April 15, 2014
The CCA was pleased to welcome back artist Mark Tribe to continue research, planning and development for his collaborative project, “Painting York.” The project will employ collective decision making, contemporary design practices, creative problem solving and civic action to transform storefronts in downtown York.
In his second visit to York, Tribe met with community members in the CCA’s downtown storefront space “Pop Start” to share a meal and discuss ideas for re-imagining downtown storefronts. Residents gave feedback on broad design and organizing parameters, project concepts and the politics of leaving and coming home. The group was eager to see artistic vision and community labor bring visual transformation to the downtown.
Tribe also worked with CCA after school student group Art Club to begin thinking about color in downtown York. To determine the current color palette the artist-led group matched color swatches to buildings on Broad Street, finding twenty four distinct colors on buildings and prominent signage and awnings. A group of ten representative colors were chosen and new matching paint samples procured. While musing on modernist implications of the organizing grid, students painted a large square matrix of the chosen colors, now on display at Pop Start.
Tribe’s project will continue to develop in the coming months and years in collaboration with the CCA and York community.
Mark Tribe is an artist whose work explores the intersection of media technology and politics. His photographs, installations, videos, and performances are exhibited widely, including recent solo projects at Momenta Art in New York, the San Diego Museum of Art, G-MK in Zagreb, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Tribe is the author of two books, The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches (Charta, 2010) and New Media Art (Taschen, 2006), and numerous articles. He teaches courses on radical media, the art of curating, open-source culture, digital art, and techniques of surveillance at Brown University, where he is an Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies. He also teaches in the Art Practice MFA program at School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 1996, Tribe founded Rhizome, an organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. He lives in New York City.
Funding for Tribe’s work at the CCA has been provided by International MAPP Productions and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the VIsual Arts. For more information please contact the CCA at 205.392.2005.