Category: Social Practice Talks

PSST: Mack McFarland

Our new season of Portland State Social Practice Talks focuses on activism. Over the next six weeks we will explore activism in its many forms, and how it relates to art and social practice.

To inaugurate our new term, we are joined by Mack McFarland, an artist and curator at Pacific Northwest College of Art.

You can find the full conversation here.

Mack McFarland is an artist and has worked as Curator for Pacific Northwest College of Art since 2006. Currently McFarland is the Director of the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA. His past exploits have included commissioned projects of new works from tactical media practitioners Critical Art Ensemble, Eva and Franco Mattes, and Disorientalism.  He has also curated survey exhibitions such as a review of Luc Tuymans’s printed works, a group exhibit marking the centennial of John Cage’s birth, and a comprehensive look at the process of the comic journalist Joe Sacco.  McFarland’s current focus swirls around issues of class, representation, information environments, and phenomenological perception. These ideas manifest in the forms of exhibitions, postcards, performances, and videos. With his artworks and exhibitions McFarland aims to develop a space for the viewer to experience an intersection of visceral aesthetic and cognition via contemplative sensory experiments.


The Social Forms of Art (SoFA) Journal is a publication dedicated to supporting, documenting and contextualising social forms of art and its related fields and disciplines. Each issue of the Journal takes an eclectic look at the ways in which artists are engaging with communities, institutions and the public. The Journal supports and discusses projects that offer critique, commentary and context for a field that is active and expanding.

Created within the Portland State University Art & Social Practice Masters In Fine Arts. Program, SoFA Journal is now fully online.

Conversations on Everything is an expanding collection of interviews produced as part of SoFA Journal. Through the potent format of casual interviews as artistic research, insight is harvested from artists, curators, people of other fields and everyday humans. These conversations study social forms of art as a field that lives between and within both art and life.

SoFA Journal
c/o PSU Art & Social Practice
PO Box 751
Portland, OR 97207
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