{"id":22,"date":"2014-03-26T07:48:50","date_gmt":"2014-03-26T11:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=22"},"modified":"2018-10-09T17:10:14","modified_gmt":"2018-10-09T21:10:14","slug":"see-the-saddest-parade-on-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2014\/03\/26\/see-the-saddest-parade-on-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"See the Saddest Parade on Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"picCookEnchantedMont140325_0183w1050\"<\/a>Celebrate our Great Depression at artist Greg Cook\u2019s \u201cThe Saddest Parade on Earth,\u201d which marches along the sidewalks of Beverly\u2019s Cabot Street beginning at 11 a.m. Sad-urday, March 29.<\/p>\n

The parade will feature sad banners and signs, as well as a sad accordionist. And perhaps even a sad stilter. For real. The parade begins at\u00a0248 Cabot St, Beverly, Massachusetts.<\/a><\/p>\n

The parade concludes at Cook\u2019s exhibition \u201cThe Saddest Forest on Earth\u201d (pictured above) on view in the storefront windows of\u00a0Montserrat College of Art\u2019s Frame 301 Gallery<\/a>, 301 Cabot St., Beverly, Massachusetts, for free, 24-hours-a-day, from March 28 to Friday, April 18. The exhibition is a large diorama depicting an enchanted forest of crying, cartoony trees. (Model pictured above.)<\/p>\n

If you would like to volunteer to walk in the parade, contact Greg Cook at\u00a0gcook30@hotmail.com<\/a>. Participants are asked to wear dapper attire and help carry a sad banner or sign. Sadness is a helpful qualification, but not required.<\/p>\n

Cook will also give a free talk about his work, \u201cRemaking Our Sad World: What Can You Accomplish with Art, Community Activism and World-Building?,\u201d at 11:30 a.m. Monday, April 14, in room 201 of Montserrat\u2019s Hardie Building, 23 Essex St, Beverly.<\/p>\n

\"picCookEnchanted140325_0117w1050\"<\/a><\/p>\n

About the Artist<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

Greg Cook is an artist, journalist and teacher based in Malden, Massachusetts. \u201cThe Saddest Forest on Earth\u201d is an offshoot of his \u201cEnchanted Forest\u201d series, which imagines a land of magical trees and birds and witches and hungry wolves. It\u2019s inspired by the history of New England, as well as Disney films and McDonald\u2019s restaurant playgrounds.<\/p>\n

Parts of the \u201cEnchanted Forest\u201d have been exhibited at Aviary Gallery in Boston; 17 Cox in Beverly; Zeitgeist Gallery in Lowell; Window Arts Malden; the Malden Parade of Holiday Traditions, and the bathrooms of Boston\u2019s Museum of Fine Arts.<\/p>\n

Cook\u2019s comics\u2014from documentaries of the Iraq war to jokes for kids\u2014have appeared in\u00a0Nickelodeon<\/a>\u00a0magazine, Publishers Weekly, The Believer and elsewhere. His funny graphic novel \u201cCatch As Catch Can\u201d was published by Highwater Books in 2001 and earned the\u00a0Ignatz Award for Promising New Talent at Small Press (Comics) Expo<\/a>\u00a0in Maryland the following year. His work received honorable mentions in \u201cThe Best American Comics\u201d editions of 2006 and 2007.<\/p>\n

Cook\u2019s drawings, paintings and prints have also been exhibited across the United States as well as in Canada, France and Italy. He was one of the many co-authors (along with Anne Elizabeth Moore, Steve Lambert and The Yes Men) of the\u00a0fake 2008 \u201cNew York Times\u201d political satire headlined \u201cIraq War Ends.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Cook hosts the monthly \u201cQuiet, Please\u201d art and culture talks at the Malden Public Library. And he teaches at Montserrat College of Art.<\/p>\n

Cook is best known locally as an arts reporter and critic for\u00a0WBUR.org\u2019s The ARTery<\/a>, which he co-founded, and The\u00a0Providence Phoenix<\/a>. He was the founder of\u00a0The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research<\/a>\u00a0(2006 to 2013), for which he won a 2009 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation arts writers grant. He has launched a new blog called\u00a0Wonderland<\/a>, which recently won a Malden Cultural Council grant.<\/p>\n

He is known for efforts under his title\u00a0\u201cYokelism\u201d<\/a>\u00a0to foster New England\u2019s art community, including founding and running the annual New England Art Awards from 2009 to 2012. He organized a\u00a0guerilla exhibition of nearly two dozen artists in the bathrooms of Boston\u2019s Museum of Fine Arts<\/a>\u00a0in 2011 for fun and to highlight the museum\u2019s disinterest in art being made in the region. He ran a quixotic campaign to try to\u00a0rid the region of bad public art<\/a>. And he successfully sparked a\u00a0community effort that got the Museum of Fine Arts to restore its Maud Morgan Prize\u00a0<\/a>for local women artists. Thomas Garvey of The Hub Review has called him\u00a0\u201ca new kind of activist-critic.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Read a 2013\u00a0interview with Greg Cook by the Massachusetts Cultural Council here<\/a>.\u00a0Follow him on Twitter@Aestheticresear<\/a>. Friend him on\u00a0Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Celebrate our Great Depression at artist Greg Cook\u2019s \u201cThe Saddest Parade on Earth,\u201d which marches along the sidewalks of Beverly\u2019s Cabot Street beginning at 11 a.m. Sad-urday, March 29. The parade will feature sad banners and signs, as well as a sad accordionist. And perhaps even a sad stilter. For real. The parade begins at\u00a0248 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,119,103],"tags":[8,6,41,7],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3995,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions\/3995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}