What is Social Practice? Alumni in the Field
MFA Public Practice
Issue 1. 2016
What is Social Practice? What is social practice? Or, for that matter, what is community art, relational aesthetics, or participatory art? These questions are not merely academic exercises in terminology meant to claim intellectual and creative territory. Ours is an art form that thrives on the many different professional, political, and philosophical discourses that inform our relationship to public life. The best answers, we believe, will be found in the work of emerging artists who are formulating new definitions and expanding the borders of this evolving set of art making practices. Here we offer some of the work of our alum since we founded the MFA Public Practice program at Otis College of Art and Design in 2007. How do our students participate as activists, producing new forms of public engagement and new knowledge, while embodying new definitions of art? During this decade we have attracted scores of students who aspired to change and engage the world through their art. They come with all kinds of backgrounds and, working across disciplines, they combine object making, performance, research, writing, tactical media, or community organizing in projects that integrate studio art practices with social engagement. Ours is a community of dedicated artists/scholars—faculty and students—who engage particular audiences and communities in collaborative processes to identify issues, promote public discourse, and catalyze social change within specific institutions, neighborhoods, and other public contexts. We invite you to join us in Los Angeles to explore your own unique contributions to the arts. But first, take a look to see how some of our alum answer the question: What is Social Practice?
by suzanne lacy, chair
Engaging the world & creating social change through the arts
Jules Rochielle Sievert: Social Designer
Jules Rochielle Sievert ‘09 moved from Canada to Los Angeles to attend the MFA Public Practice program. Her work in Vancouver in a youth activist theater program led her to seek a visual arts social justice practice.
1
A prolific and tech-savvy organizer, Jules is Creative Director at NuLawLab at the Northeastern University School of Law, a program she developed and pioneered to produce a series of art and media projects for the University. She is also the Project Director and Manager of the Social Design Collective (LLC) where she utilizes applied design, collaborative art and design practices, public art, public pedagogies, civic engagement, social justice, participatory media, social media, GIS mapping, data collection, research, social media and storytelling. Jules also founded Social Practice Art Network (SPAN), an online archive and resource, developing an international survey and study that has reached and engaged over 500 artists from around the globe, creating partnerships with Open Engagement, Arts Quest, and DotToDot Arts. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Jules was appointed artist-in-residence for the NYC Mayor’s Office of Veterans Affairs for her project using art as a strategy to do community outreach and build connections between female veterans and the (often unused) resources available to them.
2009 julesrochielle.com | @jules.rochielle
Tory Tepp: Frogs, Moths & Shopping Carts
3
2009 torytepp.com | @torytepp
Tory Tepp ‘09, one of the intrepid first graduates of MFA Public Practice program, met Mel Chin during the first year project in New Orleans, exploring race and education in the spot where Homer Plessy began his historic legal battle for equality. Tory’s itinerant public art practice was launched when Chin invited him to serve as driver and community speaker for the 19,000 mile journey of the Fundred Dollar Bill Project in 2010. While a student at Otis Tory lived near the Los Angeles River in Atwater Village (called Frogtown), a neglected neighborhood cut off by freeways and bordered by the natural riverbeds of an ecosystem that combines astounding beauty with horrifying truths. There he created a living and growing space where local people used dirt, growing beds and shopping cart portable gardens to harvest and share produce. A new interactive bio-system emerged in the neighborhood, one that included praying mantises and moths. Tory has maintained an effective eco-art installation practice through a series of environmental art residencies and projects situated in New Orleans, Milwaukee, Death Valley and Los Angeles. He was the inaugural Community Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida and celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act with a residency in the John Muir Wilderness in California.
5
Paige Tighe ‘10 encompasses concepts of intimate connection and engagement in public performance. Her work is founded in psychological research about group and solitary interactions. While in the MFA Public Practice program she danced on public buses, sang pop songs with strangers, and produced Pedestal & the All Girl Band with two students from the program, Hayata Tubtim and Andy Manoushagian. The group hilariously questioned pop culture’s role in social transformation. They performed at parties to cheer on feminists, highlighted the top 40 songs when wars started, and arranged an Aerosmith love ballad singalong for one hundred people. Walk with Me is an on-going performance where she takes someone on a walk, with no set path while holding hands, introducing topics of social and personal discomforts and comforts. In Los Angeles a performance “walk” along the LA River brought up issues of social equality, health, and urbanism that are deeply embedded in the public discourse on the future of the river. Walk with Me has been performed along the East Coast. Tighe’s work has also been shown in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and England. She co-founded the Feminist Video Quarterly screened in Minneapolis and is currently an event producer for Public Access TV.
2010 paigetighe.com | @sustainartpaige
Paige Tighe: Simple Transgressions
7
Hataya Tubtim: Drawing in Places
2010 htubtim 2009.wordpress.com
Hataya Tubtim ‘10 is fascinated by the spaces people inhabit and how spontaneous empathy arises across difference. Her practice originated in the studio with drawing, design, and painting, but she came to Otis to explore work that focuses on community engagement and public issues. Her experience in the first year project—nine-months in a small farming town in the San Joaquin Valley—was formative. Relating this to her parent’s legacy in rural Southeast Asia, she started to examine how traditional processes—including her inherited Thai culture—might draw people into a relationship with her work. After graduating for the MFA Public Practice program, Hataya returned to the San Joaquin Valley with fellow student and collaborator, Michelle Glass. They received a commission to do a short community project in southern Kern County in 2012. Afterward, she wrote a proposal that funded their current project there entitled: 1000 Wildflowers and the Women of Arvin. Hataya has received grants from the Arts Council of Kern County, Pasadena Art’s Council, the Samsung Endowment, and a commission from the Pasadena Playhouse. Hataya and Glass produced an installation at the Armory Center for the Arts in 2013, and exhibitions of 1000 Wildflowers are scheduled in Bakersfield and in Los Angeles in 2016.
Roberto Del Hoyo & David Russell: Mobile Mural Lab
9
In 2002 the City of Los Angeles implemented an ordinance against advertising on buildings, one that did not discriminate between commercial signs and fine art murals. Even today, the production and preservation of murals remains entangled within a bureaucratic web of city politics. With public presentations and workshops like “Who Censors You?” that feature the production of ever-changing murals on the side of their Mobile Mural Lab truck and in public spaces, MML invites participants to reimagine a public domain where individuals have the liberty to creatively express themselves outside the confines of private space. Recent projects include a guerilla invasion of MOCA’s Art In The Streets exhibition opening, MML, lecturing on The Mural as a Social/Political Tool in colleges, an LA County Arts Commission, and a McColl Residency in North Carolina.
2011 2010 mobilemurallab.com | @mobilemurallab
Roberto Del Hoyo ‘10 and David Russell ‘11 met in the MFA Public Practice program and founded the Mobile Mural Lab (MML), a portable project that serves as a space for civic education and mural production. The pair connects with communities via social networking, workshops, and interventions within the public realm, bringing together youth organizations, graffiti artists, muralists, performance and visual artists to ask the question, “Who has a right to public space?”
11
Felicia Montes ‘11 creates art on social and spiritual transformation while working on the front lines of activism across the Southwest and in Latin America. For two decades, Felicia has organized and performed in hundreds of cultural events, conferences, classrooms and protests for social justice. She came to the MFA Public Practice program to learn new skills to enhance an already prodigious practice. Felicia embodies the interdisciplinary and pedagogical emphasis in social practice with ritual-based public and performance art, direct actions, and enterprise. Since graduation she has continued organizing around issues of health, access, mobility, migration and more, including creating Urban Xic, an online “mercado for the movement.” Her self-named FE clothing line is another example of her eclectic body of work, which includes poetry (her recent book is “Ten Fe”) and essays. Felicia has exhibited at the 18th Street Art Center, Vincent Price Art Museum, and Self Help Graphics with installations of photography, sculpture, video and silkscreen prints. A co-founder of the Mujeres de Maiz collective, she is planning their 20-year retrospective with support from the California Humanities Council. Felicia has taught at UC Santa Barbara and East LA College and lectures across the southwest including UCLA, University of Texas, and UC Davis.
2011 feliciamontes.com | @feevaone
Felicia Montes: The Street is a Stage
Addie Tinnell: Organizing for a Transfeminist World
Addie Tinnell came into the MFA Public Practice program as Cake and Eat It with her collaborator, Kate Kershenstein. Since graduating her work has explored femme and trans visibility, police brutality and the social construction of autonomous spaces.
13
Addie has helped organize demonstrations, actions, community spaces, lending libraries, free schools and benefit shows. She creates performances and sculptures that build bridges between disparate communities, in particular transgender and nontransgender feminists. Recently, unbelievable strides have been made to address transphobia and exclusion in the military, workplace, media visibility and access to public spaces, making possible intersectionalities between political movements that are the basis of her work. Addie worked closely with feminist artist Andrea Bowers to produce a series of photo sessions with prominent transgender activists. This resulted in public dialogues and gallery installations with trans activists like Cece McDonald, Patrisse Cullors, and Jennicet GutiÊrrez. Her current project, Small ox, grows out of a series of potlucks and is an opportunity for transgender and cisgender feminists to work together toward more trans-inclusive feminist communities. It is a threedimensional installation and programmatic response to Miriam Shapiro’s 1967 work Big Ox, and will include a month of public programs and conversations modeled after 1970s feminist consciousness-raising.
2012 cakeandeatit.org
Christina Sรกnchez Juรกrez: Food, Labor, & Survival
15
Organizing food-based interventions such as communal cookouts, DIY cooking shows, and recipe swaps in collaboration with diverse community groups, Cocina Abierta Collective also provides a platform for engaging restaurant workers and consumers in dialogue about the realities of food labor. Their organizing operates at the intersection of restaurant workers’ rights and fair housing. They are founding members of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, recipients of the inaugural SPArt award for social practice art and are working on a new project in Carson supported by The Los Angeles County Arts Commission.
2012 sanchezjuarezstudio.com | @cristofina 1
Christina Sánchez Juárez ‘12 came to the MFA Public Practice program after teaching in Oakland schools to combine social justice with a new form of art-making. While at Otis, in 2011 Christina and Cayetano Juárez, a professional cook with 15 years of experience, co-founded the Cocina Abierta Collective, a nomadic, experimental and pedagogical “test kitchen.” Working with a rotating roster of designers, restaurant professionals, and community organizers, the Collective exchanges immigrant histories and culinary skills, as it promotes a worker-centered philosophy for ethical eating.
17
Jeseca Dawson ’12, started her social justice advocacy while still an undergraduate, but in the MFA Public Practice program her humor came to the fore, with idiosyncratic charac-terizations that explored issues around systemic violence in American culture. Her videos and photos address Anglo-American workingclass bigotry through examining the processes of objectification and pulling from feminist views of the self and psychodrama concepts and methods. In the video Home of the Braver, Jeseca questioned blind patriotism, hilariously portraying class inequity, patriarchy and xenophobia through the invention of characters modeled after family members. Immediately after graduating, Jeseca received the prestigious Ben Maltz Gallery Curatorial Fellowship. Her curatorial projects included: Glued to the Seat: Revealing Hidden Realities, six artists whose narrative work reveals hidden truths and confront deeply-rooted stereotypes and Variations of a Whole, thirteen artists who inves-tigate identity, social responsibility, art theory and the tension between human and natural production. Jeseca was also the Coordinator for Otis’ Talking to Action, an upcoming exhibition of artists from Latin American and Los Angeles involved with sociallyengaged and research-based practices that is part of the Getty’s PST LA/LA initiative. She is currently the Development Coordinator of Inner-City Arts in Los Angeles.
Jeseca Dawson: Humorous Videos & Serious Curating
2012 homeofthebraver.tumblr.com
Neda Moridpour: Global Activism on Gender Violence
19
Neda’s art transforms the seemingly quotidian and mundane via round-table talks, visual and performative interventions, and lens-based practices. She is part of two artist-activist collectives: [P]Art Collective and LOUDER THAN WORDS that she co-founded with S.A. Bachman. [P]Art Collective was winner of first and second prizes at Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival. Neda was one of the 2014 Women’s Caucus for Arts International Honor Roll Awardees for her work with LOUDER THAN WORDS. She is a 2014 award recipient from the Center for Cultural Innovation Investing in Artists in the Visual Arts, Craft & Literary Arts. Her work has been exhibited in the USA, Iran and China and is in the collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She teaches full time at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
2012 nedmorid.com | @nedmorid
Neda Moridpour ‘12 is a socially engaged feminist artist and educator who was born and raised in Iran. A strong awareness of gender discrimination, inequality, and censorship permeates her philosophy as she seeks to establish dialogue and mobilize communities through her art. Her thesis project for the MFA Public Practice program, The Auntie Roach (Khale Suske) (2012) was a year-long project with Iranian and non-Iranian women using an Iranian folklore story to raise consciousness about global gender-based violence.
21
Teresa Flores ‘13 is a fifth-generation Californian who explores the State’s shifting cultural identity as Latinos regain the majority. Throughout the MFA Public Practice program, her work with video, performance, and painting addressed issues of health, education and poverty in California’s great Central Valley. Her recent work, FresnYoga, synthesizes yoga poses with the icons, history, and issues facing Fresno, merging adaptive learning and community discussion with local history as a way for citizens to dialog, learn, and laugh about local topics through movement. Another recent project, Experimental Quesadilla Lab, is a pop-up kitchen and recipe exchange that uses cheese as a metaphor for deeply embedded, often invisible class and culture boundaries. The tortilla serves as a contact zone opening the space between high and low, mainstream and marginalized cultures through the negotiation of experimental quesadilla ingredients. The project is funded by the Central Valley Community Foundation through the James Irvine Foundation. Teresa splits her time between Los Angeles, where she is a teaching artist at the Armory Center for the Arts and at California State University Fresno, where she is a lecturer of Visual Culture. She continues to organize conferences, festivals, and discussions as a former board member of Arte Américas and Fresno Filmworks.
Teresa Flores: Rural Roots
2013 teresafloresstudio.com | @notteresa
Raul Baltazar: The Aztec Bunny
23
Raul Paulino Baltazar ’09, who lives and works in Los Angeles and Mexico City, has an extensive and diverse public and studio art practice. As a public artist, he has completed large-scale permanent murals, installations, and sculptures located in schools, drug rehabilitation centers, parks and juvenile halls. He organizes diverse participants for production workshops that include, for instance, Buddhist monks and school students. He is also a prolific and idiosyncratic performance artist who interweaves contemporary and traditional rituals, myths and archetypes to produce a “Mesoamerican” Trickster perspective on the humorous and the banal, a form of social practice art reminiscent of other artistic provocateurs. Baltazar’s character Tochtli 7 (the Aztec Bunny), drawing from contem-porary Latino L.A. and traditional Mexican Indigenous communities, opens a space for healing, communication and reflection. Raul’s recent grants and commissions include the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts (2015), a commission for Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, and the Cerritos Park Mural Project. Raul is a co-founder with MFA Public Practice alumnae Margarethe Drexel ‘16 and Víctor Albarracín Llanos ‘15, of Selecto Planta Baja, a contemporary exhibition space in the basement of a Latino marketplace in LA. His recent and upcoming exhibitions are in Melbourne, Copenhagen, Cairo, and Denmark.
2013 raulbaltazar.com | @mr.raulbaltazar
Lili Bernard: Artist Activist
25
Lili Bernard is a Cuban-born visual artist and actor whose work examines issues of trauma from sexism and racism in paintings, installations, performances and video. An anti-rape activist, Lili is a spokesperson for EndRapeSOL, a grassroots campaign to end the statute of limitations (SOL) on rape and sexual assault prosecution in California. When she came to the Otis MFA Public Practice program Lili had a robust artistic career that included her founding of BAILA (Black Artists in Los Angeles), an on-going social practice project that is a catalyst in the erasure of the marginalization of Black visual artists, and a networking movement to advance their careers. This work involves facilitating roundtables between BAILA and mainstream arts organizations, curating BAILA exhibitions, art critiques and studio visits, mentoring, researching, archiving and publishing BAILA happenings. Lili has exhibited and performed at Coagula Curatorial, Walter Maciel Gallery, Charlie James Gallery, Forest
Lawn Museum, Torrance Art Museum, LA ArtCore, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, ArtShare LA, Watts Towers Arts Center, For Your Art and the Otis Bolsky Gallery. She is also an actress, published writer, arts activist, curator, community organizer and mother of six. 2014 lilibernard.com | @lilibernard6
Nicola Goode & Tracee Johnson: Little House Gallery 27
After graduating from the MFA Public Practice program, Nicola and Tracee founded Little House Gallery, a thriving space for experimentation as well as an occasional private residence for artists. Located in a 1907 Venice Beach bungalow at the junction of a commercial and residential district, it remains virtually unchanged and bears witness to an iconic California neighborhood’s shifting cultural and economic history. Little House Gallery recognizes the home as a site of autonomy, innovation and imagination. The collaborators encourage artists, performers and thinkers to embrace diverse perspectives and platforms to further engage creativity, activism and pedagogy. They invite proposals that challenge both the notions of a gallery and the preconceived forms and functions of a domestic space.
2014 littlehousegallery.com | @littlehousegallery
Nicola Goode ’14, a Los Angeles native, engages photography and site-specific in her practice that also incudes collaboration, research, and curatorial projects such as her thesis installation at Mack Sennett Studios in Hollywood. Tracee Johnson ’14 has an art practice that connects learning to the natural environment; her playful BrightGreenCar operates as a chalkboard surface for LA residents’ comments. She teaches in the Architecture/Interiors/Landscape department at Otis. Both artists have thriving practices focused on public space, inspired by architecture, landscape design, and photography.
Daniel French: The Space Between Music & Activism
29
Daniel French ’14 is a musician and playwright whose experience in community organizing on neighborhood and national level social justice campaigns brought “real-world” experience to the MFA Public Practice Program. As a primary member of Las Cafeteras, a trans-disciplinary performance group that mixes community organizing with music, Daniel wanted to deepen his practice in sound, performance, and video used to shift power dynamics and to spark public dialog. The group has received wide press attention, including an appearance on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and an album titled It’s Time. Hailing from the San Gabriel Valley, for his thesis project Daniel drove across the continent documenting his family stories and his Chicano, Mexican, Fronterizo, Mohawk, German, Italian, French, and English backgrounds. This resulted in installations featuring sound, documentation and conversations that took place in community settings and within the intimacy of his own extended family. “I’m interested in how public art practice can play strategic roles in transforming a community and can partner with
Daniel continues to write and perform music with Las Cafeteras across North America and plans to release a new album in Fall 2016.
2014 lascafeteras.com | @frenchismexican
groups already working there,� Daniel said, but his heartfelt and strategic optimism also found its way to meaningful dialogue within his own family.
Noé Gaytán: The High Cost of Higher Education
31
Noé Gaytán ’15 is a California native who, like most other students, realized that financing education was a major feat for working families. He decided to get his MFA from Otis even if the degree never earned him a dime. As an artist he felt it was worth it. Still, the thought of debt loomed and the amount he would owe seemed like an abstraction. There are almost 40 million Americans with outstanding student loans, and their cumulative debt is over $1.2 trillion, a huge burden that has become an accepted fact of life. Noe wondered: What would it feel like to come face to face, in a physical and tangible manner, with his debt? For his MFA Public Practice final project, Instituitional Critique, he attempted to pay off his own loans by creating a 1:1 artistic representation of it: he silkscreened $50,000 in various denominations and sold each at face value. He also convened forums for Los Angeles college student to have conversations about the widening, unsustainable student debt in the US and what can be done to ensure that future generations can pursue higher education. Currently Noé lives in New York City and works in the Brooklyn Museum’s education department. He continues as a founding member of the Michelada Think Tank.
2015 noegaytan.com | @neasg 18
Carol Zou: Craft of Poly-vocality & Community Organizing
33 Carol Zou ‘15 is a Texangelena by way of the Chinese diaspora whose work focuses on layered human geographies, craft as non-western cultural production, and polyvocality through a community organizing model. Carol organized the Yarn Bombing Los Angeles (YBLA) collective, which creates fiber-based public art through crowd-sourced, participatory models. While in the MFA Public Practice program Carol developed work on sexual harassment on public transportation and co-founded the Michelada Think Tank with fellow students, an alliance of creative workers of color that continues to explore the need for diversity in the creative fields. Carol is currently the project manager/artist-in-residence for Trans.lation, an arts and cultural platform initiated by MacArthur Awardee Rick Lowe and commissioned by the Nasher Sculpture Center, located in the rapidly gentrifying immigrant, refugee, African American and Latino neighborhood of Vickery Meadow, Dallas, Texas. Through resident-led councils, resident-taught workshops, professional development, and pop-up
2015 thisliferecorded.com | @coralzoa
exhibitions, she facilitates a space of cultural freedom and self-organization among a diverse and poly-lingual community. Carol is a 2015 National Art Strategies Creative Community Fellow.
35
Claudia Borgna: Plastic Bags and Interdependent Eco-feminism
Claudia Borgna ‘16 was born in Germany, raised in Italy and completed a fine art degree at the London Metropolitan University. Before coming to the Otis MFA Public Practice program she was exhibiting internationally and had received several prestigious residencies and awards, including the Joan Mitchell Grant, the Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Grant, and the Pritzker Foundation Endowed Fellowship Award. Through installation, performance and video art she has developed an aesthetic of eco-feminism that explores the political, social and environmental functions of art making. She questions how the “plastic” and the natural realms interact with one another through ephemeral structures of discarded shopping bags that are surprising beautiful. Plastic bags epitomize the quintessential discarded object, a symbolic vessel wandering across the landscape.
2016 claudiaborgna.com
Claudia’s ironic and hard-hitting performances and videos, a product of her time in Los Angeles, have deepened her insights into how gender, race, class based-division of labor and distribution of property manage to structure our knowledge and inform our interactions with nature. As Claudia suggests, “The health of human and social bodies, minds and souls are inevitably tied to their relation to the natural realms. In the end social, racial and economic justices are interdependent to the well-being of the environment.”
37
Michelada Think Tank is a group of artists, educators, and activists of color who host conversations with other people of color (PoC) and allies interested in creative change. The collective grew out of the 2014 Open Engagement conference in Queens, New York, during which the group distributed a postcard with presenter demographics, calling attention to a dramatic imbalance in PoC presenters and on-going underrepresentation in the art world. They continue with public forums and exhibitions, including a residency at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions where they created a participatory installation and series of think tanks on radical art practices, navigating institutions, and redefining success as an artist of color. Core group members are MFA Public Practice alumni Noé Gaytán ’15 and Carol Zou ‘15 (mentioned above) along with Mario Mesquita ’15, and Shefali Mistry ’16. Mario’s past experiences influence his hybrid practice of curating, collecting, creating spaces for interaction, making images, doing research, and knowledge. Trained as a graphic designer, he works as an education associate at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Shefali Mistry is an artist and arts administrator doing communications and outreach for the University Art Museum at California State University Long Beach. A first generation college graduate of immigrant parents, she is passionate about education and challenging cultural norms on gender-based violence. Painting and community organizing are her tools for consciousness-raising and political action.
Michelada Think Tank: Equity Talks & Tallies
2015 2016 micheladathinktank.com
Otis Graduate Public Practice Alumni & Students 2007–2016 Victor Albarracin Candida Ayala Raul Baltazar p. 23 Lili Bernard p. 25 Henderson Blumer Claudia Borgna p. 35 Yrneh Gabon Brown Estephany Campos Alexandra Cantle Jamie Crooke Powell Jeseca Dawson p. 17 Jeanette Degollado Roberto Del Hoyo p. 9 Andrea Dominguez Margarethe Drexel Mark Farina Teresa Flores p. 21 Daniel French p. 29 Noe Gaytán p. 31, 37 Michelle Glass Nicola Goode p. 27 Tonya S Ingram Tracee Johnson p. 27 Jennifer Kane Kate Kershenstein Boseul Kim Raghubir Kintisch Gabrielle Levine Shatto Light Katie Loughmiller Andrew Manoushagian Rodrigo Marti Ale McGrew Mario Mesquita p. 37 Shefali Mistry p. 37
Rodrigo Marti Felicia Montes p. 11 Neda Moridpour p. 19 Beth Ann Morrison Margo Mullen Ofunne Obiamiwe Silvia Juliana Mantilla Ortiz Faith Purvey Beatriz Valls Rodriguez Tamarind Rosetti David Russell p. 9 Christina Sánchez Juáres p. 15 Nathalie Sanchez Catherine Scott Jules Rochielle Sievert p. 1 Susan Slade Rory Sloan Tory Tepp p. 3 Paige Tighe p. 5 Addie Tinnell p. 13 Hataya Tubtim p. 7 Carmen Uriarte Gina Valona Roston Xiaotong Zhuang Carol Zou p. 33, 37
Follow us on social media: @OtisAgitate For more alumni profiles visit: otis.edu/social-practice-art
Otis College of Art and Design
otis.edu/graduate-programs
2009
Graduate Admissions
(310) 665 6820 (800) 527 OTIS (6847) 2010
gradadmissions@otis.edu
2011
Published by the Otis MFA Public Practice Program Los Angeles, CA First Edition
2012
What is Social Practice? Alumni in the Field
EDITOR Suzanne Lacy, Chair
2013
PUBLICATION DESIGN Chelo Velasco Montoya, Program Coordinator & Faculty chelostudio.com | @chelostudio PRINTER Typecraft, Pasadena, CA
Printed on certified environmentally friendly paper Copyright ©2016
SPECIAL THANKS Ana Llorente, Otis MFA Graphic Design Faculty Mentor & Karen Moss, Otis MFA Public Practice Faculty
Featured photos courtesy of the artists and program.
2016
Cover image: Andrea Bowers, Educate, Agitate, Organize, 2010 Channel letter signs: low voltage LED lights, plexiglass, aluminum Each sign: 27” x 66” x 5.5”
2015
Otis College of Art and Design. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by an electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
2014
Edition: 1,500
The MFA Public Practice Program is the only educational program in the Southern California region dedicated exclusively to providing artists with advanced skills for working in the public sphere, focusing both on collaborative and individual art production. Founded in Los Angeles in 1918, Otis College of Art and Design prepares diverse students of art and design to enrich the world through their creativity, their skill, and their vision.
9045 Lincoln Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90045 More info: otis.edu/gpp | 310 846 2610 | Follow us on social media @OtisAgitate