Say hello to the four students that entered Queens College’s MFA program identifying their practice as social.

 

Sol Aramendi is a New York based Argentinean artist working in photography and installation. Sol has merged her artistic work with Social Practice. She is the founder of the Project Luz Photography Program for New Immigrants. Using photography as a tool of empowerment, creating a dialogue of understanding, connecting people with communities and their creativity.  Her work is currently on view at the Museum of the Americas in Washington DC. She was featured at El Museo del Barrio’s 2011″(S) Files,” the museum’s sixth biennial of art created by Latino artists living in NY. Sol’s work has been shown widely in New York, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Los Angeles, Tolouse, Barcelona, Madrid, Utrecht, and Split.

Seth Aylmer is a public sculptor and philosopher, and a former Presidential Scholar of the Arts with a degree in Philosophy from Colby College. In 2010 his sculpture, The Helper, was installed in Marcy Green South Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he also lives. The Helper is part of a series of works inspired by 2000-year old native American petroglyphs in his native Maine, and served as as a source of inspiration to community members in Williamsburg working to improve the park and surrounding areas. In 2010, he was selected as a George Mitchell Scholar for his video art. In 2011, he installed a temporary sculpture at the Burning Man art festival in the Nevada Desert. Seth has started working with Corona community members on a a series of public sculptures.

Jose Serrano-McClain is an artist, community organizer, and social entrepreneur.  He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and started his career as an economic analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he realized his passion is the economics of the creative spirit. In 2009, he co-founded Trust Art to experiment with new economic models for artistic practice that has the potential to transform communities. As part of Trust Art, he has actively collaborated in the development of dozens of community-oriented artist projects in NYC. In 2010, he joined the Queens Museum of Art in a unique role that reports to both the curatorial and community engagement departments at the Museum, identifying opportunities for Museum-commissioned artist projects to make meaningful connections with community organizations in Corona. As part of his museum work, he is one of the lead visionaries of Social Practice Queens.

Barrie Cline has long engaged diverse communities in a collaborative art practice for projects created in the public realm in NYC. She was a homesteader and housing advocate for people battling mental illness in the Lower East Side in the 80s.  In the late 1990s she created a digital media center in an after school arts center in the Lower East Side and developed the entire program into a child-directed, free play oriented arts venue that accommodated all income levels. Since 2004 she has been teaching public art to union electricians and plumbers, working with them to create exhibitions that among other goals, seeks to make their labor, craft, and being more visible to each other and a wider public. She has continued to collaborate with graffiti artists, housing organizations, and various members of the communities she has worked in (or taught in) on projects ranging from guerilla art shows of construction workers art, to multiple incarnations of a children’s miniature city, able to roll out at strategic places where communities are being encouraged to claim their right to public space—and the good life that art is a part of.