Say Hi to "Big Rusty" - Trollmap #116

 Artocracy happened to be out and about in New Jersey today, and stumbled upon "Big Rusty" - one of Thomas Dambo's amazing installations.

What a find.  Pictures are worth more than words in this case. Check out the Trollmap and find a troll near you!

With Art as my Weapon

 

Artocracy finally had a chance to visit Naoshima Island in Japan, which I've wanted to do for a long time. Words cannot really capture the experience. And, in retrospect, two nights and a day on the island was only enough to scratch the surface.  Highlights for me were works by Yayoi Kusama and James Turrell and architecture by Tadao Ando, but there is much more to the experience than that. I could have stayed a year or more at Naoshima Juju Art House - it was hard to leave. Dinner at New Olympia, and lunch at Luke's Pizza, were delicious.

Perhaps my best purchase during the entire two-week Japan trip (Naoshima, Shikoku, Hokkaido, and 2 nights in Tokyo) was the purchase of Soichiro Fukutake's With Art as My Weapon at the Chichu Art Museum. It is a thoughtful meditation on how a new vision for Public Interest Capitalism can revitalize rural communities through the arts. As the Artocracy community knows, this concept speaks to the core of our own ideas about the role art can play in healing and nurturing our broken world.