In anticipation of the launch of the Elia Mini Chair (a functional kid-size cardboard chair) happening at next week’s Free First Saturday “Escape to the Suburbs!”… yes, kids can customize one to take home!!… I talked with Michael Gross, Canadian architect/engineer and his wife Rey Tabarrok the creative duo behind this completely recyclable piece of modern furniture.

Tell us the history behind the Elia Mini Chair. How did you come up with the concept? What inspired the name?

MG: The genesis of the Elia Mini Chair was a studio project in my first year of architecture school that challenged us to design a sturdy, comfortable and good-looking chair using only cardboard. The arm chair that my partner Denis Gregoire and I designed was very well received and that got me interested in translating the project into a summer job. In 1994 I evolved some of the principles that Denis and I used in the arm-chair to create a more efficient dining chair. I actually manufactured and sold about 500 of the dining chairs before returning to architecture school for my final thesis year. Even though the chair served as a dining chair and desk chair in our own home for the many years that followed, it was only after persistent interest and encouragement from friends and my wife Rey, that I revisited the idea with the eye to manufacture it again. I think the world is obviously more concerned about sustainability now and definitely, or should I say hopefully, more receptive to cardboard as consumer product. I also think I have a fresh perspective now that I am a parent.

RT: This (parenthood) is definitely the most important element that informed our approach to creating a kid’s product. We were inspired by, and therefore named the brand after, Elia our crafty 6 year old daughter. Not only were we aiming to produce a product that was interesting and engaging, but also one that expressed our sense of responsibility towards our environment, which we try and impart to our daughter all the time. All of this, plus, it had to jive with Michael’s design and aesthetic sensibility.

MG: Yours too.....

RT: I agree. We are (for the most part) on the same page on the ‘less is more’ approach, both in terms of design, and certainly in our philosophy on consumption. But we digress....

MG: Our decision to launch a kid’s version of the chair also addresses our belief that there are few options out there that encourage creative interaction between kids and their parents, that exercises the artistic vision of the child, and are, at the end of it all, functional.

RT: .....and a good looking piece of modern furniture that is not an eye-sore. Add to that the fact that it does not contain lead, is manufactured locally, and is completely recyclable, and you have an overall feel-good experience. Which is, incidentally, why we felt that the Walker was a natural place for the launch of this product....art, modern, and social responsibility and making it all accessible through the Free First Saturday events which we’ve been great fans of and avid participants in over the years.....

Every member of your family has contributed to the development of the Elia Chair in one way or another. Can you talk a little about the role each of you has played?

MG: By now, you’ve guessed that my wife and partner Rey, has not only been a great supporter of the chair and my chair-leader (chuckles) over the years, but she also brought her great experience in marketing and advertising to the development of the concept and the brand.

RT: My biggest contribution is my perspective as a mom and as a consumer of all things crafty. I have engaged in (bought) so many craft and activity kits over the years, I know what I love in a craft project, and what is a source of frustration for both my child and me, not to mention waste...Elia obviously has been the inspiration for the brand and has actually been a very good critic during the creation of the art of the package.

Out of curiosity, do you often work on creative projects as a family unit? If so, can you share a favorite memory?

MG: We work together often, whether it is building stuff with Legos, making all kinds of variations of beaded bracelets and necklaces. Elia and I spent a good deal of time in our front yard last weekend making a snow monster with what was probably the best packing snow of the year.

RT: I can vouch for Michael’s amazing patience and enthusiasm in beading. Both Elia and Michael are also into pottery. My creative juices are exercised in finding the right place to display (or not!) the end result of these creative outputs.

The Elia Mini Chair is not only super fun to assemble and customize with your own look, but it also seems like there’s a built in learning lesson about sustainability, design principles (marriage of form and function), etc. What do you want families to get from their Elia Chair?

MG: The fact that cardboard is ubiquitous in consumer culture and is the most recycled of all consumer products makes it a great vehicle for helping kids understand issues about sustainability and the environment. I think corrugated cardboard is a really brilliant invention. It was developed as a less expensive and lighter alternative to wood and plywood as a packaging material at the end of the 19^th century. It has enormous structural strength given its light weight and this, of course, is a result of the way it is made - layers of fluted liner (paper) sandwiched between flat liner. The flutes are like roman arches in that that they resist compression and transfer load efficiently. Cardboard also behaves like a structural column when it is edge-loaded. So the Elia Mini Chair is also a great way to teach young kids about basic engineering and geometric principles like the arch, the triangle, compression, tension, beams and columns. And hopefully children will come away with an understanding that good design is a marriage of art and engineering.

Sustainability is definitely the buzz word when it comes to contemporary design and architecture. Are there any designers in the field that have inspired you? Any other cardboard furniture makers that you admire?

Frank Gehry’s cardboard furniture is really beautiful and sculptural. I also really admire the De Stijl cabinet maker and architect Gerrit Rietveld’s work. Of all contemporary architects, I think I am most inspired by Shigeru Ban. His novel use of materials (including cardboard and paper), his sensitivity to the environment and his social activism make him one of the most important, and increasingly influential, architects.

Quite often, well-designed modern-looking furniture is accompanied by a big price tag. What I love most about the Elia Mini Chair is that it’s super affordable, retailing at $29.99. And the kit includes six 12″x12″ custom color stickers to decorate the chair with so it is an incredible value. The Elia Mini Chair kits are available at the Walker Shop, at Creative Kidstuff stores, and at www.eliafun.com, and this Saturday at Free First Saturday they’ll be free while quantities last.. Michael and Rey have kindly donated several hundred Elia Chairs for local families to decorate and take home with them. Please no pushing.

Ed note: The chair is now available in the Walker shop and the link has been updated.

Dubbed “hip-hop’s Howard Zinn” by Salon.com, Jeff Chang is a cultural historian best known for chronicling the first rumblings of what in 1968 was yet to become hip-hop in the book Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. His followup, Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, looks at how this culture influenced artforms beyond the big four of graffiti, DJ-ing, b-boying/b-girling, and MC-ing, from poetry and dance to fiction, visual arts, and design.

A co-founder of SoleSides, the record label (now Quannum Projects) that launched the careers of DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, and others), Chang is heading to the Twin Cities for a free panel discussion on “hip-hop aesthetics” Thursday night, June 14. He’ll be joined by graphic artist/designer Cey Adams, Roger Cummings of Juxtaposition Arts, and filmmaker Rachel Ramist. But before packing his bags, he took time for an email volley on topics big and small, from hip-hop’s social potential to the Walker performing arts project his book inspired to his son’s Halloween costume.

In Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, you wrote about the cultural, econonic, and political conditions in the Bronx in the late '60s that gave rise to hip-hop culture (you called it the “politics of abandonment”). Here in Minneapolis, like elsewhere, we're seeing record-breaking home foreclosures, inner-city school closings, and a spike in violent crime in our urban neighborhoods. How is today like that seminal period in the Bronx? Is there a creative counterpoint to all this bad news?

Well, I would never want to suggest that we need to have social upheaval in order to create beautiful art. In fact, often societal turmoil does not lend itself to progressive work, but to xenophobic, constricted cultural production. What I can say is that it’s deeply human of us to want to make beauty and truth in the face of despair. Hip-hop, in its most vital forms, lives close to these stories, and can tell them more truthfully than most of what we are confronted with in this ether of globalized, corporatized images and narratives.

In an an interview about Total Chaos, you said, “Name your genre, and I can probably tell you how hip-hop has changed it.” Ok: Crocheting. Kidding. But what about, say, mainstream media? Or country music? Is there a far-flung genre you can name that I'd be surprised has changed because of hip hop?

Mainstream media–er, Don Imus? OK, very bad example. Country music–Big & Rich?! How about modern dance? I’m still surprised at how choreographers like Rennie Harris have transformed the ways in which elite dance critics now discuss Black social dance.

You've been praised for highlighting the non-celebrities of hip-hop, local organizers who are pushing for small-scale change in their own neighborhoods. Can you name one in the Twin Cities?

How can I stop at just one? I think the work of folks at Intermedia Arts and Juxtaposition Arts is amazing–they actually are creating global models. And although I haven’t been to the B-Girl-Be events, believe me I’m feeling the repercussions of their work everywhere I go on tour and the topic of gender and hip-hop cultural production comes up. I think the B-Girl-Be folks are creating a wave of inspiration all around the world, not just among girls and women, who finally get to be centered in the discussions and the cultural production, but among boys and men who now have a space to really express more of themselves.

What do you do when you're not engrossed in all things hip-hop?

I love the Oakland A’s. I respect the Minnesota Twins. I very much enjoy seeing the Yankees and the Red Sox lose to the Twins or the A’s.

What was your favorite Halloween costume as a kid?

I wasn’t very good at dressing up, although if I did now I might dig a pirate costume. Last year both my sons dressed up as Frank Thomas.

What contemporary artists do you currently follow? What about non-rock/hip hop music?

I really dig Mark Bradford’s work. Just got to see a show with him, Robin Rhode, and William Cordova at the Nasher and it was great. Musically, I’m omnivorous, so I’m always munching on other stuff as much as I am hip-hop or rock. Right now, I’m digging lots of dubstep, the new Spanish Harlem Orchestra and Chuck Brown albums, a new reggae album by Natural Black, and this old school house track by Joe Smooth called Promised Land.

What's on your bedside table right now?

Theme, Dwell, ColorLines, and the New York Times Magazines, Brian Coleman’s ridiculously great Check The Technique, Tezuka’s Buddha series, Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals paperbacks (Kid Power! and Rainbow Power!)

Next April, we're bringing Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s The Breaks to the Walker. It's inspired, in part, by your work. What's your involvement been and how does it feel to have your social history and cultural theory brought to life by dancers and artists?

Bamuthi and I are good friends, which to me is a major bonus, because I think he is one of the most exciting people working in theatre right now. In fact, I have told him this, a lot of what Bamuthi does with the word in his pieces–the density and depth, the multiple levels of references, the sheer joy of saying and hearing it all tumble out–gave me the courage to cut loose on my writing in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. It’s a loop of inspiration! While we have had lots of conversations about the piece, and I’ve seen portions of it so far, I really can’t claim to have any hand in his brilliance. The Breaks is going to amaze people.

And: can you dance?

Yes, but as my wife and kids often remind me, not well! Stick to the writing, they say, so I will!

Photo by Rachel Perry for Red Bull Music Academy

Leah Nelson leading a hip-hop dance workshop at Free First Saturday.

One of the highlights of my job coordinating family programs is working with local artists to develop creative and engaging learning opportunities for youth. Leah Nelson, a Minneapolis-based dancer, choreographer, producer, and teaching-artist, has been an amazing educational resource not only to the Walker, but the local art community. I asked her to talk about her role as a teaching-artist:

My relationship with hip-hop education and the Walker was reinforced after the Hip-Hop Moves Festival in 2003 and has continued over the past three summers when I’ve taught the Hip-Hop Moves dance class to youth.

With the youth classes it’s been great to see the progress young movers have made after returning each summer for an intensive week of hip-hop and funk dance and culture. The encounters between the students and teaching-artist team I work with in my company Nubia, (a performing arts collective), have created exciting environments encouraging strength, stamina and creativity as well as some excellent dance moves.

My interest has always been to encourage learners of all ages to find access to the depth of culture that hip-hop has to offer. Unfortunately the current media-driven images and highly charged environments portrayed today do not give due props to the richness and community-oriented beginnings hip-hop has to offer.

I love any opportunity I have to bring this understanding and increase my own knowledge - to participate with potential b-girls and b-boys, grafitti artists, DJs and MCs. As often as I can I organize and mostly collaborate to reap the socially jubilant rewards of programs like B-girl Be : A Celebration of Women in Hip-hop at Intermedia Arts and workshops like Hip Hop 101 happening at the Walker in April. Hip-Hop 101 is for young ones who don’t often have access can try out their skillz at the turntables, on the mic and on the dance floor … they can even get some writing technique … the idea is that these morning sessions are infused with all the tools representing the elements - and understand that its more than a “bling” thing.

This month THE ARTIST’S BOOKSHELF discusses Cintra Wilson’s coming-of-age novel COLORS INSULTING TO NATURE. It’s an intriguing read, to say the least, and raised a number of thought-provoking questions. So many in fact, that I thought it my duty, as moderator of the book club, to contact Ms. Wilson and ask her some questions of my own.

ME: Okay, we're dying to know. Because we're all star-chasing, celebrity-worshipping freaks, we're curious as to how much of your novel is autobiographical. (Not in the corny, James Frey, did-it-really-happen manner, but in the broader sense of a writer drawing on personal background and experience.)

CINTRA: Well, really, it wasn't SPECIFICALLY autobiographical (I have the opposite problem as Frey - I keep hoping nobody will really connect the dots connecting any of my book to Truth). But I like to think what was real about it was the emotional wringer; all those terrible humiliations, all those moments where Liza fails to be the person she wishes she was, both professionally and morally. Nobody specific, in the book, was anyone specific, although there were quite a few composites where I Frankenstein'd two or three or four people together to make one person. The actual events of Liza's life, and her upbringing, were....ahem....ENTIRELY different from mine.

ME: Most of your novel is set in California, which seems to be the ideal backdrop for the various coming-of-age themes you examine. Why California and not Nebraska, Florida, or New Jersey?

CINTRA: I've never lived anywhere but San Francisco, LA, and New York. Ya write what you know - I wouldn't be able to describe Nebraska with any authority. Or Florida, for that matter. All I know about Jersey I learned on 'The Sopranos.' But California has the special weirdness of being the state that houses Hollywood - and even if you live in Northern California, you are still subject to the spell of that bizarre, throbbing glow from over there. For some reason (maybe because I'm older) Hollywood seems a lot less important on the East Coast. But on the West Coast it really had the Power of Myth, when I was growing up.

ME: You absolutely nail the 80's. Will history be any kinder to that era?

CINTRA: I think I was one of six people that really enjoyed the eighties. It was a fairly innocent, creative time to be a club-kid. People worked really hard to create looks that were bold and interesting - they didn't just go out and buy a bunch of Prada shit and prance around in it. That would have been laughable. It would have looked square, boring and pathetic. Now, of course, I adore Prada, but that's because your brain gets smaller as you get older. I think designers have been slowly but methodically taking the Power of Fashion away from creative kids, since the 80's — we used to be able to tear t-shirts and pile on a bunch of rubber junk jewelry and rip up and an old prom dress and do outrageous hairstyles, like the punks, or like Madonna did in the 80's - and make solid enough statements to influence the way our peers dressed. Most of our stuff came from thrift stores, and that was cool. That would be much harder now - kids have to have those $200 jeans and $4000 handbag and the like. If you had that bag in the 80's,, it would get stolen, and everyone would laugh at you. Now everyone looks exactly the same, and it's totally boring.

ME: With Liza you developed a stunning Holden Caulfield-like protagonist. Most of the novel seems to reflect her point of view, even though it remains narrated in the third person. Did you ever consider doing the novel in the first person?

CINTRA: Interesting. No, I didn't want to do it first-person, because Liza's vocabulary would have been too limiting - plus, she ages something like 20 years, over the course of the book. I didn't want it to be a "looking back" type fake memoir. Plus, I wanted to say things about Liza that only God could say - really get into her head and reveal all her most embarrassing thoughts and secrets in such a way that she would DIE if she knew. I was really quite sadistic to poor Liza.

ME: Throughout the novel, Liza continually reinvents herself, striving to attain fame, recognition, and stardom. Ironically, she finally gains some degree of success in Las Vegas, a city that constantly reinvents itself. What's the most outrageous Vegas stage show you ever witnessed?

CINTRA: Breasts and motorcycles and some kind of swimming-aquarium, all at the same time. I saw Siegfried and Roy, too, but that was kind of a loser. The all-time most vomitous Hollywood performer ever, though, is Danny Gans. He's like the comedy answer to Wayne Newton. He makes me feel as if I have been entirely hosed-down with simple-syrup and live maggots.

ME: Liza's brother Ned serves as sort of a doppleganger/mirror image, an extremely introverted visual artist with no career ambitions. Ironically, he achieves notoriety when picked up by a gallery and promoted as an outsider artist. Here you seem to say that celebrity might NOT be so totally arbitrary after all. Have you softened your stance?

CINTRA: I actually posited Ned as my example of someone who really, really NEEDS to be left alone - not only does he not want fame, he's agoraphobic and literally CAN'T be seen - and this is the thing that attracts fame to him. Liza would kill for it, so Fame doesn't want her. Fame would kill Ned, so it seeks him out. Ned is also supposed to be the example of what I think is the artistic ideal: someone just very, very involved in making their beautiful thing, who has no particular vested interest in anyone else liking it. Liza tries so hard to please a hateful public - Ned simply works hard on something that is his own, pure expression of beauty, for himself. But as far as my stance, re: fame - yeah, it's pretty random. Some people who deserve it get it, obviously. Some don't, and some who clearly don't deserve it are on the cover of Entertainment Weekly.

ME: In the novel, as with many of your writings, you display a fascination/horror with the concept of celebrity and its place in American culture. We're now blessed/cursed with "American Idol," "Celebrity Chef," "America's Next Top Model," "Extreme Makeover," and myspace.com. Where do we go from here? Any thoughts about further evolution of our concept of celebrity?

CINTRA: I think we should bring back public executions. It's the logical next step. Simulcast them. Camus says if you're going to do the death penalty, do it big.

ME: In The Artist's Bookshelf, we try to pair books with exhibitions at the Walker. We're reading COLORS INSULTING TO NATURE in conjunction with the current Sharon Lockhart exhibition Do you see any connections to her work?

CINTRA: I like the idea of kids, kind of unattended. The 80's were more like that. Kids are under such lockdown these days. I think a lot of the things parents fear are their children having the kind of formative experiences that were actually very important for them — the parents - when they were young. Kids at that age...it looks like they're around 10, or 11 - are very wise, complicated creatures. They haven't yet been rendered idiotic by sex and the awful self-consciousness that comes with puberty. They're thinking about wild, abstract things - just beginning to get a little bit defensive.

ME: What are you reading these days?

CINTRA: Oy. Lots of stuff. I'm reading "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" by Mark Haddon; "Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations" by Christopher Lasch; "Talk of the Devil: Encounters With Seven Dictators" by Riccardio Orizio, and ELLE Décor.

ME: What's next for you?

CINTRA: I'm working on a few things. I have a one-man show (I KNOW, I just hate saying "One Woman" or "One Person" - it sounds idiotic)that I'm going to be performing in NYC and, I think, the UK, called "Contextual Retardation and Cultural Narcissism".....I'm also doing the American version of a British hit book called "Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?" which is by two very funny chaps named Steve Lowe & Alan McArthur....the Britishisms are too thick for the American audience...also, I'm coming out with a Christmas Fable next year, tentatively titled "You Better Watch Out." Think of it as a cross between "Frosty The Snowman's Christmas in July" and "The Manchurian Candidate."

And the usual articles. You can finally check out my tabloid-meltdown column, The DREGULATOR, on my website now: www.cintrawilson.com. It is actually being updated regularly, for once.

ME: Thanks, Cintra.

CINTRA: Have fun with the book.

To check reviews of COLORS INSULTING TO NATURE go to:

http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/colors_insulting_to_nature/

To learn more about the Sharon Lockhart exhibit go to:

http://calendar.walkerart.org/canopy.wac?id=2684