In a campaign year, the media’s focus is mainly on Politics with a capital P and all it entails during the horse race of an election. This series is interested in another kind of politics—the lowercase p concerns about power, inequality, and participation—and ways that artists’ personal values interface with it. At the heart of this project is the firm belief that artists' voices are vital in the conversation about creating a better society.
Examining US energy production and use for five years, photographer Mitch Epstein became fascinated by a pun: "electrical power came from political power, which came from corporate power--and civic power met up against all that." Here Epstein talks with Paul Shambroom, whose own photos examine issues from nuclear weapons to oil, about aesthetics, activism, and the work of connecting the dots of American power.
Gardening Between Hope and Doom: Fritz Haeg on Edible Estates
Confronting a symbol of the American Dream, Fritz Haeg will visit Minnesota in May to plant a garden in an unlikely place. Situated between “simultaneous, equally valid points of doom and hope,” his Edible Estates will turn a suburban front lawn into a vegetable garden. His aim: to explore the “fantastic notion of what the city I want to live in looks like.”
JoAnn Verburg on Newspapers as Portals to the Political
"The personal and the political are intertwined and inseparable." JoAnn Verburg discusses her use of newspapers—usually printed at life-size and read by her husband—in photographs that are both intimate and incisive, including Terrorized (2006) and WTC (2003), the latter of which is featured in the exhibition Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection.
