Back in 2008, a curator friend of ours reached out to us after they landed a job working for a New York-based arts organization that mounts large scale public projects. We had worked with this curator before, but not this organization. The curator encouraged us to pitch ideas for a massive project we could work on together. Because the intention with this booklet is to focus on our proposals rather than what could have happened, we’ll just call the proposal recipient: [art organization].

The proposal process was not particularly transparent. We had no idea what our budget could be or how the decision-making process might work. We had been commissioned to do some public projects before but generally on a smaller scale, with modest budgets and/ or borrowed resources. More frequently we just worked within our own means and pursued ideas for situating our work in shared city spaces without obtaining permission or seeking funding. Any of these proposed ideas, if executed at the scales suggested, would have forced us to dramatically restructure our lives in ways that—reading this list today—feels hard to imagine.

 

Some of these ideas would simply never happen now, given changes in our thinking and our world. 

 

When we created this document, it was just a typed text attached to an email. No visuals were ever created for these ideas. To make this booklet, we called on our beloved repeat collaborator Kione Kochi, whose drawings grace a number of the publications and posters we’ve made over the last nine years. We sent this text to Kione and asked her to come up with about seven color drawings for any ideas that she thought might be appealing to illustrate. Beyond those simple directions, we did little to steer her creativity. As always, we are thrilled by energy, humor, and imagination that Kione has brought to this project and we are grateful for her continued collaboration and friendship. We are exploring our history here, but it’s a lot more fun to do it in ways that generate something new in the process.