Art
Picturing the People Inside Ebola Hazmat Suits
Late last summer, when the Ebola epidemic started spinning out of control, Mary Beth Heffernan couldn't get her mind off it.
social practice
Interview
Making Political Art with Bones and Stars
Earlier this month, Albuquerque-based social practice artists Naomi Natale and Susan McAllister, founders of the Art of Revolution, were among six others to receive the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation's inaugural Artist as Activist fellowship.
Art
Between Theory and Action in Social Practice Art
That social practice is difficult to define is not a new problem. However, what I experienced was not so much a confusion of terms but a confusion of time: a series of talks that demonstrated the divide produced by the slowness of theory pitted against an active practice.
Interview
MacArthur Grantee Rick Lowe on Art as Community
DALLAS — Vickery Meadow is the kind of place that makes the news for all the wrong reasons. An impoverished enclave for immigrants and refugees in Dallas, it has long been one of the city’s most violent neighborhoods.
Art
Learning Omaha: The Impossibility of Place (Part 4)
I’m home in Brooklyn now — I’ve been back for about three weeks. As the Department of Local Affairs starts up in Bed-Stuy, where I’m the artist in residence for the Laundromat Project, I’ve been thinking about different ways to frame and understand my summer.
Art
Learning Omaha: Social Practice in Action (Part 3)
OMAHA — I walked from Nebraska to Iowa this morning, over the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge.
Art
Learning Omaha: Through Teenage Eyes (Part 2)
OMAHA — Both teaching and social practice ask a leader (artist, teacher, organizer) to codify and articulate a set of steps that are then acted out by a group. There’s a place for uncertainty, but it should be strategically applied: by choice, not default.
Art
Social Practice for Domestic Workers: The NannyVan
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Recently, I watched as a group of artists and activists stood outside the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library beside the brightly colored NannyVan, talking to a steady stream of nannies about their rights and the obligations of their employers.
Books
What Tom Finkelpearl (and Many Others) Made, and Might Make
There's been so much hemming and hawing about “social practice” art in the past few years, it’s a little painful to even say, or type, the phrase. So, it felt a little odd to be picking up a fairly lengthy book on the topic, What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation. But the number o
Art
An Artist Takes Feminism to the Stoops
"It's a utopian vision of Brooklyn, isn't it?" A friend asked this as we stood in the middle of her Prospect Heights block, watching people swirl around us, and I agreed. There appeared to be representatives of so many different races, ethnicities, genders, and economic classes, all packed into that
Art
Major New Multifaceted Exhibition Focuses on Ecology and Environmental Issues
The word "expo" conjures big visions: grand pavilions, ferris wheels, exotic exhibitions, a world's fair. But last Sunday, a different kind of expo opened at MoMA PS1, in Long Island City, Queens — Expo 1: New York, the latest curatorial effort of the institution's director, Klaus Biesenbach. It's n
Interview
Painting the Homeless
BERKELEY, California — Hugh Leeman’s work didn’t immediately impress me. It had a distinct Bay Area style, which is not my personal favorite — his paintings are loose, colorful, street art–influenced, and have some realistic surrealism mixed in — but what caught my attention in Leeman’s practice was