Links today!

Today, was my third day of classes, and what a whirlwind it has been. However, despite the tricky adjustment, I've been able to figure out some issues I want to work with in the near future. More activist artwork coming soon!

One of my first "pursuits," as my installation professor likes to call them, is to find where I fit. After a summer of trying to contextualize my work and thought process, I should be a bit closer to figuring that out. Should be, being the correct wording.

Here are the links for today:

• REPOhistory

Straight from their about page:
"Founded in 1989, REPOhistory investigates and re-contextualizes historical representation through site-specific public art works. Based on the concept of re-mapping urban landscapes, our goal is to create works that intervene in an anonymous city-scape by drawing attention to the forgotten or suppressed narratives while revealing the spatial relationships inherent in power, usage and memory.

REPOhistory (repossessing history) is a collective of artists, writers, performers and educators. Originally we believed that guerrilla art projects would be the only course of action available to groups interested in re-presenting history based on a multicultural reading of class, race, gender and sexuality. However, we have created seven officially sanctioned, public funded site-specific project. Paradoxically, despite recent trends in U.S. politics, REPOhistory has been able to find support in three demographically diverse locations and has received its second National Endowment for the Arts grant.

While tactics have changed with each project, the concepts of collaboration in a multicultural context of community inclusion has been central to our original vision of site-specific public art works. The cognitive re-mapping of the ambient urban environment and the evolution of the collaborative process will be analyzed in relationship to previous projects and new works."



Speaking of urban environments, I will suggest two more great resources for finding out more about cities, The Next American City, (which actually has a great Philadelphia page!) and the Philadelphia specific blog Hidden City.

• BOMBsite

Regina Jose Galindo in Bomb
Sharon Hayes + Lawrence Weiner

Check this out!

• LACE

"LACE both champions and challenges the art of our time by fostering artists who innovate, explore, and risk.  We move within and beyond our four walls to provide opportunities for diverse publics to engage deeply with contemporary art.  In doing so, we further dialogue and participation between and among artists and those audiences."

I got to visit LACE when I was in LA and it was a great experience. Some really incredible projects are underway. My performance art professor actually shared this link, which is a great resource.

Interesting links of the week (or day)

• Feminist Tea Party in NY and Traveling!

Feminist Tea Party

Here is some info from their about page:
A Feminist Tea Party is an installation, a performance, a participatory event and a multi-faceted collaboration. At each event, we invite a new group of guests and, with them, a new conversation. We hope to engage with each of our guests, asking them to experience the space we have created, to perform within it by playing our game, to learn from each other in an open, supportive space for dialogue and, finally, to witness our collaboration and join us to make it their own.

I dare say, we have very similar ideas. This project was told to me by a woman at the Feminist Zine Fest in Philly!

• Social practice lab in Philadelphia!  (Finally!)

Social Practice Lab

Here is a little snippet from an interview between Gayle Isa and Art Place: "The ArtPlace grant will help us to renovate the third floor of our building to create more artist studio space, as well as support the inaugural year of our Social Practice Lab to host a team of artists-in-residence to explore and enliven community connections in the Chinatown North neighborhood. We anticipate that artists-in-residence will work in partnership with a diversity of residents and neighborhood organizations to create projects similar in many ways to our previous Chinatown In/flux installations – at public sites including storefront windows, restaurant tables, an outdoor plaza, a viaduct tunnel, a parking lot—and contribute to shaping the vision of the neighborhood’s future."


It is great to have such an incredible program in Chinatown (one of the most vibrant parts of the city.) Asian Arts Initiative, the organization that heads the program, has done some amazing stuff across Philadelphia and is one of the more forward thinking art programs in the city.

• Heresies Journal

Heresies Journal Archive

While I am sure I have mentioned this before, Heresies was a feminist art journal that was in publication from 1977 to 1993. One of the amazing things about this link is that it gives the public access to all the back issues of the journal in PDF form.

Fun fact: Lucy Lippard (author of the Pink Glass Swan, co-founder of Printed Matter, and scholar of Women's Art) was actually a journalist for Heresies! Here is a link to her page on the site which says a bit more about her. The other exciting thing is that she also going to be a keynote speaker at this years NY Book Fair at PS1 Moma. (Paul Chan is the other speaker!)
The book fair is from the 28th to the 30th of September-- I hope to see most of you there!

More ramblings.

After months of research and exploration, the themes I once thought unique seem to be more ubiquitous than ever. The other day, I was meeting a friend in South Philly for a meeting about survivors of Sexual Assault at the Wooden Shoe. The meeting was part of a series of workshops for the feminist zine festival that happened Sunday. --Which I will go into a bit later. My friend and I wandered down to the Cred storefront to visit some friends.  While there, I was introduced to a sculpture graduate student at Tyler. After informing him of my project, he, like many people I meet, gave me a few names to look up.

Per usual, my list of artists keeps growing. Here is a version-- if you see anyone to add let me know!

One person, who I had recognized the name of was, Mary Jane Jacob. I took a moment to look over her website today.....under her "writing" section, there are links to "On Audiences," "On Curating," "On Public Art," "On Site Specificity," "On Materiality," and "On Artists." These same words keep being addressed over and over again. It's as if we are are all trying to wrestle with these definitions. I can't tell whether is the most interesting part, or the most terrifying-- that we can create our own boundaries.

From my own experience, being in art school, social practice still has a ways to go in terms of being understood by the larger art community. I was speaking with a professor earlier today and she was telling me how she tries to throw in as much as she can, whether the students actually pick up on the practice, I am not so sure. To quote the incredibly smart Anne Pasternak (President and Artistic Director at Creative Time), "Despite the growing prevalence of this art practice, and the rise of graduate art programs offering degrees in social practice art, relatively few among the growing masses of art enthusiasts are aware of its existence, let alone its vibrancy. To be fair, this kind of work does not hang well in a museum, and it isn't commercially viable. Furthermore, social practice art has lacked a shared critical language and comprehensive historic documentation."

This leads me to another issue that I have been dealing with recently. How does one explain social practice? What is the language we use to describe this art, and how does it correlate to the language used to critique other types of art? I had a graduate student pose an interesting question regarding how we keep defining social practice as art. Which brings me back to the point about setting boundaries. Why is social practice art practice and is there a point when art becomes social work?

These are ideas that I have been working with all summer. As I have been trying to define those words, I've also been trying to figure out the lines between academic work and these process based creative projects. Where does this work stand? I am enrolled in a course that deals with the more academic side to research, which is in no way bad, just very different from what I am learning as a social practice artist. Many of the women who I have spoken to this summer have talked with me about how research is a big component in their work; whether that be looking through archives, gathering oral histories, or reading secondary sources. As I've said earlier, I see this as a process based work in which I am trying to contextualize my own practice and find a way for others to be recognized for theirs. At this point, it is about gathering a solid understanding of what I am doing and being able to clearly define those goals.

Through this project, I have discovered much more than I anticipated. I've actually started to compile a database of projects, organizations, mentors, and literature that I have guided me to where I am now. It seems so bizarre to have given myself this crash course in social practice art, but I want to be able to share this whirlwind of information with others.

Interesting things

Last week I was up in Massachusetts with some family members on vacation. My grandmother, who is a bit of a technophobe and does not know how to use a computer asked to see my blog. I pulled up the page for her and taught some basic commands, such as scrolling, and clicking- how to go from one post to the next. As she was reading through she kept pointing out grammatical errors... so I figured I should apologize for my poor editing skills and ask that you view this as a rough draft of sorts.


On another note, a few cool things going on...

http://phillyfeministzinefest.weebly.com/ 
(Thanks to Mary for telling me about this!!) It's going on next week so check it out!

http://www.phillyzinefest.com/

http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/
(So very excited for this one!)


I believe Pussy Riot was mentioned in a comment before, so if you're interested in finding out more, here is a fascinating article... which leads to this

Also, I am still looking for a peer group to participate in my dinner party series. If you know of anyone who would be interested, please forward them this information:

This summer I have been researching women making activist art in public spaces, and now I am trying to put some of that research into practice. I will be a hosting a series of dinner parties in Philadelphia (potentially Baltimore and NY as well) in which I am hoping to find peers of mine who are interested in making work about daily interaction, and/or social change/justice. Part of the process will be to connect these young women to previous generations of activist women artists, many of whom I have been in contact with this summer. Hopefully, it will give us all a greater understanding of where this type of art has come from and allow us the opportunity to create personal connections that can foster incredible collaborative projects.

They can contact me at phoebe.bachman@temple.edu
Please get the word out there!!

Networking Art

Mierle Ukeles called it Maintance Art.....

I feel like I should call this Networking Art

Dinner Party

Call for Young Female Activist Artist Peers

For a dinner party series hosted by me but made possible by you

A la Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, and countless other artists....

I wrote earlier about my desire to find peers who are working with social practice, .... people who are interested in social justice issues and who are finding a way to work with both art and activism. In the fall, I will be hosting a series of dinner parties set around the idea of finding my artistic community and connecting a new generation of female activist artists to their predecessors. I hope that by the end of the series, many of these young women will have a stronger understanding of how their art has been able to evolve due to the efforts of past generation and we will have created a strong community of incredible women activist artists.

If you know of anyone who might fit this category, please send me an email at phoebe.bachman@temple.edu