The New Museum is out with the full lineup for its Ideas City Festival, which will take place May 1-4. The “collaborative initiative” engages a wide range of arts, educational and community organizations in a dialogue about our urban future. The festival was created in 2011. The biennial event’s theme for 2013 is “Untapped Capital.”
Ideas City kicks off with a speech by Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab. There will be a series of presentations and workshops featuring mayors from across the country and other thought leaders. On Saturday, 125 “artists, architects, poets, technologists, historians, community activists, entrepreneurs, and ecologists” will take part in a StreetFest along the Bowery and surrounding streets.
The museum has invited three architectural schools (Columbia, Cooper Union and Princeton) to lead a course, “dedicated to advancing the conversation about a host of issues facing the Bowery neighborhood, including what to preserve, what to add, density, gentrification, economic opportunities, and how to maintain the authentic vitality of this NYC locale.” On Saturday evening, May 4, there will be a dozen projections of the facade of the New Museum, features the work of artists such as Agathe de Bailliencourt, Cecil Balmond, Nicolas Guagnini, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.
In conjunction with Ideas City, the museum is launching “After Hours 2” on April 25, “site-specific murals for the steel roller shutters of commercial supply shops that line the Bowery between East Houston and Grand Streets.” There will be an accompanying map and cell phone audio guide. Among the locations and artists taking part: 180 Bowery, Mel Bochner; 212 Bowery, Adam Pendleton; 213 Bowery, Michael Craig-Martin; 214 Bowery, Kerry James Marshall; 240 Bowery, Dana Schutz.
This year The Lo-Down will be working with a group of roving teen reporters from the New Museum’s G:Class Program to document the sights, sounds and ideas at StreetFest. We’ll have more about that in the weeks ahead.
For more information about Ideas City, head on over to the event web site.
