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Life/Site Specific: The Creation, Collection, and Care of Art Environments


Builders of art environments—personal spaces like homes, gardens, and studios fully transformed into site specific and life encompassing works of art—create across the spectrum of practice, process, and material. These discrete and distinct examples of gesamtkunstwerk are present in landscapes as disparate as Philadelphia’s South Street, the Sonoran Desert, and a small bayou town south of New Orleans. The artists employ media and techniques that continually advance the canonical limits of art making, utilizing tile, concrete, shells, bottles, glitter, junk, steel, wood, clay, ephemera—anything that can be painted, epoxied, affixed, sculpted, or constructed.

While often created by people considered to be at social and artistic margins, art environments are, as described in the first SPACES Archives newsletter (1982), “art as an expression of personal joy.” Life and site specific, art environments encapsulate and affirm the value of myriad historic and cultural perspectives. This session will address the incredible range of these unfettered creative expressions through the lenses of the archive, the collection, the institution, and practice and preservation as well as artist-designed home/studio environments and collections. As museums and cultural institutions increasingly incorporate immersive, experiential artworks into their exhibitions and collections, a thorough understanding of the ongoing legacy of artist-built environments as transformational distillations of the creative life is imperative as we pry open the boundaries traditionally surrounding artmaking.

This panel is structured to encourage audience engagement with questions critical to this field. Panelists will share case studies and corresponding questions addressing such themes as access, preservation, and more.


Field of Study:






Chairs:
Annalise Christine Flynn,Vernacular Art Services LLC - annalise.flynn@gmail.com and Lisa A Stone,The School of the Art Institute of Chicago - lstone@saic.edu

Fearless Witness: Seymour Rosen’s SPACES
Annalise Christine Flynn, Vernacular Art Services LLC
Terra Firma: Home and Studio as Holistic Art Environment
Valerie Balint, Program Manager, Historic Artists’ Homes & Studios, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation
Life as A Permission Giving Practice
Alex Gartelmann, Artist, Site Steward for the Mary Nohl Home
Teaching the Non-mainframe
Lisa A Stone, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Stewarding Sight
Laura Bickford, John Michael Kohler Arts Center
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