MuraLAB, if you didn’t know, is the Mural Arts Program’s experimental creativity hub for “investigating muralism in the twenty-first century.”

This event series sounds awesome. And I’ve just heard about two talks coming up in Philly on public art and social change that I definitely plan on going to, and I hope you do too! Including, one with Columbia University professor, Laura Kurgan, and one with Brooklyn-based artist and activist, Josh MacPhee. Here are some more details…

Laura Kurgan: Human Geographies

Wednesday, April 3rd
6PM
Meyerson Hall, Lower Gallery
University of Pennsylvania
210 S. 34th Street

Laura Kurgan’s projects visualize complex political and social data to advocate for social reform. Her work explores digital mapping technologies, the ethics and politics of mapping, new structures of participation in design, and the visualization of urban and global data. One project, Million Dollar Blocks, shows how the government spends more than one million dollars to incarcerate prisoners who live within a single census block. Her book, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics has recently been published by Zone Books.

Kurgan is Director of Visual Studies, Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab, and Associate Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Josh MacPhee: The City is Ours

Monday, April 8th at
6PM
Terra Hall
University of the Arts
211 S. Broad Street, Fifth Floor

MacPhee, a Brooklyn-based artist and activist, is a founder of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and a member of the Occuprint collective. He is the co-author and co-curator of Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now, co-editor of Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture, and he recently co-founded the Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements.

See you there!