Part of the Practice
What is social practice, and how does it affect the ways we navigate our lives and make change in the world? Join artists, scholars, and collaborators from Social Practice CUNY on Part of the Practice, hosted by Catherine LaSota, as we discuss our individual art practices, our communities, and the role of socially-engaged art in our work for social justice.
Part of the Practice
01: What is Social Practice CUNY? with Chloë Bass and Gregory Sholette
Welcome to Part of the Practice! On our first episode, artists and educators (and SPCUNY co-directors) Chloë Bass and Gregory Sholette talk with host Catherine LaSota about the origins of the Social Practice CUNY initiative, including its beginnings as Social Practice Queens. Chloë and Greg discuss the evolution of art in society, weaving in their own experiences in visual art and performance art, as well as the ways they approach art and social justice in the classroom, and so much more. Tune in for a great introduction for our many conversations to come on Part of the Practice.
FULL TRANSCRIPT of Episode 01 available here.
About our guests:
Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. Chloë has held numerous fellowships and residencies: most recently, the 2022 - 2024 Kupferberg Arts Incubator fellowship, a 2022 - 2023 Silver Art Project residency, the 2022 Future Imagination Fund Fellowship at NYU Tisch College of the Arts, a 2020 – 2022 Faculty Fellowship for the Seminar in Public Engagement at the Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center), and a 2020 – 2022 Lucas Art Fellowship at Montalvo Art Center. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at the Buffalo AKG, the Middelheim Museum, the Bentway, Skirball Cultural Center, California African-American Museum / Art + Practice, Henry Art Gallery, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, and elsewhere. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Forbes, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review, and Artnews among others. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she co-runs Social Practice CUNY with Gregory Sholette, with whom she published the book Art and Social Action in 2018.
Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, activist and curator of Imaginary Archive: a peripatetic collection of documents speculating on a past whose future never arrived. His art and research theorize and document issues of collective cultural labor, activist art, and counter-historical representation. Sholette received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 2017, and is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Critical Theory (1996); UC San Diego Visual Art Program (MFA: 1995); and The Cooper Union (BFA: 1979). He is an Affiliated Faculty member of the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program at the CUNY Graduate Center.
More about Chloë:
Website: chloebass.com
Instagram: @publicinvestigator
More about Greg:
Blog: gregorysholette.substack.com
Website: gregorysholette.org
Archives: darkmatterarchives.net
Fan of: themm.us
Learn more about Social Practice CUNY.
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Thank you to our podcast editor Jade Iseri-Ramos, and thank you to Gaius LaSota for our Part of the Practice music.
Part of the Practice logo courtesy of Maliyah Mohamed.
Social Practice CUNY is funded by the Mellon Foundation.