Apr 25, 2016 | Essay, From the Chair
The visual culture of protest offers us rich and powerful metaphors. The use of art to create such images, the optics of protest, are a vital part of art history. Consider the child labor photos of Louis Hine, or those from the Dust Bowl by Dorothea Lange. Such images...
Apr 18, 2016 | Essay, From the Chair
I have been thinking and writing a lot about aspirational ideologies that are apropos of contemporary life. Aspirational ideologies are perhaps, the contemporary answer to the manifestos of the 20th century. There are too many out there to discuss, however those I am...
Apr 11, 2016 | Essay, From the Chair
Which best describes the current practice of art? Post-studio, relational, postmodern, social practice, post-historical? Or, all or none of the above? In 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, the critic Ben Davis describes the “the agents whose interests determine the dominant...
Apr 4, 2016 | Essay, From the Chair
In Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, the author and critic Claire Bishop makes the case that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part in such work, new “emancipatory” social...
