On a tour through the Midwest, artists Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio made one of their last stops at Bradley for “Cargo Space,” a mobile artist residency program. The exhibit will be open in the Heuser art gallery until Nov. 6.
The program hit the road this summer, driving in a refurbished transit bus, encouraging and providing artists with a rich creative space.
“Chris Sperandio’s Cargo Space project combined the tour and the documentation of the tour¬– where artists were asked to make interactive, non-precious artworks – into one constantly evolving event. So, the graffitied bus, the collaboration between artists and students and an upcoming book about the Cargo Space tour is the art,” Art Department Chairperson Paul Krainak said.
Cargo Space’s visit to Bradley started Oct. 2 with a Visual Voices lecture featuring Sperandio and artist Duncan MacKenzie. After the lecture, Houston-based artist Rahul Mitra created an instillation called Box City, inviting students to draw on the boxes that would become part of the display in Heuser.
The part tour bus, part mobile arts platform, part sleeper for six, traveled across the country holding lectures, exhibitions and other events where it stopped. With a grant from Rice University’s Humanities Research Center, they set out to bring artists together and create increased community among artists.
“Cargo Space’s nomadic features brought together numbers of artists from various places in the Midwest and the South,” Krainak said. “It responded to the art department’s Inland Visual Studies Center objective, which is to focus on artwork that not only exists in the central U.S. but addresses the environmental and cultural reality of it.”
Krainak said the project is inspirational in how it connects various different institutions and empowers cultural based art.
“[Cargo Space] promotes art that is timely, participatory, fun, intelligent and about where we live,” Krainak said.
