SOCIAL PRACTICE CUNY

The SPCUNY educational network amplifies the collective power of socially engaged artists, scholars, and advocates throughout the City University of New York’s rich tapestry of faculty, staff, and students working for social justice. Based at the CUNY Graduate Center, SPCUNY’s theory of educational transformation fosters structures for diverse creative leaders who will empower New York City as an inclusive, justice-driven cultural landscape. This initiative is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

MEET THE TEAM

CO-DIRECTORS

Chloë Bass

Chloë Bass (born 1984, New York) 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. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), has recently concluded a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), and will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place (2018 – 2022), an investigation of intimacy at the scale of immediate families.

Chloë has held numerous fellowships and residencies: she is a 2020 – 2022 Faculty Fellow for the Seminar in Public Engagement at the Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center), a 2020 – 2022 Lucas Art Fellow at Montalvo Art Center, and was a 2019 Art Matters Grantee. Previous recent honors include a residency at Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, the Knockdown Center, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James Gallery, and elsewhere. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review, and Artnews among others. Her monograph was published by The Operating System in December 2018; her chapbook, #sky #nofilter, was published in November 2020 by DoubleCross Press. Her short-form writing has been published in Paletten, Hyperallergic, Arts.Black, and the Walker Reader. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she co-runs Social Practice Queens with Gregory Sholette. Photo: Naima Green.

Gregory Sholette

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 also co-founder of several art collectives including Political Art Documentation/Distribution (1980-1988); REPOhistory (1989-2000); and Gulf Labor Coalition (2010 ongoing), as well as the author of the books Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (2017); Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2011); Art As Social Action (with Chloë Bass: 2018), and the forthcoming study, The Artist as Activist from Lund Humphries (2021). Dr. Sholette is an associate of the Art, Design and the Public Domain program of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and along with his colleague Chloë Bass, Sholette co-directs Social Practice CUNY (SPCUNY), a new, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded art and social justice initiative linking several MFA programs across CUNY and located in the Center for Humanities, at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR

Catherine LaSota

Catherine LaSota is a writer, artist, and community builder who has resided in New York City for over twenty-five years. She is the former Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference, and the former Assistant Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, both at Columbia University. Catherine founded and hosted the acclaimed LIC Reading Series (2015-2020), as well as the Resort writing community, which offers mentorship, coaching, workshops, and other support to writers. For the past eight years, she has helped produce events for the Brooklyn Book Festival. She is a trained facilitator with the New York Writers Coalition and served as the inaugural Development Director for Electric Literature. Her writing and interviews appear in Literary Hub, Vice, Catapult, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere, and her conversations with writers can be heard on Cabana Chats, a podcast about writing and community. Catherine is a certified advanced SCUBA diver, a former bartender, and a trained singer and French horn player. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts-Sculpture from Parsons and an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation from Queens College-CUNY. Catherine lives with her husband and two children in Queens, and she falls in love with New York City all over again every time she takes a walk.

SOCIAL PRACTICE TEACHING SCHOLARS-IN-RESIDENCE

Natalia Nakazawa

Working in painting, textiles, and social practice, Natalia Nakazawa explores ideas of transnationality, cultural identities, storytelling, archives, and patterns of migration. In her jacquard textiles series, the artist pulls images from the online open access collections with a focus on objects that embody historical moments of cultural exchange. Nakazawa’s work encourages critical engagement with personal histories, utilizing the familiar, warm format of the tapestry as a means of creating objects that can be simultaneously comforting and disruptive. Natalia received her MFA in studio practice from California College of the Arts, a MSEd from Queens College, and a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has recently been exhibited at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Arlington Arts Center (Washington, DC), Transmitter Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), The Cleveland Institute of Art (Cleveland, OH), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Lafayette College Galleries (Easton, PA), and The Old Stone House in Brooklyn (NY). Natalia has been an artist in residence at The Children’s Museum of Manhattan, MASS MoCA, SPACE on Ryder, Wassaic Project, Meta Open Arts, Interlude Artist Residency, CAMPO Garzon, Triangle Arts Association, and Wave Hill Winter Workspace.

Tom Finkelpearl

Over the last four decades, Tom Finkelpearl has worked as an artist, curator, teacher, museum director and head of a government funding agency. After earning an MFA at Hunter College, he organized fifteen shows at PS1 in the 1980s, managed over 100 public art commissions at the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) in the 1990s, spearheaded a 50,000 square foot expansion as Director of the Queens Museum (2002-2014), and oversaw New York City’s cultural funding when he returned to DCLA as Commissioner (2014-2020). Currently he is working on his third book, an assessment of the challenges facing American art museums in collaboration with Pablo Helguera.

PROGRAM COORDINATORS

Cory Tamler

Cory Tamler is a writer, translator, and interdisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in theatre, performance as research, and community organizing. Her artistic, research, and dramaturgical projects are focused in Berlin, Lenapehoking/NYC, and Wabanaki/Maine. She is the author of A Permanent Parliament: Notes on Social Choreography (2022, Laboratory for Social Choreography/Segal Center Publications) and a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Amir Farjoun

Amir Farjoun is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Alongside his research, Amir has co-created or performed works in different media, including “Debriefing II” by Public Movement (Guggenheim Museum, 2016), “Performing Knowledge” (2018, CUNY Graduate Center), and “The Sleeping Thousand” (Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, 2019). He does not own a pet.

COMMUNICATIONS CONSULTANT

Ting Y. Lin / KAI-SHU CONCEPT

Ting Y. Lin is a curious cultural producer and strategist with a fluid, interdisciplinary philosophy who often works in a hybrid capacity of programming and community building. She has collaborated with artists, thinkers, and artist-centered organizations to build socially engaged projects, deepen community engagement, and elevate artistic narratives at the intersection of culture and social justice.

OTHER TEAM MEMBERS

2023-2024 CUNY Cultural Corps Intern: Maliyah Mohamed
2022-2023 CUNY Cultural Corps Intern: Christina Lynch
2021-2022 CUNY Cultural Corps Intern: Marisa Wang

ADVISING COMMITTEE

The SPCUNY Advising Committee is a group of socially engaged art professionals and educational professionals, both within and outside of the CUNY system, who are lending their thoughts to our program.

Nandini Bagchee, City College
Claire Bishop, The Graduate Center
Daniel Bozhkov, Artist, Hunter College
Peter Eckersall, The Graduate Center
Tom Finkelpearl, arts consultant
Jeff Kasper, artist
Cindi Katz, The Graduate Center
Helen Koh, Art & Science Connect, The Graduate Center
Jennifer McCoy, Brooklyn College
Sally Tallant, Queens Museum