Creative Cities

For the 2018-2019 academic year, the Stanford Arts Institute will continue work on a new project called Creative Cities. Seeking to advance and understand the historical and future roles of art in cities, our project fosters research, conversation, and artistic projects in urban settings. Using the city as the stage for inquiry, the project will pose questions about the role of art in reimagining the urban sphere, creative economies, urban studies, the built environment, and more.

There are two main programmatic elements to this project: our year-long fellowship, and the Creative Cities Working Group.

Our year-long fellowship invites two scholars to Stanford to conduct research in this area, teach one class each, and further the campus conversation about creative cities. This year’s fellows are Nicholas Gamso and Magie Ramírez. Each will have a public talk and event about their research – further details will be posted on this page as they develop.

The Creative Cities Working Group engages a broad array of Bay Area writers, thinkers, artists and curators who are engaging critical thought at the nexus of art and urban life.

Creative Cities Fellowship

Stanford Arts Institute hosts the Creative Cities Fellowship which brings together individuals with a strong record of scholarly research and/or creative work on the intersection of art and urban centers. Reaching across disciplines (such as economics, public policy, urban renewal) as well as artistic media, Fellows will examine the role of art in cities, conduct research, and teach an undergraduate course during their year on campus.

The Creative Cities Fellowship is supported by the Office of the President.

Current Fellows:

Nicholas Gamso
2018-2019

Stanford Arts Institute will host Nick Gamso during 2018-19 as a Creative Cities Fellow.

Biography

Nicholas Gamso is an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher. He studies urban aesthetics, most often in counterpoint with the cultural politics of race, sexuality, and gender. In his work, Nick asks how artists and writers address gentrification and other contemporary urban phenomena, such as migrancy and carcerality. He has written on interventions by Kara Walker, Teju Cole, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, examining their uses of urban space and uncovering the themes of difficulty, ambivalence, exposure, and alienation. While at Stanford, Nick will devote his attention to finishing his book, which explores these topics in the context of New York City after 1975. Nick holds a Ph.D. from the City University of New York, where he taught from 2009-2016. In 2017, he joined the department of Social Sciences & Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He has received support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Nick's writings appear in Social Text, Third Text, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and the architecture journal Log.

Courses

ARTSINST 181: Art, Gentrification, & Intersectional Racial Politics

Winter 2019 | 4-5 Units
Tuesday / Thursday 10:30 AM - 11:50 AM

This course addresses the role of artists and art bureaucracies in the gentrification of minority neighborhoods, examining contested sites in New York, Oakland, East LA, and New Orleans. Students consider histories of underdevelopment and displacement, asking what these processes may reveal about greater contests over space, aesthetics, power, and knowledge. The course serves as an opportunity to engage urban cultural politics from the perspectives of critical race theory, queer studies, and feminist critique as well as through encounters with works by William Pope.L, Laura Aguilar, Paul Chan, and others.

Magie Ramírez
2018-2019

Stanford Arts Institute will host Magie Ramírez during 2018-19 as a Creative Cities Fellow.

Biography

Margaret Marietta Ramírez is a Xicana feminist urban geographer, whose work explores the interstices of racial capitalism, art-activism and urban space. Her current project documents the ways that artists of color disrupt discourses of gentrification, redevelopment, and state violence in Oakland, California through their art and activism, producing counter-topographies of the city they call home. Next she will explore the role of artists of color in the climate justice movement, and how their art is being used to envision equitable and sustainable urban futures for all peoples and species on the planet. Magie holds a PhD and MA in Geography from the University of Washington, a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from UC Berkeley, and was a 2015 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow. Her forthcoming article, 'City as Borderland', is in press in Society & Space, which uses Gloria Anzaldúa's theorizations of the borderlands as an analytic to understand gentrifying cities. She is also co-authoring an entry on ‘decolonial geographies’ for Antipode's 50th anniversary collection, Keywords in Radical Geographic Thought, and co-editing the 'Indigenous Histories of Resistance' chapter of Anti-Eviction Mapping Project's edited volume Counterpoints: A Bay Area Atlas of Displacement. Otherwise she is engaged in anti-colonial and anti-displacement work in Oakland, and spends her days mothering two small humans.

Courses

ARTSINST 183: Creative Climate Futures: Art, Climate Change & Urban Life

Spring 2019 | 4 Units
Monday / Wednesday 1:30 - 2:50 PM

Climate change is a defining factor of this generation, and yet while scientists unanimously warn of the inevitability of climate change, it remains a looming specter. This course builds an intersectional and structural understanding of climate change, and explores how art activates the intangibility of climate change, making it visible, visceral, and political. We will examine how the geographies of colonialism, racial capitalism, and migration produce climate change inequities, and how the climate justice movement addresses these through creative forms of resistance. We will undertake this exploration in three parts: first, by engaging with the cities of New Orleans and San Juan, to understand how climate catastrophe aggravates existing inequalities, and how residents creatively respond to disaster. From there we will consider how art serves as a form of politics, how it is taken up in social movements to provoke shifts in political consciousness. Lastly, we will engage directly with political art forms that address climate change, with a particular focus on those that centralize the experiences of populations most at risk of climate catastrophe. These art forms call attention to who bears the disproportionate burden of climatic shift, which geographies are most at risk, and how these creative interpretations envision climate futures. The course will culminate in a collective creative project in which students address climate change and climate futures from their own lived experiences.

Previous Fellows:

2017-18

Samuel Franklin - Visiting Assistant Professor, Brown University

Gülgün Kayim - Director of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy
City of Minneapolis, Minnesota

2016-17

Andrew Herscher - Associate Professor, University of Michigan
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
Department of the History of Art
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Johanna Taylor - Assistant Professor, Arizona State University
Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts

Creative Cities Working Group

The working group on Creative Cities is an invited group of scholars, artists, and curators from across the Bay Area who will meet regularly throughout the academic year to further their research and examine the relationship between creativity and urban places from a broad array of disciplinary perspectives. Stanford Arts Institute Faculty Director Peggy Phelan has invited Michael Kahan, co-director of the Program on Urban Studies at Stanford University, to lead these sessions.

Michael Kahan
2018-2019

Michael B. Kahan is the co-director of the Program on Urban Studies at Stanford University, and a senior lecturer in Sociology. His interest in the historical transformation of urban space has led to publications on topics including the integration of streetcars in the 1850s, sanitation reform in the 1890s, the geography of prostitution in the 1910s, and redevelopment in California in the 1990s. He holds a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, both in history.

Working Group Statement of Purpose

"Cities have been hubs of creative expression and innovation for millennia. As sociologist Howard Becker reminds us, art is a collective activity, and cities supply many of the social needs—audiences, patrons, suppliers, markets, capital – that enable the creation, distribution, and consumption of art. Of course, cities are not always nurturing environments for creative production. City governments may regulate, harass, and censor; city land prices may be too high for artists to afford. But for better or worse, cities are more than just a background or a setting for art; they actively shape the creation and reception of art in countless ways."

Continue reading full statement here.

Working Group Members

2017-18

Aku Ammah-Tagoe
English, Stanford University

Kiley Arroyo
Cultural Strategies Council

John Barton
Architectural Design, Stanford University

Tom Beischer
Architectural Design, Stanford University

Jonathan Calm
Art Practice, Art & Art History, Stanford University

Sukanya Chakrabarti
EnActe Arts

Deland Chan
Urban Studies, Stanford University

Jeff Chang
Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Stanford University

Abby Chen
Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco

Janet Delaney
Independent Visual Artist

Gordon Douglas
Urban and Regional Planning, San José State University

Nicholas de Monchaux
Architecture and Urban Design, UC Berkeley

Ala Ebtekar
Art & Art History and Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Stanford University

Samuel Franklin
Creative Cities Fellow, Stanford Arts Institute

Cynthia Garcia
Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford University

Julia Grinkrug
Academy of Art

Gina Hernandez
Arts in Undergraduate Education, Stanford University

Betti-Sue Hertz
Curator, Arts Administrator, Writer and Educator

Michael Kahan
Urban Studies, Stanford University

Gülgün Kayim
Creative Cities Fellow, Stanford Arts Institute

Marci Kwon
Art & Art History, Stanford University

S. Topiary Landberg
Film & Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz

Jason Luger
Environmental Design, UC Berkeley

Jenny Odell
Art & Art History, Stanford University

Grant Parker
Classics and African Studies, Stanford University

Peggy Phelan
English and Theater & Performance Studies, Stanford University
Denning Family Director, Stanford Arts Institute

Nicole Phillips
International Relations, English, and Urban Studies, Stanford University

Tom Winterbottom
Stanford Language Center, Stanford University

2016-17

Aku Ammah-Tagoe
English, Stanford University

John Barton
Architectural Design, Stanford University

Neeraj Bhatia
The Urban Works Agency at The California College of the Arts
The Open Workshop

Jonathan Calm
Art Practice, Art & Art History, Stanford University

Sukanya Chakrabarti
Palo Alto Children's Theatre

Deland Chan
Urban Studies, Stanford University

Jeff Chang
Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Stanford University

Abby Chen
Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco

Robert Dawson
Art & Art History, Stanford University

Ala Ebtekar
Art & Art History and Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Stanford University

Steven Feld
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University

Shelley Fisher Fishkin
English and American Studies, Stanford University

Thomas Hansen
Anthropology, Stanford University

Andrew Herscher
Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan
Creative Cities Fellow, Stanford Arts Institute

Betti-Sue Hertz
Curator, Arts Administrator, Writer and Educator

Melissa Kagen
German Studies, Stanford University

Janette Kim
Architecture, California College of the Arts and All of the Above

S. Topiary Landberg
Film & Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz

Derek Ouyang
Civil & Environmental Engineering, Stanford University

Grant Parker
Classics and African Studies, Stanford University

Peggy Phelan
English and Theater & Performance Studies, Stanford University
Denning Family Director, Stanford Arts Institute

Eric Rogers
Embassy Network and Immanent Urbanisms

Jacqueline Siapno
Independent Scholar/Musician, Member of Innovations in Peacebuilding

Johanna Taylor
Creative Cities Fellow, Stanford Arts Institute

Fred Turner
Communication, Stanford University

Tom Winterbottom
Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University

Working Group Schedule of Meetings

Participation in the Creative Cities Working Group is by invitation only.

Upcoming Talks

Talks for 2018-19 coming soon.

Recent Talks

April 26, 2018
Jeff Chang
"We Gon' Be Alright: Picturing The Era of Resegregation"

March 1, 2018
Betti-Sue Hertz
"Art and the Marking of Queer Sites in the Urban Sphere"

February 15, 2018
Jenny Odell
"How to Do Nothing"

February 1, 2018
Julia Grinkrug and Shalini Agrawal
"Fluvial Commons: Exploring Transitory Floating Communities in the Bay Area"

January 18, 2018
Janet Delaney and Michael Kahan
"Art / History: Two Views of South of Market"

November 30, 2017
Gülgün Kayim
"Artists In/Of the City"

November 9, 2017
Jason Luger
"Awakening the Dragon: Arts, Urban Space, and Authoritarianism"

October 26, 2017
Sam Franklin
"What's the Matter with Creativity?"

October 12, 2017
Jonathan Calm
"African-American Automobility"

Recent Talks

May 18, 2017
Ala Ebtekar
"Art, Social Space, and Public Discourse"

May 4, 2017
Abby Chen, Betty Yu, and Tomie Arai
"Here to Stay: Using the Power of Culture to Fight Displacement" (co-sponsored with Human Cities Initiative)

April 27, 2017
Eric Rogers
"Immanent Urbanism(s) and Critical Hedonism(s)"

April 20, 2017
Joy Siapno
"Destruction/Reconstruction/Redestruction of Cultural Heritage Sites in Comparative Context"

March 2, 2017
Johanna Taylor
"Aesthetic Justice in New Orleans"

February 16, 2017
Moy Eng and Risa Shoup
"Leveraging Economic Growth for Cultural Vitality" (co-sponsored with Human Cities Initiative)

February 2, 2017
Andrew Herscher
"'The Architectural Imagination': Creativity, Austerity, and Political Violence in Detroit, 2015 - Present"

January 19, 2017
S. Topiary Landberg
"Exit Zero: San Francisco Freeway to the Future"

December 1, 2016
Neeraj Bhatia and Derek Ouyang
"Infrastructural Opportunism and Common Ground: Designing for Discovery, Empathy, and Equity"

November 3, 2016
Susan Moffat
"Nature, Art, and Homelessness at a Shoreline Landfill: The Albany Bulb" (co-sponsored with Human Cities Initiative)

October 20, 2016
Grant Parker
"Public History after Rhodes Must Fall"

October 6, 2016
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
"Hidden in Plain Sight: The Secret Literary Landscape of American Cities"