Jessalyn Aaland, Guide for Youth Protesters, 2017 (detail); courtesy the artist

Symposium

Does Art Have Users? Day Four

Saturday, Sept 30, 2017

11 a.m.

Workshop: In Print/Imprint: Designing Political Print Pieces with Users in Mind

Time: 11 a.m.–1 p.m.

Location: SFMOMA, Koret Education Center

How can artists design a print piece for social action that considers the needs and interests of the end users? Modeled after artist Jessalyn Aaland’s Guide for Youth Protestors from the Arte Útil archive, participants will conceptualize a politically oriented print piece that addresses an issue of concern to a particular user group, integrating the user’s attributes into the design.

Workshop: Seeing Social Practice

Time: 11 a.m.–1 p.m.

Location: SFMOMA, Koret Education Center

Facilitators: Deborah Fisher, Brett Cook

How is experiential and participatory art represented? How does this work translate into visual media and institutional contexts? What is the role of research and evaluation in representing the value of socially engaged art? What are your goals and responsibilities when you represent a social or experiential project? Explore these questions and more in a workshop presented by Fisher, executive director of A Blade of Grass, in collaboration with artist and Blade of Grass board member Cook.

Roundtable: What Role Should Art Have in Civic Life?

Time: 2-6 p.m.
Location: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Participants: Suzanne Lacy, Pilar Riano-Alcala, Chris Johnson, Patrisse Cullors, Bill Kelley Jr., Dominic Willsdon, Lucia Sanroman, and others

Lacy’s work in Oakland, California, and Medellín, Colombia, in the 1990s advanced a model for the role of art in civic life. This roundtable begins by asking how we should remember and represent those projects, but it focuses primarily on the civic and social contexts that gave rise to them—youth culture and violence, race, media, public policies—and what is different today.

Part of SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Distinguished Lecture Series, as well as our Public Knowledge initiative, Does Art Have Users? is presented in partnership with the Asociación de Arte Útil and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and its exhibition Tania Bruguera: Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder.

Public Knowledge is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in partnership with the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL). The project has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. Additional support is provided by the California Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Activities in the Koret Education Center are generously supported by the Koret Foundation.