Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[J. LaMantia] It's been my honor to take this
project to every IU university campus, set up six blank walls or six blank panels that made up
the walls and have open it up for students to interact with as a civic engaged project.
Behind me is "Writing on the Wall," which is a project that started back in 2007 with the
Office of the Provost, Vice Provost, at Bloomington campus Indiana University. I was
asked then to create a signature event, which would highlight graffiti art and with the theme
politics and the arts. In thinking about that, I came up with th
e idea of not only working with graffiti artists, but also creating walls that people could
actually do graffiti on with the purpose of defining what they thought democracy was, and
possible what did it look like. [Unknown] Democracy for me, it's a good thing.
One, obviously to be able to express your ideas, and the other part of it, it really is the
civic engagement of indeed going ahead and expressing your views.
[J. LaMantia] Democracy, of course, is something of an ideal, and it's a very ambiguous word
that you could find that people have written books on. And I'm thinking that we could
actually have hundreds of these panels and have an incredibly long wall in terms of coming to
some sort of understanding of that one word. As an artist I've been overwhelmed with what
people have written on these walls. Everyday I walk away thinking and looking at this and
saying, "It's just perfect." No matter what anyone writes, it's jus
t perfect because if you don't like it, then it calls upon you to respond. And so it's been my
intention that these walls that I'm creating with the students at these campuses, as a way of
creating dialogue and hopefully, creating an atmosphere for people to think about democracy.