Common Purpose

The relationship between performance and curation has shift ed. A new attitude of fluid and pragmatic alliance has evolved as the sense of an essential antagonism between performance and curation recedes and the two fields discover a shared focus on aspects of social engagement and agency. This article considers an Australian socially engaged art project, the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA), which meshes curatorial and artistic practices in its efforts to reimagine and reanimate the future of a small country town. Employing a wide range of strategies, KSCA works closely with the local community to facilitate collective memory, reflection and social and environmental transformation. Deliberately avoiding traditional lines of artistic and institutional tension, KSCA employs an impure and inclusive approach that is emblematic of emerging forms of activist contemporary art.

Socially Engaged Art as Creative Pedagogy in Educational Spaces

This chapter looks at socially engaged art to realize and explore pedagogical creativity. Socially engaged art is interested in creating art that can be viewed as a process to navigate a deeper understanding of individuals and society. As this process relates to pedagogical creativity, the social practice artist is engaging the participant in a creative activity or process that often calls for a reflective notion. The essential shift socially engaged practice offers is a variant on the reflective process from self to a community, social, and collective reflective practice. This process of engaging with the community is critical for gaining community participant input to direct the practice. When applied to educators, teaching through a social practice lens can offer students a culturally responsive curriculum. Remote and virtual experiences can offer diverse opportunities for creativity, engagement, and discourse.

Gender and Public Space: Mapping Palimpsests of Art, Design, and Agency in Shahbag, Dhaka

Public space is an essential social infrastructure for the continuous negotiation of city life and democracy because it offers (ideally) an interactive platform for people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds and the forms of public life they cherish. This contribution inquires how public space’s design and materiality play a fundamental role in popular struggles for social justice. By focusing on the differentiated access of women to public space, the role of gender in its design, and appropriation through a feminist intersectionality lens, this article aims to understand better the complex interplay between urban space and its non‐human material agency vis‐à‐vis citizen mobilizations, movements, and socially engaged art interventions. Drawing from extensive participant observation and spatial analysis, the exemplary public space of Shahbag Chattwar (a public square/plaza) will shed light on the “gendered spatiality” of pivotal popular mobilizations and reclamations from the historical momentum of the 1952 language movement, over the 2013 contemporary Shahbag protests, and to the 2020 anti‐metro rail protests at the Dhaka University campus. Analyzing urban space as a “palimpsest,” this research reflects on both historic and ongoing scenarios of popular protests as they repeatedly occupy public space and leave spatial traces through spatial design and art. In sum, the article seeks to gain insight into public space as a principal site of contestation and negotiation of juxtaposed layers of gendered dynamics, civil rights, secularism, and fundamentalism.

Power of the Temporary: Social Art in Spaces of Transitional Living

This communication paper addresses the role of ephemeral and temporary artistic interventions into the systemic problem of homelessness and the question of sustainability in social art practice. I approach these issues through my work with homeless service agencies that are shaped by rules and procedures intended to increase predictability, whereas, as an artist, my work resists such rigidity by carving out space for spontaneity, vulnerability, and renewal. The dilemma of sustaining socially engaged art long-term raises particular questions within the context of institutions such as these. Can a project be successful as a temporary intervention within systems of predictability? If a project does become sustainable in the long-term, is there a way it can retain a level of energy incited by newness and unexpectedness? I discuss these issues in the context of two of my long-term projects, Beauty in Transition (2013–2016) and Choreographing Care (2016–2021), both working within homeless service agencies. Beauty in Transition was a pop-up mobile hair salon offering free haircare for transitional housing residents. Choreographing Care, a project supporting homeless service staff, started as a socially engaged art project and was adopted into an emergency shelter in Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S.A as an organizational initiative. The ideas I discuss in this paper are supported and inspired by disciplines of research including care ethics of Gilligan, social behavioral science of Goffman, and approaches to participation discussed by Helguera and Kaprow.

Border Tuner and Teeter-Totter Wall: Two works of participatory public pedagogy

This article looks at two socially engaged art works, Teeter-Totter Wall by Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello and Border Tuner by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer that challenge dualistic notions of self and other, public and private, and national and multinational. Each work proffers a perspective of the US-Mexico border that counters those communicated through national political rhetoric and common in popular media reporting. This article not only recognizes these works as art but also as public pedagogy, or works accessible to the broader public and community that function to teach us something or to reframe or expand our understanding and to question or resist dominant narratives. In addition to questioning totalizing narratives, this article considers intersecting notions of the public on the border. Recognizing that the border occupies simultaneous and varied notions of the public in terms of being a site of local culture, a symbol of national debate, a firestorm of divisive rhetoric and an international marker of global politics and economics, this article considers how differing sites of public pedagogy function.

Haugerudbekken: Community Improvement through Socially Engaged Art

Haugerudbekken is the collective title of a series of art projects where two local artists (the authors of this article) collaborate with pupils from local schools in Haugerud to create public art installations in the neighbourhood. Haugerudbekken may be considered a practical exploration guided by principles in the fields of socially engaged art (SEA), teaching artists (TA) and community artists (CA). The project is being undertaken within the broader context of a government run local improvement initiative in the Oslo suburbs of Haugerud and Trosterud. A growing demand for art entering a societal context (like urban development) calls for approaches emphasizing dialogue, communication and local affiliation. As this demand grows, so does the need for best-practice guidance for initiating artists as well as for policymakers and others inviting artists to contribute. Furthermore, our approach as independent artists working within a community setting might also benefit from clarification of theory and framework in this field. This article therefore aims to share knowledge gathered through our three years (and still ongoing) working on Haugerudbekken, pinpointing what we believe to be key success factors as well as challenges in our project. Findings are discussed in relation to existing theory and relevant practice in SEA, TA and CA informing existing guidelines as well as terminology.

Safety Orange

Safety Orange first emerged as a legal color standard in the US in the 1950s in technical manuals and federal regulations; today, it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarceration. The color is a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and dereliction. Its unprecedented saturation encodes the tracking of those bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures coded as worthy of care – and those deemed dangerous and expendable. This article uses the color orange as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and care in 21st-century US public life and to ponder what orange tells us about the relationship between phenomena often viewed as unrelated: information networks, climate data science, pandemic crisis, neoliberal policy, racist violence, and socially engaged art.

Institutionalization and autonomy of art: Can socially engaged art be institutionalized?

This paper deals with the autonomy of art and more specifically with the autonomy of socially engaged art once it is institutionalized. The originality of the article is its use of Goodman's terminology to theorize socially engaged art. By comparing two works of art from the same collective (one without an institutional framework and the other in a festival), the main issue is to defend the hypothesis that artistic consecration prevents an emancipatory action from functioning as art or prevents an action from functioning as socially engaged art. Thus, in the context of engaged art, the question is no longer "when is art?" but "where is art?".

Activist and Socially Engaged Art

The terms “activist” or “socially engaged” art (used interchangeably throughout this article) refer to artistic practices that are integrated with, or responsive to, forms of political protest and resistance. This typically entails some connection to a social or political movement, community, or group that is seeking to challenge an authoritarian regime or contest hegemonic forms of domination, often associated with differences of class, race, ethnicity, or sexuality. The form taken by activist art can range from relatively abbreviated performative gestures to extended engagements with institutional power structures, to modes of symbolic or discursive production circulating in the public sphere (murals, graphic art, etc.). In each case, however, we can observe a reciprocal relationship between artistic production and mechanisms of social and political transformation oriented toward human emancipation. Between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries there were significant interconnections between the concept of an activist art practice and the modern avant-garde. I’ll provide a brief outline of some of these navigational points in the section Historical Studies. It’s not possible, however, to provide a comprehensive account of sources across this broader historical range. For the purposes of this article, I will focus primarily on work since the 1960s, when we can observe the initial expression of a recognizably contemporary set of referents for activist or engaged art practice. Even within this limited time frame, the range of possible material far exceeds the space necessary to acknowledge relevant sources. Activist art practices, by their very nature, tend to overlap with, and ramify into, a range of adjacent forms of cultural production. We can find meaningful connections to activist theater (Augusto Boal), radical pedagogy (Paolo Freire), the Art and Labor movement, the traditions of community and street art, digital activism, tactical media, activist filmmaking, and urban murals, among many other relevant sources. Moreover, there are distinctive manifestations of activist or engaged art in every region of the globe. Argentine activist practice has its own unique traditions and concerns, as does art produced in Eastern Europe, South Africa, India, Japan, and Mexico. Rather than attempting to fully address each of these areas, I will offer a series of chronological divisions that chart some of the shifts that have occurred in the production of activist art since the mid-20th century.