Visual Inquiry - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2017

This article shares the impetus, processes, dilemmas, and research of Art in Transit, a pedagogic project. The project is facilitated by faculty at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, and focuses on contemporary art and design education and its relationship to place, in this case, Bangalore. The article details the research pursuits that stem from the challenges of praxis in situ, surfacing tensions that arise from engagement with communities, government agencies, education guidelines, and participating city, national and international artists. Projects by students and collaborating artists are shared as examples to illustrate and counter the binaries that emerge, for example, place and practice, or activism and gentrification. The project is framed within the worlds of Critical Pedagogy, Place-Based Education and Public Pedagogy.

The recent attempt to write the ‘History of AIDS’ in the midst of an ongoing pandemic has helped solidify media storytelling that paints institutional frameworks as receptive to dissent, proof ‘the system works’ with little indication of who it works for. In this context, the canon of political art that came out of ACT UP New York is re-deployed in support of an intricate ecosystem of power narratives that has triggered a second AIDS crisis, a crisis of remembering, and it has tipped artists, activists, and archivists into a historiological tailspin. Still, if the images created for the AIDS activist movement effectively ‘branded’ the resistance to institutional power, what insights can they provide into the 2016 American election, a moment seized by a candidate less interested in running the country than in running a brand, one constructed on the complex sleight-of-hand of social media and the increasingly permeable border between the commons and the images we use to represent it?

The Chinatown Art Brigade is a collective of Asian American artists, media makers and activists with roots in NY Chinatown. Since its founding in 2015 by artists Betty Yu, ManSee Kong and Tomie Arai, The Chinatown Art Brigade has facilitated a series of community led responses to gentrification and displacement, created in partnership with the Chinatown Tenants Union, a programme of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities. Our work is driven by a deep love for our community and the fundamental belief that fighting against racial and economic inequity must be central to our cultural and art making process.

The work of many contemporary artists includes the use of dialogue and socially engaged practices. Interdisciplinary exchange, community building and participatory dialogue have been at the core of progressive education since the turn of the century. Inspired by the notion of the artist and the educator as creative ‘border crossers,’ this article describes a unique experiment in sharing creative practices in the arts and education that took place at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City in November 2015 by the non-profit organization Art21. Creative Chemistries was conceived as a means of placing artists, classroom teachers, students, principals, museum educators and community organizers, policy-makers in education, representatives from community-based arts organizations and university faculty all at the same table to talk and make work together exploring the intersections and disconnects between the values framing their labour and creative practices. This narrative proposes that forms of intentional interdisciplinary dialogue should be considered an activist gesture, and highlights the voices of Creative Chemistry participants to describe the new thinking, learning and creative practices generated between them.

Socially engaged artistic explorations often involve changing tactics and pivoting quickly to achieve their goals and reach their intended audience. The artwork of Studio REV- takes the form of sculptures, film, videos, prints, installations, dance, interactive media and performance that address the challenges and opportunities impacting the lives of low-wage workers, immigrants, teens and women. One of Studio REV-’s largest projects is the CareForce, a transmedia public artwork and two mobile studios (NannyVan and the CareForce One) that amplifies the voices of America’s fastest growing workforce, caregivers – and the diverse people who are championing the growing national movement for domestic worker justice. With the CareForce as a case study, this conversation between writer Gretchen Coombs and artist Marisa Morán Jahn, founder of Studio REV- and lead artist of the CareForce, consider how formal and informal pedagogical strategies activate an audience. Audience in this context can be a public, a community, or something more narrowly defined – as in the case of the CareForce – as domestic workers and domestic employers. First, however, is a brief description.

The Mpowerment Program was an HIV prevention effort focused primarily on young gay and bisexual men of colour in Los Angeles. The programme emphasized a harm reduction approach to sexual health while functioning as a community-based, popular education initiative. It operated from 2003 to 2009 and was based at AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA), a large non-profit service organization. In the following roundtable discussion, former Mpowerment participants and staff look back after several years to reflect on their experiences in the programme. Their recollections address themes such as communication skills, sexual wellness, community building and the artistic components and creative practices of the group.

In 2009 the sound art collective Ultra-red initiated RE: ASSEMBLY, a long-term collaboration with students and teachers in a high school in the City of Westminster, London. During extended residencies over four years, Ultra-red facilitated an inquiry into the impact on the school of migration and immigration policy in the UK and the country’s changing conceptions of citizenship, specifically the distinction between ‘social citizenship’ and ‘state citizenship.’ Ultra-red were active in the school and helped develop large-scale cross-curricula interdisciplinary interventions. Additional inquiries into the political economy of key neighbourhoods in London involved small groups of students. RE: ASSEMBLY was commissioned as part of the Serpentine Gallery’s ‘Edgware Road Project’ and was housed in its off-site Centre for Possible Studies. The processes and outcomes of the project are discussed in relation to both the pedagogical turn in art and the emerging genre of social practice, including the tensions between disciplinary-based curricula, individualized and technique-based art education, and collaborative investigations rooted in historically and politically specific contexts.

Over the past decade the Center for Artistic Activism has trained over 1000 activists and artists from around the world how to be more creative in their activist work and strategic in their artistic practice. Central to this training is the concept of Utopia. This article explains how Thomas More’s Utopia was designed not as a plan of an ideal society, but as a prompt to stimulate the reader’s own political imagination. It is argued that Utopia is essential for social movements, and can be used to demonstrate another world could be possible, as a means to critique the present society, as a method to generate new models of society, as a tool to orient movement towards a goal, and as a way to motivate others into joining the struggle for social change. The liabilities of the artistic activist use of dystopia are also discussed.

The Hemispheric Institute at New York University launched EMERGENYC in 2008 as an incubator for emerging artists working at the intersection of performance and politics. Offering varied entry points into art and activism, the annual programme prioritizes process, discovery and reflection, fostering a ‘brave space’ for experimentation and risk-taking. During the past nine years, it has activated a strong network of local artivists – many of them from traditionally underrepresented communities – who have built solidarity across differences and who continue to challenge dominant narratives through artistic cultural resistance.

Mark Read, initiator of The Illuminator, looks back over the past five years of this renowned art-activist visual culture project. Emerging out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, The Illuminator art collective has staged hundreds of interventions in public spaces, using guerilla video projections to amplify the messages of social justice activist groups all over the country, and internationally.

In this essay, Read assesses the strategic value of such semiotic strategies within social movements, and explores important connections between the political goals of the collective, and how it organizes itself economically.