Please join Portland Society of Architects and The Urban Land Institute on January 15th at the Portland Museum of Art for a forum to identify and discuss strategies for achieving a sustainable Portland.

How do we:

• Significantly reduce our carbon footprint?
• Create a broad-based urban economy?
• Adapt to changing climate, new forms of transportation and higher densities?
• Promote innovation and flexibility in planning and design in the public realm?

Many groups are examining the challenges that face Portland. This open forum will be the first in a series of meetings that brings these forces together to envision the City’s future. Keynote speaker Gary Lawrence heads ARUP’s Urban Strategies practice. As a former Planning Director for Seattle, he developed the first sustainability-focused municipal comprehensive plan in the world. He is an internationally known expert on communities that address human need and environmental limitations. He is also a forceful, provocative and entertaining speaker.

This Lawn is Your Lawn from roger doiron on Vimeo.

This Thursday, there’s a screening at SPACE that might be worth checking out. “The Garden” tells the story of a 14-acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles, the largest of its kind in the US. Started after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers created a community garden in one of the country’s most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community. Last year, bulldozers threatened to destroy the garden for development, and there were lots of protests.

The screening of the movie will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Craig Lapine of Cultivating Community, Joan Perkins from the City’s Community Garden Program, and Wolfe Tone of the Trust for Public Lands.

23 businesses in the East End of Portland Maine have worked together to organize a Holiday event like no other! Our retail store, Eli Phant will be participating, as will many other shops, restaurants, galleries, and artist studios. Check out the site at eastendshops.com.

It’s been really fun working with other local business owners and entrepreneurs on this event, and I hope we do more projects like this in the future.

The NYC Department of Transportation unveiled the newest bike racks that will be hitting the streets over the next three years. Some 5,000 in total.

I dig the design; it will be pretty interesting to see how they hold up and what comes next. 5,000 are a pretty big number but it falls way short in meeting the demand for bike parking in the city.

See some of the finalist at the competition web site коли под наем

Will Machin, a friend from Providence and one of the artists featured at our store Eli Phant, just launched a new website showcasing his portfolio of public art, commissioned work and installations. One body of work, entitled “Work for the New Economy”, includes one of my favorite pieces from several years ago- his “Exercise Mat for the New Economy”. He describes this series of work on his website:

This work looks forward to and sideways at a world in which post-industrial and post consumer waste are everywhere; this work reaches out to understand that world through the intimacy of using traditional hand-working skills, to meet human needs like warmth, shade, shelter, play, etc. These pieces take over the space and function of objects we use daily, dancing with the factory- to- function life that serves some of our needs and leaves others unmet.

The Exercise Mat is constructed of discarded flip flops- all collected from the beach in Rio while Will was living there in 2006.

His work at Eli Phant was made under the moniker Industrial Evolution, and is in very much the same vein. It includes several sketchbooks covered in discarded sheets of rubber roofing, with paper cut from grocery bags.

Get out and vote tomorrow- if you haven’t already (yay early voting!).

Got this shot in Tribeca in NYC- note the new green bike lane in the foreground.

Josh MacPhee from Just Seeds posted some pictures on their blog of the show “Paper Politics” which he curated and is currently on display at the Dowd Gallery at SUNY-Cortland in Upstate New York. Apparently there has been controversy over some of the images, but he doesn’t know yet which ones. . . it will be interesting to find out. Josh MacPhee will be giving a curator talk on October 23rd.

Just Seeds is also on the road with a travelling print show- perhaps it is coming to a city near you!

Also, check out my friend Jean Cozzens’ print “Ruins” in the middle of the bottom photo. (I am very proud to say that I took the photo Jean used as the source for that incredible print).

Thanks Josh for sharing the photos on your blog– and thanks to Andrew Mount, the director at the Dowd, for sending the photos.

In 1918, Woodrow and Edith Wilson invited a some special guests to the White House- a small flock of sheep responsible for keeping the “First Lawn” trimmed and neat. In return they provided wool and mutton. Neat idea, and part of a long history of small-scale agriculture at the White House. In fact, there used to be a greenhouse where the West Wing now stands. Eat the View is organizing people to encourage the next president to plant a food garden on the White House Lawn. Here’s their petition (sign it here):

We, the undersigned, are petitioning the next President of the United States to plant an organic  food garden or “Victory Garden” on the White House lawn, with part of produce going to the White House kitchen and the rest to local food pantries. The White House is “America’s House” and should set a positive example for the country and the world. The new President would not be breaking with tradition, but returning to it (the White House has had fruit and vegetable gardens before) and showing how we can meet global challenges such as climate change, food security, and energy independence.

“Eat the View” is a campaign to plant healthy, edible landscapes in high-impact, high visibility places, whether it’s the “First Lawn” or the lawn in front of your child’s school.

“Eat the View” is coordinated by Kitchen Gardeners International, a Maine-based 501c3 nonprofit network of 10,000 gardeners from 100 countries who are inspiring and teaching more people to grow some of their own food. Roger Doiron, pictured below, is the founder of the organization and a great local hero here in Maine.

Micheal Hoffman, an old family friend from Baltimore, and his company See3 communications have recently released this guide to video on the web. Targeted at organizations, he does a great job of giving us a picture what the possibilities are for communicating on the web. Worth a watch. There are seven videos in the series– see them all here.

I spotted this garbage can at the Blue Hill Country Fair.

This crazy bike machine made an appearance at the Picnic Arts and Music Festival on Saturday in Portland, Maine. The Conference Bike as it is called carries seven riders, one steers and everybody pedals, and everybody talks. It was a little tight on sidewalk, but looked pretty fun.

The bike was the creation Erik Staller. He has been making what he calls Urban UFOs for over twenty years. Check out his web site to his progression.

Earlier this week, I mentioned that there’s going to be a great poster show in NYC opening September 20th. Well, if you can’t wait that long, or go that far, tomorrow night a different show opens in Boston, this time focusing on Music Posters.

Postgig is being shown at the Fort Point Arts Community Gallery, now thru September 20th. It was curated by Clifford Stoltze and complements the recent launch of his book, 1000 Music Graphics. Includes work by: Modern Dog, Aesthetic Apparatus, Patent Pending, The Small Stakes and many more.

We have several Aesthetic Apparatus prints in stock at Eli-Phant.

This morning, as the wind kicked up and a thunderstorm began to threaten, I thought it might be a good time to visit two of the City’s newest additions to its Public Art Collection, located along Baxter Boulevard in Winslow Park. “Rustle”, framed by the swaying branches and darkening sky, looked its part. And the “Cloud Bench” almost glowed.

Both pieces, by Maine-home-grown artist Vivian Beer, were installed this summer. The plantings, designed by local landscape architect Regina Leonard, were recently finished as well.

I am proud to say I was co-chair of the Portland Public Art’s subcommittee for Winslow Park, which selected Vivian Beer’s proposal. When the City’s Urban Designer position was eliminated, I became the primary contact in the City for this project, and worked with Regina (who went above and beyond the call of duty and with whom I hope to work again) and Vivian (who charmed us all) to navigate the staffing limbo.

This project was relatively modest, cost-effective, and quick, particularly when compared to some of the other projects on Portland’s public art horizon. There are currently three privately funded, large-scale public art projects in the works– “Boom” by Portland artist Aaron Stephan and commissioned to commemorate PD Merrill’s contributions to the City (I’ve included a blurry picture of the PD Merrill group’s presentation to the Public Art Committee), a Fisherman’s Memorial landscape and public art project at Bell Buoy Park, and Art All Around, the oil tanks over in South Portland. The Portland Public Art Committee has an advisory role in the Portland projects, and has no involvement in the oil tank project.

As the Public Art Committee, still a relatively young program, continues to mature and evolve, it will be interesting to see how it (we, I guess) manages the relationship between publicly funded and privately funded pieces. There is certainly an important role for each.

Hundreds of posters, photographs, moving images, audio clips, and other ephemera will be on display at Exit Art in NYC, as part of a show called Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now. One of the two curators is Josh MacPhee, founder of Justseeds, and one of our favorite artists on display here at our store- Eli Phant.

I wish I could make it to the opening on September 20th, but there will be lots of other events, including an election day party, and screenprinting workshops at the Lower East Side Printshop.

Treehugger recently featured two artists from opposite sides of the Atlantic that are working in the burgeoning field of “eco-graffitti”, specifically with the application of moss to walls in public places. A few months we posted about some local “knitfitti”. Maybe this is the next trend to hit Munjoy Hill . . .

These “green” messages evolve as the moss spreads over the surface (if conditions are sufficiently moist and shady, that is, and the moss thrives). The pictures here are from the website of Anna Garforth. Garforth is a London illustrator and designer, and has begun to expand her personal work into the public sphere. On her website she states:

I believe it is important to not get consumed by one environment and to take on a more holistic perspective.

I couldn’t agree more. One of my favorite pieces from her website was her “Head Gardener” series, one of which is pictured below, in which she recycles plastic milk bottles into some pretty wild planters to install, in true guerrilla gardener fashion, on sign posts around London. Also check out “Little Gardener” in which she works with youth to make their own sculptural planters, encouraging them to embrace the importance of recycling and growing plants.

Also featured in the Treehugger article was Edina Tokodi, a Brooklyn New York artist originally from Hungary, whose “mosstika urban greenery” project has been sprouting up in galleries and public spaces in Brooklyn for the last three years.

For a tutorial on how to do your own moss art- here’s a a how-to from instructables.

This morning, as I grabbed my morning coffee, I noticed a familiar face on the front page of the NY Times Art Section. Denver’s Big Blue Bear was the cover girl (animal?) for an article about public art in the convention city. A few months ago, we wrote a post about the Big Blue Bear and Denver’s Public Art program on this blog. At the time I was impressed by the city’s public art program, and in particular by a series of installations commissioned for a charter school in Denver (part of which is pictured below).

One part of today’s article stood out:

The sense that whimsy and serious art can coexist, and that a public art program should flirt with that idea, has been pushed from the top down as well by the city’s mayor, John Hickenlooper, an art lover and former beer brewer who joined the board of the Denver Art Museum 12 years ago, long before he entered politics.

“John knows all my curators on a first-name basis,” said Lewis Sharp, a former curator with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York who took over as director of the Denver Art Museum in 1989. “When he was simply a restaurant owner and brewer, he gave beer to all our events,” Mr. Sharp added. “Now when I hear him talk about Clyfford Still, who in my view is the most important American painter of the 20th century, I know that he gets it, right to his core.”

But before you’re start to feel like life on the Denver’s Public Art Committee (or its equivalent) is all peaches and cream, be sure to read about one of the committee’s latest installations: “Mustang” by Luis Jimenez, a 32-foot tall fiberglass horse installed this year at the Denver International Airport. The piece was one of the first commissioned by Denver’s Public Art Program in 2003, but was delayed again and again, and eventually was wrapped up in litigation between the artist and the city. And then, the piece killed him, literally. While working in his studio, Jimenez was pinned beneath a falling section of the horse, and he died on his studio floor. “Mustang” was completed posthumously, and was just installed in February.

You may not want that yellow 1950’s vinyl chair, but I am sure John and Linda knows who will love it. Portland locals, Linda Wary and John Meyers, located a few blocks form Eli Phant, are collectors extraordinaire. They hunt religiously for the yard sale items that will fit perfectly in their next project, even if they don’t know what that next project is. Having an eye for reuse and the vision and talent to create intimate interior spaces are just one of Linda’s and John’s specialties. They also dabble in fashion design, graphic design and craft.

The New York Times featured some of their hunts this week in the Home and Garden section, read the article here, and also check out Wary Meyers in the recent Design Sponge Regional Round Up.

On September 13th at Lincoln Park, over 70 vendors (maybe including you?) will set up their wares at the PICNIC Music and Arts Festival. There will also be live music from some of the best indie acts in Portland, including Metal Feathers, Cougars Kill Cobras, Dead End Armory, Huak and more!

To apply to be a vendor at the festival- fill out the online form. We’ll see you there!

I am embarrassed to admit that last week was my first visit to the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The 100 year old museum is the largest museum in America devoted to the history of the American whaling industry and its greatest port, New Bedford.

New Bedford is still the largest U.S. fishing port in terms of dollar value of catch. It has beautiful historic buildings and a rich history that may be rather surprising if all you ever do is drive by on interstate 195.

The first image is of a baleen whale, which was struck by a super tanker off the coast of Rhode Island in 1998. It is one of only three Blue Whales on display in the world. It measures about 65 feet long, and would have grown to 120 feet at maturity.

The second image is of a Sperm Whale that was found beached on Nantucket in 2002. Sperm whales helped make New Bedford the whaling capital of the world and one of America’s wealthiest cities in the 1800s. The whales were hunted and harvested mainly for their oil, which was used as lamp fuel and to make candles.

If you have a chance to visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum I highly recommended it!