Los Altos resident Lina Tellefsen, 11, is the latest citizen-artist to respond to SFMOMA’s “art instructions” in the Town Crier. She rose to the challenge this week when Jessica Stockholder asked readers to think about where art comes from, and to collect objects that can reorganize into a greater whole.
Lina said that there is so much plastic floating in the ocean – polluting the waters and harming the sea life – that she wanted to use the plastic caps to portray all the plastic in the ocean. She titled her piece “Dive In,” inspired by Matisse’s artwork “The Swimming Pool”.
Los Altos resident Carol Hug tried her hand at two different collections, juxtaposing plastic containers and even koalas. Ready to imagine up your own response to the prompt? You can find the full instructions for each art action collected here on our website, and also find the original instructions by paging through any issue of the Town Crier published in January. Readers are sending us their work via emails to [email protected] or by dropping off evidence of their art at our office.
He wrote to SFMOMA, “I pulled the raw thesaurus information from the Roget’s Thesaurus hosted by Project Gutenberg. The prompt said to think of something then think of something else but I figured a computer could do that for me. It picks a random word, then looks for words related to that first word, then it randomly chooses among the synonyms and uses one of them as the new starting point to repeat the process, checking each time to make sure that it hasn’t looped back into a word it already used.”
And the Town Crier is still looking for hawk-eyed local hunters – artist Alec Soth has challenged Los Altos to a treasure hunt, and it requires nothing but shoe leather and a way to take pictures. Soth, a photographer, wants to see what locals come up with if they follow his own artistic process: explore the area with a particular list of prey in mind. See what you find. He wants to know if residents can find and photograph:
Extra points for combining subjects in one picture – he’d love to see a supermarket cashier in a yellow uniform selling milk!
As you create away, don’t forget to share your projects with the community. Email [email protected], visit the Town Crier office or upload your photos at sfmomalive.tumblr.com/
