In this continuing series, Utne Reader Art Director Stephanie Glaros explains the process behind an Utne Reader illustration. 

When I thought about which artist I’d ask to illustrate the article “Diplomacy in a Lab Coat,” I immediately thought of James Yang. The story is about scientists acting as diplomats, and Yang is adept at tackling scientific subject matter without feeling cold or clinical. He sent me some great sketches (below), and I chose the one on the top right with one request: add more flags so that it doesn’t look like the story is only about the United States and North Korea. He did, and I was very happy with the results.

Since its inception in 1984, Utne Reader has relied on talented artists to create original images for stories that express powerful emotions, brilliant new ideas, and humorous storytelling. Browsing through back issues of Utne Reader is like a tour of “Who’s Who” in the illustration world. Artists like Gary Baseman, Brad Holland, Anita Kunz, Bill Plympton, and Seymour Chwast have graced our pages over the years, to name just a few. 

The power of art, John Berger suggested, is that it often shows that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. The smart minds behind 350.org must have taken Berger's suggestion to heart. The organization’s first global climate art project, “350 Earth,” was a series of art installations that recently and simultaneously mounted in seventeen cities around the world between November 20 and 28 this year. By presenting a global mix of celebrations and large-scale public art works that show how climate change impacts all of us, “350 Earth” reveals just how interconnected the world is.

Timed to take place during the lead-up to the United Nations climate meetings in Cancun, Mexico, the overall goal of “350 Earth” is to show national leaders and politicians the massive public concern that exists over the climate crisis. Participant projects were located in cities in six of the seven continents (only Antarctica was excluded), and involved varying numbers of people at each site, as well as artists and designers as diverse as: Molly Dilworth, Jorge Rodriguez Gerada, Thom Yorke, Liu Bolin, Jason deCaires Taylor, Sarah Rifaat, Daniel Dancer, and Bjargey Ólafsdóttir. Calls were often made public in advance of the commencement of a project, often on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and human bodies were often the main medium for each work. Each art installation was designed to be large enough to be seen from space, and “350 Earth” organizers arranged with the satellite imagery provider company DigitalGlobe to document the projects.

Among the more evocative projects was one of the first, which took place on November 20 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and drew upwards of a thousand area residents under the auspices of the Santa Fe Art Institute. The gathered participants dressed in blue clothing and held blue placards, and they acted out a human “flash flood” in the dry Santa Fe River bed while chanting, “It's hot in here, there's too much carbon in the atmosphere!” In another noteworthy project, mounted in New York City also on November 20, a large “roof mural” depicting a flooded New York and New Jersey coastline was placed atop a city rooftop. The painting was produced in conjunction with NYC°Coolroofs, a New York City initiative encourages building owners to cool their rooftops by applying a reflective white coating that reduces energy use, cooling costs, and carbon emissions.

In many of the artworks, the number 350 made an appearance. In Mexico City, on November 22, thousands of children gathered to form the shape of a huge hurricane, with “350” depicted in the eye of the storm. In the Australia outback, on November 26, volunteers carried torches and lights to form a giant “350” at night as a warning about the risk of a spread of wildfires if global warming is not halted. 350 is a significant number for the artists, the organizers, and indeed for the Earth itself. 350.org, which was founded by U.S. author Bill McKibben to inspire the world to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis, takes its name from what the organization claims to be the “most important number in the world.” 350 parts per million is what climatologists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Not all projects were as immediately successful or resonant as the ones mentioned above. In Los Angeles, on November 21, thousands of people gathered at Los Angeles National Park to form a giant image of an eagle taking flight, and solar-voltaic panels made up the outlines of the bird’s wing feathers. The rendering and execution of the eagle were somewhat rudimentary and unappealing, and the project was less clear—and likely less effective—than it could have been. But overall organizers seemed pleased with the results. McKibben acknowledged that when it comes to inspiring people to change, he was confident the images photographed from space would resonate with those who see them. But McKibben also added that, based on the lack of progress made thus far toward a global deal to reduce harmful emissions he was not optimistic about how much influence the art might have on the Cancun talks. “I think it is going to be a longer process than everyone has hoped.”

Images courtesy of 350 Earth.

In 1889, Lewis Carroll wrote that authors of the future would no longer ask themselves “What book shall I write?” but, “Which book shall I write?” Fifty years later, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges published his classic story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a fictional review of one man’s attempt to literally re-write—line-by-line and in Cervantes’ 17^th century Spanish—Don Quixote. 

Appropriation and outright theft have, of course, always played a role in the creation of all manner of art, but the lines between original work and imitation, or truth and fabrication, have never been more fluid.

Nathan Ihara, writing over at MobyLives, suggests that 2010 represented “a tipping point when it comes to our concept of originality, art, and theft.” Ihara’s piece borrows its title—“To live outside the law you must be honest”—from Bob Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” a line that, as Jonathan Lethem has pointed out, Dylan clipped from The Lineup, a 1958 film noir. The same Dylan whose 2001 album “Love and Theft” took its own title from Eric Lott’s 1993 book, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.

You could certainly argue that the mash-up is—along with zombies and vampires—sort of a perfect zeitgeist metaphor for our cultural present, and Ihara both makes that case nicely (with assists to Lethem, and David Shields’ recent appropriation manifesto, Reality Hunger)and raises the compelling question of where or when we should draw the line between sampling and stealing.

Source: MobyLives 

As someone who hasn’t played a video game since Ronald Reagan was in the White House, I obviously wasn’t the ideal reader for Tom Bissell’s “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.” I was curious, though, and willing to give Bissell at least 100 pages to make his case.  Fifty pages in I decided 100 pages was 50 too many. That’s not fair, I know, but I have all sorts of other things just sitting around waiting to boggle my brain. According to Booklist, however, Bissell’s book ultimately demonstrates that playing a video game “is a form a self-surrender, but a different form than, say, a movie. We have no influence over what happens in a movie, but we do in a video game. In playing a video game, we are, in a sense, the authors of the stories we’re acting out.”

I took from this a surely misguided notion that video games are in some way similar to real life, in the living of which we are, in a sense, the authors of the stories we’re acting out. From the little of Extra Lives that I did read I should add that the sorts of video games Bissell describes are perhaps more similar to the lives of other people (people, generally speaking, with weapons and a compelling reason to use them) than to my own, but I recognize that I live in something of a bubble and my own “story” doesn’t offer a whole lot of opportunity to “act out” and represents, in and of itself, its own unique (if terribly boring) “form of self-surrender” (read: resignation).

Because I’m both cynical and skeptical, I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that there are people –writers, journalists, novelists—who are wildly enthusiastic about penning the scripts for video games. Why wouldn’t they be? It’s a $40 billion-a-year industry, and, though it hadn’t exactly occurred to me before reading Dan Duray’s piece in The New York Observer, somebody has to create some sort of backstory for these games, even if only to provide a framework within which gamers can author the stories they act out.

“As Faulkner and Fitzgerald made their attempts in Hollywood,” Duray writes, “more and more journalists and fiction writers are making the shift to writing video games.” He quotes a man named Todd “P” Patrick, a concert promoter who runs something called a “pop-up video games gallery” in New York: “You want to write a novel? Who's going to read it? A bunch of people in grad school? Fuck that. Everybody plays video games.”

Many of the video game writing gigs used to go to characters with Hollywood screenwriting credentials, Duray says, but these days, with companies cutting corners, the work is increasingly going to journalists and fiction writers. People like Tom Bissell, who was recently named to Game Developer magazine's power list and is currently shopping around a “comedy shooter.” For that project, Duray reports, Bissell hopes to get the novelist Junot Diaz to provide the voice of the main character.

Source: The New York Observer 

Image by Nikkibearrrrr, licensed under Creative Commons. 

That giant bearded man blowing on a dandelion or that Mystery Science Theater 3000 stencil at the bottom of a wall is trying to tell you something about your city. Street art and those artists who make it, that is, might be trying to show you something about the place you live, not just their art.

Exploring the work of one Baltimore street artist, who goes by the name Gaia, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes in the October issue of Urbanite that through his work “one can almost hear the city speak.” So, what exactly is the city saying? For Gaia, who is also a gallery artist, his images of desperate looking animals with human arms and hands are “expressive of the contention between the wild and civilization.” That contention has led us to a point where, according to the artist, “we know that we are going on the wrong path, and there are messengers telling us that our lives aren’t sustainable, but no one is listening.” Dickinson would probably categorize Gaia, and other street artists like him, among those messengers. The way she sees it, simply making people notice the abandoned and destitute buildings is bringing a message to them:

It's easy to overlook the abandoned building near the corner of Park Avenue and Franklin Street on the edge of Mount Vernon. Traverse this city enough, and the sagging facades, the sunken roofs, the boarded windows become so commonplace that they are invisible. But here, on a weathered brick wall, a drawing of a man looms over the alley demanding attention. White, elderly, plump with success, he is rendered in black and white and looks toward Franklin with a dispassionate eye. His presence somehow amplifies the condition of the structure: With the roof gone and the windows blown out, sunlight pierces a seemingly moth-eaten shell. Trees grow where they shouldn't. Exposed wood roof trusses give the feeling of a beached ship, as though the building has been marooned and left to rot.

Suddenly, you see the building. Really see it.

Source: Urbanite 

Image at top courtesy of Dustin Luke Nelson. 

The October/November issue of American Craft has a nice profile of Patterson Clark, an artist for the Washington Post by day and…a totally different kind of artist by night.  

A few years ago, [Clark] became concerned about invasive plants like English ivy, white mulberry and multiflora rose choking out species like American beech and tulip poplars that are native to his area around Rock Creek Park...and he got a license from the National Park Service to remove the invasive plants near his home. But ripping out the plants and throwing them away felt destructive and wasteful. And with an undergraduate degree in biology (later followed up by an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts), he knew that these plants had useful properties. He started bringing the plants he liked into his basement studio, and over the last several years, he's been perfecting the process for turning invaders into paper, ink, and, ultimately, art.

Check out the American Craft profile for more on Clark’s process and check out the beautiful images below of the art he creates from the stuff many people would just kill off with a little bit of Roundup.

 11-Weed Blend 

One-Weed Note 

14-Stalk Note  

Flaming Ivy Vine Soot Ink  

“Bamboo culms are a reliable source for drawing pens.” 

Source: American Craft 

All images courtesy of Patterson Clark and American Craft. 

Certain intransigently conservative institutions, such as the U.S. military or professional sports leagues, may not be the barometer of up-to-date national attitudes toward difference and diversity, but they can be important bellwethers of things to come. For example, Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9981 moved, in 1948, to end discrimination in the military by banning the segregation of Army units along color lines. While the order was unpopular in the military, Truman’s move was one of the earliest tangible steps toward the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Another institutional bellwether—one that may have influenced Truman’s decision on military segregation—was the sport of baseball, which had just broken its own color line in 1947.  

The slow evolution of prejudices and bigotry in institutions such as the military and baseball are very telling. During the late 70s and early 80s, long after the bulk of Civil Rights Acts had become law, American views of gays remained particularly harsh. The arrival of HIV stirred up all kinds of national phobias, and the 1978 murder of Harvey Milk and an attack against skater Dick Button in Central Park were only two among a spate of homophobic hate crimes. That homosexuals were discriminated against in the workplace is evident in the Department of Defense’s Directive 1332.14, which, in 1981, made the discharge of gay and lesbian soldiers mandatory. Meanwhile, in baseball during that era—as is evident in “Out: The Glenn Burke Story,” a new documentary produced by Doug Harris and Sean Maddison—being gay was widely recognized to be, as one of the era's top stars put it, “a kiss of death for a ballplayer.”

The soul’s journey of Glenn Burke began in 1952 in Oakland, California. As the film describes, Burke’s was an outsized athletic talent. At Berkeley High School, he excelled at baseball and basketball. After high school, at the age of 20, he was drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 17th round of the 1972 amateur draft. According to Dodger scouts interviewed for the film, his relatively low draft position was not due to any qualms about his talent, which got their highest ratings for speed, arm strength, and raw power. Rather, the team worried that Burke was ultimately more interested in playing basketball. Burke, however, saw baseball as his most likely means to success, and he signed with the team in time for the 1973 season.

Burke immediately began moving up through the Dodgers’ farm system, showing he was a legitimate candidate for the major leagues. At the same time, the team also developed concerns about Burke’s behavior. In the minors, Burke was an inconsistent teammate, sometimes a clubhouse cutup, and other times sullen and moody. He often fought with the managers, and he kept personal habits that were different from other players—living at the YMCA, for example, rather than in a house with some of his teammates. Dodger upper management, which touted the team’s traditions and conservative values, worried increasingly about how to “reach” the off-beat young player. The Dodgers’ general manager at the time, Al Campanis, took two unusual, and telling, steps: First, he assigned one of the team’s top stars, Reggie Smith, to room with Burke during spring training; then, he offered Burke $75,000 if he would settle down and get married. Burke’s growing self-awareness and sense of humor were evident in the young player’s reported response: “I guess you mean to a woman?”

In 1976, the Dodgers’ outfield was depleted by injury, and the team brought Burke up from the minors. While he was mediocre at the plate that season, in the field he was spectacular—running down certain base hits from his spot in centerfield, representing a constant threat to steal or score runs on the base paths. Even more important, many Dodger veterans saw the spirited and witty young player as the glue that helped hold together a mismatched bunch of strong-willed veteran players. “He was the guy who kept the chemistry going in the clubhouse,” said the Dodgers’ All-Star second baseman and team captain, Davey Lopes. Burke grew close to players like Lopes, Dusty Baker, even the team’s clean-cut star Steve Garvey, and by 1977, he had performed well enough to start in centerfield and bat lead-off for the Dodgers in the opening World Series game against the New York Yankees. Still, despite Burke’s progress, management remained split on the young player, and, early in the 1978 season under questionable circumstances, the Dodgers suddenly traded Burke to the Oakland A’s for an aging veteran named Billy North.

The Dodgers’ move would ripple through the team and beyond. According to a Dodgers’ beat-writer at the time, players were “visibly distraught over the trade.” Dusty Baker speculated that the Dodger management knew about the young player’s hidden life as a homosexual. Davey Lopes was particularly upset about the trade. “You don't break up, disrupt a team going as well as it was going, to make change,” Lopes told the filmmakers. “I didn't feel it was going to make us a better ballclub…. It was probably not the real reason why things happened.” A life-long friend of Burke’s spelled out the full ramifications of the Dodgers’ decision on the young ballplayer: “He was hurt because they traded him not for his baseball ability but for his life choice.”

Much worse than the trade’s effect on the Dodgers’ team chemistry, the move set off a dramatic chain-reaction that eventually caused Burke, depressed and tired of increasing harassment from fellow players and the A’s manager at the time, Billy Martin, to give up the sport for good about a year later—in the middle of the 1979 season. It was a decision that, although made for his own well-being, Burke increasingly regretted as he grew older. In 1982, perhaps still smarting over the end of his baseball career, Burke allowed his lover at the time, J. Michael Smith, to write an article for Inside Sport exposing his homosexuality. The article, called “The Double Life of a Gay Dodger,” was unprecedented, and Burke became a national symbol of how far the sport of baseball had to go to overcome its intolerance.

In the aftermath of his disappointing career, and the national revelations for at least part of the reason for his disappointment, Glenn Burke’s life took a downward course. He was unable to hold down a steady job, and he hopped between relationships and living arrangements. After a car accident destroyed the last of Burke’s athletic abilities, his life declined into drug addition, homelessness, and HIV. Burke died a relatively young man, at age 42, of complications related to AIDS in 1992.

In “Out: The Glenn Burke Story,” the filmmakers tell a bleak story of one man’s failed struggle to achieve his potential in the face of prejudice and unfair treatment. But the filmmakers also tell a story that is relevant today, more than thirty years later. Such workplace prejudices against openly gay workers still exist—just look at the military’s “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy, which is so out-dated that a September ruling by a federal judge in Riverside, California, recently overturned it. But as for baseball, the most conservative and traditional-minded of all American sports, well, there may still be a ways to travel yet. As the film’s end credits point out, of the 6,552 men who have played in the Major Leagues since Burke’s last game in 1979 no one single player has dared come out as gay during his career.

Michael Fallon is a writer and arts administrator based out of St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Art in America, American Craft, Public Art Review, Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine, the OC Weekly, City Pages, and many other publications.  Read his previous posts for utne.com, Take Me Out to the Art Gallery, Cuban Artists Grapple with Local Racism on a World Stage, and Artist Faces Darkness at Heart of Amazon Rainforest. 

Michael Fallon is a guest blogger at utne.com. The views expressed by this guest blogger belong to him and do not necessarily reflect the mission or editorial voice of utne.com or the Utne Reader. 

Baseball has long been considered a sport for American scribes and poets, and the list of luminaries who have written on baseball reads like an American literary Who’s Who: Ring Lardner, Damon Runyan, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Don Barthelme, Donald Hall, Charles Bukowski, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Yusef Komunyakaa, and so on. Less well known, however, is the love affair between visual artists and baseball. American illustrator Norman Rockwell is probably the most famous baseball-loving American artist; his take on baseball was like his own work, wrought with homespun pathos and irony. But beyond Rockwell, the artistic view of baseball has always been anthropological. That is, beginning around the time of baseball’s very origins, artists have recorded a telling impression of what’s happening on the diamond and beyond.

Through artists, we can follow the development of the sport, as well as that of American society. Consider for instance a Currier & Ives print from 1866. Called “The American National Game of Base Ball: Grand Match for the Championship at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, N.J.” (pictured above), the work predates the arrival of the first professional baseball team (the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1869) and the first professional league (the National Association  in 1871). The Elysian Fields are believed to be the site of the first baseball game ever played, in 1846, in a game featuring a team organized by Alexander Cartright, who first wrote down the rules of the sport. If we compare the Currier & Ives image to another early baseball image from 1875, “Baseball Players Practicing” by Thomas Eakins, we can see how rapidly the game was changing, and how quickly society was adapting to the changes. Eakins was the most prominent artist of his era, and his view of the sport is quite unlike the Currier & Ives image from just nine years earlier. The former image shows a sport that is casual and rural and not much different from a picnic in the park, while Eakin’s baseball has become more codified with uniforms, grandstands, and eager spectators. The players are heroic and iconic, and Eakins revels in showing their larger-than-life quality.

Moving into the 20^th century, artists continued their fascination with baseball even through a succession of art movements and constantly evolving artistic concerns. James Daugherty’s modernist painting “Three Base Hit,” from 1919, showed the approach of the short-lived synchromism movement, which was based on the idea that color and sound are similar phenomena, and that the colors in a painting can be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a composer arranges notes in a symphony. In George Luks’ “Boy with Baseball” from 1925, we can see the urban realism of the Ashcan School. And in a cubist-inspired painting from 1949 by Jacob Lawrence called “Strike,” we can see the artist’s awareness that the country has grown into its more dynamic, mechanized, fast-moving, and multi-cultural post-War self.

Mid-century Abstract-expressionism was not immune to the charms of baseball, particularly in the figure of Elaine de Kooning, who made a number of baseball images – including “Baseball Players” (1953). Even an artist as unlikely as Andy Warhol got in on the act. One of his earliest screen prints from 1962, called “Baseball,” depicted a repeating image of Roger Maris in the midst of a homerun swing. Warhol also later did portraits of such baseball stars as Pete Rose and Tom Seaver. The Pete Rose image was commissioned by the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1985, after Rose broke baseball’s career hits record. The list goes on and includes artists such as Ben Shahn, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and others up until around the 1970s, when there’s a sudden dearth of artistic images of baseball — with the rare, rule-proving exception of John Baldessari’s “Baseball (with beer)” from 2008, which appropriated a film-still image from Bad News Bears.  

It’s unclear why the art-baseball connection is less well-known today than the literary one. What is clear is that sometime around the 1980s, baseball and art were no longer on such friendly terms. It may have been the fault of the era’s Culture Wars, when, for a good fifteen or twenty years, art and artists were a political commodity that liberals and conservatives batted around as though with a fungo bat. Also in the 1980s, baseball stepped up its efforts to control use of its trademarked images. A special wing of the league, Major League Baseball Properties Inc., regularly sued game-makers, toymakers, trading card companies, restaurants, clothing and apparel manufacturers, and anyone caught using images of current and former baseball teams and players without “express written permission.” Because of these social factors, along with the era’s transition from analog photography to digital (and the accompanying loss of archival photos), the twenty years at the end of the last century were dark ones for baseball—at least in terms of artistic representations of the sport.

Fortunately, the antagonism would not last. In 1999, Seattle art critic Regina Hackett bemoaned the fact that major-league stadiums were mostly “art-free zones,” even as she praised a breakthrough at Seattle’s new stadium, Safeco Field, where, because of local ordinances, the Mariners dedicated 1/2 of a percent of the ballpark’s construction costs—or $1.2 million—to art. Hackett praised the art at Safeco Field—comprised of 43 paintings, print, and photographs by regional artists and about a dozen major works of public art—and she called the site “the most art intensive ballpark in the country,” adding this “isn't saying much.” Since 1999 though, artists have had a growing presence at many of the new modern ballparks (14 of which were built between 1999 and 2010.) AT&T Park in San Francisco, for example, gives an “Art in the Park” tour for people wanting to see its WPA-style murals, its Willie Mays statue, and a group exhibition of lithographs by various artists. CitiField in New York and the new Yankee Stadium are also widely noted for their art collections.   

The arguable culmination of this trend can be seen at baseball’s newest ballpark, Target Field, which was voted this year the top sports stadium in the country both by Baseball Digest and ESPN. Ironically, much of the art at Target Field is not widely publicized—as most of it is on private concourses, outside private skyboxes, or in semi-private ballpark clubs. Although no official numbers have been posted by the Twins, in sum the Target Field collection of art includes somewhere around 400-500 works of art created by some 25-30 artists, as well as hundreds more photographs, photo murals, public art works, and other decorative visual elements. In the end, one can only hope, with the increasing presence of art at the ballparks, that we will at last recognize the natural affinity between artists and the sport they love.

Wind Veil Sculpture at Target Field in downtown Minneapolis 

Michael Fallon is a writer and arts administrator based out of St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Art in America, American Craft, Public Art Review, Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine, the OC Weekly, City Pages, and many other publications.  Read his previous posts, Cuban Artists Grapple with Local Racism on a World Stage and Artist Faces Darkness at Heart of Amazon Rainforest . 

Michael Fallon is a guest blogger at utne.com. The views expressed by this guest blogger belong to him and do not necessarily reflect the mission or editorial voice of utne.com or the Utne Reader.  

Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress