Alumna Lexa Walsh spent a week at the Walker Art Center doing a number of activties with the Education and Community Programs department. She did workshops with tour guides and students, met with local Socially Engaged artists, and performed Fever Songs, a public songwriting project with Walker visitors and local musicians John Munson, Jerry Brownrigg, and Richard Medek, in a ‘cabin’ made by local artist Chris Larson. The group and the public made songs about the long Minnesota winters. Look & Listen here: http://blogs.walkerart.org/ecp/2014/03/26/winter-we-bid-you-farewell-with-a-song/

PSU Social Practice Alum and current Adjunct Professor Eric Steen has two of his projects prominantly featured in the current issue of All About Beer, America’s leading beer magazine. To quote the author Don Tse, “Perhaps nobody has combined art and beer more succesfully than Eric Steen.”

Check it out here!

PSU Alumna Lexa Walsh is an Artist Fellow at San Francisco’s deYoung Museum.  In this yearlong program, highly regarded community arts organizations join forces with the de Young in presenting artist fellows who create new work to share at the de Young, other local venues, and online.

Lexa Walsh is collaborating with Oakland Museum of California and cultural workers from local institutions large and small, as well as individual artists and archivists to develop a process-oriented map and archive of remarkable and sometimes underrepresented Bay Area art projects, venues, and opportunities, both institutional and DIY, as well as local organizations’ existing archives.  As funding becomes tighter, we are seeing archives reprioritized. What does an archive mean to each of us? What tools do we use? How is it shared? What is its afterlife?

The project’s goals are to preserve & promote local culture, create networks among organizations, share practices among organizations & the public, expand ideas of what an archive can be, curate, organize & create a taxonomy from archived materials and ephemera, locate and legitimize under-recognized activities, and propose more public access to archives, offering valuable resources to local artists, scholars and the general public. As the project is collaborative and research-driven, it ultimately opens itself to discovery.

Walsh’s process includes research, roundtable discussions, interviews, and site visits to existing archives. With information in hand, Walsh is developing an online map and, yes, archive, of her collective findings, along with an exhibition of the work in progress in May 2014 at the deYoung’s Kimball Education Gallery. This month will feature public workshops and events with professionals about research, archiving and resource-sharing, connecting the deYoung and the public with the current, past and future art & cultural scene.

Current Art & Social Practice 3rd year MFA student Mark Menjivar is doing a one-week residency at the Super G Experiential Residency Program in Greensboro, NC.

In conjunction with the Super G Experiential Residency Program, Mark Menjivar has been collaborating with flea market vendors to create a Luck Installation. All items in the installation relate to luck and have been sourced from the grocery store and various vendors at the Super G Flea Market. Some items included are: cinnamon, cats, dice, dream catchers, NASCAR memorabilia, shot glasses, UFOs, dolphins, candles, food items, fortune cookies and more.

This installation is an extension of the Luck Archive – an ongoing exploration into luck that Menjivar has been working on for over 2 years. Menjivar is inviting visitors to experience the installation and contribute to the archive.

On Saturday November 9th from 9AM-11AM there will be an open house with the artist at the Super G Flea Market located at 4927 W Market St. in Greensboro. All are welcomed!

The Super G: Experiential Residency Program is an intensive three-week residency that invites thinkers and practitioners to collectively develop projects that are directed towards the production of “experience.”

The Super G Mart is a 75,000 square foot international supermarket and public flea market. Residents are given a 144 square foot space within the flea market to use and transform in any way wish. This space can act as a central hub for exploring the Super G, an actual site for social engagement, a temporary resource for the public, or simply a place to sit and do nothing.

Resident groups invited to the program can range from professionals and amateurs in a vast variety of disciplines from musicians, architects, poets, yogi’s, carpenters, anthropologists, chefs, athletes, and more.

Artist and PSU Art and Social Practice MFA alum Carmen Papalia started using a white cane when he began to lose his vision nearly ten years ago. For one day, through his performance piece titled Mobility Device, he replaced his cane with The Great Centurion Marching Band of Century High School, Santa Ana.
 
A short documentary film by Mickey Fisher on Papalia’s performance art project at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, CA can be found online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=210rI8GgCgc

(Carmen Papalia with the Century HS Marching Band, Santa Ana, CA)

Eric Steen, alumni of the Art & Social Practice concentration at PSU, was awarded Outstanding Instructor of the year in the Letters, Arts & Sciences college at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. The prestigious award was given to only two instructors out of a total of twenty departments in the college. The award was based on recommendations from colleagues, students, and after class-visits from committee members. Eric has taught community based and socially engaged art classes at the university for three years and began his teaching career as Faculty of Record while a grad student at PSU.

How can we expand the definition of craft to include artists, makers, hackers, and do-ers, who are less visible? From the marginal to the illicit, how can exploring these clandestine craft practices help examine society, culture, and ourselves?

From the Lab at MoCC, the MFA students of PSU’s Art and Social Practice program will explore these questions through an ongoing series of programs, workshops, and events. The concept of CounterCraft will become the foundation for this unique residency partnering PSU and PNCA in dialogue in conjunction with 2013 Open Engagement.

By defining counter as outside the mainstream, we aim to highlight: firstly, counter-publics engaged in craft practices; and secondly, the making and distribution of counter-craft objects. CounterCraft seeks to explore processes and materials ranging from the utilitarian to the destructive, and interrogate concepts of social, cultural, political, and economic value related to this diverse representation of “crafters” and their crafts.

CALENDAR:

Thursday April 11, 6:30-8pm, The Lab at MoCC:
Workshop: The Botanical Craft of Attraction, organized by Heather Donahue and Sarah McLaughlin

Saturday April 27, 3-5pm, The Lab at MoCC:
Workshop: The Silk Road Marketplace and the Craft of the Deep Net, organized by Travis Neel

Tuesday April 30, 5:30-7:30pm, The Lab at MoCC:
Workshop: Bike Theft Storytelling and Theft Site Identification, organized by Zach Gough and Erin Charpentier

Thursday May 9, 6:30-8pm, The Lab at MoCC:
Panel Discussion: Crafting Conversation to Get What You Want: Art and Social Practice and the Art of the Ask featuring Harrell Fletcher, MK Guth, and Ariana Jacob, organized and moderated by Jen Delos Reyes

Saturday May 11, 1-3pm, The Lab at MoCC:
Drop-in-and-Make: May is Family Month, organized by Sharita Towne and Betty Marin

Friday May 17, 4-6pm, The Upper Gallery at MoCC:
Visiting Artist: Juna Rosales Muller presents Mending Patriotism, organized by Erin Charpentier

Tuesday May 21, 6:30-8pm, The Lab at MoCC:
Visiting Artist: Shani Peters presents Crafting Counter Histories: The Art of Counter Storytelling, organized and presented in collaboration with Sharita Towne

Saturday May 25, 3-5pm, The Lab at MoCC:
Workshop: Nail Craft, organized by Betty Marin and Grace Hwang

Saturday June 1, 3-5pm, The Lab at MoCC:
Workshop: Lost Craft, organized by Betty Marin and Patricia Vasquez

 An exhibition featuring the Art and Social Practice Workbook; an edited volume of assignments from students, faculty,visiting artists, and alumni of Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice MFA Program. Visitors of the exhibition will be able to assemble their own workbook from printouts of the text designed by students of the program, Erin Charpentier and Travis Neel. Visitors will also be invited to submit their own assignments for possible use in the workbook. This exhibition will accompany a lecture by Professor and Co-director of the program Jen Delos Reyes, regarding the topic of education and Art and Social Practice. Also on display, a collective bibliography and relevant framing questions by Paul Ramirez-Jonas, a visiting professor in the program.

Participating Artists:

The exhibition will run from March 20 – April 7 at Civic Space in Windsor, ON.

The lecture will take place on March 21 at 12pm at the School of Arts and Creative Innovation, University of Windsor.

Susan O’Malley interviewed a few shy of 100 people in Palo Alto for this project. She asked: What advice would you give your 8-year-old self? What advice would you give your 80-year-old self? Using the words of those she met, she designed ten different letterpress posters. Sometimes the poster text is verbatim from the interview; other times she conflated several people’s advice into one. In addition to hanging the works in the opening exhibition at the Palo Alto Art Center, these posters were installed along Embarcadero Road in Palo Alto for passersby to see.

For this exhibition of the work at Field Work, the Art and Social Practice MFA program has displayed these pieces of advice in their neighborhood. The posters are displayed in the windows of Field Work, as well as in the windows of nearby organizations and businesses.

For more information on the project visit: www.communityadvice.org

Bio

In her socially-based art practice, Susan O’Malley uses simple and recognizable tools of engagement – offering Pep Talks, asking for advice from strangers, installing roomfuls of inspirational posters, distributing flyers in neighborhood mailboxes, conducting doodle competitions at high schools – in order to offer entry points into the understood, and sometimes humorous, interactions of everyday life. Interested in shifting these otherwise mundane exchanges into heightened experiences, O’Malley’s projects rely on the backand- forth between herself and others in the creation of the artwork. Ultimately O’Malley’s projects aspire to incite hope, optimism and a sense of interconnectedness in our lives.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, O’Malley received her MFA from California College of the Arts’ Social Practice Area. As both an artist and curator, she has participated in programs and exhibitions throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and internationally in Denmark and Poland.

When you have to pinch yourself multiple times in a day to check if you’re awake, it’s a sure sign you’re living the dream. 

Today started early, with a committed group of PDX students attending a serene hour of Yoga led by teacher in training, Nikki.  None of us would have believed it was her first class teaching, we were so calm. 

A quick check-in with our classmates afar, then we headed downtown to the Museum of Contemporary Craft to meet with curator Sarah Margolis-Pineo to discuss our residency there leading up to Open Engagement.  

Then we had Lunch. (Some of us went to Little Big Burger for junk food, and others to Yogapearl for health food).  

The first of our afternoon meetings was at the new space of the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art.  There we were greeted by Visual Art Curator Kristan Kennedy.  We spoke with her about two related opportunities. The first was possibility to use PICA’s space for programming for Open Engagement, which we graciously accepted.  The second order of business was to talk about the possibility of our program curating an artist in residence in the resource centre. It looks like we’ll be artists in residence there starting somewhere near April 1st, 2013.