NEWS

Announcing 2024–25 Faculty, Student, and Actionist Fellows

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2024–25 Social Practice CUNY Fellowship: an interdisciplinary group of 32 visual and performing artists, writers, organizers, educators, documentarians, media-makers, and scholars from across CUNY for their commitment to cultivating social change through art. Read more about this year's Fellows here!
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Introducing Part of the Practice, the new Social Practice CUNY podcast!

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 features a different voice in the Social Practice CUNY network every other Wednesday. Visit the podcast page on our website to follow along, and join us in-person on August 21, 2024 for a launch party at Francis Kite Club!
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Welcome to Catherine LaSota, our new Associate Director!

We are so excited to welcome Catherine LaSota as our first Associate Director of Social Practice CUNY. Catherine’s background in directing multidisciplinary academic institutes, organizing creative communities, and her own training as a creative writer, sculptor, and musician represents a synthesis of SPCUNY’s goals to foster artist leadership and engage in conversations across disciplines. Introducing the Associate Director role also offers SPCUNY a significant chance to increase our public presence both within CUNY and beyond.
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Interdisciplinary Artist Natalia Nakazawa Joins Social Practice CUNY as the 2023–24 Social Practice Teaching Scholar-in-Residence

Social Practice CUNY is pleased to announce the appointment of Queens–based artist Natalia Nakazawa as the 2023–24 Social Practice Scholar-in-Residence. A socially engaged practitioner focusing on issues of community activism and educational uplift, Nakazawa brings years of experience relevant across SPCUNY’s intersecting commitments and priorities: the desire to support interdisciplinary creators working at the intersection of art and social justice; the hope to train a future generation of arts leaders able to bring diverse perspectives to institutional work; and the commitment to new strategies of pedagogy engaged with the vibrant life of New York City.
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Tom Finkelpearl, Former Commissioner of NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Joins Social Practice CUNY as the Inaugural Social Practice Teaching Scholar-in-Residence

Social Practice CUNY is pleased to announce the appointment of Tom Finkelpearl as the inaugural Social Practice Teaching Scholar-in-Residence for Spring 2023. As part of his role, he will draw on his extensive New York experience as the former commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs, as well as his Queens-specific knowledge from his time at the Director of the Queens Museum, to amplify Social Practice CUNY’s connections and engagement with the larger cultural landscape and fabric of our complex urban environment.
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Create News 35 – Art and Social Action: International education in collaborative and socially engaged art

Issue 35 of Create News features some select reflections on the state of socially engaged art education from SPCUNY, who were invited to contribute to this publication alongside those involved in the new MA/MFA Art and Social Action at NCAD, in which Create is a partner.
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Lessons for Survival by Emily Raboteau, SPCUNY 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, reviewed in the New York Times

"While Raboteau grapples with much that is wrong with our troubled world, she does so with bracing honesty and insight," writes Tiya Miles in this review of Raboteau's newly-released book. "The strength of her book is her willingness to express concerns that many feel but are reluctant to voice."
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Social Practice CUNY Receives a Renewal Grant of $600K from the Mellon Foundation

The Mellon Foundation awarded Social Practice CUNY an additional $600,000 to continue its work into 2026. In that time, the initiative will welcome two more sets of student and faculty fellows and offer programming and mentorship that encourage CUNY artists and scholars to bring social change through art.
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Social Practice Queens alum Cody Herrmann reports on her 2023 apexart fellowship in Saigon

"apex has me out here in a little apartment along a dirty little canal in a neighborhood I would equate to today's Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And that's where things get a little tricky for me—you know I'm not supposed to be making art out here, but if you know one thing about me, you probably know I make work about public policy and development along dirty urban waterways."
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SPCUNY alum Pedro J. Cruz Cruz wins international award at 2022 Lisbon Architecture Triennial

2021-2022 SPCUNY Student Actionist Pedro Cruz won the highly competitive Millennium bcp Universities Competition Award for his project “El Teatro del Pueblo,” a much-revised version of his second-year studio project, in the main exhibit’s Multiplicity section. It is a work of urban ethnography, using oral histories and filmmaking as an architectural research method, that documents street vendors in Corona Plaza, Queens, NY, and emphasizes how vendors have been historically marginalized.
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Artist Rie Osogoe, SPCUNY 2022 alum, featured on Japan’s largest broadcaster for the project she started with SPCUNY

"With the cost of living rising fast in Japan, a growing number of people are living in poverty. This report explores how one Japanese artist is using the power of art to highlight social issues and help support those in need, through creative expression." Spotlight on SPCUNY alum Rie Osogoe on NHK-World Japan.
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“The Last Street End in Gowanus” project collaborator releases cassette, music video from the performance

Just released: a music video and a limited edition cassette of a sound art performance that took place as part of encounter 4 of Nora Almeida's SPCUNY Project. Artist Martin Bisi says: "Each encounter involved transforming the contested area through uses other than those intended by public officials. Our performance would be to transform the location with sound. Objects from the location were integrated into it, like the large piece of scrap metal that Bradford Reed is dragging. Other instruments were self-made from discarded materials in our landscape." By Brad Cohan for Rock & Roll Globe. Photo: Sleeping Giant Glossolalia 2022.
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SPCUNY in ARTnews’ Artist Prize Roundup

The 2022-23 Social Practice CUNY cohort is listed in ARTnews' Artist Prize Roundup in September 2022, alongside recipients of prizes and fellowships across the US including Pew Center Fellowships, Artists’ Legacy Foundation Award, and more.
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“Art for the Future,” including co-director Gregory Sholette’s Insurrection, reviewed in Art in America

"Insurrection was first exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York as part of the 1984 exhibition 'Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America' [click for more on Insurrection], one installment of a nationwide grassroots initiative that artist Doug Ashford, critic Lucy R. Lippard, and several others started in 1982, as the Reagan Doctrine of covert political meddling and overt military intervention was rapidly unfolding." By Mahan Moalemi. Photo: Peter Harris, courtesy Tufts University Art Galleries.
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Review of UnHomeless NYC in Frieze

"Not only does ‘UnHomeless NYC’ call into question the exceptionality of artistic practice – the making of art for art’s sake – but, by inviting a broad spectrum of participants, it goes to demonstrate how collective and cross-disciplinary collaboration is necessary to ensure that no one is without a place to call home." By Andreas Petrossiants. Pictured: Miguel Robles-Durán and Cohabitation Strategies, How to Begin Again, 2021. Courtesy: Kingsborough Art Museum, New York; photograph: Brian Edward Hack.
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UnHomeless NYC reviewed in Hyperallergic

"Public collaboration is the show’s greatest strength," writes Billy Anania in his review. The exhibition includes the work of current Queens College MFA Sachigusi Yasuda and was curated by artist Maureen Connor (Queens College Professor Emeritus and co-founder of Social Practice Queens), SPCUNY Faculty Fellow Midori Yamamura, and former Queens College MFA Tommy Mintz along with Jason Leggett and Rob Robinson. Photo: Detail from Willie Baronet, "We Are All Homeless" (2022). Credit: Billy Anania/Hyperallergic.
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Work by Rie Osogoe, 2021-2022 Student Fellow, in the Tokyo Shinbun Newspaper

(Article is in Japanese. Click here for English translation.) "On the afternoons of the second and fourth Saturdays, food is distributed to those in need at Higashi Ikebukuro Chuo Park in Toshima Ward. In May, a small art space was set up in one corner of the park where anyone can participate. Among those who hold a brush are welfare recipients and people living on the street." By Masaaki Nakamura. Photos: Tetsunori Sato.
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On Pre-Sale: The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art

SPCUNY co-director Gregory Sholette's new book, The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art, is available for pre-order. The book maps, critiques, celebrates and historicises activist art, exploring its current urgency alongside the processes which have given rise to activism by artists, and activist forms of art. Use code ACTIVISM22 for free worldwide shipping (valid until September 1, 2022).
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Podcast Indoor Voices, Episode 70: The intersection of art and social justice, featuring Social Practice CUNY

Indoor Voices was co-founded in 2017 by two CUNY librarians to curate interesting CUNY conversations. For this episode, Cynthia Tobar, 2021-22 SPCUNY Faculty Fellow and Bronx Community College librarian, talks with SPCUNY co-founders/directors Chloë Bass and Gregory Sholette.
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Memes Are Dominating Attention Spans and Clicks Like Never Before. So Why Is Serious Socially Engaged Art Also Thriving?

A mohawk-topped black man defiantly marches forward across a public plaza as a weaponized water cannon blasts him back, creating a visceral spectacle recalling civil rights confrontations in 1960s Birmingham, Alabama, but the year is really 2014, and the place is New York City.
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