SheilaStudio

There are two parts to this site specific project honoring the contribution made by the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena which was razed in 2016: a chronological line of Street Medallions and, placed inside, a 5 minute screen-based representation of engaged populations accompanied by the sounds of their appreciation — hands waving and clapping — during performances. The diverse communities — past, present and future — are represented and repeated by responses from visitors to the new stadium complex’s team store and food court...

The idea that conjunctions create connection captured my attention. And I noticed that unlike English in Chinese conjunction are within the sentence. So I sent a visual proposal to a friend, the architect and HKDI administrator Leslie Lu, showing how I might use Cantonese and English conjunctions in the building being constructed in the new territories.

Once I was brought to Hong Kong, I noticed that there was no place where students from various disciplines could comfortably sit together using their mobile devices. At the top of the entrance escalators was a raw, unfinished glazed room I asked for and then transformed into a student lounge. The new space makes possible a participatory democratic process, one that uses conjunctions generative of connections within as open ended frame that is material (the interactive text scroll) and immaterial.

OptiLED’s bulbs focus beams to create an array directed down in a v form echoing the building’s structure. The remaining bulbs I directed at the glazed walls to dematerialize the architectural frame. I attached an interactive LED panel to the mullion at eye level where two dozen different Green conjunctions such as …therefore…and…considering that… float by and anyone can text connect.respond@vtc.edu.hk to add any comment in any color. Their words travel the length of the room twice and then disappear –no censorship. And to my surprise and delight at the opening night of this public art project two people –McYan and his friend Phil- got up and with their bodies made the moving text appear still!

CECArtsLink sent me to Yekaternburg thanks to Kendal Henry who said I had done project with concrete and “can talk with anyone.” During the flight, I read an historical account of the region during perestroika and a local tradition of writing Chastushki, four line songs describing folk tales or current events, caught my attention.

When I was shown two sites I chose the entrance to the old WaterTower because I saw it needed a new step. Working in the concrete factory with a small group of young art and architecture students my plan was to replace the existing, very wobbly stones with a stable concrete step and set about writing the Chastushki stanzas with the students. I asked the students about their concerns and questions, and for the inclusion of ellipses and question marks to open up the lines to the people who come to the funky water tower.

Given 5 days to complete this project my idea quickly transformed into making only the first letter of each word of these Chastushki. The resultant form became an invitation to all to enter into the signification of the work at the threshold of the Water Tower. The missing letters would then appear to be effaced by history like the tower itself. 

One of the 4 stanzas says: 

water of time under your feet
we don’t keep what we have
we lack time
who is to name?

At the opening of this new step to the old tower, the students used chalk from a nearby kiosk; they chalked in the words they had composed. Once back in the states I learned that the poets of this city adopted this Step(pe) project reworking the meanings and fulfilling the possibilities it offers al…

The original Hillhouse H.S, was embedded along an edge of Yale Colleges. In he early 1960’s that building was demolish and the multi-ethnic population dispersed. My proposal was accepted for the newly renovated Hillhouse High School which was constricted in the poorer and mostly African American neighborhood of projects. The architects had already installed large 16 inch square tiles on all the walls. I inserted a Kente-cloth colorful frieze of Bisazza gold flecked tiles within which 4″ golden ceramic tiles had quotes from decades of graduates of this high school. When it was clear the High School lacked an up to date alumni list I started by calling a few graduates and each person I called led me to others until the quotes I had collected gave a very full picture of how things had changed not only at the school but in the world beyond during the many decades. Many of the texts o came from the school newspaper that had existed and was now defunct as well as from a poetry workshop Elizabeth Alexander led for this project so that current students could be represented. Althea Norcott, one of the English teachers whose father had been a custodian at Yale as well as a graduate of Hillhouse H.S., told me she had started using the text studded frieze as a learning tool in her classes; I could not have been more delighted.

For most of the people living near the 207th Street station in Inwood this last stop on the longest subway line in New York is the start of a long day if work. At each entrance/exit the experience of coming and going is integrated into terrazzo floor tiles. It is that long strip and work experience which informed the sparkling mosaic words, At long last… and on the opposing wall At the start…. The ellipses which follow these phrases are made from the same sparkling mosaic and mirror glass materials. Both the phrases reflect the experience of the subway travelers and the three dots of the ellipses invite them to finish the sentence after the … with their own thoughts.

There are 207 square tiles that follow the ellipses with texts which carry voices from generations of people who have arrived or have left from this train station: Native Americans coming to a Pow Wow at Inwood Park, merchants of various shops, resident musicians, singers, dancers in shows downtown, designers, academics, artists and activists from y countries in Europe, Asia, Latin America —and most recently from the Dominican Republic. Placed around the stairway to the trains are terrazzo floor tiles derived from Taino petroglyphs and resemble A train musicians. Above is a new steel handrail etched with the notes for the jazz classic, Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Take the A Train’ and the words Billie Holiday sang to that song… 

I was selected as one of three artists to submit a proposal after six women has been chosen to be honored at the Massachusetts State House. I was presented with the names of t the women —Dorothea Dix, Lucy Stone, Sara Parker Redmond, Mary Kenny O’ Sullivan, Florence Luscomb and talk that the site was between two arches in the hallway on the way to the legislature.

It seemed most appropriate that I ask another woman to work together with me as an expression of ‘sisterhood’ even though these six women did not know one another. Susan Sellers and I decided that since all the men were represented by marble or bronze likenesses and in a dignified manner, we would represent these women using the same materials, presenting their likeness at eye level. From the domestic sphere we introduced wallpaper, the pattern made of the laws they worked to change. Their activism is expressed in their own words. Susan and I were searching for a title for our work when I noticed that there were six women and that H E A R U S was six letters which became our title of our work.

A main library building was to replace a small storefront library in Flushing where many immigrant groups from places without public libraries often went to read newspapers in their own languages. The choice of the stairs as my site was intended to encourage everyone to feel welcome to enter this new large building. My own experience growing up among refugees led to the notion that emigration and library use have in common a search for something you do not have at home, and as a result I chose titles of books, essays, classic poems, folk tales and films which were known in each of the dierent communities, works which features a search or a journey. The titles were sandblasted into the granite risers of the south-facing entrance stairs in English and in the languages and scripts in which the works were originally written. Clearly the titles and their placement inverts the usual placement of quotes by famous and wise men above formidable entrance stairways to public buildings.

A workhouse was being remodeled to bring together the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training’s many activities. The RIDLT logo has a hand reaching for the stars which led to the idea of providing what was needed within reach.

On the ground, an array of chairs and a Lazy Susan table is installed amidst lines of new crab apple forming constellation that reminds all that workhouse inmates maintained an apple orchard were here. Everyone who come here is invited to think about and discuss the presence or absence of work.

Words questioning work are read differently from the offices above. Anyone can sit at the Lazy Susan table and move the layers to construct 10,000 possible sentences. Once seated you can see that into the table’s edge is etched times past when when people in Rhode Island worked together to get what they needed done, or protested to obtain rights to lives and work they had been denied.

I was commissioned to create a pedestrian path where the new highway would replace the elevated Green line and a thriving neighborhood had been razed four decades earlier. I proposed a set of elements along the path referencing what once was a diverse, well-knitted community of working poor.

The first element completed was the highway abutments into which I ghosted a representation of the old West End buildings. Names of obliterated streets were embedded in the new sidewalk where the old street pattern intersected the pedestrian path under the new highway. The new Highway abutment was formed as a ghosting in of the old West End buildings that were called ‘tenements’ denigrated because they often only had bathrooms at the end of the hall. Along the new highway’s sidewall concrete panels present an emphatic comment by a former resident speaking to the pride residents of the razed West End had about their close-knit community. The vaunted feeling that this was THE GREATEST NEIGHBORHOOD THIS SIDE OF HEAVEN. A stepped viewing stand serves as an ironic place from which to read this quote and think about the working people’s lives, friendship circles and mutual care which was so egregiously overlooked and undervalued by the powers that be. Two maps display the dense street pattern of the former West End brownstone buildings compared with the suburban aspect of the white Charles River apartments and winding paths.

To guide pedestrians through the new highway site, I had proposed and designed a missile barrier with the “Takings Clause” of the US Constitution and handrails with quotes from members of each of the diverse populations of dispersed, former residents. That metal work had not been completed when the Big Dig scandal and litigation caused the Central Artery Arts projects to cease in 2005.

In the spirit of delivering ‘history from below’ a timeline was placed along the doorways. The scored bands indicate each golden decade and the dark decade before and during WWII. Brass texts deliver some uses of the buildings, stainless steel texts tell of events that shaped the inhabitant’s experiences here. Below the timeline, white and terra cotta panels alternate along property lines, images represent wrapped objects talked about by people who lived, worked and had stores here. Generational marks and comments reveal differences among the generations each speaking of their own understanding of Japanese heritage and their experience here in this neighborhood.

I had just moved from Los Angeles to New Haven in 1990. I was the first tenured woman at Yale School of Art and was as eager to balance my life as a public artist with the changes I came to make at Yale; the inclusion of more women faculty as well as people of color and an un bounded engagement with the world each of around them and the development of their own unique, formal languages.

My apartment was just east of the part of downtown that was undergoing revitalization and New Haven had just released a Request For Qualifications. My administrative assistant told me it was a p;ace I should walk through as it had become blighted and emptied. I decided I would make sidewalk medallions in the form of a compass rose and place them about five feet apart to enable people, and began researching the history of that quadrant now called Ninth Square. At this time point I had competed Biddy Mason: Time & Place and was working on Omoide noShotoyo which took almost 10 years to complete due to there the weak structure beneath the sidewalk I was replacing.

I looked for people who lived and worked in the part of New haven, and contributed through their labor to the life of the city. I knew I could only create 15 compass rose medallions and was careful to pay attention to gender and ethnicity including the current percentage of those who worked in this area of the city and could reflect the 300 year history as well as inspire the current population of New Haven.

This site where Biddy Mason had lived was to become a parking Garage. When Betye Saar and I were shown the plans, she chose the area near the elevator while I chose a concrete block wall specified to define the outside perimeter of the site. I had noticed this wall would be visible from busy Spring Street and wanted any passerby to see Biddy Mason was here.

I requested some additional funds to be able to use cast concrete panels so that representative elements could be placed in the forms could make an impression in the concrete much the way Biddy Mason’s generosity, perseverance, midwife and entrepreneurial skills had so impressed me.

Biddy Mason became integral to the growth of Los Angeles and the panels of this wall are marked by the decades of Biddy Mason’s life story entwined with the development of the city in which she won her freedom from slavery.

During the process of planning and constructing this, my first site specific, permanent project, I became convinced that rather than ephemeral projects I would much prefer to make long lasting works in public sites which support local communities

In down town Los Angeles, the Latino market was undergoing renovation by a developer, Ira Yellin who called and asked if I could transform the construction fence which wrapped the site into something attracted and lively as the market had been. I noticed that across the street was a building which housed an aged population and I thought about the ways in which food and culture are linked. At that time Otis Art Institute on MacArthur Park was becoming the west coast part of Parsons and they asked me to create a parallel department of Communication Design and Illustration.

While I gathered quotes from those who spoke English about food and condiments they remembered, I asked a group of Otis students to ask the same questions I asked of those elderly people who spoke only Spanish, Japanese, Chinese or Yiddish. The evocative and poignant quotes were added to the images we had painted and for years later —as these wood panels are reused— I would see bits and pieces of our mural on the backs of new construction fences throughout LA.

I designed this poster using a Blueprint process most often used by architects.This choice was informed by the inexpensive aspect of the material to imply that at this conference our visions for the future might guide us in the decade to come. The image of the moon’s phases is from a painting by Angelica Kaufman as The Artist in the character of Design Inspired by Poetry. The gridded landscape reflects the influence of utopian images created by Superstudio during the time I was living and working in Milan. I organized a set of conference during a week in March and hoped that this one dedicated to the future of design was intended to bring women from all over the United States to discus formal languages and the future.

My attraction to hardware led me to see the biological symbol of women in a simple eyebolt. I made a necklace and w decided to give keychain necklaces with a eyebolt pendants to everyone who attended this conference during spring of the Woman’s Building’s second and last year in the Grandview site.

The American Institute of Graphic Arts invite 100 designers to make a 30″ square poster about a color. I chose pink a as the signifier of a gender and divided up the the field into pink square. Most of the squares were given out to females of various ages asking each one to suggest what that color meant.

And I left blank pink squares to imply other meanings and ideas exist as well. The panels were exhibited at the Whitney Museum and I asked a friend who was going to be in NYC to tell me what he saw at the exhibition and he told me a group of people assembled and remained there reading all about pink.

My Pink was not chosen among those to be printed as a poster, nor was my original ever returned but I was sent the film negative of the original image as it appeared in the AIGA catalog of the exhibition. Helen Alm printed 500 hundred of these Pink posters on the rotaprint offset press at the Women’s Graphic center I founded at the Woman’s Building. Pink posters were given away, sold at feminist bookstore and I put some up in Los Angels as well where people could add their comments on the blank pink squares.

During 2009-10 a group of these pink posters filled a wall in an exhibition, curated by Connie Butler; WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution opened at the Geffen Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and travelled to MOMA P.S. 1 in New York.

The board of the International Design Conference in Aspen asked me to create a journal about their 1971 conference. My suggestion was that I create a special issue of the Aspen Times assembled during the week-long conference. My plan was to reflect the various perspectives of the people in the audience, print and distribute the newspaper to all participants on the last day of this conference.

The process was explained on a panel placed within each conference carry-all. One side of the panel had a diagram of the way the various panels would be assembled to make up the pages of this special newspaper and the other side was blank awaiting their drawings and writings.

Among the works I created in response to being asked to do all the branding for the new California Institute of the Arts were a series of posters to draw the desired type of students to each of the schools. Richard Farson, Dean of Cal Arts School of Design’ wrote this text to attract those who wanted to make a difference in the world at large. I chose the shrink wrap process used to display small objects in local drug and supermarket stores. Thinking that the way something is made is part of what it means, this mode of manufacture aligned the school with the everyday and people who were not yet designers.

I chose objects easily recognizable by everyone: an acorn to represent the regenerative aspect of ecology, a jack to represent playing a game popular at the time, and a piece of a printed circuit for technology which had begun to capture our imaginations. The company who made these shrink wrap posters impressed me by employing wheelchair bound workers who carefully placed the objects on large, printed, perforated boards. The heated plastic was sucked onto the board attaching the object permanently: 9 posters per board. Thousands of these 8″ x 10″ posters were each put into a padded jiffy bag and mailed to design offices and high schools all of the country.

In 2012, art historian and curator Kellie Jones chose this poster as well as a cover of the feminist journal Chrysalis.I was the designer and a member of the editorial board of that journal and used an image by Betye Saar for a cover. Kellie Jones Now Dig This ! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and then travelled in 2103 to New York’s MOMA at P.S. 1 in Queens. This 1970 work represented my work as well as my long standing friendship and mutual support with Betye Saar. The importance of friendship was a major theme in Kellie Jones writing during the period. And friendship among artists of color was sustaining as they were not exhibited in galleries in LA and held their exhibitions in each other’s gardens.

The President, Provost, Deans of California Institute of the Arts were over loaded choosing faculty, students and planning the school. I was asked to be the editor and designer of a special issue of Arts in Society about the formation of this new school and they asked Marianne Partridge who worked then in the public relations office to help me. We went to the Associated Press and chose images that reflected the decade during which the California Institute of the Arts was being planned. While laying out those images I added work by new faculty and applicants constructing a flow through the magazine of repeated gestures and visual formats, correspondence between the Provost during the decade of planning, minutes of deans meetings and diverse kinds of paper. The center of the magazine was printed on bright yellow, highly shiny calendared paper and masking the existing hierarchy I included an Index-contents page alphabetizing the list of names and the pages where their work could be found.

In 2013 Irma Boom showed me a Dutch site where this issue of my magazine was displayed and she translated the text as admiring the use of a flexible cardboard cover, silvered, transparent and variously colored stock I chose to make the black and white printed images and texts much more tactile and vivid.

Miriam Shapiro asked me if I would design a special issue of the feminist newspaper Everywoman about what she and Judy Chicago were teaching in Fresno. I went up to Fresno and collected the students and artist-teachers images and texts. Back at my studio I chose a ‘Consciousness-Raising’ model in which each person has the same amount of time to speak, and gave students and teachers each a two page spread. The center spread became an image of a cheer given to welcome Ti-Grace Atkinson to Fresno.