An introduction
Since the Hammer received a James Irvine Foundation grant to start Public Engagement at the museum in 2009, the scope of socially engaged art presented at museums has broadened dramatically. And increasingly we are in greater dialogue with one another — each year seems to bring a new convening to discuss this work, and in fact the Hammer will organize a symposium in Fall 2015. Yet writing about socially engaged art hasn’t proliferated at the same pace. Not even close.
The purpose of this forum is to give those of us intersecting with socially engaged art a place to write and think about various aspects of the work we are seeing and making. The first topic is “the archive,” which has been on my mind a lot lately, as I’ve been thinking about how to organize and share the extensive digital files that have accumulated as a result of documenting the many programs we’ve made within Public Engagement. The result of some of this pondering manifests in the new Public Engagement web presence, where you will find links to an extensive selection of images and videos that we have created over the years
Dale Davis, co-founder of the historic Brockman Gallery, and an artist in his own right, writes in his post about his experience of processing decades of ephemera via a residency at Art + Practice. (You can read about the Hammer’s very first Public Engagement partnership with A+P here) Though he is not writing about archiving vis-à-vis social practice, I have found it helpful to see how someone adjacent to the field is addressing the very same issues that many of us are.
Each writer will certainly take a different approach—conceptual, predictive, instructive—Dale’s falls into the latter category, illuminating the process of organizing volumes of letters and posters, while giving anyone embarking on a similar endeavor some great questions to consider from the beginning. I hope you’ll respond with thoughts or questions as Dale himself will reply. I may even chime in too as I am very eager to be in deeper conversation with each of you. As our work expands, so too should our dialogue.
Allison Agsten
Curator of Public Engagement
