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Magnificent Distance, 5x5 Public Art Festival

5x5, Washington DC’s inaugural public art festival, saw twenty-five site-specific artworks developed by five invited curators – appointed by the DC Commission for the Arts & Humanities after an internationally-promoted open-call and 80+ applicants.

Under the title Magnificent Distance Hollinshead’s research explored the slippage between the symbolic DC of the worldwide public imagination and the ‘domestic’, human DC with its complex histories and communities. He purposefully selected five UK-based artists to facilitate this sense of cultural dislocation, acting as the mediator between DC and the UK, and selecting exhibition sites at the interstices of these two DC realities – meeting points between federal and community environments, locations undergoing transformations between uses, and at points where differing scales of architecture meet.

The principal outputs were site-specific installations in Washington DC (20 March - 28 April 2012) at the United States Supreme Court, Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library, National Building Museum, Navy Yard, Cosmos Club, Techworld Plaza and a screening at the Library of Congress. Research was also presented at the symposium: ‘Envisioning a Future for Public Art’ Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC (March 2012).

Hollinshead’s five projects were significantly different from previous public art commissioning by the DCCAH, providing a more socially engaged, critically rigorous model in which the site-specificity of the artworks extended beyond the spatial to consider historical and political aspects. Whilst the 5x5 festival was conceived as a one-off event, its success (including coverage in the US media - New York Times, Washington Post and Public Art Review) has seen it become a flagship biennial.

Magnificent Distance’s potential as a commissioning model for Newcastle was explored through curation of the documentary exhibition at Globe Gallery; editing the eponymous Magnificent Distance publication and authoring one chapter; and co-organising the one-day conference (54 attendees, including policy makers, council officers and design professionals).