Author Archives: jolanta

I first experienced New York City without being able to speak. Coming from Japan, I felt the language and culture were barriers, and it was as though I had a communication disability. Street art broke that wall for me. In the media studies, I agreed with Marshall McLuhan’s idea that media is an extension of […]

I have a problem with public advertisements. Unlike TV, radio, the Internet, or magazine ads, people are forced to look at public advertisements. It’s naive to think these campaigns are harmless. These ad campaigns are aggressive. Aggressive because the public’s voice is marginalized. Aggressive because only those who can afford the space are allowed the […]

The number 3 is a magic number. From religion to the arts and even the sciences, systems of belief are what categorize people into various communities. Depending on the “god” of our focus, whether it includes worship of an art object, a deity, or what lies inside a petri dish, we are, or we choose […]

Above the mahogany Colonial night-table in the Pendleton House of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD Museum), a small painting by Alonzo Chappel depicts Roger Williams stepping from his boat to greet and smoke a peace pipe with the Narragansett sachems. This idealized image of the hopes for “what cheer, netop” […]

Abstraction and the bravery it took to embrace and intently explore it, when she began in 1915, sets Georgia O’Keeffe at the front of American modernist artists and artists around the world. It was the beginning of many revolutions of the 20th century; in 1912 Kandinsky had painted the first completely abstract oil painting and […]

Architecture informs us about what is happening in our lived environment at a historical moment. In our understanding of architecture we are led by three fundamentals: permanence, distinction, and recognition. Architecture can help reshape our very existence. Buildings symbolically represent an attitude about what is taking place inside. They have certain qualities that can evoke […]

My street work consists mostly of isometric rectangles and squares. I selectively place these graphics around New York to highlight the unexpected contours and elegant geometry of the city itself. All execution of a piece is done on site with little to no planning. For however briefly, I am trying to offer people a chance […]