In Assistant Post Culture Editor Kristin Salaky’s story “The Career Canvas” Jan. 28, she said student artists “vie for job search success with double majors.” Their searches can include artwork they install in public places locally.
The Smithsonian magazine February feature “Art Attack” has the answer from British street artist “Banksy”: “While he may shelter behind a concealed identity, he advocates a direct connection between an artist and his constituency.
‘There’s a whole new audience out there, and it’s never been easier to sell (one’s art),’ Banksy has maintained. ‘You don’t have to go to college, drag ‘round a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries or sleep with someone powerful, all you need now is a few ideas and a broadband connection. This is the first time the essentially bourgeois world of art has belonged to the people. We need to make it count.’ ”
To the School of Art students: Is that ample reason to become street artists — Muralists of Esthetically Illiterate Athens, Ohio? In 2010, two OU graduate art students from Nicaragua and from Columbia painted the great mural on the Whitmore building on Mill Street — a stone’s throw from the school. One of the artists made a large painting that now hangs on the south side of 16 S. Congress St. Last summer, two or three Bachelor of Fine Arts graduates painted the mural on the outside of Athens’ health-food store, The Farmacy, on Stimson Avenue. These artists created their own jobs!
Local media, including The Post, barely mentioned them. In my career as a public artist, lazy and/or disinterested media is a cause for lack of art in public places, in places where people can view them in their daily outings. Another reason Athens is public-art-poor is the near-total lack of interest by School of Art faculty to promote public art courses. Athens city government has commissioned only ONE public art piece since its secretive city arts commission was formed in 2006 as Athens’ “art czar” of public taste(!).
At Cleveland State University in 1980-82, I had my art students present for-real public projects for sites in Cleveland in graphic form on large poster boards, which became part of an exhibition of class works at term’s end. The proposals had to have photos and signatures of owners of the proposed art site, funds needed, structural and design schemata and a brief note about the project. Art jobs are for the creative-making, students. Go make!
John Spofforth is a 1968 alum of Ohio University.
