As part of a week-long intensive seminar, Grant Kester, critic and Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, will address themes in social practice art. What conditions apply to critical art practice in the public realm and how do these relate to the urban, social, and political? What is the relationship between art and democracy? What is the long-term sustainability of community-based socially engaged art? How do informal pedagogic, public address and dialogic strategies apply to students’ practices in art, design, theater, intermedia, cinema, communications and urban planning, among others?
This event is a collaboration between USC’s Roski School of Art and Design and KORO, Public Art Norway in Oslo.
Visit http://bit.do/USC-CultureInAction for the schedule of Culture in Action lectures May 24 – May 30. Presenters include Rick Lowe, Tania Bruguera, and Lucy Lippard among others.
Grant Kester is a Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts department at the University of California at San Diego and the founding editor of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism. His publications include Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Duke University Press, 1998), Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (University of California Press, 2004), The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Duke University Press, 2011) and Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art 1995-2010, co-edited with Bill Kelley (Duke University Press, 2017). His current book project is Autonomy and Answerability: The Aesthetics of Socially Engaged Art.
The Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California is a unique, supportive environment for creativity, experimentation and collaboration in the visual arts. The school encourages interdisciplinary approaches to studio art, design, curatorial practice and critical studies. With equal emphasis on making and thinking, the USC Roski School prepares artists, designers, curators and writers to contribute in new and meaningful ways both to their fields and to society at large.
The Culture in Action title is borrowed from a pioneering social practice exhibition curated by Mary Jane Jacob in 1993, and thanks to activist artist Daniel Martinez.