PSU MFA Art & Social Practice Wednesday Afternoon Conversation Series
PSU MFA Art and Social Practice Wednesday Afternoon Conversation Series
The PASPWACS is a brand new series of presentations by people and organizations related to Art and Social Practice including artists, non-profits, writers, and architects. The presentations are free and open to the public and take place on Wednesdays at 1 pm at Field Work, an off-site social practice classroom and civic space at 1101 SW Jefferson Street, Portland, Oregon. The conversations are streamed live and archived as podcasts. The presentations function as extended Q and A sessions with an expectation that participants and listeners will educate themselves in advance about the work of the presenters. The series is coordinated by PSU associate professor Harrell Fletcher and run by the graduate students of the PSU Art and Social Practice MFA program. For more information go to: http://www.psusocialpractice.org/
Spring 2013
April 10, 2013 Rural Studio
Rural studio objective: "If architecture is going to nudge, cajole, and inspire a community to challenge the status quo into making responsible changes, it will take the subversive leadership of academics and practitioners who keep reminding students of the profession's responsibilities."
Samuel Mockbee
http://apps.cadc.auburn.edu/rural-studio/Default.aspx
April 17, 2013 Carmen Montoya of Ghana Think Tank
Founded in 2006, the Ghana Think Tank is a worldwide network of think tanks creating strategies to resolve local problems in the "developed" world. The network began with think tanks from Ghana, Cuba and El Salvador, and has since expanded to include Serbia, Mexico and Ethiopia. In a recent project, we sent problems colected in Wales to think tanks in Ghana, Mexico, Serbia, Iran, and a group of incarcerated girls in the U.S. prison system. These think tanks analyze the problems and propose solutions, which we put into action back in the community where the problems originated.
Maria del Carmen Montoya is a new media artist who works in sculpture, performance, and video. Her work explores the personal, emotional and utterly irrational tendencies of technology.
April 24, 2013 Jason Roberts of The Better Block
Cities around the U.S. are looking for tools to help redevelop communities that enable multi-modal transportation while increasing economic development, and reducing carbon emissions. The "Better Block" project is a demonstration tool that acts as a living charrette so that communities can actively engage in the buildout process and provide feedback in real time.
Before founding the Better Block project, Jason Roberts led muliple community non-profit organizations focused on alternative transportation inccluding the Oak Cliff Transit Authority, and Bike Friendly Oak Cliff.
May 1, 2013 Wendy Ewald
Wendy Ewald has for thirty-eight years collaborated in art projects with children, families, women, and teachers in Labrador, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mexico, and the United States. Starting as documenentary investigations of places and communities, Ewald's projects probe questions of identity and cultural differences. In her work with children she encourages them to use cameras to record themselves, their families, and their communities, and to articulate their fantasies and dreams.
www.literacythroughphotography.wordpress.com
www.wendyewald.com
May 8, 2013 Ben Kinmont
Ben Kinmont is an artist, publisher, and antiquarian bookseller. Existing somewhere between conceptual art and "social sculpture," Kinmont's work is based in real-time exchanges such as meals, conversations, and gestures. In 1996 he began his publishing project, Antinomian Press, which focuses on ephemera and archival material, often distributed for free. Kinmont also has an ongoing antiquarian bookselling business, begun in 1998, that specializes in books and manuscripts about domestic economy and food.
May 15, 2013 Shani Peters
Shani Peters is a New York based artist (born in Lansing, MI) working in video, collage, printmaking, and social practice public projects. She is interested in collective movement, in cyclical patterns throughout history and generations, and in cultural record keeping and accessibility. Her work examines histories in the focused context of present societal conditions, and re-presents them in manners consciously influenced by a hyper-mediated society.
May 22, 2013 Astria Suparak
Astria Suparak has curated international exhibtions, screenings and events for PS1, The Kitchen, YBCA (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), Eyebeam, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Liverpool Biennial, Anthology Film Archives, FotoFest Biennial, Participant Inc., and Yale University, as well as for alternative spaces from rollerskating rinks and elementary schools to sports bars and ferries. In the last dozen years she has presented 300 shows in 10 countries.
Winter 2013
January 16, 2013 Laura Foster
Laura O. Foster lives in rural Northwest Multnomah County with her husband and children. She grew up in Aurora, Illinois, an old industrial town on the Fox River. She attended Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, and the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she graduated with a degree in Finance. After working East Tennessee, she moved to Portland's Hollywood neighborhood in 1989. She began her writing career in Tennessee as a commercial loan analyst, then moved into technical writing in Portland, and later into trade book publishing. She edits nonfiction titles when she is not working on her own books or articles, and writes and edits for her neighborhood association's newsletter, the Skyline Ridge Runner.
January 23, 2013 Walidah Imarisha
A historian at heart, reporter by (w)right, rebel by reason, Walidah Imarisha is an educator, writer, organizer and spoken word artist. She teaches in Portland State University's Black Studies Department, Oregon State University's Women's Studies Department and Southern New Hampshire University's English Department. Walidah has toured the country several times performing, lecturing and challenging. She has facilitated poetry and journalism workshops third grade to twelfth, in community centers, youth detention facilities, and women's prisons.
January 30, 2013 Salem Collo-Julin of Temporary Services
Temporary Services is Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. They are based in Chicago, Copenhagen, and Philadelphia. They have existed, with several changes in membership and structure, since 1998. They produce exhibitions, events, projects, and publications. The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to them.
February 6, 2013 Justin Langlois of Broken City Lab
Justin A. Langolais is an artist working in integrated media and social practice. He has an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Windsor. He is the co-founder and research director of Broken City Lab, an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research collective and non-profit organization working to explore and unfold curiosities around locality, infrastructure, and creative practice leading towards civic change.
www.justinlangolais.com
www.brokencitylab.org
February 13, 2013 Sebha Sarwar
Sebha Sarwar is a writer, multidisciplinary artist, and activist, currently based in Houston, USA. She moves between the city of her birth, Karachi, Pakistan, where she spent the first half of her life in a home filled with artists, activists and educators, and her adopted city, Houston, where she has recreated a community similar to the one where she was raised. Her writings have appeared in anthologies, newspapers, and magazines in India, Pakistan, and the US, and her work (writings, installations and videos) explore displacement and women's issues, moving between South Asia and the US.
February 20, 2013 Amy Franceschini
Amy Franceschini is an artist and eductor who creates formats for exchange and production that question and challenge the social, cultural and environmental systems that surround her. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. Her projects reveal the wasy that local politics are affected by globalization. In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers and in 2004, she co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space.
February 27, 2013 Christine Gaspar of Center for Urban Pedagogy
The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a nonprofit organization that uses the power of design and art to improve civic engagement. CUP collaborates with designers, educators, advocates, students, and communities to make educational tools that demystify complex policy and planning issues. They believe that increasing understanding of how these systems work is the first step to better, more equitable, and more diverse community participation.
Fall 2012
October 10, 2012 Greg Tudor of Friends of Trees
Friends of Trees' mission is to bring people in the Portland-Vancouver and Eugene-Springfield metro areas together to plant and care for city trees and green spaces. Through our Neighborhood Trees program, homeowners buy discounted trees to plant with their neighbors at weekend plantings.
October 17, 2012 Naomi Natale
Naomi Natale is an installation artist, photographer, and social activist. She was founder and director of the Cradle Project, a fundraising art installation designed to publicize the plight of 48 million children orphaned by disease and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, Natale leads a new fundraising art project titled One Million Bones, designed to recognize the millions of victims killed or displaced by ongoing atrocities in Burma, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan.
October 24, 2012 Public Matters
Public Matters is an interdisciplinary, social enterprise: artists, media professionals, eductors. Public Matters designs and implements innovative programs that build social, creative, and civic capital in communities.
October 31, 2012 Ernesto Pujol
Ernesto Pujol is a site-specific public performance artist and social choreographer. His undergraduate studies were in humanities and fine arts, followed by graduate work in education, media, and psychology. Pujol has an MFA in interdisciplinary art studio practice from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works between New York and the Midwest/West.
November 7, 2012 Yoshua Okon
Yoshua Okon was born in Mexico City in 1970 where he currently lives. His work is like a series of near-sociological experiments executed for the camera. It blends staged situations, documentation and improvisation and questions habitual perceptions.
yoshuaokon.com
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