Flint Public Art Project

Location: Flint, MI

Website: www.flintpublicartproject.com

We organize workshops and temporary installations to inspire residents to reimagine the city, reclaim vacant and underutilized buildings and lots, and use innovative tools to steer Flint's long-range planning.

We support collaboration among local residents and organizations as well as with leading artists, architects, planners and community organizers from around the world, connecting Flint to regional, national and global movements to revitalize neighborhoods and cities through art and design.

We will document and amplify the many ways local residents, businesses and institutions are transforming Flint and its public image and identity, and will broadcast this new story to audiences throughout the city and the world.

Executive Director Stephen Zacks is an internationally recognized architecture and urbanism reporter, theorist and cultural producer based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and a native of Flint, Michigan. Co-founder of the Bring to Light–Nuit Blanche New York festival, he is currently writing Beautiful Ruin: The Generation that Transformed New York, 1967-1986,a nonfiction narrative about New York during the mid-70s fiscal crisis

Director of Programs Jerome Chou is an urban planner and landscape architect. Previously he was Director of Programs for the Design Trust for Public Space, where he led projects to retain garment factories in Midtown Manhattan and to expand urban agriculture throughout New York City. He also has worked for the Baltimore City Planning Department, as a community organizer for ACORN, and for the nonprofit book publisher The New Press.

Architect-in-residence Andrew Perkins recently completed a collaborative Master's thesis project at the University at Buffalo, which transformed an abandoned house into his year-long off-the-grid home, using only waste materials. Focusing on areas of blight, depopulation, and economic tension, he uses waste materials as the common denominator to transcend social and financial gaps. His work with Flint Public Art Project involves transforming the long-vacant Spencer's Mortuary into a cooperative art space and model for material reuse.

James Andrews is an artist, educator, organizer, curator, and arts producer based in New York City. His work involves exploring new forms of social organization and experimental groups. Prior to studying systems approaches to art and collaboration with Paul Ryan at The New School, Andrews was artist in residence at the Banlozi Camp for Refugees in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 2003 he co-produced Art, Circuitry, and Ecology, a conference at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Berkeley Hall of Science, honoring the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Andrews has exhibited, taught, performed, and organized extensively, including shows and events at Postmasters Gallery, Sculpture Center, the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina, ABC No Rio, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Deitch Projects, and the Queens Museum. Andrews is a founding member of Nsumi Collective. Nsumi creates collaborative artwork that combines fine art, architecture, community engagement and experimental design. They produce and participate in exhibitions and events, conduct research on public art, pedagogy and emerging collaborative practices. Andrews has organized numerous public workshops and lectures on topics such as formal decentralization, swarm intelligence and emerging forms of civic protest with the Museum of Arts and Design, Storefront for Art and Architecture, School of the Future, and Creative Time as a part of the Living as Form show, with Trade School NYC.

His collaborative work has been covered by NHK TV (Japan), The New Yorker, Metro NY, Total Theater Magazine, Archinect, the New York Times, Art News, Waging Non-Violence, and The Economist.