"Art Makes A Better Place"

Candy Chang is a public installation artist, designer, and urban planner who turns art into architectural renewal projects, by making it a public effort. Candy likes to make cities more comfortable for people to live in. She’s the co-founder of Civic Center, an urban design studio where she combines architecture, graphic design, and urban planning to make thoughtful public spaces and communication tools for everyday issues of city life. She’s passionate about redefining the ways we use public space to share information important to our neighborhoods and to our individual well-being.

Her parents immigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. Candy spent her time as a child, growing up in the cornfields of Ohio and beyond. She now lives in New Orleans where she "loves porches, palm trees, and ceiling fans" while working on public art projects, big and small. She believes that one of the greatest things in life is spending time in public places with the people you love. She also believes that these spaces can better serve the people who live, work, and play in them.

Which brings us to Candy's latest project, entitled "Before I Die." Candy sets the foundation of this project with a simple question: What do you want to do before you die?

Turns out, there are many answers to this. For her latest project, “Before I Die” artist Candy Chang asks this question in a very public way. She turned the side of an abandoned house in her neighborhood into a giant chalkboard, where residents can fill in the blank and remember what is important to them in life. It’s also about turning a neglected space into a constructive one, where people can learn the hopes and aspirations of others in their immediate surroundings. For Candy, “Before I Die” has proven to be a great lesson, experience, and project. Visitors get only one piece of chalk and one line on which to write their answers. Some are serious "she my daughter graduate" while others are plain silly "wear a pirate suit."

The wall awaits your scribbling, if you are in the New Orleans area [900 Marigny St.]

Among her achievements, Candy is a 2011 TED Senior Fellow and has a B.S. in Architecture, a B.F.A. in Graphic Design, and a Master’s degree in Urban Planning from Columbia University. After co-founding design firm & record label Red Antenna in New York City, she collaborated with community organizations on urban design projects in New York, Nairobi, Vancouver, New Orleans, and Johannesburg. She was an art director at The New York Times and a design researcher at Nokia in Helsinki. She was also a project leader for Global Studio and a fellow at the Spatial Information Design Lab. She has performed electro in New York, Detroit, and Grenoble, and her work has been exhibited at the National Design Museum, Koltsovo International Airport, and many humble sidewalks.

Making the world a better place through art is Candy's expression and we're happy to have seen public space in a different light. Any place can be made beautiful, through community and compassion.

Images from candychang.com

Hilary Lauren Fox
		About the author:
		Sometimes she's a redhead, sometimes she's a blonde. Some days it's H&M, and on other days, it's Chanel. What ever the mood, she is a woman who is passionate about the arts, fashion and social media. Born in Toronto, Hilary Lauren Fox is an only child to artist parents - mom was an illustrator and pattern maker, dad was a painter.  Rather then studying the arts as her parents hoped for, Hilary opted for a degree in psychology with dreams of working in a clinical setting. But after graduating she realized that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree and that the arts was in her blood, applying her education within the art and fashion world.
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