Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

Ghana Think Tank, a social practice art collective, arranges interactions among people by asking think tanks from other countries to comment on problems submitted by communities in the “developed” West. Between the summers of 2016 and 2017, the Williams College Museum of Art collaborated with GTT on a project that continually frustrated the prevailing models of the museum and campus life. The work’s activities revolved around provoking discomfort by challenging participants’ cultural values, and whenever the center of the project drifted closer to the comfort zones of the museum and the students with whom the artists partnered, the GTT artists and curators stepped in to help realign the work with its purpose. This paper explores both that effort to re-establish conceptual discomfort as the center and also the stakes of that adjustment, which tended to cause discomfort of the logistical sort — an effect unintended by the artists that nevertheless threatened to eclipse the concept. The WCMA/GTT partnership will be used as a case study for asking how institutional structures can be challenged by social practice art and how the success or failure of such arrangements is continually negotiated.