In November 2014, Maura Pellettieri and I presented the project Impossible Wants
Socially Engaged Art and the Public Sphere

Unruly Engagements: On the Social Turn in Contemporary Art and Design

Cleveland Institute of Art held an international conference for academic, curatorial, and independent scholars as well as practicing artists and designers. Unruly Engagements featured Shannon Jackson as keynote speaker.

This interdisciplinary conference examined various approaches to social practices in both art and design in an effort to understand the concepts, terms, and varieties of engagement of the past two decades or so. Among the primary objectives was to facilitate public discourse on the feasibility of interventionist projects in art and design in urban environments, with special attention to “rust-belt” cities like Cleveland.

http://cia.edu/academics/community-works/unruly-engagements-conference/overview

Photo: Jennifer Baker’s tile is set over Lucy Clark’s Poem #182 into Spruce Street in St. Louis by City Worker Lawrance Mack. Photo credit, Laurencia Strauss.