This project facilitates dialog around (and the actual creation of) homes for rats and mice in the city of Greensboro. Modular kits were fabricated and then local high school students assembled them, all the while discussing issues of shelter and need. We have a surplus, we have skills, and we can devote the time to be generous citizens, even across species boundaries. Everyone, everything, needs a home.
Rod Northcutt is interested in people—how they live, die, love, fight, screw, eat, drink, share, hoard, isolate, commune, work, make, and think. He was trained in art schools (MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA in Painting & Drawing from the University of North Texas) and he has exhibited internationally, although he gave up on making pretty things for rich people long ago. He has lived and worked in Austin, Southern New Mexico, Chicago, Detroit, Rochester, and Southern Ohio, and he began teaching at the university level in 1999 in El Paso. He now creates projects that aim to generate dialogs within communities through creative, making-based practice. He is a professor of sculpture at Miami University, Ohio and he maintains a community studio in rural College Corner, OH, Called MAKETANK Projects with his wife Christina Miller and also is one of two co-directors of MAKETANK, Inc. which administers the Oxford Kinetics Festival. Refusing to work alone, he collaborates with other like-minded artists and collectives, cultural groups, and citizens of small communities to use art, intervention, and dialog to address social challenges.
