CHF Chicago Humanities Festival

Panel

  • E-Mail
    (e.g. amandasmith@gmail.com)

    (Please separate multiple email addresses with commas.)

    (You may use or edit the message above.)

  • PRINT

  • Share

  • TEXT SIZE

Creative Reuse in Design

 Launch Media

ABOUT 

Art assemblage collective member Sara Black, designer Cat Chow, ReadyMade editor Julia Cosgrove, industrial artist Kevin Henry, and art professor Lane Relyea test the notion of do-it-yourself in both fine and applied art.

  • ABOUT Sara Black

    Sara Black belongs to the art collective Material Exchange, whose projects have shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Park Avenue Armory, and elsewhere. Black earned her MFA from The University of Chicago, her bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from Evergreen State College, and her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She has taught at The University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and other schools.

    Profile

  • ABOUT Cat Chow

    Cat Chow studied costume design and earned her bachelor’s degree in theater at Northwestern University. Her work has exhibited across the country; examples of it can be found in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She is a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. She has played guitar in the rock bands Fashion Show and Plastic Crimewave Sound.

    Profile

  • ABOUT Julia Cosgrove

    Julia Cosgrove is currently executive editor of Afar. When she moderated this panel in 2007, she was serving as deputy editor of the do-it-yourself magazine ReadyMade. She has also written and edited for BusinessWeek, the New York Daily News, and Time Out New York. She helped launch Time Out New York Kids, a spinoff of the weekly arts and entertainment magazine. Profile

  • ABOUT Kevin Henry

    Kevin Henry is an industrial designer and design activist, educator, curator, and writer. He is the founding faculty member of the product design concentration at Columbia College in Chicago where he coordinated that program for its first ten years. He has lectured widely on topics ranging from sustainability and technology integration to the changing world of digital snapshot photography and revamping foundation programs for the twenty-first century.

    Profile

  • ABOUT Lane Relyea

    Northwestern University’s professor of art theory and practice Lane Relyea earned his doctorate in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. He has written essays and reviews for magazines including Artforum, Parkett, Frieze, Art in America, and Flash Art. His monographs have focused on such artists as Polly Apfelbaum, Richard Artschwager, Jeremy Blake, Monique Prieto, and Wolfgang Tillmans. He has contributed to the exhibition catalogues Public Offerings and Helter Skelter and edited Artpaper, Minneapolis-based art magazine, from 1987 to 1991. Profile
Click next to learn more...

1 of 1

I think DIY is political and I think humans like to share and I think companies like to come in and figure out how to manhandle that sharing so they can actually make a profit.       

Click play to listen. Recorded on November 6, 2007.

Led by ReadyMade Magazine’s then deputy editor Julia Cosgrove, this panel of resourceful Chicagoans examines the growing practice of creatively recycling materials both in contemporary art and everyday life. They assess the relationship between recycling and art—does your duct-tape wallet deserve gallery space?—and speak to whether recontextualizing and reassembling found materials offers any environmental benefit. (You may be surprised.) What is a viewer’s role in completing an artwork? Who determines meaning? And what do fanzines have to do with it?

Panelists discussing this resurgence of do-it-yourself and bottom-up creation include designer Cat Chow, industrial designer and educator Kevin Henry, art  professor Lane Relyea, and Material Exchange art collective member Sara Black.

Generously sponsored by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, with additional funding provided by the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Above: Detail from Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany  by Hannah Höch (1889-1978). 1919. Collage, 114 x 90 cm.

Tags

reuse, recycling, do-it-yourself, DIY, repurposing, creativity, sustainability, environment, harm, waste, disposal, bricoleur, collage, ReadyMade

Learn More

Similar Programs

high-speed rail

Panel

The GO TO 2040 Plan Bold Innovations for a Better Chicago

How will metropolitan Chicago look by the year 2040—and how should it look? In the tradition of Daniel Burnham, expert panelists elucidate the ways in which growth patterns and regional prosperity could be ameliorated through better planning.

enormous finger, tiny rock

Panel

Small Gestures It's the little things...

Four Chicago thinkers debate the conection of big and small. Can the two seeming extremes nurture each other?

Support CHF - Donate Now

Festival Sponsors

© Copyright 2012 Chicago Humanities Festival