ARTIST STATEMENT
I've spent most of my art career making a conventional "banking" style of art described by Grant H. Kester in his book, Conversation Pieces as a style "in which the artist deposits an expressive content into a physical object, to be withdrawn later by the viewer." Over the last couple of years, I have been investigating how to incorporate processes of dialog and collaboration into my practice expanding beyond just object-based artwork. I am not willing to give up one practice for the other but instead have been trying to incorporate both. In 2008, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco asked me to include some older work that I had made in 2005 about abortion rights activism prior to the passage of Roe V. Wade in an exhibition called, "The Way We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics." My interest in social and public practice as well as expanding the collaboration between art institutions and community organizations led to my proposal that the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts offer visitors the opportunity to donate money to a small, local women's health care clinic in Oakland. Once a week the museum is free to the public. I suggested that on these "free" days, as an artwork, I offer the public the option of donating the attendance fee of $7 to the Women's Choice Clinic. I even created a donation form for my contribution to the exhibition catalog. After much discussion Ken Foster, the Executive Director of YBCA, responded by stating, "We want to provide a platform to a wide range of artists whose work speaks to the contemporary art world. This precludes us from advocating for a specific "cause" or "ideology" of an artists' work beyond providing a platform for its exhibition." Although I presented the "free day" donations idea as an artwork, the institution seemed not to be able to agree with me. For them the object-based work was considered as art while the performative, community-based aspect of my project was considered a political "cause".
Instead of giving up my pursuits of integrating community issues with cultural institutions, I began a series of conversations with curator Bob Sain that let to my artist-residency at 18th Street in our project called, "Love in Cemetery." Bob and I discovered that we had mutual interests in the relationship between artists, art and social engagements, as well as the relationship between arts organizations and social engagements. Prior to our conversations, Bob was invited to be a guest curator for an exhibition at 18th Street Arts Center. He had an interest in developing a project around these ideas, and hence our conversations began over a series of months. His curatorial focus was to identify and explore an aspect of L.A. in 10 years from now. Instantly he knew this would be an amazing opportunity to focus on the role of museums and their obligations to be socially responsible. Both of us saw this as a compelling vehicle to create a public platform for discussion of these issues. Through the conversations between Bob and myself, we broadened the scope of the project from art museums to cultural organizations. We realized the nature of this project would require us to work dialogically and collaboratively with many people and organizations, as well as mutating our roles as artist and curator.
One of our biggest concerns was how we would make a project like this with little funding, and how we would assure a substantial input of thought-perspective from a broad range of the LA cultural community. This led to what we thought was the most direct, democratic and practical way to proceed: Bob decided to develop an online survey of 4 questions that could act as a springboard for the project. The responses to the questionnaire will be displayed in the exhibition. In the survey, he identified 4 fundamental areas:
1. Concerns of our time
2. Community Impact
3. Role of Artists
4. Visions for a new kind of cultural organization
For my artist-residency, I have decided to develop a laboratory or practicum where experimentations with interventions and collaborations between cultural and community organizations could take place. I am using Bob's survey as the basis for this practicum. The heart of this project is not just about discussion, but also action and engagement. I hope to create a series or sequence of activities that manifest my positions on the issues put forth in the survey. My goal is that this artist-residency will be a generative process, but I cannot accomplish this as an individual artist. Therefore I have been given the opportunity to work the first year graduate students of the Otis Public Practice Program. Each of them, or in groups of 2, will choose a community organization to collaborate with and develop a project that will include an art component to be part of the 18th Street exhibition. The artist's studio at 18th Street Art Center will be used as the hub for their projects. It is my hope that these projects will integrate diverse local communities with cultural institutions as well as propose an expansion of sites of production for institutions. In this project, it is the artists' responsibility to not only unite these communities with arts organizations, but also to impact the life of the community they choose to work with in a meaningful way: to create something of value or use for the community after the exhibition ends. It is my goal that this project becomes an example that encourages cultural organizations to address their obligations to social issues, such as class, ethnicity, gender and politics.
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