This year, we’re reflecting on the act of gathering as an artistic form and tool for building movements, distributing resources, and nurturing new futures. In a field as expansive and difficult to define as socially engaged art, the impulse to gather people, collectively organize, and build networks emerges as a throughline amongst a vast array of disciplines and practices. This work cannot happen individually; collaboration is inherent to the process at all scales, from artist cooperatives, ensembles, and mutual aid networks to broader efforts of convening and coalition building across networks and geographies. 

A Circle of Circles

Nobuko Miyamoto

Great Leap

In the circle we dance, no beginning, no ending. In the circle we dance. I am you, you are the other me. 

That's everything right there. That's what it's all about. 

Art, Activism, and Oneness: Inside the World of Nobuko Miyamoto

Gabriel San Emeterio

What Would an HIV Doula Do?

What’s very real is the need for community—just how isolating living with HIV and other complex chronic illnesses can be. There’s a real need to connect on those bases.

The Stigma Is Well-Earned, But It’s Really Problematic

Wild Path Collective

I think that when a group is actually in a deep practice of being an ecosystem, it becomes that rare place where the group’s members can slow down and tend to themselves. Being with one another becomes more like taking a slow walk amongst trees and a lot less like a job.

A Collective Is a Forest

Martha Gonzalez

Quetzal Flores

Even if FandangObon becomes extinct one day, 

will be the archive of some collaboration that existed. People will dance it, people will know it. It’s both the archive and the repertoire in this case.

Where Music Meets Movement

What Would An HIV Doula Do? is also a question, one that we are more interested in continuing to ask—of ourselves, of each other, of our communities, of culture at large—than we are to answer. The work we do with WWHIVDD requires a trust, built over time and through collaboration and conversation, through shared vulnerability, through doula-ing others and doula-ing ourselves.

WWHIVDD Collectivity

This cohort has helped to create a place to think about these questions, to listen to how our colleagues around the country are trying to move. There’s not one solution model to the challenges that we’re facing right now, and more and more I find it deeply radical when people choose to do things together. 

A Process of Processes

Dan S. Wang

explores the destabilizing collapse of public and private spheres in the U.S. today. Guest edited by artist and writer Dan S. Wang, varied contributions from artists and practitioners will unfold throughout the rest of the year. Does the crumbling of the U.S. political systems we've known open space to—in Dan’s words—“reinvigorate our imaginations regarding government and what it can do”?

No Privacy, No Public

Janet Sarbanes

And then there are the usual civil society formations—no harm in adopting those and making them your own. Or better yet, create new ones. Small solidarities give life meaning—they fend off loneliness and bring joy.

Written on the Tail End of This World: A Letter from X to Z

Yrneh Gabon

I’ve always used every tool to survive as an artist, with a deep sense of responsibility toward the role of the artist. 

The Weight of Salt

Donna Neuwirth

The site-responsive nature and land-centric approach to projects allowed for a home in the discourse and practice of creative placemaking, a world that offered support for just such an odd hybrid as Wormfarm. Collaboration across sectors happened organically as we—two artists—were, like it or not, out of the arts silo.

Advance and Retreat, or Milk from Fifteen Cows

Alex Paik

What is culture besides behaviors and codes that we have collectively decided to copy? How far back do we need to go to find the original? How much or how little do we embrace the imperfections of our copies that we pass on? What is the allowable deviance before it is no longer a copy? Who decides such things?

On Bodies and Copies, Seeing and Being

Anders Zanichkowsky

Be prepared: These are the sort of questions a public death must burst open like a spiral uncoiled from a spring.

How to Die in Private // How to Die in Public

kimi malka hanauer

Inherent and not always by choice, ungovernability emerges as bodily defiance. It manifests against the day’s order. An irreconcilable grief. An absence of all that cannot be stolen back. The demand to make ourselves imaginable, thinkable, speakable.

toward an ungovernable study: disordering the stacks

Emilio Martínez Poppe

Jameson Paige

A conversation between artist Emilio Martínez Poppe and curator Jameson Paige reflecting on their process, friendship, and the resonance of 

Civics Lessons: Learning How to See Philadelphia's Public Sector

Ryan Lee Wong

A hundred years ago, a colonial cop met a group of Buddhist monks, and their encounter foreshadowed the struggles of the century to come: between religious tradition and political modernity, between national resistance and colonial domination—and the unexpected blurring of those binaries.

The Cop, the Monk, and the Elephant

Justine Di Fiore

I work to bring that energy and muscle memory from caregiving into my practice in the hopes that the compassion will rub off onto the surface of the painting, if that sounds possible. That’s what I'm striving for. And maybe this is what I mean when thinking about the personal as political—caregiving as resistance.

Care on Canvas

Robby Herbst

The Model Cities Program encouraged community stakeholders to co-organize, articulate problems, and generate solutions to address the crisis of poverty in a wealthy society.

What Was Liberalism: Affective Policy in the Art of Citizen Participation

, the first collection of contributions to 

, centers artists in their own voices to spotlight the wisdom of our creative community. Anchored by a set of twelve questions created by artist Chloë Bass to gain insight into practitioners’ work and person, 

 gathers responses, reflections, and expertise from a range of contributors. Exploring the knowledge passed through creative lineages and the ways socially engaged practice proliferates inside and outside of institutions, 

 provides a window into ongoing conversations between friends and mentors.

Another Way

Kathie deNobriga

What new sights or insights might a detour provide?
What mysteries are there to explore?

Risa Puleo

In our social and professional worlds, we are all navigating tricky terrain while advocating for ourselves and our work. We hoped that ABoG could play the role of crowdsourcing and collecting different kinds of approaches to questions that we all navigate in this field.

Lee Heinemann + Risa Puleo

Chloë Bass

A Blade of Grass commissioned twelve questions from artist Chloë Bass for this issue of 

12 Questions for A Blade of Grass

Ari Wolff

I get asked a lot, “Is teaching your art practice, or is the larger project of engaging with the social practice community your art practice?” And the answer is no. Those are important things in my life and they are not my art practice. Not everything that's important to me needs to be my art practice.

Ari Wolff + Chloë Bass

Mary Patten

Ashley Hunt

I’m sure there are people who have historicized this moment, but that's an interesting paradox when these practices get historicized and codified. It's a tricky balance between the need to write and be part of creating critical discourse around these practices, and yet there's also that danger of things becoming domesticated—made safer somehow.

Ashley Hunt + Mary Patten

Avram Finkelstein

LJ Roberts

I would be a person who up until recently was unencumbered by the question of institutional interaction. Because everything I've done is in the public domain. I don't own any of it, it belongs to the world. It was meant to be the world’s.

Avram Finkelstein + LJ Roberts

Gaye Chan

TAKE = act without shame
LEAVE = share without condition
WHATEVAS = trust without apology.

Cassils

I'm looking for an inventive strategy that pushes back on the scrutinizing and surveying gaze of the trans body. This work is a contestation of that gaze while still bringing forward visibility for each other.

Etched in Light

Denise Shanté Brown

If we truly desire and believe in the values, practices, and principles we’ve set for ourselves, we need to rehearse them now, and not wait for these visions to magically take shape in some distant, unknown timescape.

Elisa Harkins

One of my obsessions is the preservation and revitalization of Indigenous languages and cultures. The questions I can't let go of revolve around how to effectively restore and celebrate these traditions in contemporary society.

ENTRE

One question that consistently comes up for us as a collective is, “What would life look like without borders?” We believe a post-border world is possible, and we are always striving to reimagine what that reality could look and feel like.

Mona Gazala

The questions I ask in my practice often alienate me from people and institutions that would have been helpful to my career as an artist. And I’m OK with that.

The Center for Artistic Activism

In partnership with researchers from the Center for Artistic Activism, the practitioner-led board of A Blade of Grass embarked on fieldwide research centered on what socially engaged artists need and what organizational models can most sustainably meet those needs.

A Blade of Grass + The Center for Artistic Activism

This year, we’re reflecting on the act of gathering as an artistic tool for building movements, distributing resources, and nurturing new futures. In a field as expansive and difficult to define as socially engaged art, the impulse to gather people, collectively organize, and build networks emerges as a throughline amongst a vast array of disciplines and practices. This work cannot happen individually; collaboration is inherent to the process at all scales, from artist cooperatives, ensembles, and mutual aid networks to broader efforts of convening and coalition building across networks and geographies.

Contributions