With a focus on socially engaged art practices in the twenty-first century, this book explores how artists use their creative practices to raise consciousness, form communities, create change, and bring forth social impact through new technologies and digital practices. Suzanne Lacy’s Foreword and section introduction authors Anne Balsamo, Harrell Fletcher, Natalie Loveless, Karen Moss, and Stephanie Rothenberg present twenty-five in-depth case studies by established and emerging contemporary artists including Kim Abeles, Christopher Blay, Joseph DeLappe, Mary Beth Heffernan, Chris Johnson, Rebekah Modrak, Praba Pilar, Tabita Rezaire, Sylvain Souklaye, and collaborators Victoria Vesna and Siddharth Ramakrishnan. Artists offer firsthand insight into how they activate methods used in socially engaged art projects from the twentieth century and incorporated new technologies to create twenty-first century, socially engaged, digital art practices. Works highlighted in this book span collaborative image-making, immersive experiences, telematic art, time machines, artificial intelligence, and physical computing. These reflective case studies reveal how the artists collaborate with participants and communities, and have found ways to expand, transform, reimagine, and create new platforms for meaningful exchange in both physical and virtual spaces. An invaluable resource for students and scholars of art, technology, and new media, as well as artists interested in exploring these intersections.

We engage with works of art in many ways, yet almost all modern philosophers of art have focused entirely on one mode of engagement: disinterested attention. Nicholas Wolterstorff explores why this is, and offers an alternative framework according to which arts are a part of social practice, and have different meaning in different practices.

This interdisciplinary book explores the role of art in placemaking in urban environments, analysing how artists and communities use arts to improve their quality of life. It explores the concept of social practice placemaking, where artists and community members are seen as equal experts in the process. Drawing on examples of local level projects from the USA and Europe, the book explores the impact of these projects on the people involved, on their relationship to the place around them, and on city policy and planning practice. Case studies include Art Tunnel Smithfield, Dublin, an outdoor art gallery and community space in an impoverished area of the city; The Drawing Shed, London, a contemporary arts practice operating in housing estates and parks in Walthamstow; and Big Car, Indianapolis, an arts organisation operating across the whole of this Midwest city. This book offers a timely contribution, bridging the gap between cultural studies and placemaking. It will be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners working in geography, urban studies, architecture, planning, sociology, cultural studies and the arts.

In What We Made, Tom Finkelpearl examines the activist, participatory, coauthored aesthetic experiences being created in contemporary art. He suggests social cooperation as a meaningful way to think about this work and provides a framework for understanding its emergence and acceptance. In a series of fifteen conversations, artists comment on their experiences working cooperatively, joined at times by colleagues from related fields, including social policy, architecture, art history, urban planning, and new media. Issues discussed include the experiences of working in public and of working with museums and libraries, opportunities for social change, the lines between education and art, spirituality, collaborative opportunities made available by new media, and the elusive criteria for evaluating cooperative art. Finkelpearl engages the art historians Grant Kester and Claire Bishop in conversation on the challenges of writing critically about this work and the aesthetic status of the dialogical encounter. He also interviews the often overlooked co-creators of cooperative art, "expert participants" who have worked with artists. In his conclusion, Finkelpearl argues that pragmatism offers a useful critical platform for understanding the experiential nature of social cooperation, and he brings pragmatism to bear in a discussion of Houston's Project Row Houses. Interviewees. Naomi Beckwith, Claire Bishop, Tania Bruguera, Brett Cook, Teddy Cruz, Jay Dykeman, Wendy Ewald, Sondra Farganis, Harrell Fletcher, David Henry, Gregg Horowitz, Grant Kester, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Pedro Lasch, Rick Lowe, Daniel Martinez, Lee Mingwei, Jonah Peretti, Ernesto Pujol, Evan Roth, Ethan Seltzer, and Mark Stern

Essays on and around art and art practices by the author of I Love Dick. A border isn't a metaphor. Knowing each other for over a decade makes us witnesses to each other's lives. My escape is his prison. We meet in a bar and smoke Marlboros. —from Social Practices Mixing biography, autobiography, fiction, criticism, and conversations among friends, with Social Practices Chris Kraus continues the anthropological exploration of artistic lives and the art world begun in 2004 with Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. Social Practices includes writings from and around the legendary “Chance Event—Three Days in the Desert with Jean Baudrillard” (1996), and “Radical Localism,” an exhibition of art and media from Puerto Nuevo's Mexicali Rose that Kraus co-organized with Marco Vera and Richard Birkett in 2012. Attuned to the odd and the anomalous, Kraus profiles Elias Fontes, an Imperial Valley hay merchant who has become an important collector of contemporary Mexican art, and chronicles the demise of a rural convenience store in northern Minnesota. She considers the work of such major contemporary artists as Jason Rhoades, Channa Horowitz, Simon Denny, Yayoi Kusama, Henry Taylor, Julie Becker, Ryan McGinley, and Leigh Ledare. Although Kraus casts a skeptical eye at the genre that's come to be known as “social practice,” her book is less a critique than a proposition as to how art might be read through desire and circumstance, delirium, gossip, coincidence, and revenge. All art, she implies, is a social practice.

This book analyzes social practice art that has a political agenda. Contributing scholars define this practice, provide historical context, and consider contemporary social practice art that addresses the current volatile political context.

"Art as Social Action . . . is an essential guide to deepening social art practices and teaching them to students." —Laura Raicovich, president and executive director, Queens Museum Art as Social Action is both a general introduction to and an illustrated, practical textbook for the field of social practice, an art medium that has been gaining popularity in the public sphere. With content arranged thematically around such topics as direct action, alternative organizing, urban imaginaries, anti-bias work, and collective learning, among others, Art as Social Action is a comprehensive manual for teachers about how to teach art as social practice. Along with a series of introductions by leading social practice artists in the field, valuable lesson plans offer examples of pedagogical projects for instructors at both college and high school levels with contributions written by prominent social practice artists, teachers, and thinkers, including: Mary Jane Jacob Maureen Connor Brian Rosa Pablo Helguera Jen de los Reyes Jeanne van Heeswick Jaishri Abichandani Loraine Leeson Ala Plastica Daniel Tucker Fiona Whelan Bo Zheng Dipti Desai Noah Fischer Lesson plans also reflect the ongoing pedagogical and art action work of Social Practice Queens (SPQ), a unique partnership between Queens College CUNY and the Queens Museum.

"Art as Social Action . . . is an essential guide to deepening social art practices and teaching them to students." —Laura Raicovich, president and executive director, Queens Museum Art as Social Action is both a general introduction to and an illustrated, practical textbook for the field of social practice, an art medium that has been gaining popularity in the public sphere. With content arranged thematically around such topics as direct action, alternative organizing, urban imaginaries, anti-bias work, and collective learning, among others, Art as Social Action is a comprehensive manual for teachers about how to teach art as social practice. Along with a series of introductions by leading social practice artists in the field, valuable lesson plans offer examples of pedagogical projects for instructors at both college and high school levels with contributions written by prominent social practice artists, teachers, and thinkers, including: Mary Jane Jacob Maureen Connor Brian Rosa Pablo Helguera Jen de los Reyes Jeanne van Heeswick Jaishri Abichandani Loraine Leeson Ala Plastica Daniel Tucker Fiona Whelan Bo Zheng Dipti Desai Noah Fischer Lesson plans also reflect the ongoing pedagogical and art action work of Social Practice Queens (SPQ), a unique partnership between Queens College CUNY and the Queens Museum.

This book takes a new, exciting and important approach to art. It shows how children and older students can use art to explore personal, social and cultural issues that touch their lives. The book covers new ground, responding as it does to the increasingly diverse nature of cities and to recent government initiatives worldwide to foster social inclusion and equality of opportunity and support active citizenship. The contributors are art educators. They write about their ways of engaging with contemporary art practice in their particular fields so as to encourage young people to acquire critical understanding. They also challenge the pedagogies that perpetuate long-established forms of art practice. Tim Rollins writes about his work with disaffected youths in the Bronx and John Johnston describes work in art to bring communities together in Northern Ireland. Other contributors include Toby Jackson, head of interpretation at Tate Modern, Diedre Prinz, curator of the Robben Island museum in South Africa, the 198 Gallery in south London, and Viv Golding who works in museums and gallery education. Sinath Bannerjee explores socio-cultural issues in comic novels in India and Sue Lok explores identities through art practices. Educators at each level also contribute to this groundbreaking book. Andy Gower describes his innovative art practice in a secondary school, and children of Room 13 - in a Scottish primary school - report on their organization of their own focus for art. Lesley Burgess and Nick Addison give an account of their development of critical and social practices in art education at London''s Institute of Education. The book is for all those working in art education, in museums and galleries, schools and communities. Contributor information : Tim Rollins work in New York with Kids of Survival (KOS) has achieved world-wide acclaim. Beginning in the 1980s Rollins taught a highly disaffected group of teenagers in the Bronx and together they established an art workshop where members of the group produced challenging conceptual art work. Subsequently work was sold and is now held in major galleries around the world. Through their visual practices many members of the group overcame feelings of rejection and alienation and developed self assurance and confidence. John Johnston works with the Protestant communities in Belfast and through the use of visual practices he has been working with young people in a variety of community sites to explore issues of identity. This is a difficult educational challenge given the history of Northern Ireland. Recently he has been invited to work in Lebanon at a human rights summer school. He has been working with young people there to explore themes of ''home'' and ''belonging'' through visual practices. Room 13 consists of a highly creative group of children at Caol Primary School near Fort William in Scotland. The children are producing contemporary art which has received much interest and acclaim nationally and internationally. The children run Room 13 as an entirely self-funding business, independent from the school. Rob Fairley and Claire Gibb are the only adults involved, they offer advice but they are not the children''s teachers. An elected committee of children makes all decisions about the work and the business. Viv Golding is a lecturer in museum studies at Leicester University. She uses the concept of ''museum clearing'' to counter the discourses of lack, often a self-fulfilling prophecy that frequently permeates much discussion of Black children and their under-achievement in UK schools today. The practical value of her critique is illustrated through a fieldwork project involving imaginative art and literacy school and museum work in south London with early years children. Deidre Prins and her team work as education officers at Robben Island Museum in South Africa. They provide some background to the work of the museum and introduce readers briefly to the legacy of creative forms used in the maximum security prison between 1960s and 1991 and the role it played in creating a process of ''normalization'' under conditions that were repressive and alienating. A large part of the audiences of Robben Island Museum are children and youth. All of them have no memory or experience of the colonial period in RSA history and very few of them have a memory or experience of apartheid. These are two defining periods in the lives of all South Africans, with the scars, benefits and joys of a new democracy. To create a dynamic learning environment in which children and youth can engage with a legacy which is at once painful and liberatory, requires a process of ''making memory'', speaking about the past, doing the past and understanding the past. Their engagement with this past in turn creates their own memories and leaves its mark on Robben Island, which is a living museum. The theme of ''memory making'' will be described through the production of a photographic collage which is part of the annual Spring School activities. 198 Gallery :The team at the 198 Gallery write about their work on he Urban Visions scheme which is an outreach programme that deals with disaffected youth in south London. Lucy Davies the chief administrator and other gallery staff will write about how their program has impacted on the learning experience of children from this diverse urban environmen. Many are excluded from schools or have learning difficulties which schools find difficult to address. The gallery in its work across a range of media, but more especially electronic media, has earned the respect of many in educational and fine art circles both in this country and in mainland Europe. Sue Lok is a an artist and lecturer at Middlesex University. She has a particular interest in the experience of Chinese British artists and young people. Her work will explore themes central to their experience alongside issues emanating from her own experience as an artist and researcher. Lesley Burgess and Nick Addison are art educators at the Institute of Education in London. They have a nation-wide reputation for their seminal publication Learning to Teach Art and Design in the Secondary School. They have carried out further research in the arena of teacher education for this book. Andy Gower is head of art at a north London comprehensive school. He and his team have devised a way of teaching which is unique but very successful within the state system. Their issues-based approach extends across the year groups and encourages responses which address issues of personal, social, cultural and political concern. The idea is not to focus greatly on the development of traditional skills in making art but in fostering a creative thinking environment in which children respond imaginatively and personally to issues which impact on their lives. Sarnath is a comic artist: he address issues through the graphic medium of comic imagery. His work explores relationships and issues of exclusion, both physical and psychological. The ways in which his pieces unfurl encourage different interpretations and readings of what is being said. It is an extraordinarily intense and challenging comic style which demands constant revisiting and re-reading. His chapter invites us to enter the world of a south Asian man whose thoughts drift in and out of different points of experience. It takes us on a physical and psychological journey and depositis us in a space that begs more questions about identity and belonging. Sarnath Banerjee has initiated a scheme in the south Asian community of Tower Hamlets in east London which will see Bengali women make comics about their lives and thoughts. He is developing a similar scheme among a number of minority ethnic communities in the Brixton area of south London. He is shortl