Monday, November 10th
JOURNEYS LECTURE
4:30pm - Adamson Wing, 136A Baker Hall
Marilyn Taft Thomas, Professor of Theory and Composition in the Carnegie Mellon School of Music
Living Life With a Purple Crayon
There is a whole series of children's books about Harold and his purple crayon. Harold has a great imagination, and he draws himself in and out of various situations with his purple crayon. He goes off on adventures by drawing a boat and climbing into it, he draws various creatures he meets along the way, and when he is all done exploring his purple world, he draws the window to his bedroom, scrambles through it, and climbs back into the bed he has just drawn with his purple crayon.
My journey through life is a lot like Harold's, but my purple crayon helps me to make sense of the things that already happened to me. Whenever I get stuck in a life situation, and just can't seem to find my way out, I write. Sometimes I write music, sometimes I write words. Often, it is poetry. Writing, for me, is a search for self-discovery. If I knew what I needed to say, I wouldn't have to say it.
My purple crayon is my fundamental tool for coping with the difficult challenges of life itself. This lecture is all about some of those challenges and the purple crayon that helped me through them.
Thursday, November 13th
4:30 pm Your Town, Inc. Exhibition
Miller Gallery's 2nd floor, PCA
Julia Christensen, artist and writer
Big Box Reuse
Big box buildings have increasingly dominated the American landscape since the 1960s. Author, artist, and researcher Julia Christensen spent the last six years studying these monolithic, free-standing structures and their resulting effects on our culture. In Your Town, Inc., the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University will exhibit photographs and installation work examining how communities are changing in the shadow of corporate real estate.
Eighty photographs from Christensen's forthcoming book, Big Box Reuse (MIT Press, Fall 2008), illustrate the ways in which communities throughout the United States creatively re-employ the structures constructed and abandoned by multinational corporations, such as Wal-Mart and K-Mart. Resulting endeavors include: justice center, megachurch, senior resource center, elementary school, and flea market.
For Your Town, Inc., an architectural construction on top of a parking lot will be fabricated by Christensen in collaboration with students at Oberlin College and Carnegie Mellon. The structure itself, Unbox, is a reaction and response to the big-box concept. Inbox demonstrates characteristics opposed to megastore values and conventions-it will be transportable, modular, built of recycled materials, and easily reusable. Furthermore, Unbox will be activated for creative and social uses, rather than retail purposes, by various groups from Greater Pittsburgh who can propose events to take place within this new facility. The building can enable discussion about urgent issues such as sustainability, user-friendliness, and reusability.
The parking lot in the gallery will be built to City of Pittsburgh code. The lot raises questions about the infrastructural aspect of our lifestyles-particularly, the autocentricity of our culture.
Booksigning to follow lecture.
1 comment:
I had a few extra minutes the other day and popped in to see the Big Box Reuse exhibit at the Miller Gallery. Much to my surprise, one of the images in the exhibit is from the small western town where I did my undergrad--at a location I knew well. It made me stop and think for a second. The Wal-Mart that was there literally picked up and moved a mile down the road, leaving behind a big empty box that luckily has been put to some use. But so many of those images are very depressing--what is the ultimate toll of the abandonment of these strange structures and the empires that once ruled them?
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