There's a revolution spreading across the country. It aims to green urban and suburban spaces and turn them into agricultural sites, in order to alleviate interrelated social and environmental ills: to fight climate change and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels through localized food production, to provide urban—and especially low-income—dwellers with better and more affordable access to fresh produce, to reduce the dumping of pesticides into the soil and groundwater, and to restore humankind's integral relationship with the land that yields its sustenance. It may not be surprising that such concerns are in the public consciousness these days. Perhaps more unexpected is the fact that, among the activists, environmentalists, and farmers engaged in these initiatives, many artists are leading the cause and lending shape to what our green and bountiful cities of the future may look like.

+ read more

Birmingham artist Walton Creel sits in his studio, surrounded by six large-scale "drawings"—for lack of a better word—leaning edge to edge. In many ways, this ongoing series, Deweaponizing the Gun, is his most ambitious work. Each piece is made in a particularly dangerous way, with Creel shooting a four-by-six-foot metal panel at close range, one bullet after the other, until his gargantuan task is completed.
   It almost seems unbelievable. Try telling yourself that, maybe, he uses a power drill and a metal punch. For the idea of an artist standing over or around a piece of metal, slowly and methodically firing round after round, actually seems to strain credulity. Yet here is Creel, working almost obsessively, squeezing the trigger five thousand times as he composes each image, firing again and again until it emerges clearly.

+ read more