Earth Day Print Shop

Members of the SPC participated in Lincoln's Earth Day celebration on Saturday, April 18, 2015 with our Earth Day Print Shop.

Our team presented information about the production of T-shirts, including water use and environmental impact along with a sustainable alternative. We brought along a large selection of donated used shirts for printing on and decorated those with Earth Day themed designs by UNL art students/faculty and other environmentally involved artist/activists. Participants were invited to choose a shirt for printing, and our master printer, Joyce Bingeman, screen printed designs on the spot. The event was free to participants. 

Thank you to all the wonderful people who helped us pull it off! This was our first team printing event, and we look forward to doing more in the future. 

* all photographs by Amanda Breitbach

Slow Art Day

The founders of International Slow Art Day believe that when people look slowly at a piece of art they make discoveries, the most important of which is that they can see and experience art without an “expert” (or expertise).

Members of the UNL Social Practice Coalition became aware of the event and its mission through interdisciplinary artist Sarah Berkeley  (http://www.sarahberkeley.com).

As a group, we decided to contact several museums and artists in Lincoln to help facilitate and coordinate Slow Art Day events.

As a result, we were able to assist with and promote five different events at three host institutions: the Sheldon Museum of Art, the Great Plains Art Museum, and the Elder Gallery at Nebraska Wesleyan University. 

About 70 participants joined art professionals, students, and volunteers to look slowly at a variety of artworks, including abstract expressionist paintings and outdoor sculptures, quilts from the Civil War period, and contemporary video and participatory sculpture. 

One participant said he valued the chance to spend more time with the art, "as if it were something that you loved to do or like choosing to spend time with someone that you love." Another person said that it was like taking a deep breath in an otherwise busy life.

* photos courtesy of Erin Poor, Sheldon Museum of Art

Real Food Film Festival

The UNL Social Practice Coalition hosted our second public event on Friday, March 6, 2015, screening a series of short films about sustainable food and farming.
Meadowlark Coffee & Espresso graciously allowed us to use their space, which helped us attract a diverse audience. We had a great turnout, including natural science professionals, farmers, and local food advocates as well as art students and faculty.
Following the screening of the films, we had a conversation about image making, the media, and message communication that was interesting and thought provoking. We also started thinking about the potential of film to communicate to broad audiences and possible venues for showing locally made films in Lincoln.

People's State of the Union

Just now posting a record of our People's State of the Union discussion on Jan. 29, 2015


This event was part of a national effort coordinated by the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, in their own words an "action network of artists and cultural workers mobilizing creativity in the service of social justice."

UNL SPC members Joyce Bingeman and Amanda Breitbach met leaders of the USDAC at the Imagining America conference in Atlanta in the fall. We were excited about their ideas and methods and decided to participate in their People's State of the Union project, an opportunity for national reflection and goal setting about the state of our nation and neighborhoods.

We hosted our local event at the Bennett-Martin Public Library, and we had a really interesting turnout of people and perspectives. Participants were asked to share their response to the prompt, "Describe an experience that showed you something new or important about the state of our union." Each participants story was recorded, and those stories and photographs from the event were submitted to the online national collection. Stories from all over the U.S. were compiled into the 2015 Poetic Address to the Nation, performed and broadcast live on February 1, 2015.

Locally, we made some exciting new connections, with a community action group called WeMidwest and also with a representative of SP CE Commons, a community space that hosts events including writer and artist groups, as well as with some really wonderful, hopeful people.

We were surprised when the group asked for our next event - they did not want to stop! At their request, we're planning to continue the conversation through email and social media, and we may collaborate with the other groups to host another community imagining kind of exercise.

Why We Make Art

An Excerpt from the article "Why We Make Art" found August  25 2014, http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_we_make_art

Along with a link to the writings of Harrell Fletcher on Social Practice as Art

http://www.harrellfletcher.com/?cat=33

Harrell Fletcher: Anything anyone calls art is art

An image from "The Problem of Possible Redemption 2003," staged at the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York. The video is an adaptation of James Joyce's novel Ulysses shot at the Parkville Senior Center in Connecticut, with the seniors reading the lines from cue cards.Harell Fletcher

Harrell Fletcher teaches in the art department at Portland State University. He has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, and in numerous other museums and galleries around the world. In 2002, Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, a participatory website with Miranda July, which they turned into a book, published in 2007. Fletcher is the recipient of the 2005 Alpert Award in Visual Arts.

The question of why I make art needs to be broken down a bit before I can answer.

First of all, what is art? The definition for art that I have come up with, which seems to work best for me, is that anything anyone calls art is art. This comes from my belief that there is nothing intrinsic about art. We cannot do a chemical analysis to determine if something is art or not. Instead, I feel like calling something “art” is really just a subjective way of indicating value—which could be aesthetic, cultural, monetary, and so on.

If we look at other kinds of creative activity we can see how various forms can all exist and be valid at the same time. I’ve made what I think of as art since I was a child, initially drawings, then photographs, paintings, videos, and so on. By the time I got to graduate school, I was not so interested in making more stuff, and instead started to move into another direction, which these days is sometimes called “Social Practice.”

This is sort of a confusing term since it is so new and undefined. In a broad way, I think of it as the opposite of Studio Practice—making objects in isolation, to be shown and hopefully sold in a gallery context. Most of the art world operates with this Studio Practice approach. In Social Practice, there is more of an emphasis on ideas and actions than on objects; it can take place outside of art contexts, and there is often a collaborative or participatory aspect to the work.

So back to the question why I make art. In my case, the projects that I do allow me to meet people I wouldn’t ordinarily meet, travel to places I wouldn’t normally go to, learn about subjects that I didn’t know I would be interested in, and sometimes even help people out in small ways that make me feel good. I like to say that what I’m after is to have an interesting life, and doing the work that I do as an artist helps me achieve that.

“everybody is an artist.”

Beuys’ Concept of Social Sculpture and Relational Art Practices Today

By Chicago Art Magazine on Nov 29, 2010 in Articles, Featured

“Best of Chicago Art Magazine” re-post. Originally appeared in Chicago Art Criticism on 2/28/10

Laurie Rojas

German artist Joseph Beuys’s work appears unfathomable: his entire oeuvre engaged drawing, sculpture, performance, pedagogy, and political activism. Art critics and art historians have admitted the difficulty of placing this enigmatic artist within the modern or postmodern lineages of significant postwar artists. In the foreword to Joseph Beuys: The Reader, Arthur Danto argues that Beuys (1921–86), like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, is one of the artists who one must turn to in order to understand contemporary art. Danto believes, however, that unlike Duchamp and Warhol, who are frequently discussed and shown, Beuys has faded from contemporary awareness. This is both true and not true.

Beuys is famously remembered for two things: the theoretical hypothesis of “social sculpture,” and the statement “everybody is an artist.” A close consideration of the relationship between these two concepts reveals Beuys’s program for art and his historically motivated vision for society. Both concepts have influenced participatory, socially engaged, and relational art today and provide a vehicle for unraveling their historical significance, even if they claim to detach themselves from Beuys’s historical moment. Perhaps of even more significance, then, is what aspects of Beuys work seem to have–somewhat suspiciously–faded.

Danto suggests that perhaps the fading interest in Beuys lies in the fact that both the subject of Beuys’s art and his own personal myth are bound up in World War II and the period of German reconstruction. It is possible that the fading of Beuys is due to the inability to digest and resolve the problems his work raised in the aftermath of World War II. Our historical moment, almost five decades later, inherits that history and those desires, even if a certain metaphysical strain of postmodernist thinkers have incessantly argued that such a moment has irretrievably passed. The analysis of the influence of Beuys on contemporary artists, specifically those engaged in relational aesthetics, in this essay is to argue and demonstrate that the moment has not passed, but changed. The difference in our historical moment is that we are less conscious of—and less interested in–the social conditions that produced and re-produces the political disillusionment and aesthetic desires and needs that emerged after WWII.

According to Danto, the ideological context–the German mentality of the 1960s–is inseparable from the work, and a necessary component for its emergence and understanding. In that case, the question for critically engaging Beuys’ work rests on whether he was was part of an effective, critical neo-avant-garde or something else—as art historian Benjamin Buchloh attempts to do (to be addressed in part II).

In the present, a decade dominated by the discourse on relational aesthetics and socially engaged art practices, Beuys theory of social sculpture, and his relationship to Fluxus in Düsseldorf, places him within the early experiments in this camp. This approach to Beuys is illustrated by the inclusion of Beuys in Claire Bishop’s Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art, but also, in Francesco Bonami’s “The Legacy of a Myth Maker.”

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Peace + Justice

PEACE & JUSTICE  |  INDIGENOUS LEADERSHIP  |  CLIMATE ACTION

Brought Together by Keystone Pipeline Fight, “Cowboys and Indians” Heal Old Wounds

As natives and ranchers work together to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, they're also learning to understand each other's history, culture, and relationship with the land.

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by Kristin Moe

posted Apr 24, 2014

Faith Spotted Eagle and Tom Genung perform a water ceremony together at the "Reject and Protect" demonstration against the Keystone XL pipeline in Washington, D.C. Photo by Kristin Moe.

Protests and demonstrations happen almost every day in Washington, D.C., but this one was unusual. On April 22, a circle of tipis went up between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument. Nebraska ranchers offered gifts of food, tobacco, and cloth to elders from the Piscataway tribe, who welcomed the visitors to their traditional land. Then the group got on horseback—the indigenous contingent in traditional beads and feathers, the ranchers in cowboy hats and bandanas—and rode through downtown demanding that President Barack Obama reject the Keystone XL pipeline.

The pipeline, if approved, will be built on land guaranteed to the Lakota people in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.

That action—the first event in a five-day gathering on the National Mall—was the largest mobilization yet from a group called the Cowboy Indian Alliance, an unlikely coalition of farmers, ranchers, and members of Native American tribes from across the Great Plains, all united by their opposition to Keystone XL.

That unity flies in the face of centuries of conflict between indigenous people and settlers, but participants from both sides hope this is a sign that old wounds are beginning to heal. They hope that the pipeline, which has caused them both much distress, will be a catalyst for reconciliation.