Understanding, Mapping, and Exploring the Terrain of Public Pedagogy

We look across the perfectly lined and spaced products in any suburban grocery store, angled slightly to highlight their curled and bolded logos and glowing palely under fine-tuned florescent lights-and we learn the aesthetics of pop-glitz and oversaturated colors, all bounded within staccato linearity, Warhol’s critique turned into its object. In a museum of natural history, we slowly amble down designated paths from entrance to exit, marveling at the narrative of human evolution-from a primal, savage, and dark body to an efficacious, civil, clean white one. Walking down public streets, we are taught where we can and cannot be, our teacher oft en the baleful gaze of the police. In the guerilla gardens of Detroit, Los Angeles, and London, we learn to reclaim post-urban spaces as sites of production and community support, the crops a small, defiant green beacon that refuses suffocation by the labyrinth of dull grey. An artist’s lyrics and music intertwine to create passion, rage, and action, where before there was only overwhelming alienation and acquiescence.