Blog
Category: Threatened Environments
Margaret’s Grocery listed as one of Mississippi’s Historic Trust’s 10 Most Endangered Properties!
Margaret’s Grocery listed as one of Mississippi’s Historic Trust’s 10 Most Endangered Properties!
Sign petition to help save Roberto Pérez’s Spanish art environment!
Roberto Pérez has spent more than a quarter century creating a variety of artwork in different media, but his masterpiece is an architectural sculpture in the Spanish province of Granada. This work has been created with stone and recycled materials of all kinds, and he has become known by many as the “Andalucian Gaudí.”
Support the Conservation of Chomo’s Village of Preludian Art!
SPACES Board member Laurent Danchin has launched a campaign to restore components of the Village d’Art Préludien created by Chomo (Roger Chomeaux, 1907-1999) in a small parcel located within the Fontainbleau forest in France. Although Chomo studied and successfully created and exhibited his work within the art mainstream as a young man, in 1960 he moved to this site, became a hermit, and spent the rest of his life creating an impressive environment of idiosyncratic buildings as well as numerous sculptures; most of the work was fabricated from recycled materials of all types. He named the site to reflect his feeling that his art served as a prelude to a new world that we would be soon to enter.
Help Fund the Ed Galloway Totem Pole Restoration Project!
Galloway Totem Pole in 1981, Photo by Seymour Rosen
The loss of a site (contributed by Debra Brehmer)
The question looms large: Why preserve an art environment on its original site if there is money to move it to a location that might be more suited to “public access” and less contested by the neighborhood?
Casa de las Conchas
The Casa de las Conchas, in Montoro, some 20 miles west of Córdoba in Spain's Andalucía province, is for sale. This spectacular art environment, created by Francisco del Rio Cuenca (1926-2010), is ornamented with over 116 million shells from all over the world. (See SPACES's page on the site at http://www.spacesarchives.org/explore/collection/environment/casa-de-las-conchas-house-of-shells/).
Update on Josep Pujiula’s art environment, Argelaguer, Spain
In Spain, working on finishing up the edits to the galleys on my book on Spanish art environments, I’ve also been very involved with advocating for Josep Pujiula i Vila’s art environment – what is left of it, that is. For those of you who signed the petition I started on Avaaz last spring, we are most appreciative, and your support is putting pressure on the local politicos to find a solution to save the site. They know that the world is watching!
Josep Pujiula's art environment threatened
As many of you know, for 45 years Josep Pujiula i Vila has been building one of the most spectacular examples of public art in the world. Completely self-taught, he began building for his own enjoyment, yet has come to delight in sharing his work with others. At the height of its existence, his constructions—which were primarily created out of the flexible saplings that he gathered from the nearby river—included eight towers, some approaching 100 feet (30 meters) high, along with a labyrinth that snaked over the landscape over a mile (1.6 km) in length. It was a joyous work of art that was an inspiration to its thousands of international visitors each year, and it has been featured in newspapers, magazines, books, and television programs internationally.
