Process & Public Art - Buster Simpson

The Buster Simpson exhibit at the Frye Art Museum made me think about landscape, process, and our hopes for public space and public art. He is an artist motivated by process artwork as a collaboration, making work from society's waste in the 1970s. He avoids an end goal based on achieving an aesthetic and instead focuses on process and primarily stewardship of place. He also highlights the conflicts at the heart of our "clean and green" movement that continues to ignore the processes of industry and instead focuses on creating parkland by "cleaning and greening" by essence ignoring the processes alteration.  His goal is to create public land that allows for an enlarging experience of what public space and parks can be, places of learning, discovery, atypical use of materials, places of mess, chaos, and exploration.

He uses symbols of the Woodman, the crow, and salmon to talk about process, salvage, collection, place, and environment.

He asks an important and frequently overlooked question in the process of city building - What is the relationship between the old and the new, what is salvaged, sacred, and saved. How are we stewards and caretakers of our cities, towns, and environments?