The cover image for this issue of Artkrush is a detail of A Skate Park that Glides over the Land & Drops into the Sea, a digital rendering by Acconci Studio. The design studio is exhibiting this proposal for a San Juan skate park in Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006, which is on view at New York City's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, through July 29 and at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston from September 8 to January 6, 2008.

Born to Italian immigrants in 1940, Vito Acconci grew up in the Bronx, New York, and first worked as a poet before shifting to interactive performance art in the '60s. His body became a prominent subject in profane yet intellectual works such as Seedbed, for which he lay beneath a gallery floor, masturbating for eight hours a day while whispering pornographic fantasies to gallery-goers. From these corporeal performances, Acconci progressed to photography, film, and audiovisual installations. The Renaissance man's work has been shown in solo exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, and Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, and in numerous other museums and galleries worldwide.

Turning to more spatial interactions with the public, Acconci founded the architecture and design firm Acconci Studio in Brooklyn, New York, in 1988. His sweeping, often computer-aided designs respond to a given site with poetic flourish. In A Skate Park that Glides over the Land & Drops into the Sea, Acconci's curving structure echoes both the site's topography and skateboarders' looping arcs. The studio's installations, restaurants, and design solutions prove that design can be as pioneering and lyrical as any of the mediums Acconci has mastered. (LM)