Desert Initiative

ARID Journal

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Selected Artwork

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Roosevelt Row

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The Desert Initiative is building connections between desert communities regionally and globally through arts-based research and projects. The Desert Inititiave currently consists of four primary components: 1) Development of a Desert Studies curriculum based at the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts and connected with partners globally, 2) ARID, a peer-reviewed on-line journal of desert art, design and ecology, 3) an international artist-in-residence (AIR) program based in downtown Phoenix, and 4) Desert Initiative: Desert One, a creative collaboration of more than sixty regional partners connecting the four desert regions of North America and exploring and presenting the desert as a site of investigation and creative inquiry.

I'm thrilled that my current work is a convergence of many of my passions including working with artists, connecting communities globally, arid land agriculture, and art and creative inquiry as means of positive social transformation.

For more information visit the links to the left.

"borders are scars on the landscape"

The quote is most likely attributable to a sage Native American early in the negotiation of the "resettlement" process in the formative years of U.S. history. Borders are a political construction, a human fabrication around geography, resources and power defined and re-defined through time by war, bloodshed and death. Borders are also a unifying construct that can bring people together and form deep bonds.

My community, my family, is comprised of individuals that live in places around the globe, across political and geographic borders. They are individuals that value creativity, risk, innovation. They are compassionate, hard-working people that want the best for themselves and for their friends and families.

In response to recent legislation and policy that seeks to reinforce the divisive aspect of borders, five individual artists from diverse cultural and geopolitical backgrounds have joined me in becoming a part of a new community that re-contextualizes the notion of community relative to borders and permanency. The artists currently reside in the bordering states of California and Arizona and reflect the symbiotic exchange that occurs between the cultural communities in these two states.

Each individual artist has one word of the quote tattooed on their body. The placement and design of the word was determined by each individual. The artwork, the community, is only complete when all six individuals are together to form the narrative of the text of the quote. The work was first presented in Long Beach in March, 2010 and was completed in Phoenix in April, 2010 with the live placement of the sixth tattoo with all six artists together.

Special thanks to the participating artists who are, in order of their appearance in the quote: Crystal Phelps, Yuko Yabuki, Greg Esser, Dominic Miller, Jay Lopez and Steven Yazzie.