Intro to Public Doors and Windows

Public Doors and Windows is a collaborative artist team made up of Harrell Fletcher, Molly Sherman, and Nolan Calisch. They are based in Portland, Oregon. Together they work to create participatory and site-specific projects that engage with and include local people and the broader public.

Drawing inspiration from small-scale farming and the community supported agriculture (CSA) model, PD&W bring similar elements into their artistic practice, creating work that values collaboration, reciprocal relationships, and a sense of investment with the people and places where they work.

Currently the collaboration is involved in ongoing projects with the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz, the Parthenon Museum of Art in Nashville, Tennessee, and the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon. In 2013 they published A Children’s Book of Farming in Le Cateau-Cambrésis with One Star Press as part of the Le Nouveau Festival at the Pompidou Center in Paris.

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To a Lifetime of Meaningful Encounters Exhibition at the Matisse Museum
in Le Cateau, France July 2014-September 2014

A participatory walking tour, part of A Collective Museum
commissioned by the UC Santa Cruz Institute of Arts and Sciences. 

The One Mile Loop

The One Mile Loop, a project for FLEX IT! at the Parthenon Museum. 

Our project The One Mile Loop is a series of public signs and musical performances that respond to the routine exercise habits of runners and walkers who use the "one mile loop" around Centennial Park and the Parthenon Museum.

We will replicate a series of six public historical markers, but instead of containing historical information, the new markers will share information about the current lives, exercise habits, and musical preferences of six Nashville citizens who regularly use the park. These personalized markers will be installed incrementally around the one mile loop pathway for the duration of the Flex-It show. 

We will also organize a one day musical event on a weekend in early September where six local bands, of differing musical genres, will play a set of songs selected by the six runners and walkers. A musical performance will take place at each of the six marker sites around the loop, enabling the general public to experience a continual live musical experience as they make their way around the path. 

We will work with the Musical Arts Center in Centennial Park to select several of the the participating bands for the event. 

A playlist of the reinterpreted songs will be made available on the Flex-it blog as a free download.

The Highlander Spring 

The Highlander Spring, a project for  FLEX IT! at the Parthenon Museum. 

Highlander Folk School was an adult education center founded in 1932 that brought together many labor and civil rights activists including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr, and Pete Seeger. The original site of Highlander was located near Monteagle, Tennessee and included a spring fed pond which was made by Highlander participants. On September 2, 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech at Highlander called “A Look to the Future.” During this Labor Day event, people took part in many integrated cultural activities including dancing, dining, swimming in the pond, and drinking from the spring. In his speech, King stated: 

“I have been asked to speak from the subject: “A Look to the Future.” In order to look to the future, it is often necessary to get a clear picture of the past. In order to know where we are going, it is often necessary to see from whence we have come.”1

We would like to collect 25 gallons of the spring water from the original Highlander site and make it available to museum goers through a water dispenser that is set up in the Flex-it gallery. Alongside the water dispenser will be at stack of newspapers we create that provide information about the pond, Highlander and it’s cultural and recreational activities. Museum goers will be invited to taste the spring water that Myles Horton, Martin Luther King Jr, and Rosa Parks would have consumed and reflect on Highlander’s influence on the the social and cultural history of Tennessee. 

We imagine the water dispenser would be sectioned off from the rest of the exhibition and designated as the only area for drinking the water in the museum. This area would include a recycling bin for the used paper cups and markers on the floor or museum partitions. Once all the water is consumed, the empty dispenser will stay in place until the end of the show. 

1. http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/a_look_to_the_future_hfs/