Creative Practice Showcases
The East Boston Spatial Justice Lab: Designing Change through Participatory Design and Narrative Change View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Jules Rochielle Sievert
My research consists of a theoretical and historical framing of Wicked Problems, Entanglements, Socio-Legal Systems, Radical Imagination, and Trauma-Informed Design. Design as a field discipline is continuously evolving, and so are the collective methods, tools, and techniques that constitute it. Connecting Design to law highlights the inherent power of Design to transform the systems and institutions around us. I present some early findings on a project known as the East Boston Spatial Justice Lab. This project has a research plan that aims to understand how art and cultural organizing in East Boston works in combination with legal systems and legal advocacy to impact a sense of belonging, community well-being, and subsequent policy change.
Community-based Art Projects for Social Change: High School Students Take Creative Action View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Laura Beiles Coppola
This session showcases the ways in which high school students at an independent school in Brooklyn, NY identified urgent issues in their school community and created publicly engaging art projects to raise awareness and confront them. Through an explanation of the project, a slideshow of contemporary artists students explored, and student artwork spotlights, this session highlights ways in which art can affect change for students impacted by issues ranging from anxiety and stress to racism and environmental concerns.
Jarring as Arts-based Inquiry into the (Im)possibilities of Social Practice: An Installation View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lynn Sanders-Bustle
In this paper, a cis-gendered, white female artist/researcher employs "jarring" as a speculative adventure (Rousell, 2021) into social engaged art (Helguera, 2011) as a participatory process. Drawing from affect theory (Manning & Massumi, 2014; Stewart, 2002; 2010) and titled the Jarring Affects of Participatory Practice, the installation, which is comprised of over 150 jars, offers a critical reappraisal of participatory art through the creation of a material register of natural, manufactured, and hand-crafted items, loosely and directly related to the Linnentown Mosaic Project (LMP). The LMP was a year and half long effort to create a participatory tile and mirror mosaic to honor Linnentown, a mostly Black neighborhood in Athens, Georgia which was erased in the 1960’s through urban renewal. Backed by funding from the US Housing Renewal Act the destruction of Linnentown was not unlike efforts occurring nationwide at that time, in what Baldwin (2015) referred to as UniverCities (Kahler & Harrison, 2019). Just one of countless acts of violence committed in the U.S. against Blacks in what Christina Sharpe (2016) refers to as the wake of chattel slavery, Linnentown’s erasure represents how the wealth of Black families was taken, impacting families and communities drastically. The interactive display invites the creation of jars and participatory arrangement by viewers as a contemplative gesture related to aesthetic/political/institutional challenges associated with art designed with social justice aims. Iterations related to display as well as multiple sites continues to offer new perspectives about social practice.
Please Touch the Art: A Post-digital Artmaking Event in the Courtyard of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Joshua Graham
As one of four members of The Openroom, a local artist collective, I curated an outdoor exhibition and artmaking event titled Please Touch the Art at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. Looking for strategies to connect the public with artmaking opportunities during the initial phase of the pandemic, we facilitated a safe experience where participants could digitally manipulate and interact with artwork created by internationally known artists. The initial phase of the project was curatorial. We selected artists exploring how networked technologies shape artistic production and dissemination. Once the artists were selected, we built an interactive website that prompted viewers to manipulate the artwork using a selection of digital design tools. The culminating event, held safely outdoors in the courtyard of the museum, included a lecture by scholar and artist Marisa Olsen, and a collection of kiosks where participants could use a stylus to engage with and transform the work in the show. Each contribution from the public was catalogued, creating a record of our community effort. This paper highlights the relevance of unconventional exhibition spaces as sites for knowledge production. It demonstrates effective strategies for organizing participatory exhibitions and the role of emerging technologies and art practices in contemporary culture. Operating under the condition that the unspoken “rules” of galleries and museums do not necessarily apply to online platforms and alternative exhibition spaces, I showcase how this community-engaged collaboration between artists and institutions platformed lesser-heard voices in the community through participatory methodologies.
