Steve Lambert

CAFK+A Big Ideas in Arts & Culture Lecture Series – May 22

Steve — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:56:13 +0000

I’m speaking at City Hall (!) in Kitchener, Ontario on May 22nd.

Tuesday May 22, 2012 – 7:00 pm
Kitchener CIty Hall Rotunda
200 King St. W., Kitchener

Steve Lambert is an American artist who works in a variety of media, commonly using print and communication vehicles as a means of developing a dialogue with his audience. He has produced interactive scoreboards, letterpress posters, signage and postcards. One of Lambert’s best known projects is The New York Times “Special Edition”, which announced the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following the 2008 American election.

Lambert uses art as a bridge to connect uncommon, idealistic, or even radical ideas with everyday life. He carefully crafts various conditions where these ideas can be discussed with people to produce a meaningful exchange. Often this means working collaboratively with the audience, bringing them into the process or even having them physically complete the work.

He has collaborated with well-known art collectives such as the Yes Men and the Graffiti Research Lab, and other organizations such as Greenpeace. He is also the founder of the Center for Artistic Activism, the Anti-Advertising Agency, Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art) and SelfControl (which blocks grownups from distracting websites so they can get work done).

There will be a complimentary shuttle from downtown Guelph to Kitchener for the Steve Lambert lecture, departing from 193 Woolwich St. (Macquarie House) at 6:00 PM. Seats will reserved on a first-come, first-served basis. Please visit http://stevelambertbus.eventbrite.com or contact Danica Evering at danica@musagetes.ca or 519 836 7300 x 103 to reserve your seat.

Image credit: Steve Lambert, Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, 2011. Courtesy the artist.

About Big Ideas in Art and Culture

The Big ideas in Art and Culture Lecture Series is a joint production of CAFKA and Musagetes. CAFKA is about making art happen in the public spaces of this community, introducing contemporary art to new audiences and engaging the public in new ways of seeing their city. The Musagetes Foundation has been active around the world gathering artists and public intellectuals to consider variations on the theme of social transformations through creative and artistic interventions. These open forums, or cafés, explore and apply new ideas in creative practices, social change and community development. Musagetes Cafés have taken place in London, England, 2007, Barcelona, Spain, 2008, and Rijeka, Croatia, 2010. Future cafés are being planned to take place in Sudbury, Ontario, 2011 and in Lecce, Italy, 2012. CAFKA gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Trillium Foundation, the City of Kitchener, The Kitchener and Waterloo Community Foundation – Musagetes Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council in helping to make this lecture series possible.

…Is This Free? at NURTUREart

Steve — Sun, 06 May 2012 17:34:53 +0000

The New York Times Special Edition will be included in “…Is This Free?”

…Is This Free? is NURTUREart’s 2012 summer exhibition series. Curated by Marco Antonini, the project will consist of three separate exhibitions, featuring artworks, ephemera and publications that have been conceived and produced to be freely distributed.

Historically relevant artworks, ephemera and publications will be presented side by side with contemporary work by emerging artists, including a series of project-specific artworks commissioned by NURTUREart. Community high school classes as well as members of our audience will be involved in the production of open source artwork, instructional pieces and performance workshops, producing artwork that will ultimately become part of the three exhibitions.

…Is This Free? will also include two side projects: Lawn School (curated by Megan Snowe and Rachel Steinberg), a series of free outdoor classes on various topics of practical and theoretical interest, open to any and all to teach and attend, that will take place in city public parks and …Can I Take This? (curated by Megan Snowe), a regularly updated bookshelf of free publications.

The program aims to address a series of equally timely and important questions: Can Art really be Free? At what cost do creative ideas exist (and thrive) as acts of generosity? Who owns a work of art, once it is freely distributed and supposedly liberated from commercial interests? Conceived as a collective effort and produced with the collaboration of a large group of artists, individuals and organizations, …Is This Free? responds to a highly visible trend in the development of artistic practices that use free or alternative forms of exchange as forms of distribution, bypassing the art markets and their rules. The program’s inclusion of artwork, ephemera and publications dating back to the sixties provides a historical frame of reference for the younger artists involved, tracking down the paths of surprising inter-generational trajectories.

The three segments of …Is This Free? will respectively open on:

Friday, July 6
Friday, August 3
Friday, August 31

The …Can I Take This? bookshelf will be permanently installed in the exhibition space and present rotating selections of materials, while the Lawn School will follow the exhibition schedule with weekly meetings (classes TBD) for the whole duration of the summer program.Contact info:

Marco Antonini T.
marco@nurtureart.org
www.nurtureart.org

NURTUREart, Non Profit Inc.
56 Bogart St., Brooklyn, NY 11206

Speaking at Occupy Boston April 28th

Steve — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 02:55:01 +0000

Artists from occupy boston to host night of conversation & action – Featuring artist Steve Lambert

WHERE:
Samsøn (formerly Samson Projects)
450 Harrison Ave, South End Boston

WHEN:
Saturday April 28th, 5pm -

WHAT:
5-6:00 Alternative sign-making workshops
6-7:00 presentation by artist Steve Lambert
7-8:00 Q&A followed by drinks, hangout, and discussion
8-10:00 screening, Yes Men Fix the World

On April 28, 2012, Members of Occupy Boston’s arts working group, CASA, will host a gathering with artist and cultural provocateur Steve Lambert. Taking place at Samsøn, this event will be an opportunity for Lambert and the greater Occupy community to connect over questions of messaging, humor, culture jamming, and creative activism as the movement heads into the coming seasons.

Lambert’s work includes “The New York Times Special Edition” produced with the Yes Men and many other groups in 2008 and distributed in cities across the US carrying headlines such as “Iraq War Ends,” “Maximum Wage Law Passed” and “All Public Universities to Be Free.” More recently, Lambert’s gigantic, sign/scoreboard “Capitalism Works For Me,True/False” is touring the country posing a personal question its viewers can vote on.

The Present Group writes of Lambert’s work, “These bits of provocation get people thinking (and talking) about how they act, what they believe, how they imagine the world around them, and how they imagine it could be.” With the School for Creative Activism, Lambert has taught workshops that infuse creative tactics with traditional community organizing and civic engagement.

Lambert, along with painter Josh Luke, produced signs for many of the tents in the Dewey Square occupation in October 2010. Intending to produce change, he’s given simple advice for how to do more than “raise awareness” while maintaining a positive attitude. Join us on the 28th as we recharge our creative batteries and rehash the radical. Spring is upon us. There is difficult and enjoyable work to be done, absurd futures to dream up, and important questions to ask ourselves in the next stages of the Occupation. We think art and creative action should play a significant role in the shapes, forms, and modes of communication and performance employed in these next steps.

New Political Movements conference at New School for Social Research – 4/21

Steve — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 05:50:52 +0000

Room 913, 6 East 16th Street. 12:15-1:45pm

Roundtable: Activism On The Ground

Melissa Gira Grant
Nicolas Grau
Steve Lambert
Yotam Marom
Moderator: Deva Woodly

Transmediale Audio Recordings – Ludic Salon

Steve — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:52:50 +0000

Transmediale has posted audio recordings of the 2012 panels. This recording is me talking about the Capitalism Sign at the “Zombie Play at the Ludic Salon.”

This panel was a lot of fun. Some of the questions come from great folks like Dmytri Kleiner and Jacob Applebaum.

(By the way I say “extinct” when I meant “endangered”)

You can get all the ludic salon recordings from this page on Soundcloud

This is the link to the Debugging and Rebooting panel, which got a little weird and would be difficult to understand without the video.

Minus Space in Oaxaca

Steve — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:42:14 +0000

MINUS SPACE en Oaxaca 
Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca Alcalá (IAGO)
Macedonio Alcalá No 507, Centro
Oaxaca, México, CP 68000

MINUS SPACE en Oaxaca presents an overview of graphic arts strategies employed by 31 reductive artists working around the globe, including North and South America, Europe, and Australasia. Spanning multiple generations as well as divergent contexts, the artists on view in this exhibition share a core interest in the language of printmaking and editioned works of art.
The exhibition features an extensive array of printmaking methods, including monoprint, silkscreen, etching, woodcut, lithograph, letterpress, chine-collé, digital inkjet, and offset. The exhibition also includes works of art produced in multitude, such as artist books, record albums, postcards, paintings, and porcelain and wax objects. Many of the works on view extend printmaking’s traditional boundaries by hybridizing two or more artistic media, including photography, computer arts, installation, performance, and written language, resulting in entirely new forms with multiple layers of meaning.

Participating Artists:  Josef Albers, Soledad Arias, Hartmut Böhm, Sharon Brant, Vicente Butron, Vincent Como, Mark Dagley, Julian Dashper, Linda Francis, Cris Gianakos, Daniel Göttin, Michelle Grabner, Lynne Harlow, Daniel G. Hill, Juan Raúl Hoyos, Gilbert Hsiao, Kyle Jenkins, Steve Lambert, Vincent Longo, Stephen Maine, Rossana Martínez, Russell Maltz, Manfred Mohr, Victoria Munro, Rose Nolan, Carrie Pollack, Erik Saxon, Robert Swain, Tilman, Jan van der Ploeg, Patricia Zarate

College Students Take Note: New York Arts Practicum Program

Steve — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:23:36 +0000

College students, take note: this summer I will be Visiting Faculty for the inaugural year of the New York Arts Practicum program.

New York Arts Practicum is a summer program in New York City where advanced undergraduates, recent graduates, and graduate students experientially learn artmaking and participate in intellectual culture outside of the art school.

Enacting Populism open until April 22nd

Steve — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:15:01 +0000

Here’s some images of my work from the Enacting Populism show at the Kadist Foundation in Paris. There’s more images on Mousse Magazine.

The show is up until April 22nd.

Capitalism Works For Me! True/False – Boston Tour

Steve — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 17:12:38 +0000

Lincoln, MA, March 27, 2012 – DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum announces the tour dates and locations for Steve Lambert’s Capitalism Works For Me! True/False sign, which will be placed in public spaces via one-day installations throughout the Greater Boston area April 6 through 12. The artist will be on site to install the sign, encourage voting, and engage the public in this timely dialogue.

At 9 feet high and 20 feet wide, Steve Lambert’s Capitalism works for me! True/False? brazenly asks for your participation—your vote—in an ongoing debate that has recently occupied Wall Street, Dewey Square, and public discourse throughout the world. Using the space of art as a space for dialogue, Lambert harnesses humor and brashness to address one of the most common and complicated issues of our time—the economy and growing state of class disparity.

His sign, currently on view in the front entrance to deCordova’s Museum as part of The 2012 deCordova Biennial, will travel throughout the Greater Boston area this April to create and capture dialogue, and even more so, votes. As the global economic crisis worsens and Americans take to the street in protest, Lambert’s project echoes a growing public anxiety.

The sign will be at the following locations on the dates listed below (times approximate):

Friday, April 6, 10:30 am–2:30 pm
Davis Square, Somerville (near JP Licks)
In collaboration with the Somerville Arts Council

Saturday, April 7, 10:30 am–2:30 pm
Price Rite Parking Lot
892 River St., Hyde Park
In collaboration with Finard Properties

Monday, April 9, 10:30 am–2:30 pm
MassArt
Adjacent to Kennedy Building, Huntington Ave, Boston
In collaboration with MassArt

Thursday, April 12, 9:30 am–1:30 pm
Newton North High School, inside the main entrance
457 Walnut St, Newton
In collaboration with Newton North High School and the New Art Center

Thanks to the deCordova Museum.

Building Everything You Want v2

Steve — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 16:27:36 +0000

Yesterday I sent off a piece from the new Everything You Want Right Now edition. This “version 2″ edition is in a different color than the original and includes a LED backlit panel – the first time I’ve done this in a piece. The 2nd version was inspired by a website someone passed on to me. On the site they had pirated the original Everything You Want Right Now image (they used it without attribution, against the terms of my Creative Commons license) and altered it to be blue instead of orange. I liked the color, so I made it real. Their piracy inspired innovation so everything turned out well in the end.

Here’s some images and video of the build process. This is not complete by any means, just some photos I snapped along the way.

The piece will be at the Chicago or Houston art fair this year. Maybe both. I don’t remember. I just make the stuff.

Click here to view the embedded video.