I Wish to Say: The Birthday Project

By Sheryl Oring

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 098008900X
• ISBN13: 9780980089004
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: Quack!Media
• Length: 140 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.3" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Civic activism meets conceptual art in this portrait of American Humanity

This is the kind of civic engagement that we desperately need in art. Oring has taken the roots of conceptual art from the 1960's and grafted onto them a breathing, living, voting, public conscience that is so needed in our current climate of cyberapathy. This project takes the virtual interconnections that happen on the internet, the MoveOn.org type caucusing, and strips it down to a gritty, face to face, typewriter-key-to carbon-to-card-to-mailbox human conversation. And it is exactly these increasingly rare and endangered conversations with strangers, of the type that Oring initiates (and Emanuel's photographs beautifully document) that are exactly what allow democracy to exist. I show this book to my students and it serves as a model for a new kind of art, a new kind of art teaching, that is very ripe for our times. I have found that it is so timely that my students take to it like fish to water, they crave this kind of work without having even known that it existed. The photographs (which fill this very visual book) are beautiful, humanizing portraits of very specific American citizens. They are respectful and inspire the viewer to respect these people, even when we might not agree with their politics.