Practicing in Public
Conversations on Socially Engaged Art
(OR Books, forthcoming February 2027)
Practicing in Public gathers a vital new body of conversations emerging from Social Practice CUNY, a network of artists, organizers, and educators working with communities beyond the university to confront the most urgent questions of our time. Contributors span staff, collaborators, and faculty and graduate students across the CUNY system, reflecting a wide range of disciplines, lived experiences, and political commitments.
Across these exchanges, artists and practitioners explore activist organizing, coalition building, environmental and economic justice, art and climate change, the role of archives, pedagogical and publishing methods, and the role of cultural work in an era of overlapping crises. Grounded in real-world projects addressing immigration, affordable housing, information sharing, and climate response, the book asks a central question: What futures become imaginable through interdisciplinary, socially engaged practice?
Edited and introduced by SPCUNY Associate Director Catherine LaSota, the anthology draws inspiration from SPCUNY Fellows’ projects, cross-institutional collaborations, and conversations from the podcast Part of the Practice. Together, these dialogues document the possibilities, frictions, and contradictions of working publicly—within and against institutional constraints—while offering concrete models for collaboration and collective action.
As a project that grew in the soil of the largest urban public education system in the United States, the City University of New York, Practicing in Public is both a record of experiential learning and a provocation: a field guide for artists, students, organizers, and cultural workers seeking new ways to practice, organize, and imagine a shared future as old systems fracture.
Contributors
Kendall Allison
Nora Almeida
Ashanti Omowali Alston
Sofya Aptekar
Arthur Avilés
Chloë Bass
Ashley Dawson
Ángeles Donoso Macaya
Cristina Ferrigno
Tom Finkelpearl
Tao Leigh Goffe
Alicia Grullón
Chris Harding
Emily Jacir
Kerosene Jones
Amirtha Kidambi
brandon king
dequi kioni-sadiki
Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles
Quinlan Maggio
Ash Marinaccio
Jackelyn Mariano, Esq.
Anne Davis Mulford
Lucas Murgida
iki nakagawa
Esther Neff
Sunisa Nuonsy
Emily Raboteau
ingrid romero
Gregory Sholette
April Wen
Ari Wolff
RAVES & REVIEWS
“After more than 35 years of independently creating and producing visual and performance art in the public sphere, often without permits, permissions, or the umbrella of an institution, I found Practicing in Public both heartening and necessary: a reminder that the public is not an audience to be managed but a messy, unpredictable place where art, life, politics, and other people collide. These conversations take seriously the questions many of us have been living with for decades, and they offer a generous, hopeful map of how artists might continue to practice together in the world as it is today.” –Ed Woodham
“Practicing in Public is a journey of success stories where dialogue, shared meals, and collaboration are the prize. Reading these conversations among more than thirty social practice artists, devoted to sharing as art, justice as art, eating as art, and healing as art, I realize: everybody wins.” –Linda Mary Montano
“If our imaginations are central to enacting the change we want to see in the world, then Practicing in Public is the dream-fodder we’ve been yearning for. Part-manual, part-chronicle, this thoughtful assembly of thinking and words by some of the most critically and socially engaged artists working today maps the profound field that Social Practice CUNY has brought to life over the span of its existence. The knowledges and learnings presented offer readers inspiration and scaffolding for changemaking in their own contexts and on their own terms, centering equity and cultural sovereignty at its most dynamic, refusing to look away from the tough questions.” –Laura Raicovich
“Practicing in Public is a call to gather and a vital resource for socially engaged art practice and pedagogy. Its conversational form foregrounds the presence and active listening that this work requires, creating space for nuance, contradiction, and coalition building. Carrying forward SPCUNY’s emphasis on traversing silos within and around public institutions, the book offers these conversations as seeds for new questions and forms of collective work.” –Alex Strada
“Embracing vulnerability, and the difficulties of relation as experienced across shifting scales of power and positionality, these conversations are nourishing and insistent reminders of the potential that emanates from commitments to social practice. I am moved by their willingness to sit with complex questions and allow them to remain open with the desire to unearth the political strategies that emerge through art making alongside organizing.” –Gervais Marsh
“Practicing in Public is a guide to socially engaged art, a way to find ourselves within a living tradition. Practice is what we have, doing it consciously is what we can offer as artists, engaging with intentionality is how we take part as citizens. This is the guide we’ve been looking for to get back on the road with new companions.” –Tania Bruguera
“Socially engaged art is a field that is continuously reinvented through the encounters, collaborations, and disagreements of those who practice it. Practicing in Public beautifully captures this process of collective inquiry. Rather than attempting to define social practice, this book brings together a remarkable range of voices to explore how art intersects with pedagogy, activism, institutional life, and the everyday work of building communities. What emerges is not simply a collection of conversations, but a compelling demonstration of conversation itself as a creative and transformative act. This is an important and generous contribution to the field, reminding us that the most meaningful artistic practices do not merely represent alternative worlds, but help us rehearse how to inhabit them together.” —Pablo Helguera, artist and author of Education for Socially Engaged Art
