Description

"Making Art Work" The Center for Artistic Activism was founded by Steve Lambert and Steve Duncombe. In 2009, Duncombe, a veteran activist, and Lambert, an accomplished artist, found one another. Duncombe was sick of planning protests that were routine, colorless, and ineffective, and Lambert was frustrated by political art that few saw and impacted less. They both thought the other one might have the answer. They quickly learned that neither did, but together they began researching how arts and activism could work together. Eager to share what they had discovered, they turned this research into a series of training workshops they have brought to activists and artists worldwide. Steve Lambert’s father, a former Franciscan monk, and mother, an ex-Dominican nun, imbued the values of dedication, study, poverty, and service to others—qualities that prepared him for life as an artist. For Lambert, art is a bridge that connects uncommon, idealistic, or even radical ideas with everyday life. In 2008, Lambert worked with hundreds of people on The New York Times Special Edition, a utopian version of the paper announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. In 2011, he built a 20 x 9 foot sign that reads “CAPITALISM WORKS FOR ME!,” allowing people passing by to vote “TRUE” or “FALSE,” and is touring it across the United States. His work has been shown everywhere from marches to museums both nationally and internationally and has appeared in more than fourteen books and four documentary films. He was a Senior Fellow at New York’s Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology from 2006 to 2010; developed and leads workshops for Creative Capital Foundation; taught at Parsons/The New School, CUNY Hunter College, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and is currently Associate Professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase. Steve has advanced degrees from a reputable art school and respected state university. He dropped out of high school in 1993. Stephen Duncombe has more than two decades of experience as both a teacher and an organizer. With a PhD in sociology from the City University of New York, he has taught at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the State University of New York (SUNY), and he is currently a Professor of Media and Culture at New York University (NYU). He received the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching while at SUNY and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at NYU. An activist his entire life, he co-founded a multi-issue community activist group in the mid 1990s, the Lower East Side Collective, which won an award for “Creative Activism” from the Abbie Hoffman foundation. He was also a lead organizer in the international direct action group Reclaim the Streets. He is the author and editor of six books, including Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and the Cultural Resistance Reader; writes on culture and politics for a wide range of scholarly and popular publications; and is the creator of an open-access, open-source, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia.