Teaching the Practice
I first encountered the Hammer’s Public Engagement program when I convened a panel on alternative curatorial practices as part of my Field Methods course at Otis College of Art and Design. The intent was to explore innovative curatorial practices in socially engaged art. What I found interesting about the Hammer was the museum’s willingness to allow reflexive criticalities to influence its methodologies. Recently it demonstrated its flexibility by forming a last-minute partnership with our Graduate Public Practice program for the symposium ENGAGE MORE NOW! We were collaborating with the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis to plan a public presentation as part of its project for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time LA/LA initiative, Talking to Action,[1] for the same weekend, and rather than compete for audiences, we wanted to join forces to present a discussion by our gathering of Latin American scholars and curators. In the spirit of social practice, the Hammer was happy to comply. Attending the symposium from the vantage point of teaching in the field, I was interested in what questions and observations might make their way back to our classroom.
In a practice that requires fluency in so many arenas — including processes, fields, histories, and disciplines — what stood out for me in the two-day symposium were issues of audience and translation. Candice Hopkins discussed ways in which biennials were rethinking notions of community due to a decline in arts participation nationwide.[2] Gregory Sale asked an ongoing yet continually relevant question in a panel on museum-sited projects — “Where are the publics?” — directed at visual art’s lack of reach, or translation, to people who speak, metaphorically, different languages. Otis faculty member Bill Kelley Jr., one of the curators of Talking to Action, moderated the panel “Talking to Action: Researching Community-Based Art Practices in Latin America and Los Angeles.” What I found most interesting about the panel, conducted in both English and Spanish, was watching the audience demographics shift along with the actual language. It seemed that a new constituency joined this panel, one that was clearly, by virtue of its members’ responses to Spanish-language statements, bilingual.
Led by Kelley and his cocurator, fellow Otis faculty member Karen Moss, Talking to Action is a research and curatorial project that will culminate in an exhibition on collaborative and dialogically based forms of art at the Otis Ben Maltz Gallery in 2017. The panel offered the symposium attendees a look at a dialogic process in which researchers are exploring methodologies, subjects, and approaches from their different countries. Each panelist is researching a project in the context of the country where he or she works: Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, and the United States. Looking at social practice from Latin America in a panel conducted forthrightly in two languages brought the issue of translation to the forefront. In Latin America there is actually no term of reference for the transdisciplinary dialogical work that we call social practice, and yet artists have been engaged with these practices for decades.
The conversation onstage was part of a process that has included convenings in different countries over the course of a year and has involved students in our Public Practice Program, who have reported on the Cognate Collective, Iconoclasistas, Dignicraft, and Polen art collectives, to name a few. All the students attended the Hammer symposium, learning from panels and from the improvisational moments in between, as when Documenta curator Hendrik Folkerts met with students over coffee in an informal seminar during a break. Our program is constantly seeking to locate learning opportunities, cultivate community networks, and develop resources. Symposiums such as ENGAGE MORE NOW! reinforce the idea of a broad community of practitioners and programs in our local and international art ecosystem. Representing the process of translation in the symposium itself was, for me and my bilingual students, a validation and an unusual demonstration of the outward-reaching efforts of institutions like the Hammer to truly represent civic culture in all its diversity.
Notes:
- More info is available on the Talking to Action blog: http://blogs.otis.edu/talking-to-action/about
- This national trend is reinforced in recent studies conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts spanning over a decade. National Endowment for the Arts, A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2002–2012.
Consuelo Velasco Montoya (Chelo) is the founding Program Manager and faculty member working alongside Chair Suzanne Lacy in the MFA in Public Practice program at Otis College of Art and Design. She was previously employed by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro Art) to support the selection of public art for the Expo Light Rail line. Her MA in Public Art Studies from the University of Southern California focused on arts administration, digital media and art in rural contexts. Velasco Montoya is on the advisory committee for the Social Practice Art (SPART) fund and is a board member of the Vincent Price Art Museum. She is currently pursuing a second masters, an MFA in Graphic Design at Otis College of Art and Design.
