Maybe I read too many haunted house books as a kid, but there's always something about an abandoned building that makes me shiver. It's so sad to see a storefront, once some entrepreneur's hard-won dream, empty and shuttered; depressing to visit a city neighborhood and realize there's nowhere to buy an apple. So I love this photography project envisioned by Emily Schiffer, called See Potential.

A public arts initiative, See Potential seeks to take vacant lots and abandoned buildings and transform them with large-scale photographs portraying healthy food shops or community gardens.  According to the website, "In the South Side of Chicago, a lack of access to affordable, healthy foods is holding a community captive to circumstance."I love the idea that these large photo installations not only create striking images, transforming dilapidated buildings into art galleries, but also encourage the community to appreciate the potential of where they live (and get involved themselves by contributing photographs and ideas).  Here is art that not only comments on a problem but seeks to transform it. It's gutsy, it's exciting, and it's a call to action to see the potential in even the most depressed of places.

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Photo: Thinkstock

One afternoon shortly after I had moved to New York City I witnessed a scene that seemed to be a short, one-man play about the ill affects of graffiti: It was a blazingly hot day, and an elderly man stood in his shirtsleeves scrubbing away at an ugly tag on his bodega's window. Frustrated, he threw his wet rag to the ground and uttered a sound something like a damaged car motor. Poor man! It is for his sake that I am glad that the DIY, anti-establishment spirit of street art has been channeled in less damaging, more lovely ways lately. Delicate books sculptures, for example, or cozy displays of knit-bombing.

Or guerrilla fruit grafting. As the Huffington Post reports, "For the past year, the renegade group has been secretly splicing San Francisco's strictly decorative apple and pear trees with fruit-bearing grafts, causing the city's previously barren trees to become heavy with fresh apples and pears. The group aims to use the city's preexisting trees to provide 'delicious, nutritious fruit for urban residents,' and basically feed anyone who is hungry in the process."  The group's open source code site offers advice on finding graftable trees and tracks how the grafts are going. Okay, so some San Francisco city officials may be symbolically throwing their wet rags to the ground ("The City considers vandalism a serious offense,"  Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru told the Examiner). But really, how upset can anyone be over beautiful, delicious fruit?

Art is Everywhere:
Food Art
Lunch Bag Art
Tree Art

Photo: Thinkstock

When I was a college senior, I motivated myself bright and early one icy January morning to stop by the rec center before my challenging Creativity Workshop "morning" class at 10 am.  I felt extremely, ridiculously proud of myself. An elderly lady, naked as the long-ago day she was born, sidled up to me in the locker room. "We see a lot of your types in January," she said, cynically. Feeling abashed and overdressed in my bathing suit, I protested, "You'll be seeing a lot of me all year!" My new early morning swimming habit was no resolution-based romp! I was for real!

At least for the next few weeks. And so it goes in the world of New Year's Resolutions. Which is why I was so pleased to learn about the 50/50 challenge. The 50/50 challenge is the kind of year-long-commitment that actually sounds fun and enriching and—what!—like I might actually do.

The idea is to read 50 books and see 50 movies in 2012. (That's about one book and one movie a week, mathematicians.) You can sign up on the website, but don't be scared by words like "commit" and "rules." You don't have to know what you're going to read or watch. They don't even have to be "good." As the website says, "Go ahead, read Kardashian Konfidential, we won't tell."

This year, there are few long-term projects that I have been working on that I've seriously been considering abandoning. Number one is cooking. I am not sure if I am better cook that I was a decade ago, despite my experiments with intimidating ingredients like shellfish and kale, not to mention new cuisines like Indian. Why not give it up for 2012 and eat nothing but fast, easy chicken breasts? The same goes for playing the guitar. It takes me months to learn one measly song. I am tired. I have kids. I have a job in the morning. Why not relax at night and watch TV instead?

Then I stumbled this short film by Denis Chapon on Laughing Squid. Every day for the last three years, Denis has drawn 12 drawings, each on piece of leftover  paper he found in his company's copier room. At the end of the 795 days, he had 9,540 illustrations, which, when put in order made this  four minute, two second long film:

12 Drawings a Day - 12 Dessins par Jour from Denis Chapon on Vimeo.

Chapon claims that he didn't write a script for the film. There is no romantic story, thrilling action sequence or stunning  climax. But there is a testimony to the power of chipping away at a larger, unseen goal, adding to the artistic kitty bit by bit, page by page, line by line until you have a body of work that is yours. It's no accident, after all that he called his totally non-realistic film an "animated diary." He may not have recorded his activities each day, much less his love life or dinner choices, but at the same he did record the larger, more beautiful truth of his life—from the dark days when you feel like throwing your refrigerator and desk out the window to the happier one when so-called bombs turn into bluebirds and fly gracefully away.
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