GUH Lecture: “Contested City: Art, Activism, and Urban Renewal”
Contested City: Art, Activism, and Urban Renewal
Monday, April 22, 2019 from 6:30-8:30pm in 170 Wurster Hall
Artist, activist and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani will speak about her five years of work with community members and urban planning students at a 14-square-block area in lower Manhattan that remained vacant for many years after being cleared for redevelopment. She recently published Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York's Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, a chronicle of both the area's fifty years of community activism for affordable housing and the community-engaged pedagogy she created with both students and community members. Bendiner-Viani's work echoes methods of urban conversation used in our Global Urban Humanites project at UC Berkeley, including exhibitions, interviews, and collaborative art creation.
This talk will be of interest to urban planners, artists, community organizers, housing specialists, architects, urban designers, public historians, and beyond. Please RSVP on the GUH website below.
About the Speaker
Dr. Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is an urbanist, curator, and artist pioneering public arts and urban research for community engagement, and is author of Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York's Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (University of Iowa Press, 2019). She is principal of the design and research studio Buscada and teaches urban studies and public art at The New School. She was the 2017 Post-doctoral Fellow in Visual Culture at the International Center of Photography and holds a PhD in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY. She regularly consults with arts and culture organizations on community and art engagements and strategic visioning. Her creative practice has been shown at institutions including MIT, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Center for Architecture, the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, and Tate Britain. Her work on cities, culture and photography has appeared in journals, including Visual Studies, Urban Omnibus, Space and Culture, Society & Space, and Buildings & Landscapes. She lives in New York City.
See the event on the Global Urban Humanities Initiative's website.