CHICAGO - With her iconic long dark hair curtaining her demure countenance, Yoko Ono has been in my personal pantheon of women makers for most of my life. When I was a distraught teenager in a midwestern suburb, she was there - singing discordant arias from my bedroom stereo. Her siren call couldn't quite be deciphered, but, like a feminist signal from afar, it cut through the fog of oppressive cultural forces.
The Christmas Festival of Bad Habits is a temporary -space installation located on Římské náměstí in the historic center of Brno, Czech Republic. Developed by architectural studio Peer Collective in collaboration with artist Kateřina Šedá, the non-profit organization Renadi, and the Brno-střed Municipal District, the project reconsiders the spatial and social format of the traditional Christmas market. Instead of retail-driven programming, the installation introduces a structured environment for reflection, movement, and collective experience.
A core component of the Colossal-curated exhibition, No One Knows All It Takes, is community participation. Each of the artists- Bryana Bibbs, Raoul Deal, Maria Gaspar, and Swoon ( previously)-is deeply engaged with the people they portray and collaborate with, a commitment that inspires nuanced, insightful projects and a truly communal process. As part of the exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art, we've considered how to reflect this mode of working through programming and a participatory project.
Have you ever wanted to burn a man? In June 1986, the founders of the Burning Man project and nonprofit, Larry Harvey and Jerry James, built a wooden human effigy and set it on fire on San Francisco's Baker Beach as a symbolic act of letting go of their personal crises. They call it the First Burn. Every year since, the two committed to doing it again.