Sholette Professional Activity Highlights
(2015-2018)
( Sholette_Greg_CV_11.2014-11.2017 )
ART WORKS & CURATED PROJECTS
Art & Scholarly Projects at a glance
Exhibitions, Performances, Installations (since last promotion)
2017 “DARKER” ink wash drawing series, Station Independent Projects, NYC, January 7-29.
2015 “Imaginary Archive: Philadelphia,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Feb 4-March 2, 2015.
Group Art Exhibitions (since last promotion)
2018
We The People: An International Group Exhibition of Contemporary Art Toward Ending the Korean War. Ozaneaux ArtSpace, Chelsea NYC, March 16- May 24, 2018.
2017
RISE. Walsh Art Gallery, Sept 5 to Sept. 29, Seton Hall University, NJ, 2017.
Cultural Hijack, International School of Architecture ARCHIP, Prague, Check Republic.
Dark Matter Games was a curatorial and archival project inspired by my research and writings organized by S.a.L.E. Docks Independent Cultural Center, Venice, Italy, in the Summer of 2017. * The exhibition also included an animation piece of mine Gone A’missing (in Plato’s Cave, 2017).
* Dark Matter Games exhibition was included as a best 2017 pick for the December issue of Artforum, selected by curator Manuel Borja-Villel, Director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain. p 166.
2016
2015
The 56th Venice Biennale invited to participate by curator Okwui Enwezor as core member of the artists’ collective Gulf Labor Coalition, Venice, Italy, 5/6–11/22, 2015.
Vertical Reach, ArtSpace, New Haven, Connecticut, 2/20-5/2, 2015.
Respond, Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY, Jan. 17 – Feb. 22, 2015.
Curatorial projects (since last promotion)
It’s the Political Economy, Stupid (ITPES: is a traveling exhibition curated in collaboration with Austrian artist Oliver Ressler), presented at the Reed Gallery, The University of Cincinnati, Ohio, February 15th to April 10th, 2016 (ITPES is an exhibition about the financial crisis as seen by artists and has traveled to various venues in NYC, Chicago, Vienna; Finland, Serbia, Greece, and Cyprus.)
NEW BOOKS & PUBLISHED WRITINGS
Books
(since last promotion) * Indicates a peer-reviewed work.
Spanish Translation of my 2010 book Dark Matter (intro)
Edited Volumes (since last promotion)
An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art, co-edited with Chloë Bass and Social Practice Queens, Skyhorse Publishers (In-press and scheduled for release: May 2018).
Major Past Publications Include:
Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. London: Pluto Press. New York American distributor: Palgrave Macmillan. Second edition: September 2011. * (online) [Turkish translation here 2013, Spanish translation in progress: Google Scholarly Citations: 1105]
It’s The Political Economy, Stupid: The Global Financial Crisis in Art and Theory. Co-edited with Oliver Ressler, London: Pluto Press, 2013. (Published in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of same name curated by the editors). (online) [Google Scholarly Citations: 9]
Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945. Co-edited with Blake Stimson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.* (online) [Serbian translation by Ksenija Todorović, CLIO Publishing Co., Beograd. Google Scholarly Citations : 133 ]
The Interventionists: A Manuel for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. Co-edited with Nato Thompson and published in conjunction with the exhibition “The Interventionists,” Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, May 29, 2004, 2nd, 3rd Printings 2005 published by MIT Press in association with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. (online) [Google Scholarly Citations: 142]
Chapters in Books (since last promotion)
* PDF “What do Artists Want?, Re-reading Carol Duncan’s 1983 essay Who Rules the Art World” in 2017” in Who Runs the Artworld: Money, Power & Ethics, Brad Buckley & John Conomos eds., Libri Publishing, 2018. pp 57-73.
PDF “Collective Bad” in Collective Good / Collaborative Efforts Geir Haraldseth and Michael Birchall, eds. Stavanger, Norway: Rogaland Kunstsenter, 2018. pp 33-41.
PDF “Artistic Critique, Pedagogy and Aesthetic Judgment after the Social (Down) Turn,” Art School Critique 2.0, Richard Jochum, editor, Teachers College, Columbia University, Ragged Sky Press, 2017. p 143.
PDF “From Proto-Academy to Home Workspace Beirut…” Future Imperfect:Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East. Anthony Downey, ed., (Sternberg Press, 2016) pp 190-204.
* PDF “Public Art in a Post-Public World.” Companion to Public Art, ed.s Knight; H. Senie, Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. pp 245-250.
PDF “Art Out of Joint…” High Culture/Hard Labor, ed. Andrew Ross, OR Books, 2015, pp 64-85.
* PDF “Occupy The Art World?” in ECONOMY Art, Production, and the Subject in the 21st Century, eds Angela Dimitrakaki & K. Lloyd, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2015, pp 174-185.
Journal Articles, Reports, Catalog Essays (since last promotion)
“Reimagining Monuments to Make Them Resonate Locally and Personally,” Hyperallergic, Nov. 6. 2017.
PDF “Right on the Ash: The Traumatic Palette of Wafaa Bilal,” catalog essay for exhibition Wafaa Bilal: 168.01, Art Gallery Windsor, 2016. pp 8–18.
“The Ghost Ship Fire and the Paradox of a “Creative City,’” Hyperallergic (online), Dec. 28, 2016.
* “Delirium and Resistance after the Social Turn,” Field Journal (online): Issue #1, Spring, 2015.
Special editorial work (since last promotion)
Guest online curator e-Flux Conversation: Strike Art… the Post-Occupy Condition, Spring, 2016.
REVIEWS OF MY WORK (since last promotion)
Daniel Larkin, “Dark Matter as a Metaphor for Arts Activism,” review of my solo exhibition at Station Independent Projects for Hyperallergic, NYC, Jan. 25, 2017.
Noni Brynjolson reviews Delirium and Resistance, FIELD Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, Issue 9, Winter 2018 (online, not-paginated).
Carlos Garrido Castellano review, “Activism against Nostalgia and Self-Defeatism: Gregory Sholette, Delirium and Resistance. Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism,” Afterall Online journal, The Netherlands, Feb. 02, 2018.
Eric Triantafillou reviews Delirium and Resistance for Critical Inquiry. Chicago, December 2017.
Gretchen Combs reviews Delirium and Resistance for the Brooklyn Rail, Oct. 5, 2017.
Josefine Wikström reviews Delirium and Resistance for Paletten (Swedish art journal) “Fran paris to abu dhabi- about the new conditions of the art.”D&R Review Palatan Sweden PDF
Wilfred Chan reviews Delirium and Resistance for ArtsAsiaPacific journal Nov. 2017. PDF: D&R Review ArtsAsiaPacific 2017
Regine Debatty reviews Delirium and Resistance for We Make $$$ney Not Art, Aug. 21, 2017.
Susan Ryan, “Depths and Possibilities — Activist Art (a review of Delirium and Resistance)
Interviews Given (since last promotion)
“Dark Matter Games,” interview Sholette, Szreder, Fischer by M. Baravalle: OPERAVIVA, 5/10/2017.
“Gregory Sholette’le Söyleşi,” interview with Cihan Küçük, SKOP (Online Turkish cultural journal.) 11/13/2016.
Nkule Mabaso interview for ONCURATING, 10/ 2016.
Special Event
Aesthetics of Resistance: Greg Sholette and Dread Scott in conversation.
Recognition
Nominated Chamberlin Award Headlands Center
SP Certificate Official State Recognition letter
G Sholette – Mellon Seminar Fellowship Letter
Sholette et al award Art Against Austerity
Citations of my work including the REPOhistory collective (select)
(RE: REPOhistory) “Half-Measures Won’t Erase the Painful Past of our Monuments,” Holland Cotter, January 12, 2018 The New York Times.
Decolonising The White Artist’s Practice Along the lines of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Nelson Maldonado-Torres “To form a bridge between Spivak, Maldonado-Torres and the contemporary art-world, the help of Gregory Sholette’s Delirium and Resistance: activist art and the crisis of capitalism (2017) will be invoked on occasion as Sholette has done extensive research on contemporary art and capitalism.3″
Manifestations and Conditions of Art A Erjavec – Art and the Challenge of Markets Volume 2, 2018 “… A related view is offered by Gregory Sholette , who argues that financial reductions in art and culture, so typical of contemporary neoliberalism, have first taken place “in New York City some thirty years ago [and have] proven pivotal for the evolution and the spread of neo …”
Can Centrala Save Us?K Paprocka-Jasińska – Polish Theatre Journal, 2017 “… The present article is a peculiar case study assuming the perspective of institutional critique –as expressed in the thoughts and observations of Bojana Kunst, Kuba Szreder, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Gregory Sholette and others – to examine how Centrala operates. …”
Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics EE Scott, K Swenson – 2015 (Ref to my books)
Picturing Politics: Drawing Out The Histories Of Collective Political Action In Contemporary Art H Ellul “Far from being 80 relics of a distant age, this iconography is part of a living tradition invoked in its materials. Remade in marker pen on cardboard, the drawings were provoked by Gregory Sholette’s observation of Occupy Wall Street that ‘Zuccotti Park and other OWS encampments revealed a mix of high-tech digital media and handmade signs, a mix of the archaic and the new as if beneath the Internet there is cardboard’.81″
A NOTE ON SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART CRITICISM MB Rasmussen – The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2017 “… As Gregory Sholette and Gene Ray write in the introduction to a theme issue of Third Text titled “Whither Tactical Media?,” 9/11 and the war on terror seemed to have pulled Page 6. 65 A Note on Socially Engaged Art Criticism …”
Artists on the Gallery Payroll: A Case Study and a Corporate Turn L Bradby, J Stewart – Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts, 2017 (Ref to book Dark Matter)
Anticipation, Action and Analysis: A New Methodology for Practice as Research L Campbell – PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, 2017 “… practice, tactics that demand participation from an audience (whether they like it or not). Gregory Sholette and Nato Thompson refer to “tactics” as “manoeuvres”8 to describe interventionist practice. They propose that “tactics” can be thought of as …”
(RE: REPOhistory) Megan E. Springate editor LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History. National Park Service, Dept. of the Interior 2016 p. 29 Excerpt: “Artists have also played a role in making LGBTQ history more visible at historic sites and buildings, independent of their official status in designation and preservation programs. In a 1994 temporary street sign installation project called Queer Spaces, the artists’ collective REPOHistory boldly called attention to nine New York City landmarks of LGBTQ history with text screened onto pink triangles made of chipboard, queering the narrative usually found on historical markers.69 Similar to other REPOHistory projects, the signs were intended as counter-monuments to provoke public reflection on why some histories are visible, while others remain obscured in public memory. Since 1989, the Visual AIDS organization has used art projects to increase AIDS awareness and prevention, document the work of artists with HIV/AIDS, and promote the artistic contribution of the AIDS movement. It offers a reminder of the impact of the epidemic on an entire generation, including its artists, and points to the enormous shadow it casts over LGBTQ preservation efforts. While none of these strategic interventions in urban design, public art, or streetscape projects has led directly to the preservation of historic resources, together they have helped to gain traction for emerging heritage preservation initiatives.”
(RE: REPOhistory) 69 “History that Disturbs the Present: An Interview with REPOHistory Artist Greg Sholette,” interview by Dipti Desai, April 26, 2007, http://www.gregorysholette.
Google Scholar reports 466 total citations of my writings.
Academia.edu reports 842 Followers | 439 Following | 7,167 Total Views
Recent select keynote lectures and presentations (since last promotion)
Guest Lecturer, University of Virginia, February 7, 2018.
Guest Seminar leader, Instituto Artivismo/Hannah Arendt Institute for Activism, Havana Cuba, Dec. 20 to 23, 2017. Also see my Blog posts.
Keynote, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland, Nov. 17, 2017.
Panelist, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, Nov 4, 2017.
Keynote, Northwest Pacific Art College, Graduate Symposium, Oct. 7, 2017.
Keynote, Yorkshire/Humber Visual Arts Network, Hull, UK, September 30, 2017.
Symposium about my new book, The Showroom (art center), London, UK, Sept. 27, 2017.
Presentation, “Art School Critique 2.0,” Teachers College Columbia University, NYC, Nov 18, 2016.
Panelist, “Acting Out: On the Body Politic,” Athens Biennial, Athens Greece, 4/16,2016.
Lecturer, Neuberger Collegium, Dept. of Art History, University of Chicago, 10/8/2015
SERVICE TO SCHOOL & ARTS COMMUNITY
Social Practice Queens (SPQ)
Shelly & Donald Rubin Foundation (awarded $ 30 & 20,000, 2015-2017)
Vilcek Foundation online news (awarded SPQ $28,580 2016-2017) *
(* Refunded by Vilcek at $15.000 for 2018)
QC Research Enhancement Grant for multi-disciplinary project, San Juan, Puerto Rico ($10,000, 2018) Letter: Sholette et al award 12-5-2017
SPQ Advanced Certificate in Critical Social Practice *
(* Developed certificate with assistance from Queens College administrators in 2014.)
Social Practice Queens Website
Teaching and Open-Source Scholarly Resources
Social Networking Sites
Organizing Activity (other than SPQ)
Gulf Labor Coalition (current)
STATEMENT OF CANDIDATE
Since last promotion my interdisciplinary practice as artist, writer and teacher continues to draw on diverse fields from drawing and sculpture and media, to critical theory, pedagogy, urban studies and cultural studies. This is what I call an expanded social practice, (though it might also be described as a “hyphenated” role of artist-scholar-instructor) and often involves collaboration with other artists, organizers, researchers, or sometimes other citizens, or non-professionals.
Since receiving tenure in September of 2015 I have been active in the areas of teaching, scholarship and service to Queens College and CUNY. In order to heighten my research and pedagogical capacities I used my 2016 sabbatical leave to complete a PhD dissertation at the University of Amsterdam . On April 21, 2017 I successfully defended my dissertation for the School for Heritage and Memory Studies (AHM) to become a Doctor of Philosophy while standing before a robed panel of seven interrogators from the field’s of art history and critical theory. The central chapters of my dissertation were then published as a new book entitled Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism by Pluto Press (UK) and distributed by the University of Chicago here in the US. (The book, as opposed to the thesis, contains a preface written by noted writer Lucy R. Lippard, as well as an introduction by Plymouth University-based art historian Kim Charnley.) To date the book has received three solid reviews in Critical Inquiry, Frieze, Brooklyn Rail and the online blog We Make $$$oney Not Art. (* Links to these and most other activities are available through the online site: http://www.gregorysholette.com/?page_id=3324 ). The new book proposes that the contemporary art world can no longer claim autonomy from the capitalist market, asking how artists focused on social and political justice can operate under such circumstances, or what I call a “Bare Art World.”
Teaching remains central to my creative and scholarly research and production because it is in the classroom and through interaction with students that I grow intellectually and artistically. Since receiving tenure I have focused on more undergraduate studio instruction in the areas of drawing and sculpture; developed ARTS 333, the first CUNY approved Pathways studio art related course ( although after much effort ARTS 182, another studio course, has still not been approved); I have supervised a dozen graduate students on their independent research (ARTS 172); and I designed and shepherded through approval a new, 24 credit, New York State approved Advanced Certificate in Critical Social Practice that currently has two enrolled candidates. Also, while on sabbatical leave, I wrote a grant proposal for The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation’s newly created Art and Social Justice initiative and was awarded $30,000 (followed by 20, and 15 thousand dollar awards in 2017 and 2018 respectively). These funds were raised for and are managed by Social Practice Queens (SPQ) to support student “art action” projects, hire guest speakers and mentors for students, and a portion of this money was used to pay contributors to the book Art As Social Action (see below0. SPQ is a unique MFA Concentration and Post-graduate Certificate Program bringing together the resources of an academic research institution, Queens College (City University of New York: CUNY), with the long-standing community-based activism of the Queens Museum.
. Since then the grant has been refunded (at $20,000. this past year) and we currently await news about the new round. (Altogether, SPQ has raised in the past three years over $100,000 from the Rubin and Vilcek foundations with 1/3 of funds funneled into QCMFA student art projects.)
Just about two weeks after officially receiving tenure I was awarded an A. W. Mellon Fellowship, Public Engagement & Collaborative Research for the CUNY Graduate Center. With course release time provided as well as funds for a community-based art project I conceived of a collaborative art event and then recruited former SPQ graduates as well as (then) current MFA students to work on it with me. Together we developed a performance piece complete with sculptural props and music entitled Precarious Worker’s Pageant that took place in Venice, Italy during the 56th Biennale in August of 2015.
The pageant project also coincided with my official participation in the Venice Biennial as a member of Gulf Labor Coalition, a social justice arts and culture group I have been working with since 2010. Other exhibitions of note include Imaginary Archive, a continuously enlarging collection of mostly fictional documents created by myself and other invited participants, that was the inaugural show for a new art gallery at Zeppelin University in Germany, as well as part of a three-person exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. But perhaps most significantly since tenure was “Darker,” my third solo exhibition held at Station Independent Projects gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Featuring a suite of large, ink wash drawings many based on snap-shots I took of public demonstrations the exhibition received an excellent review linking my art to my writings (Hyperallergic, Jan. 15, 2017).’
Finally, I am enthusiastic to report on a new edited volume combining critical theoretical essays and practical lesson plans that I co-edited along with my colleague Chloë Bass and our SPQ students that is due out this coming spring. Art as Social Action is both a general introduction to and an illustrated, practical textbook for the field of social practice, an art medium that has been gaining popularity in the public sphere. The volume features over forty contributions from noted artists, teachers and theorists within the emerging field of social practice art, and includes essays by me, Chloë and several Queens College students and alumni. With the introduction of this book Queens College Art Department will continue to be a leading institution within this developing cultural sector, and it is in no small part thanks to the strong and leading role that the City University of New York plays within the humanities and within public education that the opportunity for these positive outcomes has arisen. Still, there is more to be accomplished. Discimus ut serviamus.
