Artists Heather Layton (Rochester, NY) and Julie Püttgen (Sewanee, TN) met in the summer of 2007 and immediately immediately began formulating ideas for collaborative work. Both had independently been working on interactive community art projects for years, for example Layton’s (sub)Urban Homicide (2006) and Püttgen’s Finding Vanished Atlanta (2005).  Land Mark / Coming Soon / Historic Prevention, their first large-scale collaboration, invites communities to consider their past, present and future through a series of complementary interventions:  Land Mark imagines traces of the past in the present-day landscape; Coming Soon suggests immediate future alternatives to current conditions; and Historic Prevention projects the future consequences of an uncorrected present.

Layton and Püttgen have prepared preliminary maquettes for interventions close to home.  Ultimately, these or similar texts suggested by local communities will be installed as guerilla public art in the form of commercial vinyl lettering, place markers, and other forms of signage. It is the artists’ intent that Coming Soon, Land Mark and Historic Prevention will eventually function as shareware: free ideas easily reproduced by activists anywhere.  A project blog will invite participants to share images and stories about their own, local versions of these interventions.

Click here for a full project description.

profit sharing
day care
local produce
rent control
local biodiesel
job security