News

All News

September 12, 2011

Sustaining Central Market Arts
This coming Monday, September 12, we will be hosting a retreat and working session devoted to Sustaining the Arts in the Central Market district of San Francisco.  With seed funding from UCIRA, ARC is working to build artistic partnerships between the UC system and arts organizations of Northern California.  One of our tasks is to think long-term about the role of the arts in Bay Area neighborhoods—as a means for building community, as a force in local economies, and as vehicles for provoking critical and imaginative reflection.
Our Powerhouse Year on Market
With the assistance from the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, the Northern California Community Loan Fund and NEA/SFAC ARTery Project grant last year, we were able to temporarily relocate to Mid-Market while our Leavenworth building undergoes renovations.

April 29, 2011

Panel Discussion: When Presenters Become Curators/When Curators Become Presenters

The first panel of the daylong symposium "Curating People," presented by the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley (arts.berkeley.edu) on April 29, 2011, this discussion of "When Presenters Become Curators/When Curators Become Presenters" is introduced by Shannon Jackson (UC Berkeley), moderated by Leigh Markopoulos (California College of the Arts), and features Betti-Sue Hertz and Angela Mattox (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), Erin Doughton and Kristan Kennedy (Portland Institute for Contemporary Art), and David Henry (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston).

April 28, 2011

Curating People: Michele Rabkin
Why I want to be in on this conversation…I am excited to be involved in organizing the “Curating People” symposium because it allows me to re-visit issues that I explored when I was a practicing artist—or to be more accurate, a student artist. 
Curating People: Erika Balsom

My research focuses on how and why the projected image has emerged as a major feature of artistic production over the past two decades. In addition to the analysis of key artworks, a significant component of this project has involved examining the various strategies curators and artists have used to display moving images in a gallery/museum space. These can range from the innovative to the exploitative, from the refreshing to the careless.

Curating People: Shannon Jackson
Confessions of a Social Reform and Theater Scholar Turned Social Practice and Performance Scholar | Alright, this a broad-stroked exercise that reduces the terms that precede and follow both sides of the “turn.” And of course, I would not want to say that I have concretely left one kind of position and concretely entered another kind of position. But the exercise does allow me to say a bit more about what it means to come to the question of Curating People as someone who first studied theater and wrote a first book on social reform history.
City, Arts and Public Spaces: Susan Schweik

Keyword: Editing the City | Recently New York City’s official adoption of a new disability accessibility icon has gotten a lot of press: a dynamic figure in a wheelchair zooming through blue space, in sharp contrast to the familiar poky, static handicapped parking-lot sign.

Curating People: Betti-Sue Hertz

Somewhere along the way in the late 1980s things shifted. I was a young visual artist living in a loft in downtown Manhattan where I made my paintings and sculptures, mostly highly charged abstract works. I kept myself on a rather rigorous art-making schedule. During the day, I was curating exhibitions in the South Bronx at a small alternative exhibition space as well as cemeteries and industrial parks. It was this combination that caused the crisis.

Curating People: Erin Boberg Doughton
I came to PICA through a performance background in theatre, dance and music. Starting on the ground floor of a new organization I was part of a small team working with artists in both visual art and performance. With each project I learned a new set of skills, generally related to connecting artists with the human and/or physical resources they needed to make their work happen, teaming them with designers, technicians and thinkers in our community as well as spaces, materials, and tools.
Curating People: Post-Show Paraphrase
My own notes are my personal interpretations of points raised by our speakers, but here is an attempt to share a few paraphrases of some of the things that made me do some extra scribbling.  Others should feel free to add phrases and paraphrases that they remember—or correct mine.
Angela Mattox: how can different organizations make use of each others’ resources to support an artist?…there is an art to the practical…
City, Arts and Public Spaces: Gavin Kroeber

Keyword: Event Landscape | The arts and the city are mutually recomposing one another – conceptually, physically, operationally.

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Dominic Willsdon

Keyword: Biennial | Recently, I have become involved in devising contemporary art biennials, at a time when the debate about these events has slowed.  Like so many of the dozens of biennials around the world, the two I am now working on – the Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre and the Liverpool Biennial – date from the 1990s.  Istanbul (1987) and Havana (1984) are among the older contemporary biennials (excluding Venice and São Paulo, which belong to a different time).  Before it is anything else, a biennial is an ongoing series of temporary exhibitions supported by a

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Anthony Cascardi

Keyword: Dwelling and Beyond | In the early stages of thought about what we have come to call “global urban humanities,” the term mega-city was suggested to us as the type of site where an exploration of the potential connections between the humanities and fields including environmental design, architecture, and urban planning might be especially fruitful.  The suggestion, implicit or explicit, was that the mega-city was especially representative of contemporary conditions and that it presented a unique set of problems, ones that had yet to be thoroughly explored by a

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Michael Dear

Keyword: Geohumanities | Framing

The ‘geohumanities’ is a transdisciplinary and multi-methodological inquiry that begins with the human meanings of place and proceeds to reconstruct those meanings in ways that produce new knowledge as well as the promise of a better-informed scholarly and political practice. The term is meant to encompass (but not supersede or replace) related but more specific constructs such as the ‘digital humanities.’ 

Place

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Andrew Weiner

Keyword: Public Spaces|I’d like to start by echoing the questions that Shannon and others have already begun framing in prior posts. Part of the excitement in joining a cross-disciplinary group like this lies in seeing the precision and inventiveness with which scholars from other fields are able to engage concepts that sometimes seem to lose their edge through overuse.

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Christian Frock

Keyword: Public | As much of my work as a writer, curator and educator focuses on the ways artists work in public space, I am drawn to dialog that parses the meaning of public space in civic life.  Recently I have been thinking about two (seemingly) unrelated articles by New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman that explore the value of public spaces in an urban context.

Curating People: Lisa Wymore
Confessions of an experimental artist who has also become an academic and a dance/performance educator and mentor | Like many who are part of this symposium, I wear multiple hats in one day. I am both an administrator of a dance program within a university and an artist who manages, runs, and creates for my own dance company. My choice to make artistic work within an academic institution has provided me with distinct types of support and opportunity.
City, Arts and Public Spaces: Linda Haverty Rugg

Keyword: Environmental Humanities | (Cribbed from the co-authored Background Report, The Emergence of the Environmental Humanities, Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research/MISTRA, Stockholm, 2013, co-authors David Nye (Chair), Robert Emmett, James Fleming, and Linda Haverty Rugg)

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Imanuel Schipper

Keyword: Co-Production | Especially when we talk about the specificity of city, we think of something, that is somehow close to a lived situation (with a specific narration, setting, dramaturgy, time-structure) than a fixed place. And this situation is somehow more than „only“ the place. It also seems clear to me that we (as visitors or inhabitants of that city) are producing (or at least co-producing) that situation.

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Julia Bryan-Wilson

Keyword: “Arts” | I’ve started to note what happens when “art” goes plural to become “arts,” as it has in the title “City, Arts, and Public Spaces”:  how, and in what contexts, does this multiplicity matter?  Art historians often assume that the definition of art in its singular form defaults to the realm of the visual, as if the concerns of, say, painting, photography, and sculpture are distinct from those of literature, music, or dance.  “The arts” is a convenient way to signal a more inclusive or multidisciplinary approach, one that widens out from a narrow understanding to inc