Freehouse signage
Jeanne van Heeswijk.
Recently, in the second week of January 2014, I was invited to a conference in South Rotterdam's Afrikaanderwijk ...
Recently, I have had a few experiences that have encouraged my thinking on how a socially-engaged art project, or any experiential artwork that actively facilitates and engenders interactions among its participants or with the work itself, aligns with theoretical educational models.
The region of Southern California produces hundreds of MFA graduates each year, yet the traditional (and even non-traditional) art markets barely support a frac...
For the next in this series of interviews in conjunction with the SOCiAL: Art + Peopleinitiative of public programs, I sat down with Anne Bray (artist, organizer of SOCiAL and founder of LA Freewaves) and Fabian Wagmister (director of the Interpretive Media Laboratory, IMLab).
I feel a resonant sadness at the passing of this platform, one of the few dependable spaces for rigorous socially-engaged practice within a major art museum in this city. Perhaps the work was not always so rigorous, and the structure was problematic, the collectives were not always collectives, the "social practice" looked more like straight-up performance at times, and MOCA itself became increasingly unstable territory for experimental work to find purchase. But Engagement Party mirrored my own love affair with social practice, way back when I saw the backwards lettering of the Finishing School poster suddenly clarify in the mirror of the USC IFT building's women's bathroom.
Last week, the fantastic Justin Langlois of Broken City Lab asked me to answer this question for an interview series they are doing:
Is social practice, as a...
Yesterday I watched the “Public Art” episode of Bravo network’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. Besides the ho-hum projects produced and the silly, shall...
The three days I spent in Portland for PSU's Open Engagement Conference were blessed with perfect weather, and the city seemed lush and magical. I'd never been ...
Artist Eric Steen, a recent graduate from the Social Practice MFA program at Portland State University, wrote me the following in an email yesterday:
“In ...
One of the issues with art that is inherently based on social exchange is that these practices have not really been clearly examined or theorized. There is a te...