The Omnibus Roundup – Jerks, Maps, Mediamesh, Redistricting and Painting Urbanism

DON’T BE A JERK
The NYC Department of Transportation just launched “Don’t Be a Jerk,” a new bicycle safety ad campaign as part of the umbrella initiative BikeSmart, which aims to educate cyclists and other road users about sharing our streets safely. The video campaign features celebrities like Mario Batali, John Leguizamo and Paulina Porizkova biking badly — being jerks — to illustrate how not to behave on the road. Catch all the videos on DOT’s site.
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From the Topographical Atlas of the City of New York, 1874 | via nypl.org

FIND OF THE DAY: MAPS
Do you like maps? We do! The New York Public Library has compiled digital versions of some of the oldest and most beautiful maps of the city on its website — 7,100 pages from 124 historical atlases of New York. The list includes fire insurance maps, topographic, zoning and property maps and more. Browse through the digital gallery here and click through to purchase prints of many of them in the NYPL store. (via @urbnscl)

Mediamesh | via ag4 mediatecture

.MEDIAMESH WRAPS PORT AUTHORITY
By the end of June, the Port Authority Bus Terminal will be wrapped in Mediamesh, a metal weave peppered with LED lights developed by GKD-USA, a joint effort of a German lighting engineer firm and an American metal manufacturer. This new “fabric” can be wrapped around buildings without disrupting interior views to the outside and, in the case of the Port Authority, will allow permeability for exhaust fumes to escape. Mediamesh can be used as advertising space or for art installations and, as the Architect’s Newspaper’s A/N Blog notes, its concealment of the terminal’s façade is seen by many as a bonus.

EVENTS & TO DOs:

KNOW YOUR LINES: Next Wednesday, May 18th, head over to McNally Jackson Bookstore at 7pm for a talk on the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s Making Policy Public Series with CUP Executive Director Christine Gaspar and Erika Wood, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, moderated by our own Cassim Shepard. The latest iteration of the series is Know Your Lines, a look at the largely invisible redistricting process and why it matters. For more information about Making Policy Public, which uses graphic design to explore and explain complex urban policy, check out CUP’s MPP website or look back at two Omnibus features on previous editions: Vendor Power! and Predatory Equity.
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Haas&Hann proposal for New York City

PAINTING URBANISM: Dutch artists Haas&Hann are known for their bold, colorful, large-scale murals and favela paintings that aim to activate the urban fabric through public art created by the residents of the communities themselves. Their urban interventions are now being featured in an exhibition, opening tonight at Storefront for Art and Architecture, titled “Painting Urbanism: Learning from Rio.” Paintings, documentary footage, pictures, sketches and plans of past, present and future projects — including a series of proposals for New York City, Paris and Cairo — will be on display at Storefront through July 30th.
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PARSONS FESTIVAL: Parsons New School for Design launched its first art and design festival on May 7th. The festival, with over 200 events, is going on through May 23rd and includes a day-long block party on Saturday, May 21, from 11am to 5pm on West 13th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Some upcoming talks include: scientists, scholars, and technology experts talking about where Transhumanism Meets Design (May 14-15), a symposium on technology’s potential to radically transform the human condition; Water Fight: Fracking, Food, Art and Economy (May 16), in which a panel, moderated by Anna Lappé, author of Diet for a Hot Planet, will address industrial hydrofracking (drilling rock formations for oil and natural gas) and tools for protecting ecosystems and building a green economy; and many, many more. See the full schedule here.
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Roberto Mollá Ricochet at CHRISTINA RAY

RICOCHET: Check out Valencia-based artist Roberta Mollá’s latest exhibition, Ricochet, at the CHRISTINA RAY gallery. This new series of paintings marks the first major presentation of Mollá’s work on canvas. For more information about Mollá’s work, look back at our Omnibus artist interview with him: Symmetrical Mud and the Floating World. (May 12th – June 12th)
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