ART + SOCIAL ACTION
The Advanced Certificate is not being offered at this time. For more information please contact socialpracticequeens@gmail.com
MELLON FOUNDATION SUPPORTS SOCIAL PRACTICE CUNY AT THE GRADUATE CENTER TO CULTIVATE DIVERSE ARTISTS AND LEADERS IN NYC
An innovative program based at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York aims to create a new generation of cultural leaders in New York City who represent the city’s diverse population and are committed to bringing social change through art. The program, Social Practice CUNY (SPCUNY), is funded by a three-year, $530,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and draws on the strengths of CUNY’s interdisciplinary M.F.A. programs, which emphasize social justice and provide outstanding art and architecture education to diverse students.
The ambitious program will offer full in-state tuition fellowships to up to five Queens College M.F.A. students, grants of up to $2,000 for CUNY faculty and graduate students, and a graduate seminar based at The Graduate Center for fellows and other CUNY graduate students.
WHAT IS SPQ?
Social Practice Queens (SPQ) is a unique pedagogical experiment and educational platform that supports the integration of studio art with interdisciplinary research, community collaboration, environmental justice and critical urbanism. Founded in 2010, SPQ links together the resources of an academic institution, Queens College and the City University of New York (CUNY), and the long-standing community-based activism of the Queens Museum and other partnering institutions. SPQ’s goal is to initiate real-world change through practices of care, social intervention and aesthetic experimentation.
Select SPQ projects include the book: Art As Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art, a collection of lesson plans and essays by leading figures within the field; SPQ Green Lab, a daylong series of environmental workshops on Governors Island in the summer or 2019; an Advanced Certificate in Critical Social Practice; and several related undergraduate courses including: Introduction to Socially Engaged Art (ARTS 333), Imaging Resistance: Photographic Media and Socially Engaged Art (PHOTO 200), and Performance Studio (ARTS 394).
Every semester one or more seminars introduce students to the contemporary theory and methodologies emerging around social practice, as well as the development of critical theory and how it relates to their future role as cultural producers.
SPQ supported seminars are often team-taught, partnering QC Art Department faculty experienced in social practice, with professors in adjacent disciplines, including the QC Urban Studies department, the Graduate Center and Hunter College, as well as with professionals outside the university system.
SPQ SEMINARS
Every semester there is seminar that introduces students to the contemporary theory and methodologies emerging in the nascent field, as well as to develop their understanding of critical theory and how it relates to their future role as cultural producers.
SPQ seminars are often team-taught, partnering QC Art Department faculty experienced in social practice, with professors in adjacent disciplines, including the QC Urban Studies department, or with professionals outside the university system.
SPQ PROJECTS
From the beginning, students are encouraged to develop real-world projects to serve as long-term practicums reflecting the ideas, theories and methodologies they encounter across their various SPQ seminars.
Student-led projects can be developed in tandem with the Queens Museum’s ongoing community-based initiatives, giving students access to the formidable expertise, resources, and networks of the museum’s community organizers and arts administrators.
Protecting Our Nature & Our Sacred Land
Beacon of Pluralism
The Eagle of Corona Plaza
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Application for Spring 2021 Enrollment Now Open
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cynthia5102021-05-14 15:05:442021-05-14 15:08:39Spotlight: Brianna Harlan (she/her/hers/sir)
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cynthia5102021-05-12 19:47:062021-05-12 19:47:55Spotlight: Isiah Powell-Taylor
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cynthia5102021-04-08 01:22:362021-05-12 19:36:24Spotlight: Connor Henderson (he/they)REFERENCES
SPQ is truly breaking new ground in many ways: it is supporting a burgeoning new field of artistic practices through solid theoretical foundations; it is developing new alliances between arts education and non-educational, even commercial organizations in the world; and it has helped reposition the mission of an arts museum, the Queens Museum of Art. While other museums are committed to public education, SPQ has tied solid and lasting connections between the arts curriculum at Queens College and the presentations at the museum, significantly influencing the curatorial direction of the museum, and helping opening in up to local and international audiences.
Greg Sholette is the best example of an artist committed to a localized context who can establish meaningful connections to contexts far away, supporting international exchange with specific, localized and shared experiences. His work in educational institutions — Lebanon, Switzerland and elsewhere — and his involvement with a large international art collective — Gulf Labor — have benefitted SPQ immensely and opened it up to the world.
There is a need for this kind of program in the USA and in the East Coast in particular. Most Social Practice programs are based in the West Coast. In the east I believe only a school in Maryland has it. Furthermore, Social Practice is particular in its resistance to the market, actually it is total lack of interest in the market based art world. For this reason it really only makes sense to study it in a public institution that can keep the costs of such a degree affordable. Furthermore, the Queens MFA is aligned with with Queens Museum the only museum that has geared its entire mission and departments towards its own community. Structurally and ideologically the Queens Museum is perfectly aligned with Social Practice -other museums have relegated social practice to the education department. Furthermore, the Queens MFA in social practice is the ONLY MFA program in the city that is run in affiliation to a museum.
I would argue that Social Practice is the only field in contemporary arts that has a live discourse. All other discourses in painting, photography, sculpture, etc, are no longer growing. What passes for discourse is really art history, a discussion of innovations and changes that have already taken place. This growth and lively debate means that there is still room for students to become actual contributors to the field. The other fields can only offer competing for mastery over established concepts and forms.
The SPQ program is led by Greg Sholette, one of the most accomplished critics and artists working on contemporary socially-engaged art. Sholette has a long and impressive history as an activist artist and scholar, extending back to his early groundbreaking work with PADD and Repo-History, as well as his work as a critic, theorist and historian of engaged art (as evidenced in his books Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture and the edited anthologies Collectivism after Modernism and The Interventionists). It would be difficult to imagine another figure in the contemporary art world who is better suited to run a program like SPQ.
The study of socially-engaged art has experienced a dramatic growth over the past decade. There are now several MFA programs in the US focused on this area of practice, with several more in the development stage. The SPQ program, however, has unique strengths, including the leadership of Greg Sholette, close ties with the Queens Museum of Art, a national leader in the area of museum-based support of engaged art, and proximity to the vital New York-area art scene, which has the largest concentration of activist artists and art collectives on the east coast.
Socially Engaged Art has changed the art practice in profound ways. It is not a genre or a discipline, but rather an overall rethinking of the artist’s role in society. Artists who take part of this program are bring groomed to become agents of change wherever they may go- city government, urban renewal programs, arts education, or any socially- conscious initiative, public or private. To support a social practice program is to help build the foundation for the artists of the future as change agents of society.