Anhoek School Marfa Slideshow

Photos by Elizabeth White, Julia Sherman, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Susan Sakash and Rob Crowley

Further musings on the July 1st presentation can be found here.

Armadillo Project has a new mobile home!

Some avid RISD | Public Engagement blog readers might remember the Armadillo Project, an MIT-sponsored repurposing of a FEMA trailer, from the Tricks of the Eye exhibition earlier this spring.

Last week, MIT professor and Armadillo project coordinator Jae Rhim Lee, passed off the keys to the trailer to an AMAZING arts group based out of Pasadena, CA called Side Street Projects. In a nutshell Side Street Projects is a completely-mobile artist-run organization that helps visual artists with a wide array of unusual programs and practical services that help artists roll up their sleeves and do things themselves.

Each year, more than 1,000 children age 5-11 participate in SSP's renowned Woodworking Bus program, which teaches kids how to use tools and create unique objects out of wood. For the grown-ups, they also provide a host of practical support services designed to meet the needs of working artists.

You can follow the Armadillo's journey back to California here. Once it returns the Armadillo will become newest addition to Side Streets fleet of mobile art education classrooms for kids in LA County.

A happy ending to a great piece of public art!

Project Open Door DEEP DOCUMENTATION

THURSDAY, JUNE 18 FROM 5-8PM

at the RISD | Public Engagement Gallery
IN RISD’S CIT BUILDING, 169 WEYBOSETT STREET, 2ND Floor

Project Open Door and RISD | Public Engagement invite you to the opening of DEEP DOCUMENTATION, a multimedia installation by local teaching artist and documentarian Jori Ketten resulting from Ketten's participation in a year-long RISD Project Open Door classroom.

Deep Documentation is funded by the Surdna Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Contrasting with standard evaluation projects by resisting reduction and simplification, the installation instead provides a textured look at student learning via interactive exhibits, video, and the pairing of text and still images.

What are students really taking away from my classroom?

At the end of the school year, educators around the country are asking themselves this question as summer vacation approaches. Tests, papers, standardized tests, and rubrics help school teachers analyze what students have learned, but questions remain: What did my students deeply absorb? What changed or shifted for them this year? What do they really think about their work, and what are they taking away for the experience of being in my classroom?

The same questions apply for teaching artists working in schools and after-school programs. It's easy to say arts learning is visible. We know when a student enjoys the arts and we can see his or her skills improve. But what else is he getting out of it? What will she remember? What were the bright moments, what stood out? Why? And how do the arts fit into students' lives when they're not in an arts classroom?

A year-long research and documentation project at RISD’s Project Open Door.

During the 2008-2009 school year, teaching artist and documentarian Jori Ketten was invited to RISD's Project Open Door. Ms. Ketten came to class weekly and piloted participatory observation practices in the program's Portfolio 1 class with the goal of helping program staff understand why students come to Project Open Door and what they get out of the experience.

Project Open Door is a free after school art education and college access program aimed at students from low income families attending Rhode Island’s struggling public schools.

Featuring students' own work and words, the installation is the culmination of Ms. Ketten’s research and investigation. Ms. Ketten will also lead a workshop on June 19 as part of Plugging In: Connecting Teaching Artists with New Media and Technology, a conference at RISD sponsored by the New England Consortium of Artist Educators (www.artisteducators.org).

Design*Sponge Interview with Peter Hocking

A couple of weeks ago, Peter was interviewed on behalf of New Urban Arts by the editors at Design Sponge.

The guest blog article was published over the long weekend:

http://www.designspongeonline.com/2009/05/peter-hocking-new-urban-arts.html

Summer Jobs at Riverzedge

RiverzEdge Arts Project (Woonsocket) seeks:

Landscape Design Project Supervisor
and Mural Project Supervisor

Start Date: 6/22/2009 (temporary summer positions)

Must have BA or BFA. Ideal for recent graduates in Landscape Architecture and Painting.

For more information, contact the Office at 401-427-6906.

The Year of Providence Initiative

Last Wednesday, a group of RISD staff, faculty and administrators gathered to celebrate the accomplishments of the Nelson Mandela: Honoring His Legacy initiative.

2008-2009 marked the first attempt to build a cross-campus dialogue around a specific theme, working with students, faculty and staff to integrate these conversations into the classroom and extracurricular activities. A full report of the activities contained within the initiative can be accessed here, including the Free Food 4 Thought dinners (with creative cuisine by RISD Catering), cross-programming with Foundation Studies, English Department, the RISD Film Series, Brown's John Nicolas Brown Center for Public Humanities, and more.




At the closing reception on Wednesday, the co-sponsors of the Nelson Mandela Initiative, the Office of International Programs, the Office of Multicultural Affairs and RISD | Public Engagement announced the launch of the 2009-2010 initiative: The Year Of Providence. This year-long acknowledgement of place and concept will kick off next September with an exhibition of Latino(a) artists at the Ewing House. Featuring work by three RISD students, three RISD faculty and 3 local artists, this exhibition encapsulates the spirit of the initiative, to connect RISD to the rich diversity of the larger Providence community, giving voice to lesser known histories of this city and its residents.

To find out how to get involved in this initiative, feel free to contact RISD | Public Engagement over the summer at 401-427-6906.

The Manifesto Project - Photos

Micaelan Davis ( MFA ‘09 FURN)

In the envelope: I have never been one for concluding statements; even my physical work resists being neatly summed up. I see each piece as a moment in time, a specimen of work performed and ideas made real, a stop on the continuum of its evolution. I look at each piece and see the next step I would take or the next piece I would design. I am a gray thinker who longs for the black and white. I use knowledge and facts to get me a little closer to the truth, whatever that may be. When the answers don't make sense I am intrigued. I am interested in the connections between things, why we behave like we do.

Currently on view in the RISD Public Engagement Gallery: The Manifesto Project

Artwork by 11 RISD grad students from the Furniture, Textiles and Jewelry + Metalsmithing departments explore their personal creed as they pertain to being makers of things.

Here are some photos from the exhibition which will be up through Friday May 15th:

Sooyeon Kim (MFA ’10 J&M)

installation view
(l-r) Peter Hedstrom (MFA ’10 FURN), Mary Gagne (MFA ‘10 TX), Erin Scully (MFA ’10 J&M)
foreground Martin Goebel (MFA ’10 FURN)

Final Hearing on Public Art Today!

More encouraging opinions in today's ProJo editorial section.

Tuesday, May 12th
2:30pm, State House (Senate Lounge on the 2nd Floor)

Today is your final opportunity to have your voice be heard at a public hearing on
potential changes to the state's public art funding. The Senate will vote on future
public art allotments next week.

Tuesday, May 12 at RISD | Public Engagement

The Manifesto Project: A one evening exhibition of 11 RISD grad students’ work for the seminar Contemporary Production Practices
Tuesday, May 12 from 6-8pm in the CIT Building, 2nd floor

Instructor: Liz Collins
Students: Micaelan Davis (MFA ‘09 FURN), Debra Folz (MFA ’10 FURN), Mary Gagne (MFA ‘10 TX), Martin Goebel (MFA ’10 FURN), Phillip Grass (MFA ’10 FURN), Peter Hedstrom (MFA ’10 FURN), Minwon Kim (MFA ’10 J&M), Sooyeon Kim (MFA ’10 J&M), Antonio Manaigo (MFA ’10 FURN), Matthew Perez (MFA ’10 GLASS), Erin Scully (MFA ’10 J&M)


Come see this diverse representation of ideas concerning the creative process of 11 brilliant artists and designers from RISD’s graduate program. In addition to showing the fruits of this exciting project, they class will be celebrating the end of the course and would love to have a drink with you!

Project description:
We seek to define ourselves within the world of art, design and production. This exhibition is a means of establishing that footing. The manifestos that will be presented will explore our personal creed as they pertain to being makers of things.

Course Description for Contemporary Production Practices:
In this course, we examine the multitude of models for the manufacturing of goods, from products to projects. What is the relationship between the designer/artist and the factory? What defines a factory and what constitutes an "industrial process?" How do things get made? Who makes them? These are some of the questions that guide us through the complex world of small to high volume production of consumer goods and the global marketplace. We also look at artists who manufacture and examples of creative projects where making multiples through outsourcing of labor is the means by which large pieces, collections, editions, and bodies of work are realized. Each week we focus on a particular aspect of manufacturing and production, with lectures by the instructor and guests, discussions, student research presentations, and field trips. Topics such as the designer/technician relationship, global trade, the supply chain, and the artist as laborer are touchstones for our in-depth conversations and study of this multifaceted concept. Alongside of weekly readings, written work and research, students are asked to develop a component of their studio work that addresses the idea of a manufactured object.

Upcoming Events - Week of May 11th

Project Open Door on ProJo video

A nice feature on the Providence Journal website about the artists at RISD's Project Open Door...

http://www.projo.com/video/?nvid=359540&shu=1

President Maeda Plugs for Public Art

I just got back from testifying at the Senate Hearing for revisions to the state's 1% for Art program. In my testimony, I made reference to the letter written by President Maeda and presented to the committee by Liz Keithline of RISCA. Little did I know that most people had already read the letter in today's Providence Journal!

You too can read the letter here.

My main points were pretty simple:
1) Public art is perhaps the most accessible form of contemporary art. In a era of budget cuts in the schools and after-school programs, it is important that public art exist to enliven our shared landscapes.
2) While few of our RISD faculty or students (or community artists for that matter) have the expertise to navigate the world of permits, insurance, and six-figure budgets necessary to execute these large scale public artworks, RISD offers an ideal pool of candidates for smaller scale temporary work. Often emerging artists grow into full sized public art works only after getting their feet wet working on smaller-scale, performance or installation based, projects. So direct some portion of that 1% towards these works!
3) Open up opportunities for RISD students and classes to learn first-hand about the public art selection process by sitting in on these convenings. The participation of RISD faculty on a more permanent selection panel would be invaluable in terms of curating a truly innovation public art program for the state.
4) As taken from Janet Zweig's letter of support - In the Providence Journal article dated April 23rd, 2009, titled "Can Rhode Island still afford to pay for public art?" the first sentence states that "Over two decades, Rhode island has spent nearly 3 million dollars on public art..." While 3 million dollars sounds like a lot of money, by this calculus, Rhode Island has spent $150,000 per year on public art. This is far below the national standard, even when the state's size is considered.

The committee meets for its final public testimony hearing on May 12th @ 2:30.

All in all it was a good day up on the hill for art in Providence.

AmeriCorps*VISTA Position at RISD | Public Engagement

Applications due June 1st

RISD | Public Engagement seeks candidates for an AmeriCorps*VISTA position that will run from 30 July 2009 to 29 July 2010. This AmeriCorps*VISTA position is sponsored through the Rhode Island Campus Compact and will be placed at Rhode Island School of Design. The VISTA member will work closely with the director of RISD | Public Engagement to advance the strategic goals of the Office.

Specific VISTA Responsibilities:

Communication
• Developing communication about public engagement across the College;
• Communicating with community agencies about RISD | Public Engagement’s existing work;
• Working with the director to communicate public engagement opportunities through existing student and academic services offices;
• Assisting with the development of content for the Office’s web site;
• Coordinating a weekly electronic newsletter for the office;

Community Outreach
• Building our database of community partners;
• Working with potential community partners to assess opportunities for collaboration;
• Meeting with community agencies to determine how RISD can support existing services and establish new long-term partnerships;

Academic Support
• Assisting with the development of our service-learning initiative;
• Coordinating information for faculty about service-learning resources;
• Coordinating meeting of RISD’s faculty forum on service learning;
• Assisting the development of new community-arts/design programs and coordinating existing partnerships;
• Supporting students and academic departments in the development of new, on-going initiatives;

Extracurricular Support
• Assisting the development of our campus sustainability initiative;
• Coordinating events open to students and faculty that promote community involvement;
• Advising students about possible service programs;
• Assisting the director to coordinate service programs;

Qualifications:
• Familiarity with community-based art and design programs;
• Familiarity with a four-year undergraduate institution;
• Strong organizational skills;
• Ability to communicate across difference and with a diverse set of constituents; a commitment to supporting inclusive learning environments and workplaces;
• BA degree

Questions and Application
Please direct questions and inquiries about the position to Peter Hocking, Director of RISD | Public Engagement – phocking@g.risd.edu or 401-413-0275. A formal application can be submitted at: www.compact.org/ricompact/vista/join.php

About AmeriCorps*VISTA

AmeriCorps*VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) is one of several full time national service programs. VISTA members who are interested in developing lasting solutions to the problems of poverty in America serve in nonprofit organizations and agencies to develop and expand services, strengthen programs and empower low-income individuals. For more information about the program, please visit the RI Campus Compact web site.

About RISD | Public Engagement
The Office of Public Engagement works with faculty, students, alumni, and community partners to connect art, design and scholarship with the public good. Reflecting the values of the College, RISD | Public Engagement believes that public participation is a central concern of a college education. Recognition of one's social responsibility and one's ability to affect public issues is intrinsic to understanding one's role in a democratic society and key to addressing the most pressing questions that face us -- locally nationally and internationally. For more information about us, visit our web site.

All these conversations, heading...

I just returned from a conversation around collaborative research at RISD, which was sponsored by the Landscape Architecture Department in honor of the 10th anniversary of Innovation Studio. These past few weeks have seen a congregation of thoughts and actions around the ways in which RISD as a community is stepping up to the social, political and design challenges of our times. Some of these other events and occasions include the panels around David Orr's visit, Marjetica Potrc's talk to the Sculpture Department on interdisciplary practice around issues of self-articulated communities, and our own office's Student Visioning Gathering this upcoming weekend.

In all of these gatherings, there exist a number of emergent themes that belie the imagined divide between the fine arts and design disciplines and offer up a compelling vision for really "what we do" here at RISD.

Just briefly, themes I took away include:

1) While innovative, integrated learning and research is happening at RISD, people are operating in discrete pods, which decreases the impact of the work. How do we create nodes of knowledge gathering and dispersal for students and caulty to know how to approach cr0ss-departmental collaboration and resource sharing?
2) As an institution RISD needs to shift gears to recognize the rapid speed at which financial, ecological, social, and political reorganization is progressing, lest we be left out of the conversation.
3) Research at RISD is classroom & studio-based, ultimately tied to the interests and passions of the student body. Therefore the school has an obligation to students to find ways of accumulating and dispersing information about what research they are doing and support faculty who are formulating new seminars and studios to push this learning.
4) The ways that we work with communities, whether local collaborations or in system analysis of developing countries, there needs to be an acknowledgement of the informal strategies (informal cities, design solutions, high-low technology interfaces, etc) that are also impacting these investigations.

With all of the incredible creativity here at RISD, there are no shortage of ideas of how to best address these issues. However, I keep returning to a place of caution - that we don't need to wait for leadership (and its subsequent financial resources) to come from above. We can do more by learning to want less, to make concrete steps forward that fit current financial realities. As an institution of creative learning, I am confident RISD can put forth innovative strategies for moving the agenda of ethical and sustainable education into the new paradigm that lies ahead.

Public art under review in Rhode Island

Yesterday the Providence Journal ran an article about the Senate Review of the state's current 1% for Art policy.

You can read the full article here. The likelihood of this review is a revision to the policy but hopefully in the favor of making a shift towards directing some portion of those funds to more community-based temporary public art projects. At the recent hearing, senators frequently mentioned RISD, along with other higher-ed institutions, as incubators for up-and-coming public artists.

For people who are interested in learning more or voicing their opinion on the issue, there will be a session for public testimony on Tuesday April 28th at the State House.

Contact RISCA at (401) 222-3882 for more details on the hearing.

David Orr @ RISD

The next two days are going to be jam-packed with events surrounding David Orr's visit to RISD.

Once again, Respond|Design has pulled together a timely and compelling series of conversations about the intersection between art/design and sustainability both globally as well as here on the RISD campus!

David Orr is Professor and Chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College. He is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on environmental literacy in higher education and his recent work in ecological design. Orr is the author of four books: The Last Refuge: The Corruption of Patriotism in the Age of Terror (Island Press, 2004); The Nature of Design (Oxford, 2002); Earth in Mind (Island, 1994); and Ecological Literacy (SUNY, 1992). For a full bio, you can check him out here: http://www.davidworr.com/


This week's events include:
Thursday, April 23

11:30am - 1:00pm BEB* room 106
Urban Eden Conversation:
Professor Anne Tate will present her sabbatical work. Come join in the speculation on the future of our sustainable city.
Panelists include:
DAVID ORR +
Damien White, sociologist
Charlie Cannon, landscape architecture
Lili Herman, landscape architecture
+ more...

6:30pm - 8:00pm Metcalf Audiotrium**
David Orr: Down to the Wire:
The activist-educator joins RISD to discuss how sustainability intersects art and design in an age of climate change.

Friday, April 24

11:30am - 1:00pm BEB* room 106
Curricular Change: A Dialogue on Sustainability at RISD:
Panelist will include:
DAVID ORR +
Liz Collins, Textiles
Dennis Congdon, Painting
Peter Hocking, Public Engagement
William Miller, Painting
Robert O'Neal, Industrial Design
Colgate Searle, Landscape Architecture
Damian White, Sociology

Imagination and Wonder in the Face of Climate Change

After viewing Jane D. Marsching's video/sound installation, NOAA Webcam 2005, RISD students in Christopher Ho's Competition, Collaboration, and Collective class discussed the desire to communicate social, environmental concerns with the quest for aesthetically compelling imagery. How, they wondered, do artists walk the line between creative ambiguity and wanting their art to be a call to action?

This essay by Marsching gets to the heart of these questions while also pointing to the ways in which our collective relationship to the reality of climate change has radically shifted over the past five years. Today we are living in a post- Inconvenient Truth age when much of what scientists and artists and activists were struggling to vocalize five years ago is now readily accepted. There is less a need for convincing, or pointing to the problem.

We know the problems - the question as Marsching puts it, is now "how can we put everything we have in service to the act of inspiring individuals, communities, and countries to work for our future?"

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Imagination and Wonder in the Face of Climate Change

Bleak news about climate change barrages us relentlessly. Stories of future disasters, of ineffectual changes, of ever more catastrophic climate models create a picture that many find daunting and off-putting. We have gotten better at recycling, using fluorescent light bulbs, etc., but still, the problem seems so huge, so out of our hands, and getting every more complex, that its easier to turn away or indulge in cynical dystopic visions.

The North Pole is the epicenter of the climate crisis news cycle and data glut. It is our canary in a cold mine (literally), as the effects of forced anthropogenic warming affect the delicate ecosystem more extremely than climates closer to the equator. Melting faster than scientist's predictions can keep up with, the possible effects of the rapidly transforming boreal climate keep us hooked up to the morphine drip of cataclysmic prophecies.

As a result, we are paying attention to the North Pole in ways we have never done before. New technologies have allowed for nearly real time experience of the landscape through webcams and other networked technologies. Advances in engineering have allowed for penetration of otherwise truly remote wilderness as never before: witness the invaluable data found in mile long ice cores carefully screwed out from deep within ancient ice sheets and glaciers. Developments in energy production and travel allow for tourists and scientists both to cheaply (relatively, at a cost of often $25,000 per ticket), quickly, and comfortably sail up to the pole in nuclear icebreakers or subs. This mythical place, which was once our most remote, our most inaccessible landscape, is now almost on our doorstep and irrevocably connected to very real, even quantifiable, daily human life.

And yet, the long rich history of Western exploration of the far north is still a part of our anxiety over the disappearance of its age old climate. The images, lectures, lantern slides, poetry, and journal entries picturing the far off lands fueled deep desires to experience and conquer. To the culture that produced so many people willing to throw themselves at this harshest of terrains at ever greater expense and national pride, the north pole was our farthest north, spiritual summit, heroic destination, most extreme landscape on the farthest edge of the world. Its vast tracts of land and sea and ice existed beyond our borders of representation and understanding, yet were pictured as sublime frontier, filled with the supernatural or paranormal, a place outside of the normal vagaries of life, where even our shadows, footprints, and breath act alien to us.

"What may not be expected in this country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities forever." — Mary Shelly, Frankenstein, letter from Walton, explorer to North Pole

But, Shelly's Frankenstein lecturing about the quest for glory on the way to the North Pole is now Al Gore on an elevating platform gesturing towards complex graphs of temperature fluctuations. The technologies of communication deployed by science, industrialization, and geopolitical concerns picture this territory now. What was once considered a wilderness foreign to our Western culture is now a harbinger of our future and so has become part of us. The natural, the technological, and the production of data are no longer in conflict, but exist in reciprocal need.

The north pole, once a mythical land of unreachable sublime wilderness, is now at the heart of scientific data predicting calamity. How do these disparate pictures resolve or oppose one another? Can we turn our doom-filled prophecies into catalytic responses? Can the power of imagination and wonder provoke us out of exhausted cynicism toward visionary engagement?

What is the opposite of despair, of disaster, of death? Elaine Scarry, in her groundbreaking book The Body in Pain, makes a claim for the power of imagination to push the world towards creation, while pain (or the fear of pain?) leads towards destruction. In the nineteenth century, Western explorers of the Arctic took with them on their ships as much of Western culture as they could, including sets of silver, libraries of great literature, and smoking jackets. They also brought trunks of costumes with which they performed the popular theater of the time upon the ice during the long winters of darkness when they were trapped in the ice in subzero temperatures with little hope of survival. These extravaganzas were a necessary focal point for a crew deeply suffering and filled with doubt. Harnessing the power of wonder allowed them to take a journey out of the dark cold and into other fantastical worlds with humor and spectacle.

This story became the basis for Arctic Then, a series of images of vaudevillian performers enacting uncertain tableaux with detritus of our urban communities and set upon 3D visualizations of digital elevation models of ice caps and glaciers from around the world. The images put the glaciers in the place of the explorers of yesterday: starving, endangered, with little hope. There is so little that we feel we can do to save them. Perhaps yoking the power of imagination on their behalf can create a rift in the immense sea of complex uncertainties of responses to the climate crisis.

Arctic Listening Post

I have researched, mapped, and explored the North Pole for the last five years through Arctic Listening Post, a collaborative, interdisciplinary digital media project. Through this project, I created a pair of video installations that imagine the future of the North Pole over the next hundred years: Rising North and Future North Ecotarium.

Rising North, a nine-minute large scale video projection pairs a very economical and meditative color field visualization of the change in temperature at the North Pole over the next century with a larger than life operatic voice singing in aria form the prosaic news headlines from Google news on the vernal equinox of March 21, 2007: reports of kiteboarders surfing over the pole to watercolor classes offered in North Pole, Alaska to endless accounts of changing climate data. How can we make sense of the climate change predictions in the news? How do we absorb scientific information into our everyday lives?

Future North Ecotarium imagines our future in the next hundred years after irreversible climate change. Created in collaboration with visionary architects Mitchell Joachim and Terreform Studio, the three-minute stop motion animation images our response to a three meter sea level rise over the next century. Massive migrations of urban populations will move north to escape severe flooding and increasing temperatures. Many areas inside the Artic regions will warm up significantly, making their occupation newly desirable. Real estate values will shift to privilege far northern climates formerly imagined as the edge of the earth. The reality of hundreds of millions of people relocating their respective centers of culture, business, and life is almost incomprehensible. In this animation, entire cities float away from their flooded moorings and meet in a new North, re-imagining the entire surface of our planet in the future.

I am often asked, what is the point? Or, more directly, can aesthetic experience or art make any real difference in the face of such a huge crisis? What does looking at (and listening to) art do to effect change? Beyond pointing to the long history of art used to revision crisis in the service of change, I call upon the power of our imagination in partnership with our intellect and our activism as the key trio in a global consciousness shift that is necessary to slow and ameliorate the human causes of climate change. Instead of prioritizing one approach over the other, the question should be: how can we put everything we have in service to the act of inspiring individuals, communities, and countries to work for our future?

The Nature of Teaching Exhibitions

The Tricks of the Eye exhibition evolved out of a number of conversations between our office and other departments & offices on campus on how best to foster discussions around publicly engaged art practices at RISD. Given the intense project-driven nature of studio practice and students' busy schedules, I proposed that we create an exhibit that would connect classroom learning to examples of contemporary creative practice. By working with faculty whose courses explore similar themes, students would be offered the opportunity to engage in the work on many different levels, from the intellectual to the conceptual to the aesthetic.

ceramic bowls and poster prototype for Blue Hammer, Leon Johnson

Coming from a background in dialogue-based and performative public art, I was curious about how documentation of these kinds of practices would go over with RISD students. When introducing under-explored forms of art making, there needs to be some level of education around the practices - we chose to take a multi-faceted approach using descriptive wall text, visiting artists talks and classroom visits, and guided-tours with me as curator. Given that we were highlighting documentation of past projects, rather than original work, I was concerned with how to balance the need to contextualize the documentation without having the show become overly dependent on text. I tried to address this issue by including a number of different mediums - from textile to ceramic objects to vibrant poster art, and video to audio.

Meyers-Bitter Survey and Knitting Nation installation views

Does this kind of presentation of multi-faceted art practices work as an exhibition strategy? Even though we recognized the importance of combining object-based work that taps into our desire for craft and concreteness with more conceptual and relational practices. It was also important to, as much as possible, to create opportunities for the students to meet with the artists (or me as the curator) so their critiques and questions could be addressed in real, face-to-face, time.

These conversations - with Peter Hocking and Charlie Cannon's Use of Space:Place of Campus and From Studio to Situation seminars, Marie Cieri's Social Geographies class and Christopher Ho's Competition, Collaboration and Collective seminar - proved to be rich moments of contextualized learning. Sitting in on these classes and walking classes through the exhibit, I have found myself being asked to defend a number of the projects. It was important for me to articulate that I chose to include much of the work due to its compelling problematic nature. Rather than offering answers, the projects included in the show grapple with the complexities of representation and dissemination of socially charged information. The curator's role is one of navigating and interpreting for audiences that may be unfamiliar with the ways in which the highlighted projects fit within the artists' investigative trajectories or larger social practices.

To that end, I will be hosting weekly curator tours of the exhibit on Thursday afternoons from 12:00 - 12:30 starting March 19th and continuing through April 2nd. Please feel free to RSVP to me at ssakash@risd.edu. I also welcome comments to this post or via email.

5 Questions

Organized by AREA Chicago and Creative Time, Inc. this online interview project features the responses of Chicago artists and art administrators to questions related to connecting art to social justice movements, building local audiences and social networks, and sharing economic resources. Many of the people interviewed for this project were part of the Art & Activism retreat that I attended back in January - it is interesting to hear their thoughts about art and social change in this place-specific context.

http://5questions.areachicago.org

Though some of the concerns are specific to the city of Chicago, there is also a lot to ideas that are pertinent to the conversations around the Creative Providence Cultural Plan, as well as the growing sense of the need for artists and designers to take a relational approach to their creative practice which recognizes their role as citizens and change makers.

The questions:

1. Who is your audience, and how does your work mobilize it towards strategic local concerns?

2. Given that the ways we make money impacts the type of culture we produce, how does the local economy effect your art practice? How do you work to obtain and share resources?

3. Describe a local cultural event that productively expanded the social networks that your practice operates in. That is to say, the event produced a new sense of community that had political potential.

4. As a politically engaged artist or organization, how do you and/or your practice relate to existing social movements?

5. These conversations come out of a nation-wide concern about the fate of democracy. How do you see your projects tying into a larger national structure? Is organizing nationally productive? What are its limitations?

Leon Johnson Artist Talk

2009 Public Engagement Associate, Leon Johnson, will be giving a talk on the intersection of his creative and pedagogical practices on Tuesday March 10th at 6:30pm at the Office of Public Engagement (CIT Building, 2nd Floor).

For more information, please visit Leon's page on our website. You can also check out documentation from two of his recent projects in the Tricks of the Eye exhibition.

Tonight! navigating between home and exile

We Learn Together Group Discussion

Unweaving Common Threads through Discussion

Join us Thursday, Feb. 5th from 6:30pm - 8:30pm at The Center for Integrative Technology (169 Weybosset St, Providence, 2nd Floor) for week three of the four week series Common Threads: From Vietnam to Iraq.

Mike Ritz of The Genesis Center will facilitate a group discussion intended to reveal the human stories behind political actions and economical and geographical circumstances.

Due to the interest of many who have stories to tell and wisdom to share, what began as a panel discussion has morphed into a full group discussion where everyone can speak, share, and be heard.

Thursday, we learn from each other.

photo from RISD Pa'N Dau Exhibit

Who will be there?
You will be among a number of individuals who have gained experience and/or expertise through their volunteer work, their careers, and/or their own personal lives:

• Sister Angela Daniels Co-founded The Genesis Center and has committed a major portion of her life to assisting refugees from Southeast Asia.

• Socorro Gomez-Potters, a Mexican immigrant, has aided immigrants and refugees from many different countries over the past 20 years while living in Providence.
• Matt McLaren has been a Refugee Health Case Worker in Providence for the International Institute of Rhode Island since 2003. He helps people understand U.S. culture of preventative care, navigating doctor’s referrals, pharmacies, health insurance provision, and all other aspects of our health care system.
• Ivon Nano is an Iraqi refugee who came to the United States six months ago. She now resides in Providence.
• Bill Pellicio teaches at the Center for the Study of Interpersonal Violence. He also serves on the board of SEDC.
• Patricia V. Symonds is the adjunct associate professor of the Department of Anthopology at Brown University.
• Fu Yang was a medic and Captain in the Hmong military before coming to Rhode Island in 1977.

Need more info? Call Mike Ritz at 401-781-6110 x28

Notes from Chicago

Note: This blog posting is LONG overdue. My desire to keep a daily blog report during the Janaury 9-11th Art and Activism retreat was more than a little overly ambitious. Not only was the retreat incredibly intense and full, but it took me a good couple of weeks just to let all of what happened sift through in my brain...so here is a condensed version of the report back.

A telling moment: the last morning of the We Want More retreat one of the members of the Just Seeds Radical Print Collective announced to the group, “We keep talking about how to open this group to others, but I have no idea how to invite people to join us when we can’t even define what this is.” And really, what was this? A gathering of 80 plus artist-activists interconnected by one or two-degrees of separation? A retreat to reflect on the ways in which our shared and divergent practices are or are not making a difference in the social movements with which we align ourselves? An opportunity to connect around our commonalities, support one another’s efforts, and strategize for how to get more from ourselves?

Yes, We Want More. But exactly who are we, and what is the more that we claim to want? After three days of on-site investigation and two weeks of post-retreat reflection, these questions continue to bounce around my brain, delightfully unanswerable.

Filled with a burning urgency to figure something out, a small subset of the group spent the final hours of the retreat attempting to lay out some possible guiding principles.
We believe in:
- Arts* as open-ended experiments in imaginary, libratory, future possibilities of being;
- The orientation of arts’ work within social movements;
- Arts as forms of visual and performative languages in opposition to commodity form;
- Aesthetic cultural work against ALL hegemonies;
- Arts against oppression;
- Art that articulates possibilities for an unwritten future.

* The group presented these principles with the caveat that the words “art” or “arts” were both equally problematic. Ditto “value”. (Words are so hard!)
We agree to uphold these principles in our creative practice and acknowledge that, in many cases, IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING!

While the seven people in our small group enjoyed the mental and linguistic experiment, after presenting to the larger group, we chose to abandon any further efforts to carry these principles beyond the walls of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Whether the result of our discomfort around setting out definitions for the larger group or our resistance to speaking for those who did not choose or could not attend. Poof! (Thus I am recording them here as a reminder of our hard work, despite the utterly inconclusive outcome).

There were plenty of other undeterminables and moments of organizational meltdown – much of which focused around the question of who we were and who we were not. How to address the lack of diversity in the group became one of the hot spots of the retreat—looking around the room, the we represented was overwhelmingly white artists in their mid 20s to late 40s (it was curious that the brown people in the room didn’t seem to quite meet the group’s desire for diversity, as if somehow we were equating diversity with the presence of black people) The 80 one minute presentations reflected overlapping interests in performance, installation, occupation, food, street spectacle, mapping and creative discourse. Tune an ear to the conversation and the language floating to the top was that of university-educated, middle to upper class, anti-capitalist rhetoric.

It wasn’t until after the retreat that we (by which I mean the Providence representation of me, Andrew Oesch, Jori Ketten, and Micah Salking) asked our selves the question, “What if these elusive others that kept being evoked chose not to attend because they were just NOT interested in having this kind of conversation, participating in this academic, activist discourse?” It is important to remember that the same language that inspired many of us to respond to the initial invitation may have been a detraction to others who may be joined in similar struggles. I don't want to say that the language we use is good, or bad, but simply to point out that the ways we communicate matter to how our events/projects/etc. are perceived by others.

Beyond the fascinating meta-experience of trying to identify “what happened”, there were also direct take-aways that, yes, are even MORE questions. Here are a few that I sent to Steve Lambert (see earlier blog posting) the day after I returned to Providence.

- We talked a lot about imperfect models of slow burn strategies that offer resilience for groups that are in it (ie social change, mutual aid) for the long haul. People really responded to the model of the church (or temple, or mosque … lots of discomfort there too from a largely areligious crowd) as a model for building support systems that are intergenerational, ritualistic, with multiple points of entry.

- Conversely, what are other ways of talking about spectacle that do not carry the same, potentially vacuous, connotations? Celebrations? Radical sites of participation? I haven’t come up with anything yet, but I am wondering how to reframe spectacle versus the concept of slow-burn tactics that came out of the conference.

- People talked a lot about art being embedded in activist movements, which reminded me of your [Steve and Steve] How To Win presentation in which you talked about thinking of art as only one part of a larger strategy. My question then is whether artists are ready to step out of their leadership roles to both show up and in effect “be of service” to larger social movements. At the same time, I don’t like the uni-directional relationship implicit in “service”. Basically, can artists be humble?

- I keep coming back to the question that was raised at the How to Win talk about whether there are subversive art practices that do not need to employ the masters tools. Smaller, less sensational acts - what role do they play? Especially given that when you look at the ways in which social change is often a process of small incremental shifts in patterns and habits based on relationship building with these larger flash point moments. So the small is important, as is the intimate, but in what ways?

****

I am still waiting to hear back from Steve on his response. But in the meanwhile, the We Want More group has continued to move its thinking beyond the retreat and towards two upcoming events. The first is the radical urbanism The City from Below conference to be held in Baltimore March 27th-29th. Its organizers position the conference as follows:

"In cities everywhere, new social movements are coming into being, hidden histories and herstories are being uncovered, and unanticipated futures are being imagined and built - but so much of this knowledge remains, so to speak, at street-level. We need a space to gather and share our stories, our ideas and analysis, a space to come together and rethink the city from below."

The other flashpoint will be the US Social Forum in the summer of 2010. A number of people at the conference were excited about building solidarity between the arts and cultural producers and the amazing groups activating for this national event. And so, onward with all the desire and ambiguity that can be conjured.

Critical Response at RISD

What makes for a positive critique? Students were asked this question by the facilitators of the Liz Lerman Critical Response Workshop, which was held yesterday in RISD's Tap Room, hosted by the Office of Student Life. The responses from the 30 students at the afternoon workshop were illuminating:

Critiques work when:
- the people critiquing have an idea of the original intent
- the criticism is specific but not given as an attack
- the critic can be open minded from beginning to end / free from their personal bias
- the person's comments open up a discussion or dialogue with the artist
- the feedback is honest
- the resulting discussion is high-energy
- the critic offers a fresh viewpoint (often times this comes when the person is from outside the artist's own discipline, but sometimes the artist just wants to hear from someone who can speak his or her own language, knows the references...the end point being that both opportunities are valuable)
- the critic offers set of knowledge that can inform the project
- there is an expression of paternal/maternal support versus the competitive sibling syndrome

After being walked through the four-step process that is at the heart of the Critical Response theory - see the Roadmap for Meaningful Dialogue - someone asked about students' immediate responses to the process. These two were especially interesting in the context of RISD learning:

1. I wish faculty were here to hear this! Right now is one of the first times I've ever heard about this different model of critique; it just makes sense.
2. I feel like this could be useful for how critique is modelled in Freshmen Foundation - faculty often just let us flounder.

Put into practice in a model critique by volunteer students from the Construction/Deconstruction Wintersession class, I was surprised by willingly students engaged in the Critical Response practice. What felt to me like a pretty warm and fuzzy process of neutral questions and opinions by permission that might turn off the typical RISD student, actually seemed to open up the space for people to feel more empathy for the artist's process and offer opinions that were coming from a more informed place.

The question that naturally came up at the end of the workshop was: how does this kind of process get applied at RISD? It is not as though faculty are just going to make the automatic switch. The presenters offered one suggestion around how to rephrase a negatively generated opinion to ask yourself neutral questions rather than just retreat to a defensive position. Because when defensiveness starts, learning stops.