Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts sponsors this episode.
Artist Michael Konrad is a bit of a pessimist, using a semi-permanent material–plastic bags–to explore the end of a great civilization. Konrad’s mournful installation was in the January 2011 Wind Challenge 2. His meticulously handcrafted mummy style sleeping bag and an American flag, his use of letters that lose their words, and words that lose their sentences, become artifacts of the city in post-industrial collapse. More than that, they become strategies for reinventing life. Konrad himself moved here with his young family from New York, taught himself to sew and iron, and his reinvented his own life in the process.
This episode is edited by Peter Crimmins. The music is by Eric Biondo. Thanks to the Knight Foundation for helping us get the ball rolling on this project. Thanks to J-Lab and William Penn Foundation for additional support and to our partner WHYY NewsWorks for their ongoing support. You can listen to Artblog Radio on Apple and Spotify.
