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Here's a drawing I thought you'd appreciate! It’s the Obama Lotteria card. Are you familiar with this Mexican game?	FOOD FOR THOUGHT is a look at three young artists, Crystal Liu, Tim Sullivan and Takako Tanabe, who are using either the subjectivity or the objectivity of food as a deeper look into the various aspects of our daily lives.
It’s our one-year anniversary this month and in OD-CAP’s effort to explore themes that are valued by our contributors and users, this issue continues to consider works of art that engage us.	Bayete Ross Smith focuses on identities saying "I wanted to do something with I.D. [cards] and I was thinking about that Old Dirty Bastard Album cover where his face is on the welfare card. I was thinking about drivers’ licenses, work I.D.’s, you know putting all these different people’s faces on [them].”
I had a conversation and exchanged emails with Ulysses Jenkins about the topic of race and/in digital space. I asked Jenkins to explain his early efforts with computer-based imaging and to discuss this so-called race-blind digital environment.	The OD-CAP audience of users is an intimate one and one of OD-CAP’s successes is that it has given its contributors a voice and a sense of community on the web. During 2008, OD-CAP is investigating race and digital space. Since our interest at OD-CAP is on art, our contributors have focused on how artists have embraced different digital technologies and how they are getting their work out to larger and crossover audiences that they may not have been able to reach in more traditional museum and gallery exhibition models.
Returning to the Bay Area, I had a meeting at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, CA. There I saw their latest exhibition entitled Africa [dot] com: Drums 2 Digital. The exhibition information states that the show “presents a look at the uses of digital technology in the art and social life of Africa’s first digital generation”. While at the museum, I met Deborah Stokes, the guest curator for the show. We discussed the show and the broader issues related to the technological transformations in Africa.	Jaime Lowe talks about making a degree in art work for her until she gets that art job that she studied for.
Nicole J. Caruth asks Fahamu Pecou about his series, The Shit. "Why not use the tricks-of-the-trade from my life as a graphic designer? At the time, I was designing a lot of the promotional collateral for hip hop artists, and clubs, etc."

The Wisdom of OUR Crowd

Since launching ODCAP in February of this year, I have continually tried to make this a more active site for its users by inviting them to join me as collaborators and contributors in the navigational function and content development of the site. I took this approach because we in the art world often talk too much to each other and do not invite  enough dialogue from those outside of our discipline.

Having finally arrived at my residency in southern France, I have been reflecting on what I plan to accomplish here. Aside from merging my various roles as artist, curator, and art historian into an art process that encompasses all three "hats", I want recommendations from you, our users for artists that you think we should highlight or feature on ODCAP. Who are the new artists that you feel we should look at? Who are some of the established artists that we might expose to our users? These artists need not be artists of African descent, just artists who you feel we should be aware of.



We welcome your responses. Tell us why you are recommending the artist and complete contact information, list of sources to learn more about the artist, and at least two jpgs of their work. Please also tell us about yourself—you need not have any background in art to make a recommendation.

Fill out artist recommendation form.

About OD-CAP

Open Door-Contemporary Art Projects (OD-CAP) offers a novel approach to accessing art and culture information. Using a combination of different media, OD-CAP exists in a new virtual territory and takes the “best practices” in the complex world of art museums and exhibitions to “extend the white cube” making it possible for artists, scholars, and curators to interact with off and online communities.

OD-CAP is a specific content-oriented social-networking interactive collaborative site to change long held assumptions about audiences and their engagement with art. The OD-CAP website explores and develops the intersection between technology and community-building. At OD-CAP, visitors at all levels can discover new colleagues and collaborators through shared interests. Visitors can also adapt new media habits through the OD-CAP site exploring technology to make a difference in their personal visual literacy and the visual literacy of their communities.