How Do We ______ in Public? is a free public programming series of four experimental events taking place across New York City throughout 2026.
Organized by the Social Practice CUNY core team of artists, educators, and scholars (Chloë Bass, Tom Finkelpearl, Catherine LaSota, Nicolás Dumit Estevez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Gregory Sholette, and Cory Tamler), the series expands our existing work and reaffirms its commitment to strengthening socially engaged artistic practice, especially at a moment when culture faces sustained attacks and freedom of expression is increasingly constrained.
Building on the foundation of our work in supporting artist-led research and projects while making a deliberate shift, How Do We ______ in Public? is designed intentionally to engage a broader, non-CUNY public through our team’s collective years of producing, experiencing, researching, and teaching social practice within a public university. Framed as an open-ended, collective experiment, each program is a participatory proposition exploring methods of being, thinking, and enduring together in today’s complex sociopolitical landscape.
How Do We ______ in Public? responds to contemporary crises shaping the cultural field, including the defunding and targeting of public institutions and the erosion of shared civic space. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the series tests new forms of social practice in real time, foregrounding experimentation, solidarity, and public accountability.
Across four interconnected programs, How Do We ______ in Public? asks how we study, move, keep secret(s), and continue together in public when the infrastructures that once supported those actions are fraying. As we assess our organizational moment and contemplates its evolving legacy, the series will culminate in early 2027 with a reconvening of participants to reflect on the insight, tensions, and possibilities surfaced through these programs. How Do We ______ in Public? is supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Eugene M. Lang Foundation.
PROGRAM 1: How Do We Study in Public?
Thursday, February 12, 2026 at 6PM at CTHQ
Organized by Gregory Sholette and Tom Finkelpearl, this event draws on the “educational turn” described by art historian Claire Bishop, revisiting two decades of experimental pedagogies operating alongside and against corporatized universities. Together with Bishop and joined by educators and cultural practitioners Tania Bruguera and Pablo Helguera, the evening will confront pressing questions: What becomes of counter-institutional pedagogies when their host institutions face systematic defunding and ideological assault? What new pedagogies emerge not from neoliberal triumph but from its unraveling? Under fast-changing circumstances, exactly how do we study in public?
Archive of event coming soon.
PROGRAM 2: How Do We Move in Public?
May 2026 at BAAD! (Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance)
Organized by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel, this event brings together choreographers with connections to the Bronx to generate movement-based actions in public space across the South Bronx. Responding to escalating surveillance, policing, and state violence, particularly the terrorization of Black and Brown communities under ongoing ICE raids, the program advances movement as a counter-response of neglect, care, and shared imagination, asking how bodies navigate, reshape, and reclaim urban space under conditions of threat.
PROGRAM 3: How Do We Keep Secret(s) in Public?
Saturday, September 20, 2026 at 6PM The City Reliquary
Organized by Jacquelyn Marie Shannon and inspired by anthropologist Michael Taussig’s framing of magic as “a skilled revelation of skilled concealment,” this immersive event explores secrecy as a social practice. Drawing on research with occult communities, the event features artist-practitioners who employ relational forms of concealment, including magicians, mediums, witches, hypnotists, death doulas, sex workers, dream workers, and more. Across indoor and outdoor spaces, participants are invited to rehearse secrecy as a shared skill, a means of building trust, sustaining connection, and preparing for moments that demand hiding, signaling, and collective commitment.
PROGRAM 4: How Do We Continue in Public?
December 2026, location to be announced
Organized by Chloë Bass and Cory Tamler, this evening focuses on the necessity of going on in a time of overlapping personal, systemic, ecological, and international crises. Flash talks explore continuity through perspectives such as disability, geologic time and the climate disaster, gentrification, life after genocide, internationalism/anti-nationalism, and abolition, followed by conversation groups facilitated by the speakers that give participants the opportunity to go deeper together. The evening will center co-learning and mutual exchange of ideas with people in different fields but oriented towards the aim of more just futures even in the face of profound obstacles.
