to go back to the big circle. Okay. That's how we made it. My husband's in the theater and that's what he taught me. You know, it looks like it's sold out and more people want it. I run an island in the harp in the New York City Harbor called Governor's Island. It's a hundred and seventy two acre island that is a former military base. So it had been closed to the public for its entire history when it was transferred by the federal government. They put in a ban on residential housing. So we couldn't pursue kind of conventional development methods and many other complications that are too long to say, but basically I started there in 2006. So we very consciously decided to and the way we did that was we took a permit sort of an open permit process. So very similar to what you would see in a municipal park so that any organization could use our historic buildings as well as our green spaces to create programming and what you'll see. Can you just advance the slides? So you'll see as we go through the slides that's Mark DeSuvaro's exhibition presented by Storm King. This is the Jazz Age Lawn Party. This is actually a creative time project Anthony McCall's installation in a historic chapel. This is actually a new piece funded by actually Art Place. What we call a primary piece of art by an artist Mark Hanford. This is a festival produced by the Dutch government in 2009, a site specific performance. This is, oh get out and play, sorry I thought I was improv everywhere, but get out and play. This is, we have a venue that does a lot of concerts so this is probably, it looks to me like actually a live act not an EDM, we have a lot of EDM concerts that hold 3,000 people. This is an artist project in one of our houses produced by a different branch of the Dutch government, artists slow knitting. This is a performance in one of the National Park Service sports on the island, a site specific dance created by a local, curated by a local dance organization Dancing in Streets. This is another piece, this is our new park which hasn't opened yet. So you're one of the first people to see this. It doesn't look like this today, it's covered in snow, but it will open in May. This is another, this looks like a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. This is an artist working in the studio. We have a year round art studio program. This is a figment, kind of one of our signature projects. It's a participatory arts festival that happens every June and they also do a season long sculptures and artist design miniature golf. This is another market subro, you can see people frolicking. This is a project for the new museum as part of a larger exhibit they did, needed a site. This is a Russian artist, they wanted a derelict site so we provided it. This is people frolicking, I can't actually tell you what festival that is. It might be a family festival, I have no idea. This is Henry V, being performed site specific. They started in a fort in Manhattan, the audience and the actors came over on a boat and so act one right is England, act two is France, so we were France. This is again another view of our new park, the public previewing it and this is an artist design tree house that's also become a signature project and you can see a little bit of miniature golf course, this was probably last summer. This was a signature project last year, this is a festival of vintage, all rideable carousels and carnival rides collected by two men in France who then produced and presented this festival on Donors Island. This is another sculpture, pigment sculpture. This is a slow food, not the slow food that we know, but it was an artist project where you had to eat slowly and you were served by older people. I can't remember the artist, site specific dance, Jodi Oberfelder, she raised money for this on Kickstarter, it's now actually playing, performing somewhere else in New York and studio 360 is about to do a piece about this particular project. There's another jazz lawn party. Anyway, it's very cold and wintry in Governor's Island right now but that gives you an idea of what we're like when we're open. Basically, we have an open call, we don't fund anything, we don't select anything and we don't curate anything. We like to say we're the island created by and for New Yorkers, all of those projects, some of them are created by tiny organizations that barely exist, some of them are created by very famous organizations like the New Museum, the International Center for Photography. We don't get involved in any of the content. There's an open call, it's rolling, you can come to us in the middle of the summer and say I have a project for next week and if you can sign a permit and have insurance, then you can do it. We have certainly seen the island transformed by performance and temporary projects. When I started the summer before 8,000 people came the whole summer, last summer we had 400,000 visitors in 40 days. Up until this year we've only been open on the weekends and people come to New York City because they expect this incredibly eclectic range of programming. It's not just a park, it's a destination and they're all New Yorkers, 85% New Yorkers and that's very conscious. So that's kind of what we do. We've obviously seen this is what has built our identity. It's quite an extraordinary site. We have incredible views of the Statue of Liberty but it's this effervescent, ephemeral, temporary performance project in the traditional culture that have really made us what we like to say a very lively and loved place which was very improbable when we started. So that's us. I'm Jim Lasko. I run a company called Red Moon Theater in Chicago. We create these large scale mechanical contraptions that are used to enliven, activate, animate public space. Sometimes those contraptions are platforms for our own performance but sometimes they're also platforms for everyday citizens, people who would not necessarily consider themselves artists or creative people at all. So I don't know what we're going to run through. I think mine's on a this is a series of houses that we actually sunk into the Jackson Park Lagoon. It's the one-time site of the 1893 World Fair. This is on the J. Pritzker Pavilion stage. This is an adaptation of Old Man in the Sea done on the Steppenwolf stage. These are contraptions actually that we make that pay our bills a little bit that we rent out. This is just a scene from a series of sort of urban interventions. This actually played on the Disney stage. Some pyrotechnic stuff and there's a human hamster in there. This was a residency in a school where they were moving out and they made these products. This as well. This was called a momentary opera. I don't even know what that is. Or how it got in there. These are again, these are, those were urban parks. This was part of a Logan Square Halloween event that gathered about 20,000 people to that neighborhood on a single night on Halloween. The show called Long Live the King that happened in a public space. That whole tower got erected as part of the show. This was a thing called the ladder machine and a show called Last of My Species that happened on the lake front. Some of those people are professional performers and some of them are community members. This was in the Rockefeller Chapel, an adaptation of Hunchback. This is the White House. Hunchback. These shows toured around. The project that we were funded for our places, this audaciously ambitious thing of seeing if we couldn't create somehow what Chicago's Mardi Gras would be. What would the Chicago's Running of the Bulls be? How could we create a signature event that grew up so genuinely from the kind of core assets of Chicago that it became an indelible and permanent feature of the city. So we're working in this first year in 15 of Chicago's 77 wards, some of the lesser served areas of the city to create these sculptural pieces that will float down the Chicago River and then through a kind of extensive urban ritual be burned and as they burn they actually open to reveal another entity inside. So the exterior is reflective of what that community wants to be rid of, what they don't want within their community and then the interior piece is what they want to signal to the city that they're proud of and value. So it's a huge project and a lot of the things that we're doing today are ringing for me in terms of the need for not only trying to create the project, but trying to track the creation of the process, trying to do the base level data accumulation so that we can study the impact over time both I think economic impact and cultural impact of it. So it's very complicated. So we thought we'd ask questions, but I see some people so can we just smush the circle out a little bit so everybody's in the same. So if you want to start asking me could you come over here? Yeah, so I've had the chance to talk to Leslie before. We got to be in a panel and ask them together with a bunch of mayors and you don't select, we don't curate, we don't do anything and yet it seems to me by my definition there's some form of curation which is to say we do a different space, not Governor's Island to to occupy the culture. You may have chosen a different strategy. Yeah, I think it's well, Sherry sitting across from me who's in Times Square so if Sherry and I switched jobs I think we'd have a really different strategy, right? So everybody goes to Times Square that, you know, we had the opposite problem. We were abandoned. There was no reason to go to Governor's Island and we needed people to be, we wanted it to be so how do you make an abandoned place in the middle of the city that nobody can live messy? You hand it over to people and you take you're comfortable with the risks that happen when stuff you know is sometimes great, sometimes not great. People can tell the difference but also we have, by doing that, there are, and there are other people here from New York who can speak to this, there are thousands of artists who have done projects on Governor's Island and they have huge equity in our space and I think if we had taken a different strategy like a sort of traditional curatorial strategy they would not have that equity. You know, the local creating community would not have that equity and that's been incredibly important and then I would also say that the public gets that there's not a curator. They get that there's this sort of serendipity I can wander in and there's different voices speaking and that's what makes cities to me so exciting and so that was our challenge was how do you make truly an abandoned place, accessible only by boat, have the energy of a city. So Jim, in Jim's website use a word that actually we haven't heard in the last day which is spectacle. And I think that most people think of spectacle right, the Super Bowl halftime that was a spectacle, Bruno Mars so can you talk a little bit about why use the word spectacle and sort of how it might resonate for the rest of us and that's not a word that... So that was a failed attempt to reappropriate a word that has been collectively dismissed by the art world. Oftentimes spectacle is used as the counterpoint to substance right, like we where form meets content is substance and then everything else is spectacle and so that we thought it would be interesting to try to claim the extra and call our work that in some ways so it didn't work so well, we haven't persuaded anybody that that's good use. So it persuaded me on your website but actually if I went to Chicago No it's a word that for example a group called Royal Deluxe uses the word spectacle Are people familiar with Royal Deluxe's work? If you have not like just Google what is it the girl? The elephant in the girl, the Sultan's elephant and just have a little tissue next to you because it's you cannot imagine that gigantic puppets moving through the streets of London could be so moving but I've cried multiple times watching their work only on video I've never seen it live Yeah I've seen it live, it's amazing work and there's a bunch of amazing things about it but it's grandiosity and it's super fluidity it's super fluidity is it's merit? The fact that it is doing this thing that there could be no sensible reason to do really and the scale of it and the sheer amount of communal force it takes to bring that work into a city is it's expression and it's virtue in some ways and so that was the effort Now it's your turn, we're alternating Well maybe you'll just tell us about your most spectacular failure Well of course none of them are mine because we don't produce any of them I would say my favorite was the food truck clusterfuck if you actually Google the food truck clusterfuck you will actually there's been one since in another location that has superseded it but the risk that you take of course not everybody's, you know, Nato Thompson in creative time so people who produce a food truck festival without enough food kind of shouldn't really be in business so on an island that was a big failure that was a big weekend and people were really hungry and there are rare occasions when you're not allowed to submit a permit again but I'd say actually we even let them try again and they had a beer festival without enough bartenders so then we just said we're kind of done with you in general what's interesting about food so we believe very strongly that culture is everything right it's not art it's not visual art it's the old definitions folkloric dance it's food everyone loves street food but we have actually not seen the food festival model really work so we had a bunch of them we had another guy who couldn't pay us bills so that's been actually disappointing because people love it they come in droves and the blogosphere the food blogosphere in at least our city is so intense and we all the culture world have a lot to learn from those people and also what you see is that young people people under the age of 30 I don't understand this will pay $65 to go to a food festival to eat we used to have pig island it was one of our signature events you know that's $600 is a real amount of money to stand on a lawn and eat little bits of pig but that unfortunately there was sort of a flowering of food and then it's you know besides a wonderful kind of site specific food festival in New York called smorgasburg but other than that that really hasn't taken hold and that's a big disappointment but well the first was the food truck cluster which didn't have enough food and then the guy we just haven't seen people I think figure out how to make economically viable a food festival so that's really interesting so you can have a bunch of food trucks parked somewhere so we of course have mobile food as a concession but the sort of food related event there was a sort of flowering of them and then they kind of dissipated I think it's economics can I ask a question do you do the individual artists or presenters or producers have so responsibility for all the marketing of their events or do you have a shared calendar that people can go to see what's going on that's a really good question and I think what's important about that is I think there's an assumption in particularly I don't know how cities of like we have empty space and we'll give it to artists and it's like oh how will the artists pay for their production values you know whatever they have to create in that space and then also why are people going to go to that space we when we started of course the only people who would talk to us were young arts organizations that had no other place now of course museums come but we have now built a reputation and an audience and so people know to come to Bars Island and there's going to be something that surprises them so you may be coming because there's a great graphic design show and you may be coming to ride a bike but you'll all do that and then what we've done that's very important is we basically say to each organization you get to produce a poster and you produce multiple copies of it and that's it so Barnaby has a really well financed organization Sherry doesn't the audience comes and they can't tell the difference and the interesting thing is that the two guys sitting in their apartment they can produce better graphics often than the cultural institution so the audience comes and they're like cool here's a historic costume show here's a photography show two guys with a pug international center photography I can't look at a website and then we have a website but we basically the problem with New York is that if you try to spend money you have to spend so much money and if you have a little bit of money I was thinking more if I wanted to go check out the government and I can look and see what's there that day yes we have a kind of crappy website because we're the government but again that's important because that's really changed the equation like Rocco came to visit once and we had the figment guy meet him so Rocco is famous as a theater producer and I said David tell Rocco your marketing budget is zero that's not possible in New York City but it is what we call permerary work let me talk about what that evolution is and where you are now in it and how that curatorial discussion is now either interfering with the original intent or supporting it so we have this sort of open call any of you can create an organization and fill out a permit for this summer and that will continue forever we love that we call it open house GI but we also recognize that this site has many layers of meaning we have these weird forts weird landscape we have this emergent democratic culture and we have this spectacular new park designed by a firm called West 8 and we really wanted to give artists the opportunity to kind of study and sort of experience all the modalities of this place that's changing and you can really only do that with a commission so in addition to our free to be you and me approach we have and we have now have two projects that have been completed one artist who works in sound Susan Phillips who creative time introduced us to because she did a temporary project on the island and the other the sculpture she saw the work of Mark Hanford a sculpture based in Miami and really and we could see in the process that each of those artists took kind of the difference right because they were able to come out in the winter when it's a scary place and then the summer and sort of everyone who lives in Miami understand from a distance kind of the role of this place and for Mark what was extraordinary about his work is he was actually responding to drawings because the landscape wasn't built yet and it's amazing to see them so that we will continue to do that in parallel with the work we do we think of it as totally complimentary and because I think that conversation in New York around site specific work is very limited by the paucity of sites that are available and so we have this unique site so we want to give artists that opportunity and those projects we fundraise for other questions or can we go back to the mic yeah oh you want to pass that yeah and if people don't mind introducing themselves and saying where they're from that would be great sure, Laura Loebenstein I'm from Boston that is I NCO for social intervention Jim we have long believed in spectacle and tried to use that word as well so I was excited that you used it and part of our work has been thinking with activists about spectacle and ritual and these things that activists don't necessarily think about in their work so I was interested it seems like your upcoming vision is both spectacle and ritual for communities in terms of thinking about what they value and how they want to represent themselves so I'm just wondering kind of how those conversations have gone I think a lot of times activists feel so they're urgent and linear in their work so how have you gotten folks to think about the amount of investment that it'll take to create something that you're going to burn and then you know sail down a river well the biggest thing that's happened for us is we have an amazing platform right so this is the mayor's Mayor Emanuel's first kind of major cultural initiative and so we have literally the main branch of the Chicago River and we have this opportunity to provide that platform to other organizations community based organizations and activists so that is a that's a real draw for people and organizations and activists so I don't think people for the most part have responded to that as why would we want to do all this work for that I think there's a sense of like I get what this could be and I want to participate in it. That said we have long standing relationships with many of the community based organizations that we're working with and we are also piloting this through three city-wide organizations who have real boots on the ground in these communities in these lesser served communities like Ceasefire now called Cure Violence is a gang intervention program and they are really helping us to reach populations that we would not otherwise reach as an example but last summer we did some preliminary kind of self-introductions which is we brought this huge machine into the public spaces in those neighborhoods and sort of threw a big party with this machine that was this machine is like a 32 foot vehicle and then the front scissors toward the back and the middle rises and it gets to be about 16 feet in the air in it is a platform and so then on that platform anybody could come up and spin, could DJ, they could do spoken word poetry they could do a political diatribe it was a huge soapbox in a sense but its erection itself is a spectacle and it draws people to it so we were able to do that event and sort of introduce ourselves and introduce the concept of spectacle to people and I think that that went a long way toward getting people interested and then the final thing is who doesn't want to burn shit it's not like you're throwing it out after where you're burning it and that's really interesting so we've not met a lot of resistance how's the fire department doing? one of the complicated things for sure is as far to be would attest to you and maybe even more complicated in our scenario because this is a the Chicago River is an Army Corps of Engineers project the Coast Guard has province over it as well as the city as well as the environmental EPA so we're dealing with lots and lots of bureaucracy in order to get this up and I think that's one of the challenges always when we talk about performance in the public realm is how do you do that and so in my case it's easy because I control the public realm so I can make that happen but I'm curious if other people have experiences where if you're trying to do this what does it take to get everybody on the same page to allow something crazy to happen people have experiences with that yes sir I'm from Detroit so the food truck cluster fuck to me just permit cluster fuck was the first thing that came to mind so you know one thing that I think we've had a lot of value in is teasing out the permitting process for artists to be able to get things done as one of our kind of main value adds to the process it's not easy and it's very kind of overwhelming and nobody wants to spend any time with that process so the extent to which we provide a very clear road map has allowed a lot to happen legally you know which is not always the case and I think we showed you the picture of the Carousel Festival little did I know that the elevator division of the department of buildings issues the permits for carnival rides in New York and imagine the conversation when you have a 1910 carnival ride and they're asking for as built drawings getting those guys to yes like you know actually so I'm from the city of Minneapolis and we have a festival in the city called Northern Spark which is an all night festival it starts at sundown and goes until sun up the following day and it's basically participatory art it's or anyone you know anything doing anything all over the city and that was it's actually administered by a non-profit but this is our third year and over over time we have actually built a relationship so from the government side they initially came to us asking for permits and it took forever because often they're asking for things that you know are really out of the box and we have to figure out how we're going to do that how we're going to work that within our rigid permitting system but now we're in a situation where I and Steve Dietz who's the curator go together and we negotiate and we're in a situation where now Steve is working very closely with us to actually develop projects for temporary projects for underutilized spaces so it's moving to the next level where we're going beyond the festival and into you know creating competitions temporary artwork interactive work he works in media mostly but it we've developed the relationship and responsibly the city has has also created a team that comes together because we all know that there's not going to be one person but many people from the police to fire to everybody else it's going to look at the request so I think that's been a sort of a an organic thing but it's actually really worked and it stayed there now it's that's what's happening so one of the things that I talked about and I know you talk about is that these temporary events transform places so how do you make and I'm sort of this is a question for everybody how do you make that case so one of the things I'm looking at NATO because I love creative times work they did this amazing project actually above our very David Byrne playing the building and you know for those of us who got to experience it you were in this vast derelict hall and there was this organ connected to the pipes it was amazing now that building that'll become a catering facility so that memory of that is almost like you know the layers buried so I'm just sort of curious how people think about making the case that it's worth all the effort to do this temporary whatever right exhibition event and that requires an enormous amount of effort funding etc but then goes away you know is this on it's just soft anyways you know what I think it's like just to go to the spectacle thing think of it in urban cities like the learning curve in different cities is different where the mayor's at or the department of cultural affairs is at it's always different and you know for me like spectacle is like the training wheels to get to the really good stuff in a way it's like it's a way to get everyone on board so like you know I'm a snob right so like newy blotch I kind of like but I can see how it really makes a lot of headway mass appeal kind of Cirque de Soleil I guess aesthetics yeah family goes out cities get crazy about it and then it really opens the door to the imagination of the city like wow this is possible and I've heard you talk about it second Saturday in Miami and that's a different thing which was more of this kind of cataclysm of come one come all artists from every strength just show your stuff and those things are given also too sometimes you're like there's a lot of crap yard in the city but it's good too because I think that's also training those first cities but at the same time too for me the arts is like you want to get that stuff out there so that you can start doing the stuff that's grittier heavier because in New York I think we have this advantage of all these big yards and it's always important so like we have, I mean that's why is this in your city why you're able to do these things because of yours it's part of the tradition there so we don't have to prove the arts matter to talk to folks and they're like oh my god we are so far to go you know we got our mayor doesn't get it at all and that's when I think you've got to like have big spectacle things to decide you know and they help too because they see to do these lunch things and they're like or like the gates you know they're like I want that I want the waterfalls but I think in terms of just, I don't know just to say because in order to create tons of pride or even exist in any city that's willing to talk to the fire department is what willing to talk to codes to make it easier on you because it's, you know, you need expeditors to get this stuff past project wise but basically the whole city builds it now the whole city builds it now and stuff like that we've started as a you know $17,000 a year storefront with no permissions for anything and it was I mean the rule for us was like ever and you can get really far that way I mean I sit here as testimony to seek forgiveness right so, you know but then at a certain point you cross a tolerance point where you need and I think it's good to just say to own that we're not, you know, negotiating these permits it's true we're doing that through at this point Department of Cultural Affairs, the Department of Transportation they have to go figure out how to pitch what we're doing to the fire department to the coding department so that it makes sense to them and they permit it and that's an important thing to say like I'm not often I have but I'm not often sitting in the room with the people who grant the permits I'm sitting in the room with the people who are going to go get the permits for us and so there is a city advocacy part of this. I think it's true about spectacle as for me not so much the training wheels is like the Trojan horse it's how do you get, you know, how do you use that big item to get in there to do one little thing that's interesting and that's dynamic, go ahead. So this issue about permanence and temporary, I mean I think part of the wow this one's louder so I think part of the, I think I like I like a lot about the temporary is that it becomes a demonstration, right you're never gonna, Governor's Island's interesting because you're trying to always be temporary but you're limited to this place I think in most cities you would try something temporary in a place to demonstrate that it can work to demonstrate that their people will come that people appreciate it and then it's sort of like paves the way for something more permanent in places that, you know, aren't completely built out like New York I mean it's like there's there's like this extra space that it's sort of you use this temporary as purely a demonstration or as a sampling or as a template, you're not necessarily I don't know if cities can always be always temporary in any place I think eventually you prove it out enough and then people generally like damn we can do this every week here and then all of a sudden that's not temporary thing anymore that's a real installation that's a real business that's a real event or a current so I think there's this idea of using the temporary as experimental as proving things out as, but then they move forward and in general like it seems to me there are two basic arguments that people use to justify transformation of space where they say you know we've transformed that space in the hearts and minds of the people who got that experience who were there and they see that public space completely differently or that space completely differently as potential is completely transformed for those people and the people who catch the rumor of that that that space is transformed in that way and that's powerful for sure and then I think the second line is we've transformed that space because we see the economic impact of these kinds of cultural events now that space like Logan Square was at one time completely working class, poverty class welfare class and now where we did those events it's the hippest area in the city it's the Brooklynization of Logan Square is what we call it and it's completely transformed but there wants to be some other line between those two that you get at that's about somehow the creating through these temporary fixtures through ephemera you've created the potential for action that is different than it was before that event happened and you know development is one route but there wants to be other routes and it's a little unclear to me and I asked this question to the group through somebody else yesterday but how do you really get into some of the social justice issues of what happens when you activate a public space or a space enough that now you've basically well frankly run counter to the social agenda that initiated the enterprise and it happens to us time and again I want to push back a little bit just on what you said because we totally believe in improvisation we had this great comment for someone who joined our team and she said I've never worked in a place where improvisation is your norm she said I thought of improvisation as what you did after you failed you just do it all the time and we can talk a lot about how like the new park that we just finished you know so much of its design and sort of based on kind of starting things and changing them but you know cities are about a femoral experience right that's why we live in cities and with all credit people don't live in cities right it's like I walk on the street it's going to be different every day and so and I think that notion of I miss something right New York is right the city most obsessed with what did I miss oh my god I didn't see the rain room at MoMA you know I'm going to kill myself so so I think I don't think it's just about laying the case for like here we're going to have an art project and then it's you know we're going to have people dance and then hopefully we're going to get a public sculpture it may just be enough that there's dance happening and you know we made that easy for that to happen but I think there were a lot of hands that came up just before yes ma'am but can we just can we have some people just haven't spoken yet I wanted to know if you had any creative security have you done any incentives like that because a lot of times we're doing big spectacle in a city where there's a lot of crime everybody's security happy at the municipal level so the cops come and they put their bright lights on you know flashing to shut streets down and it's a danger signal and I think like doing things like making it the event lights they're purple on the cop cars like there's just like when you're coming into an event in a city there's the security question so I would love to know if you found some creative solutions to this we haven't had that issue with NYPD is very good at profiling acts in their entirages so there's different but those are more for our traditional concerts so in terms of you know kind of different levels of security quite frankly we're an island so that's one of the great things is that we don't really have security issues we ran into this big in a big way last summer and we were working with ceasefire and ceasefire let me just give you a little background on ceasefire there was a documentary on ceasefire called the interrupters but their policy is within 20 minutes of a homicide they will meet with the grieving family and interrupt the cycle of violence that usually follows any gang-related homicides but any homicide really because you can't always distinguish anyway so they work in these neighborhoods and their thing is they will not work with the police so when we did events with them we had to get permits that excluded the police from setting the perimeter which is complicated so in every case the only way we could do that was by finding local officials who would vouch for ceasefire and vouch in one place it was the park superintendent who literally was part of a motorcycle gang and he said like my motorcycle gang is going to watch the perimeter and that's how we're going to get it done so it goes to something that was said earlier but I guess to Lori you have to work micro locally and for us at least with the high level of city officials simultaneously bouncing back and forth I saw a bunch of other hands Hi, I'm Cindy Ortstein I'm the director of arts and culture for the city of Mesa, Arizona and executive director of the Mesa Art Center which is the largest multidisciplinary art center in the southwest but I used to run a very large once a year festival in Allentown, Pennsylvania and I've done a lot of both ephemeral work and annual work of short term and I want to speak on behalf of the importance of those activities for not only changing the way people perceive space and a place but the way they perceive their own relationship to art and the way they perceive art itself because I think what's really important is the way it takes the experience of art outside of what they might think of as the norm or the standard experience and I think shakes up people's ideas about the place of art in society and the place of art in community as well as the role of art in place so I think those are very important for our field in terms of a lot of people coming out of curiosity or because they think it sounds fun, it sounds like a family event they maybe don't think of themselves as art patrons really, art goers art users, art makers and I think that these kinds of ephemeral experiences or short term temporary experiences really change the minds of a lot of people about their relationship of art and the place of art in their community and in their own lives and I think that that's incredibly important for us to do as a field one thing I want to add to that for us having people meet artists here we are, everyone think that's great most people in New York City most educated, sophisticated people have never met an artist and it freaks them out and so I will just tell one of my favorite stories, we have open studios that's a requirement of our art studio and we have a lot of Hasidic families who come everyone talks about diversity, nobody talks about trying to get Hasid's no seriously, because Hasid's that's not chic, that's not multi cultural we have a lot of Hasid's we work with that community to make sure they're welcome we have a kosher vending machine you have no idea what it took to get that but so there's this Hasidic family talking to an artist and she's walking through the art studio just like Nato is walking to see his friends I'd like you to draw my children so this is a conceptual artist he's completely lacking a vocabulary to explain to this mother that what he does is not what she thinks art is so on the one hand I'm like isn't this amazing because right in our city the Hasidic community is very segregated, very distrustful of outside communities, you don't see them doing things that other people do typically so I'm like wow but that interchange for both sides was very very profound because he was used to explaining his art to me and to Nato and to people in this room but not to like no I don't do portraits of children so that exchanged to me like when I walk in that studio I think and I wasn't there for the story I heard it third hand is about that essence those social interactions happen from both spectacle in other words for scale getting up to something that really gets the politicians and the funders willing to do it but it's also the ephemeral nature is if we don't have any special events you have to make this point that everyone has to come to be there and be present, that's when those interactions happen and the other thing I just wanted to add that came out very clear here, people are asking how do you get the trust that you've got on Governor's Island I mean you have to earn it you have to build it but it's it's a larger ecosystem and this is where I worry a little bit about this metaphor the field which is a monoculture in this new rose and produces harvest with industrial farmery that goes into the silo because actually to do this place-making is a much more complicated task but a whole ecosystem of participants and trust and interaction and new audiences and a multiplicity of viewpoints and a really broad definition of art and then incredible things can happen in the social engagement that you can do and Leslie on Governor's Island people are now going to say what's going to happen and it's that a time roll nature and now they're suddenly open to go into something but they've completely come out I don't know what I'm going to go see but I'm interested I'm going to try to put my thoughts together I think that would be incredibly thoughtful for any of these things to that I was having conversations with a couple of weeks with these people thinking about creative place-making as a field and how much of a misnomer that idea is about even the behavior behind creative place-making so basically the conversation started with someone asking the question what are the aesthetics of creative place-making and we've been like okay let's cycle that back a little bit what's the behavior that creates the aesthetic oh wait, how do we create the agency that builds the behavior that creates the aesthetic okay so it goes back to people and kind of to what you're saying Jim the special sauce, the secret sauce is really creating agency in people to take ownership of a place that's inspired to then create something so kind of circling back to the idea that I'm a funder so I'm a funder and we do a lot of intervention, ephemeral temporary work partly because it's very interesting work in our communities and also because the arts sector as a field isn't such disarray is the word I want to use right now that from the largest organizations interventions we see are being the most interesting way to get people to think differently because business as usual isn't going to work both within institutions and within communities I guess my question to you all as practitioners is how important is it to you that things scale or become a funder is that important can you define thing in that sense things happenings organizations the artists that are creating work becoming institutionalized in some way however thing is defined with this group the answer to the question for many of us in Tucson, Arizona I'm not a member of an art place grantee but I am a part of the arts council there that has an initiative called place and arts culture engagement let me just say that conversation that I just read he's probably watching this now hi Roberto so the answer to your question so you'll know what my answer is the permanence for that particular initiative is not important at all it's those steps behind it and the sense of agency being permanent that's important the question that you asked to me is really core about when we engage with people in communities to co-activate and animate space what responsibility do we have for what happens after that transformation and the folks who come in behind it in terms of ensuring that if they want to stay in the space or in the neighborhood that they can and that things change in the way that they have at least to see that the table rather than being on the menu so to speak to me this notion of temporary and ephemeral it's a means to some other end art is a tool in the toolkit that's a means to another end and so for me I was at the table that was talking about this as a movement not as a field because I think it means that we are planting seeds and we're going to stick with the agricultural metaphor we're planting seeds that other folks may harvest and that we need to be cognizant of then what are we are helping to cultivate and what are we helping to plant the seeds if that makes sense the answer in Tucson in terms of places permanent is not so important in terms of the physical other answers Mark why don't you try my name is Mark Murphy I'm the executive director of Red Cat here in Los Angeles Center for Contemporary Performing Visual and Media Arts connected to the California Institute of the Arts Art Place one of our big initiatives recently has been the Radar LA Festival Contemporary Theatre and we thought about not permanence but about trying to use strategies to maximize the way that a festival might resonate beyond the 10 days of the festival itself we utilized as part of the last Radar LA Festival a number of the historic theaters that we toured yesterday along the Broadway from free events at the Grand Central Market to event staged in the Palace Theater and the Million Dollar Theater and Tower Theater all at various stages of user friendly status, let's talk about the permits another topic and one of the editorials that was written after the festival spoke to a few impacts one was audiences who live in Los Angeles that had never been a pedestrian downtown or seen those facilities began to think about downtown differently so that can resonate amongst people's own perceptions of the city where they live but also other colleagues, cultural organizers and others began to see our use of some of those spaces as a sort of a pilot project at a time when people are considering what form downtown development should take and how these theaters might be used or might be an ongoing part of the cultural life of the city and of course the owners too began to think about things differently and imagine the possibilities of what a great resource they had there's a second phase to our project which was realizing more and more was really the key to its impact the festival was international but half of the projects were by Los Angeles based artists or collaborations by LA and visiting artists the second phase of our project is a series of artists residencies and development opportunities for local artists mostly in the performing arts to develop new work there's a real lack of infrastructure in most cities especially in Los Angeles for the development of new work especially in contemporary dance and contemporary theater so we're trying to nurture and incubate projects not necessarily definitely for a future edition of the festival but for presentation but us for some of our partners on the festival or in general in an ongoing way in a way rather than bricks and mortar permanence that was seen as an investment in trying to establish perhaps teach some of these artists to fish in a way that they may be longer greater infrastructure that they can or other organizations can provide or at least provide some temporary support to them as an example of how that might help to enhance the quality as well as the integrity of the artists work ongoing so Michael Forsythe with Revolve Detroit our program center around activating vacant store fronts through art and entrepreneurial activities we do a lot of temporary these sort of stuff so our endgame is permanent change so we want I work for an economic development agency traditional old school economic development I get to do all the fun projects so our endgame is filling the space full time but one challenge we've had in Detroit things change so rapidly and it's more about an intervention to change the trajectory of these neighborhood business districts where they're going they're one bad lease away from getting a couple bad businesses that's going to influence the mix and where it's one other store front that goes vacant that's going to go into disrepair and the cycle continues so one of our main challenges is creating some permanence in the process itself and there was some conversation around building capacity and leadership and who leads is it artists, is it entrepreneurs, is it some of your untraditional leaders people who aren't used to playing a leadership role and for us one thing that's been very powerful is taking this of people view as a liability and creating a new ownership structure ownership is a big issue in Detroit centered around vacancy so when you create ownership over what people typically view as a private space and make it public so that the community feels a sense of ownership if we build it we will come that has seemed to work very well for us the big challenge has been you know the ability to empower these leaders who have been able to do the space activation you know they're living there permanently now they've kind of taken it on and that's a great thing and you know we've had these spectacle these big festivals to get everybody out people see the value of arts programming now and they're trying to sustain it but the real challenge now is how do we sustain it the image a little bit that's part of what we try to do but in terms of sustaining that process of creating rituals creating arts programming for those artists who aren't used to playing that role it's more than just then now and that's been a challenge for us in that terms of leadership capacity how do you build that and it sounds like you're doing some of this work in Chicago kind of pagan ritual what do you want to get rid of what do you want to see we've tried to do some of that but when it comes down to actually doing it you know we've gotten started but we can't hold your hand the whole way how do you get people to continue on that road and do it themselves I think we're just about to wrap up I just want to close with if I can with a small warning because I think that I'll do some inspiration okay then I'll hand it to you for the inspiration you know I think a lot of us who get into this work are interested in social justice issues we're interested in economic development and community development etc and and yet those of us who are artists or even those of us who are producing artists or curating artists I think we need to be really careful of when we start talking about permanence when we start talking about determining the impact of the work we start to A we start to become the we're in danger of becoming the another layer of we know how to do it for everybody and we have the formula and you should follow this path too but most importantly we begin to close down for ourselves the kind of truly deep idiosyncratic and particular voice that drives the project and and that makes it valuable to begin with if we were urban planners we would be urban planners if we were social engineers of any variety but but the artist is driven by something else and being true to that and tying oneself to that as closely as possible is actually the greatest virtue that we have I just wanted to say one thing about the permanence versus temporary I very often just think the permanent is about making a statement the temporary is about asking questions so are you trying to make a statement are you trying to mark a gateway are you trying to put something there permanently because it's going to say this is okay or this is what we're about or whatever it is we work in the temporary choose it because we're interested in the variety of questions and that means a variety of scale that means the intensity of the social fabric etc so it's not it's really about what are you trying to do and then making the right choice for what it is I just wanted to because I'm mindful of the time my husband is a theater producer and he produces cheesy entertainment as well as and he has this phrase did it transport you you know what is that and so one of the things I think is amazing about the work that people are talking about is that it transports the public in a shared moment but that shared moment you carry with you whether you walk through the gates whether you saw David Byrne and that space and you as a member of the public are changed forever and how whether that needs to be institutional those are all the practical things and permits but to me that's what's so exciting about what the ephemeral can do on a wacky island in a downtown wherever it is because people will still be talking about your festival you know the tower theater may not open again for 20 years but people will remember that moment and when they drive past the downtown LA exit they're gonna say I had a different relationship to downtown LA and so that's I think sort of the virtue of that I'm mindful of time so the boat is leaving as we like to say on Governor's Island but thank you all for participating and we're on our next section