Former "ASP" Student Wins Award

Congratulations to one of my former "Art as Social Practice" students, Fred Lameck, who is this year’s American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Design Continuum Fund Recipient. Fred collaborated with his fellow student, Nora Mosley, on their social practice project, Gender Without Boundaries. He’s currently a Senior Manager at Witeck Communications, working with corporate clients, and he also works with non-profits like the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, and PFLAG. I am extremely proud to see that Fred’s “passion for social justice and gender issues,” clearly evident in his collaborative “ASP” project with Nora in Fall 2014, is still continuing. Kudos, Fred!

Here’s a Q&A with Fred on the AIGA-DC web site: 2015 Design Continuum Fund Recipient.

FACE VALUES

FACE VALUES, a participatory art event organized by MCB in collaboration with Corcoran College of Art students from his “Art as Social Practice” course, opens Saturday, May 11 at STUDIO 1469. Students photographed random people in urban environments and at the event the participant subjects and the public may post comments on the photographs and what they suggest or reveal about the person. The event seeks to initiate conversations about social identity, stereotypes, the way we present ourselves and how others see us.

From the event announcement:
"In a project working within the public sphere, we seek to convey a message of acceptance, not tolerance. In an exhibition from the students of the Corcoran College of Art + Design's “Art as Social Practice” course, they shall embark on a quest of neglected importance to the people of Washington, D.C., but also to the world at large. Tendencies to judge others based on color of skin, amount of tattoos or piercings, age, sex, sexual orientation and gender has become so ingrained into our everyday lives that we make assumptions without thinking critically about ourselves and the others with whom we interact.

Through this project we seek to challenge the notions of stereotypes juxtaposed against the actuality of who people really are versus who we assume them to be. For the duration of one week, students will set out to take photographs of willing participants that will be exhibited at STUDIO 1469. on Saturday, May 11. At the opening of the exhibit there will be opportunities for the photographed participants and others to use Post-It Notes to write down what characteristics are revealed about the participants in the photographs. Whether good or bad, all comments will be posted alongside the photos so that conversations may begin in an open, and welcoming atmosphere to potentially start a discourse on race, body modification, age, sex, sexual orientation and gender, and about how we display ourselves, and how others perceive us. It will also speak to the fact that although we are all equal, we do all have differences that are of little consequence. Our goal is to spread awareness of the equality of all people, and thus create a sense of community within the Washington, D.C. public sphere."

CONTACT: mcb@markcameronboyd.com

On site

A performance by Mark Cameron Boyd & friends creating a spatio-temporal, participatory installation in the conference room at Grupo 7, Georgetown's leading architecture firm; MCB will speak "on site," his words transcribed via his text bisection process that guests may decipher afterward.

Sponsored by The Art Registry Group, Alchimie Forever & Grupo 7; additional artwork by Joan Belmar, Joel D'Orazio, J. Ford Huffman, Ani Kasten, Khanh H. Le & Greg Minah.

Where: 1010 Wisconsin Ave. NW, WDC
When: reception: 5:30-8; performance: 6:15pm
RSVP: rsvp@theartregistrygroup.com

Participatory Conceptual Collaboration

My 18-year-old niece, Matilde Chan Do Rosario, wanted to make art with me so we did a small blackboard she can take back to Macau. It's participatory so she can invite her friends to decipher the sentences and conceptual because I only supplied the idea, the words and the process.

The Collaborative Turn

"Maria Lind characterizes 'collaborative practice' as having the subsets of collaboration, interaction and participation. Collaboration is 'an umbrella term for the diverse working methods that require more than one participant.' Interaction can be many people working together or one individual 'pressing a button.' Participation is 'creation of a context' for participants to 'take part in something that someone else has created.'(1) My goals for Graduate Collaborative Studio come from my vantage point as an artist who makes installations that function as participatory sites for the collaborative art making experience. My text-based installations invite viewers to actively participate by writing directly upon my artworks. In my practice, this collaborative play with text 'stands in for' the experience of art as the viewer’s contribution affects the 'final image' of the work."

_________________________________________________

1. Quotes from "The Collaborative Turn" by Maria Lind, in Taking the Matter into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices, London, 2007.

Participation & "De-Authoring"

“The gesture of ceding some or all authorial control is conventionally regarded as more egalitarian and democratic than the creation of a work by a single artist, while shared production is also seen to entail the aesthetic benefits of risk and unpredictability. Collaborative creativity is therefore understood both to emerge from, and to produce, a more positive and non-hierarchical social model.”(1)

Collaboration in art-making is not new. In fact, much contemporary art is a collective production engineered through technical support and mediated through components of technology. What is more intriguing about the collaborative making of art is the idea that it embodies a “de-authored lineage that aims to embrace collective creativity.” The rejection of a sole “author” responsible for the artwork is an essential 20th Century art theory and currently fertile grounds for collaborative art-making. This “de-authoring” continues to launch new interpretations of collaboration in socially-engaged art, postconceptualism, cinema and performance.

The goals for Graduate Collaborative Studio come from my vantage point as an artist who creates participatory installations that function as sites for the collaborative art-making experience. My text-based installations invite viewers to actively participate; to “play” with the words and meanings hidden in the text by writing directly upon the panels. This collaborative play with text “stands in for” the experience of art as the viewers’ contributions affect the “final image” of the work.

There are two areas of collaborative art-making that I wish to explore: situations, sites or installations that invite collaboration to transform viewers into participant /interpreters; and “de-authored” collaborative works that yield control by one “author” to production shared by many.

____________________________________________________________________

1. Bishop, Claire. “Viewers as Producers” in Participation, London-Cambridge, 2006, 12.