Socially Engaged Art
Socially Engaged Art
Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change
Edited By xtine burrough and Judy Walgren
"With a focus on socially engaged art practices in the twenty-first century, this book explores how artists use their creative practices to raise consciousness, form communities, create change, and bring forth social impact through new technologies and digital practices."
Below the Skin: AIDS Activism and the Art of Clean Needles Now
Dont Rhine
This article “draws attention to the particular role of artists in [the first Clean Needles Now exchange’s] early years.” The author discusses his experience with CNN and how it “had a profound impact on the way I practice both art and politics,” and how CNN “refused the crippling opposition between direct action and direct service.”
Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago
Timothy Luke
"Describes and illustrates the innovative process of public dialogue and involvement that underlay eight works of public art in Chicago, in a project organized by Mary Jane Jacob."
Desarmando Desarrollismo: Listening to Anti-Gentrification in Boyle Heights
Ultra-Red, Image Credit: Timo Saarelma
“In 2016 the residents of the Pico Aliso public housing in Boyle Heights together with a coalition of neighborhood groups began calling for a boycott against gentrifying businesses in Boyle Heights. Given the number of art galleries among the boycotted businesses, artists and cultural workers from around the city joined in solidarity with local residents.”
Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook
Pablo Helguera
Education for Socially Engaged Art emphasizes “the use of pedagogical strategies to address issues around social practice, addresses topics such as documentation, community engagement, dialogue and conversation, amongst many others.”
Facing Value: Radical Perspectives from the Arts
Edited by Maaike Lauwaert and Francien van Westrenen
"Value as a non-economic notion is one of the hardest concepts to tackle. […] This book presents nine alternatives to regain personal power, find inspiration, shape a better environment, share energy and creativity, and build on a vital and just society."
Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art
Suzanne Lacy
In this "anthology of writings, artists and critics offer a highly persuasive set of argument and pleas for imaginative, socially responsible, and socially responsive public art."
Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose
Edited by Tim Doud and Zoë Charlton
"Broad in scope, Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose presents an overview of the different paths taken by artists and artist collectives as they navigate their way from formative experiences into pedagogy."
Philadelphia Assembled Resources
Philadelphia Assembled, Image Credit: Bri Barton
Publications, posters, and other resources from Philadelphia Assembled, which speak “to many urgencies throughout the city, from mass incarceration, to self-determination, to giving and receiving sanctuary, to decolonizing the future.”
Space-Time Collapse II: Community Futurisms
Black Quantum Futurism
"Space-Time Collapse is an experimental writing and art/activist series in which Black Quantum Futurism-- as both a praxis and a movement-- imagines future(s) and recovers pasts, using experimental writing, cosmic visions, and exploratory images in Black speculative practices where ancient anti-clock time theories and practices vibrate, grow, and live."
The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena: An Anthology from High Performance Magazine 1978-1998
Edited by Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland
“Over the last two decades of the 20th Century art workers hotly debated the concepts of “the public,” the “responsibility of the artist” and the “purpose” and “meaning” of art–especially when art is moved out of the museum/gallery and into the spaces of daily life. The Citizen Artist, a compendium of articles from the magazine High Performance, brings forth the voices of the artists that formed the backbone of these debates.”
The Force of Listening
Lucia Farinati and Claudia Firth
"'The Force of Listening' explores the role of listening in the contemporary intersection of art and activism and asks what potential for transformation it might facilitate. Written as a constructed montage in dialogic form it draws from conversations with artists, activists, and political thinkers which took place during 2013-2014, in the aftermath of the wave of protests and occupations against austerity."
The Inner Public
Krzysztof Wodiczko
This essay discusses “the specific kind of public that emerges in [Krzysztof Wodiczko’s] projects and that is generated from within the process of social and technical production of these projects[, which he calls the Inner Public …]. The integrity of any project, in all the stages of its production, including its public reception and its social afterlife, depends on the testimonial role of the project participants and the audience function of the Inner Public.
What We Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art
Edited by Ted Purves
"Through a variety of lenses, this book examines contemporary artists' use of the "gift" - the distribution of goods and services - as a medium for artistic production. Featuring a detailed survey of over fifty artists' projects from fifteen countries, What We Want Is Free explores how these artists use their projects to connect participants to tangible goods and services that they might need, enjoy, and benefit from."
Workbook 09: Practice Sessions Workbook
Ultra-Red
"As part of Ultra-red’s twenty-year anniversary in 2014, the collective published nine workbooks detailing sound investigations conducted between 2010 and 2014.” Workbook 9 places “in dialogue experiences and protocols across different Ultra-red investigations.”