Art From Under the Engine

Posted by Nishat Kurwa on March 1, 2011

The Artpologist Project was inspired by artist Daniel Gallegos’ time in Khazakstan with his wife, an academic. When they moved back to the States, he was eager to further their ideas about combining art and anthropology to document communities. Then a friend invited him to meet her neighbor, a mechanic, and his latest project was born.

The friend’s neighbor was Speed Pickney, a mechanic at a shop between Emeryville and Oakland, California. When Gallegos first saw the shop, he thought, “There’s no art here.” But he continued to visit, stopping in from time to time on his way home from work. Drawing on ethnographic practice, he began to see the shop, and the applied labor therein, as a site of art-making — especially when he considered the beauty of the chassis, and witnessed the shop’s role in forming community.

He brought in a videographer and photographer friend, and the mechanics themselves began to participate in documenting the shop for the project’s blog. Here’s the description from the site:

Speed’s auto shop serves as a microcosm for the shifting urban landscape in Oakland, California. With Speed, we explore various social, political, and economic perspectives of Oakland, and examine how neighborhoods and priorities are changing. We hope this investigation will shed light on how the auto shop and the residential neighborhood have influenced each other, and how they have worked together to strengthen and enhance the community.

You can hear more about the project’s evolution here:

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