Blogging at “The Perfect Moment”

Krista and I are writing about on our upcoming experiment over at Imagineourparks.org. In our first post, we write about how “The Perfect Moment”  started as a tongue-in-cheek response to the US’s NEA/NPS call for applications, Imagine Your Parks.

As artists interested in ideas of contested territories in more than human worlds, we had initially planned to apply for the NEA/NPS project support. As we write about in the blog, we quickly realized that we were ineligible. It was actually an exciting moment, rather than frustrating, it raised some primary questions that I find myself asking in my research, artworks and in teaching:  Who gets access to public funding for the arts? What are ‘public lands’ in North America? Who can access them, for what activities? Who or what counts and who or what becomes excluded?

We’ll be thinking through these questions during the coming weeks as we ramp up our to our moving campsite installation in early June. The NEA/NPS call for projects provides an important connection between seemingly disparate events: the change in funding individual artists — acknowledged as having made worse “the climate in which artists in the United States make art and seek to have it funded”; and the criminalization of citizen science in Wyoming.

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