Monique Engel, Sculpture DeCordova, digital printI recently had the pleasure of serving as a co-juror for the 7th Annual Colleges of Worcester Consortium exhibition at ARTSWorcester's Aurora Gallery. Nancy Sheehan in the Telegram & Gazette wrote a preview last Friday. Congrats to all who submitted, and to those who were awarded jurors' prizes! I was especially impressed with the photography coming out of Worcester's programs. The show is up through March 3.

Bruce Nauman, Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), video still, 1968

Art:21

Various and former guest bloggers and columnists are posting their top ten lists for 2010 over on the Art:21 blog. Here's mine - check out the rest of them for a global roundup of contemporary art events and other fabulous things I most likely missed last year.

[Nauman's video (still, left) is from Courtenay Finn's exhibition You Can't Get There from Here but You Can Get Here from There, at ApexArt.]

EDIT: My guest blog post from last May, "On Teaching Art to Scientists," is #5 on Art:21's  "Most Viewed Posts of 2010" list! Check out the original post here.

Boston Globe

Cate McQuaid summarizes the past year's Boston gallery shows and Sebastian Smee covers Massachusetts museums.

EDIT: www.wickedlocal.com, the website for the Cambridge Chronicle, listed Daniel Peltz's project Crossing Non-Signalized Locations as a top news story for 2010. Link here: scroll down to "Artists make their mark on the city."

New York Times

"ta-dah! One of those little beasts jumps out to mock me." Christoph Niemann, Abstract City: The Haunted HouseholdThere are a host of 2010 "best" lists in the Times this week - my favorite is the roundup of "opinion art," or illustrations that accompanied articles and columns in The Opinion Pages.

And here's an opportunity to publicly profess my love for Christoph Niemann.

Drawing in Public

Astrid Bowlby created a new ink and cut-paper installation for the space entitled The Clouds are Full of Rocks, and two banners by the Beehive Collective are also on view. The Beehive folks will be down from Machias, Maine to give a picture-lecture on January 26 at 6 PM - don't miss it!

Drawing in Public is on view through February 18, 2011. More information under Current Projects and Photos.

Photo by John Wilcox for the Boston Herald

• TONIGHT, channel 7 news at 6 PM: tune in for interviews with Sue Clippinger, Director of the Department of Traffic, Parking, and Transportation and Jason Weeks, Director of the Cambridge Arts Council. UPDATE: link to the video

• Rachel Zimmerman of WBUR covered the project in her "CommonHealth" column

• the Boston Herald has their own take

• the Associated Press just picked it up and suddenly, it's everywhere.

Daniel Peltz and his project Crossing Non-Signalized Locations in the Cambridge Weekly Dig

Of, By, and For opens tonight at the CAC Gallery, 344 Broadway, Cambridge. 6-8 PM.

"Made in collaboration with featured artists, Trespass examines the rise and global reach of graffiti and urban art, tracing key figures, events and movements of self-expression in the city's social space, and the history of urban reclamation, protest, and illicit performance. The first book to present the full historical sweep, global reach and technical developments of the street art movement, Trespass features key works by 150 artists, and connects four generations of visionary outlaws including Jean Tinguely, Spencer Tunick, Keith Haring, Os Gemeos, Jenny Holzer, Barry McGee, Gordon Matta-Clark, Shepard Fairey, Blu, Billboard Liberation Front, Guerrilla Girls and Banksy, among others. It also includes dozens of previously unpublished photographs of long-lost works and legendary, ephemeral urban artworks."

Written by Carlo McCormick, Marc and Sara Schiller of Wooster Collective, with essays by Anne Pasternak and Banksy.

Book launch and signing Sept 28, 7-9 PM at Taschen, 107 Greene St, NY. More info here. Congrats Paul!

The boots are based on the original auto-immobilizer designed by Frank Marug, a violinist and pattern maker. A fictional parking regulation authorizing "soft-booting" is one element of Peltz's project, which also includes:

• new street signage, produced and installed by the Traffic division staff at five locations around Cambridge. Though official in appearance, the signs are stripped of their regulatory language, shifting their function from control to poetry. In response to an existing Inman Street sign that reads "If you're reading this sign, You're biking the wrong way,” for example, a new sign continues the poem with the phrase "If you're reading this sign, You're reading this sign.” Says Peltz, “I consider this part of the project to be very fragile, like a weak pulse that can at times seem to disappear and yet if listened to closely has surprising variation.”

• a redesigned parking ticket envelope that introduces a series of yoga postures for giving and receiving parking citations. During his residency, Peltz learned that the aim of the Department of Traffic, Parking and Transportation was to maintain flow in the city, which led him to imagine a more peaceful exchange between Parking Control Officers and drivers being ticketed. This new envelope will be put into circulation and delivered with all parking citations, beginning in September.

• “10,000 Excuses,” a large-scale drawing composed from the archive of electronic parking disputes received by the City. This will be transcribed, by hand, by departmental staff and visitors onto the back wall of the Cambridge Arts Council Gallery at 344 Broadway. The deliberate act of re-writing the anonymous disputes is an opportunity to consider what is revealed in these texts – the culture and habits of city residents and visitors.

These elements invite the passerby to stop and wonder at their source and meaning, and ultimately, to discover a new perspective on life in the city. The artist explains, “Crossing non-signalized locations is intended as a double entendre that references the real thing of a parking code but also contains connotations of meeting in uncertain places, shifting meanings and embracing the ambiguity that is inherent in life.”

The exhibition opens with a public reception from 6-8 PM on Tuesday, September 7. Daniel Peltz will give an artist talk that evening at 7 PM. Please join us! For more information, the full press release, and high-res press photos, please visit www.cambridgeartscouncil.org.

Paul Notzold will close the show on Friday, November 19 with a second TXTual Healing event, location TBA.

To generate images and interest for the exhibition, Brooklyn artist Paul Notzold brought TxTual Healing to Inman Square on August 7. It was a great event - beautiful weather and a fun and involved (and well-behaved!) crowd. Jean-Dany Joachim, the current Poet Populist of Cambridge, was on hand to contribute poetic texts. TxTual Healing is Notzold's ongoing series of interactive street performances, in which the public can contribute narrative to projected graphics using their mobile phones. To date, Notzold has brought TxTual Healing to over 50 cities in 11 countries, generating tens of thousands of messages. Across the globe, common themes have emerged - relationships/love/sex, politics, privacy, pop culture quotes and memes.

The CAC Gallery exhibition will feature a series of images that document the Cambridge event, as well as a new interactive projection. Visit the show between Sept 7 and Nov 19, and bring your mobile phone! City Hall Annex, 344 Broadway, Cambridge, MA. For more information, visit www.cambridgeartscouncil.com.

This Saturday is the Danforth Museum's Patron's Preview for their summer show Off the Wall, juried by Jen Mergel of the Boston MFA and Helen Molesworth of the ICA Boston. I'll be speaking at the "curator's conversation" before the event with Jen Mergel, Dina Deitsch of the DeCordova, Randi Hopkins of the ICA, and fellow independent curator Rachael Arauz. We've been asked to discuss the changing role of the museum vis a vis the economy and the closing of local galleries, and where independent curators fit into the mix. This has been a popular topic in the press as of late, so I'm looking forward to hearing what my fellow panelists have to say about this issue at both the local and national level. Tickets are sold out, but I hope you can visit what promises to be a fabulous show! I'll report back next week...