Sholette’s Recent & Upcoming Activities

$600,000 Mellon Foundation Grant Renewal for SPCUNY 2024-2026

Keynote for National Museum Seminar Dublin, Ireland

Affiliated Doctoral Faculty EES CUNY Grad Center

MIT Press (new book contract, 2203-2025)

Senior Fellow, The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, at the National Gallery of Art , June – August, 2023

Keynote presentation The Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles

Dividual Labor: Gregory Sholette as Inspiring Teacher

Gallery Affiliation: Station Independt Projects, Toronto

Sirius Art Center (letter of interest for solo exhibition, Ireland, 2024).

Reviews of Dr. Sholette’s books and writings (select)

Citations of Dr. Sholette’s published research (select, recent)

Two-Page Overview of Sholette’s Activities, here

See below for previous activity 1980–present

CV (download PDF here)

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Professional Highlights 2018 – Early 2023

MOST RECENT BOOK:

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The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art

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London: Lund Humphries, (2022). 178 pages. ^ PDF

Book Reviews: A Top Art Book of 2022 (United Kingdom) The Art Newspaper and in its Italian Translation One of the Top Ten Art Books of 2023 by ARTRIBUNE, also, One of The Top 75 Community College Titles 2023 and has been reviewed in FIELD JOURNAL and WE MAKE MONEY NOT ART and ArtReview and PALATTEN (Sweden)

Italian Translation (2023) L’arte dell’attivismo e l’attivismo dell’arte

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Previous Books and Major Publications

* peer reviewed

* Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism. London, Pluto Press, 2017. (256 pages, extrapolated from my University of Amsterdam PhD Thesis.) ^

Merciless Aesthetic/Nemilosrdna estetika, selected published essays, WHW Press, Serbia, Croatia, 2017. (204 pages, with half in Croatian.) ^

* Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture London, Pluto Press, 2011. (256 pages. A highly cited book that has been reprinted several times and translated into Spanish, and Turkish.

Edited Multi-Authored Collections

Art As Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art. Sholette and Bass eds, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2018. (336 pages in total: my essay is 5000 words, plus 42 additional commissioned essays and other contributions.) ^

 * Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945. Ed. with Blake Stimson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (304 pages: 4900 word introductory essay co-written with Blake Stimson, plus 10 commissioned essays.) ^

The Interventionists: A Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. Co-edited and designed with Nato Thompson. The MIT Press /MASS MoCA: 2nd printing 2004, 3rd printing 2006. (153 pages: 4000 word essay by me, plus 3 commissioned essays, many color  illustrations.) ^

Amazon author’s page with most books.

Guest Edited Multi-Author Journal Publications

* Optimism of the Will: 2018 FIELD Reports on the Global Resistance to Neo-Reactionary Nationalism, guest editor for a double issue of FIELD journal of socially engaged art, Issues 12/13, online only, 2019.  (My essay is 2000 words introducing 30 commissioned essays I curated from around the world, see below.) ^

The Field Journal Regional Reports include:

* Whither Tactical Media? A special guest edited journal issue with Dr. Gene Ray for Third Text, Vol. 22, No. 5, 9/08. (2700 word introductory essay co-written with Gene Ray, and 15 commissioned essays.) ^

CHAPTERS IN BOOKS (forthcoming or recent)

* “The Courbet Conundrum, and the Phantom Archive of Activist Art” The Routledge Companion to Marxist Art History. Tijen Tunali and Brian Winkenweder (eds). New York: Routledge, (forthcoming, March, 2024). ^

* “Performing Exceptionalism: Notes on art, class, and labor in the writings of Ben Davis, Dave Beech, Leigh Claire le Berge, Hans Abbing, Pierre-Michel Menger and Carol Duncan.” The Routledge Companion to Art and Capitalism. Child, D. (ed). New York: Routledge, (forthcoming, 2024).

* “Performing Resistance. Repurposing the phantom archive of activist art as a horizon yet to come.” The Routledge Companion to Performance Art Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless (eds). New York: Routledge, (forthcoming, 2024).

CHAPTERS IN BOOKS (since 2018)

“Glorapedia” for the book Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life Eds. P. O’Neill & Mick Wilson, MIT, (2022).

* “A Collectography of PAD/D, a 1980s Activist Art Collective” The Routledge Companion to Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century. Shipley, Lesley E. and Mey-Yen Moriuchi, (eds). NY: Routledge, (2023). ^

“Boicot, barricadas e instituciones paródicas. De la crítica institucionalizada a las paradojas de la resistencia en un mundo del arte desnudo” in ¡Abajo el muro! Arte, neoliberalismo y emancipación después de 1989. A. López Cuenca, R. Bermúdez, T. Valdovinos (eds.) Ciudad de México/Guadalajara: MUAC-UNAM/ITESO, 2021. pp. 36-51. ^

“L’amour/ c’est la résistance/c’est la guerre, on art’s long, torturous romance with high culture” an essay for the book Resistance Anew: Artworks, Culture & Democracy edited by Bernard Fibicher 2021. pp. 105-115 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/resistance-anew-bernard-fibicher/1140683178

“Privilege as Form,” chapter for the book Critique in Practice: Renzo Martens’ Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, Anthony Downey editor, Sternberg Press, 2019. pp 328-303 ^

“Lavoratori dell’arte, lavoratori dell’arte, che avete fatto? Dalla dematerializzazione dell’arte alla materializzazione del lavoratore creativo neoliberale 1968-1977,” in Ilenia Caleo, Piersandra Di Matteo, Annalisa Sacchi (eds.), In fiamme. La performance nello spazio delle lotte [1967-1979], Venice, Bruno, 2021. pp. 361-371. ^

Other Publications

A short and incomplete history of “bad” curating as collective resistance.” e-flux Art Agenda Reports, Sept. 21, 2022 (online).

“NFT Fever: Is It Time for the Great Refusal 2.0?” Electra Magazine, Lisbon, Portugal, Issue 14, Summer, 2021.

OP-ED on Covid’s Challenge to CUNY Reimagining Higher Education Through Socially Engaged Art,” Hyperallergic, August 3, 2020

“Memes Are Dominating Attention Spans and Clicks Like Never Before. So Why Is Serious Socially Engaged Art Also Thriving?” Artnet News, December 2020.

The Archive We Can’t See: Mining a Speculative Counter-Narrative within the MoMA’s Victor D’Amico Papers,” a commissioned essay for MoMA Education Department, 2019. (unpublished).

* “Do We need a Turing Test for Activist Art in a Bare Art World?,” Johns Hopkins ASAP/Journal 3.2, 2018. pp. 221-230.

ARTISTIC PRACTICES

Work in-progress in studio

Recent group exhibitions & participation (* note covid gap)

“Insurrection Redux” mixed-media, 36″ x 106″ x 8″ (2022)

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Maha Moaleni begins her Art in America exhibition review this way: “Greg Sholette’s Insurrection (1984/2021) involves a short text repeatedly silkscreened on four adjacent panels that remain half-concealed under a lush thicket of synthetic flora native to Latin America. The phrase is from an 1858 treatise by archaeologist and onetime United States chargé d’affaires in Central America E.G. Squier, who promoted the white supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny via the tropes of evolutionary naturalism, calling US colonization nothing more than assistance to a fate that would otherwise unfold at a slower pace: “Deus Vult––it is the will of God!” Continue Reading

My piece is also discussed in the context of the exhibition catalog by Paloma Checa-Gismero in her review “Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities, edited by Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, U.C., 4 (4) 2022. pp 38-139.

Sholette wall installation at STAMPS Gallery, University of Michigan, 2018

Other Group Exhibitions (since 2018)

  • 2022, (July) Summer School: Art, Education, Resistance, ABC No Rio.
The Last Meeting in progress for Re-Working Labor, Chicago
Precarious Workers Pageant, Venice, Italy

EARLIER MAJOR EXHIBITIONS & PROJECTS

For the Gulf Labor Coalition human rights campaign in 2017, Dr. Sholette conceptualized and produced a public performance project in Venice, Italy: The Precarious Workers’ Pageant

Imaginary Archive (2010-2015) involved a collection of documents about pasts, whose futures never arrived. some of the work was created by Sholette, other contributions came from artists living in cities where the installation traveled to cities including: Germany, Philadelphia, New Zealand, Ireland, Austria, Ireland, Chicago and Ukraine.

[EVEN OLDER ART PROJECTS 1980 – 2012]

Website with additional documentation of candidate’s art, scholarship, and organizing

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OTHER PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

LECTURES and WORKSHOPS

2022 In-person: Keynote, Art & Identity Politics, Murcia, Spain, Oct. 19-21.

2022 In-person: New Book Launch, The Showroom, London, UK, Sept. 15

2022 Talks, In-Person: Documenta 15, Kassel, Germany; Instituto de Historia da Arte, Lisbon, Portugal; Icelandic Art Center, Reykjavík Art Museum; (2021) Keynote Speaker: Art and Human Rights ​International Conference.

2022 Workshops, In-Person: UNIDEE, Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, Italy; Sirius Art Center, Cobh, Ireland; Fire Station Artists Studios, Dublin, Ireland.

2021-2022 Panels & Presentations, Online: Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library; Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles; Wheaton College; Bard Graduate Center/Clemente Center NYC; Artists for Artists – Pedagogical Platform Master Class, Art & Science Direct CUNY GC.

2018: Workshop, INSTAR/ Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (Hannah Arendt Institute for Activism) Havana, Cuba.

2018-2021 ZOOM Presentations “in” Brazil, Colombia, UK, Ireland, Beirut, S. Korea: Online with video documentation.

Documentation of Sholette’s public presentations during Covid

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Social Practice CUNY: an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded, cross-disciplinary, cross-university, social justice art-educational program: https://socialpracticecuny.org/

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GRANTS

Finalist for Andy Warhol Foundation Writers Grant 2022 (unsuccessful)

2020-2023 $ 530,000. Andrew W. Mellon Grant to establish Social Practice CUNY Program at the Graduate Center and Queens College.

2022 £ 39970.34 SPCUNY in collaboration with Queens Museum, Tate Modern, Middlesex U., London for The Art of Engagement: foundations for an international learning community in social practice exchange project.

2022-2023: $6,000. TRADB PSC-CUNY – graphic novel publication support.

2018-2019 $10,000. Regrant: Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation Art and Social Justice Initiative for Social Practice Queens/Art as Social Action

  • note: I am currently a finalist for the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for another book proposal now under review by MIT.

SERVICE TO CUNY

Co-Director of Social Practice CUNY which provides grants to CUNY-wide interdisciplinary arts faculty and students involved in social justice and focuses on developing diverse leadership in the arts. SPCUNY is funded by the Mellon Foundation and located at the Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center (initiated in 2021).

Faculty member Art & Science Connect Working Group

PhD Dissertation Advisor, Stefanos Milkidis, Urban Studies, EES

Lecture for Urban Studies/ EES April 15, 2021 (online)

Co-Taught Core Seminar in Urban Studies with Cindy Katz, Spring 2020.

SERVICE TO QUEENS COLLEGE

SPCUNY’s 2021-2024 mellon grant funds full-tuition for QC MFA Art students in their 2nd year, while Social Practice Queens previously provided student financial support with grants from the Rubin and Vilcek Foundations.

Member of the Queens College Research Advisory Committee 2019

Member of the 2022 Photo and Imaging FT Faculty Search Committee

Created the only Pathways (CE) courses in the Studio Art Department: Arts 388, and Arts 333.

Created a new Art History course geared towards the QC Art Dept’s new Photo & Imaging Program Imaging ResistancePhotographic Media & Socially Engaged Art.

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Sholette Exhibition Catalog (2004)

Sholette Select Art Works PDF

Previous Professional Activities (1980-2015):



Sholette: Website, Blog, Seminar Pages, Archives.

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