senseofplace LAB is an artistic laboratory to develop a language of place – using art / architecture / design / language / urban planning formats – to facilitate dialogue re: where we live: locally and globally. It was founded by Laurie Halsey Brown in San Francisco in 2008 based on research/projects since 2000. senseofplace LAB creates projects for both an art context, and in collaboration with – and then placed into – communities. Each senseofplace LAB project continues a development toward a language of place, in order to create a shared way to communicate about places we are connected to. One benefit of this is for architects, urban planners and developers to better communicate with those that live in the places that they design/build for.
senseofplace LAB is currently located in the Sunshine Biscuit Factory near the Coliseum BART in the East Bay. 8000 San Leandro Street, 94621. Take a left off 81st from San Leandro and it’s over U-Haul.
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Laurie Halsey Brown: Bio
Laurie Halsey Brown is the Director/Founder of senseofplace LAB. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1990. After which, she lived in New York City for ten years before moving to Rotterdam, the Netherlands for five years. She has been living in San Francisco since 2007.
A large scale interdisciplinary piece based on her residency in the World Trade Center was shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC in 2001, and her work afterwards has been shown nationally in places such as Exit Art, White Columns and internationally, including creating several large interdisciplinary art projects funded by the Dutch and British government. She has also had video work shown internationally in such venues as the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
She was one of ten finalists for a 2012 Masterminds Grant from SF Weekly: Honoring the Bay Area’s Most Inventive Artists. Her photographs were in an 2011-2012 exhibition in the Bay Area juried by Sandra S. Phillips, Senior Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Drew Johnson, Curator of Photography at the Oakland Museum of California – and won a Jurors Choice Award. She is also included in the 2011-2012 exhibition Before the Fall at the New York State Museum.
Brown’s work has been written about in Art in America, and several times in The New York Times, and most recently in SF Weekly. Her works are part of the permanent collection in the Museum Boijmans, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and in many private collections. She has been actively involved in guest residencies nationally and internationally including Belfast, N. Ireland; Berlin, Germany; Rotterdam, the Netherlands and in the UK.
She was a faculty member of the New School University, NYC from 1999 to 2012, where she designed and taught an online course titled ‘Interdisciplinary Media and Contemporary Society.’