The Power of Art

This evening at the Fine Arts Building on the campus of the University of Kentucky there was a speaker by the name of Blithe Riley who spoke on a topic that I have never heard a person talk about before, that topic was Art.  Blithe Riley is an artist and activists of Art as a job and not just a hobby.  She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York but travels all around the world to endorse the idea of Art as more than just something people do for fun.  Blithe started out with a fun an interesting game she created about Debt where she simply asked everyone there to stand up or sit down if the question applied to them.  She asked questions about student debt, housing debt, credit card debt, medical debt, etc. and surprising many of the people there seemed to all have the debt problems and she talked about her debt and the debt of Artist of the day.  She showed this picture created by the O.W.S. or the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I really came to find this picture interesting and all through the talk I kept seeming to come back to this picture because I feel like this image really spoke to me because it explains what I myself and many other people; especially college students are going through in this time.  
Blithe then went on to give some eye-opening statistics like "In 2009, 50 million Americans have no health insurance."  She discussed many of the projects and organizations that she is affiliated with such as the Coble/Riley Project which is an organization that both her and another artist and activists named Mary Coble  started together.  This organization works with many other people on projects such as Ascension/Immersion: 2009.  The concept of this project is "A performer travels between two states, one interior and one exterior. There is no goal or destination. Instead the figure engages in a process of ascension and immersion, repeated through the structure of the loop. The timing of this process is fragmented by two screens, in which the same action is simultaneously experienced at different moments in time."
Another project is the Market Estate project: 2010, which I also found the most interesting where architects and owners of this estate brought artists in to use this place and created "a project transforming 100 empty flats in a 1960s London housing project into an art production site and exhibition arena, right before its slated demolition."  The most interesting part of it is how they used just the debris from the building to create an almost "trail" through the building to show the building. 

Blithe Riley is an amazing person who opened my eyes to an issue I can honestly say I had no clue about but after the talk she gave I can now say my ignorance on the subject is gone.  Now I still have much more research to look up before I say that I know what I am talking about but that is more of a blessing than a curse because it allows me to keep looking into the topic.  I hope with reading this it will give you an eye-opening experience and want you to look deeper into this issue.  If you wish to keep following Blithe Riley and all other organizations in pursuit of a better world where greed and corruption are removed and happiness and kindness take its place.
http://coblerileyprojects.com/
http://occupywallst.org/
http://www.metafilter.com/119525/Privately-Owned-Public-Spaces
http://www.blitheriley.net/
http://www.marycoble.com/