Projects within the School of Art address social impact as viewed through the lens of art in various contexts and also include an array of projects that demonstrate self-reflection and meditation on pedagogy, the history of art, and the use of materials in artistic practice.
Duff Norris, MFA Fine Arts ‘20 and Shaun Leonardo
School of Art, Fine Arts
Artist and Visiting Fellow Shaun Leonardo partnered with MFA 20′ student Duff Norris to create the Social Practice Matrix, a tool for investigating and evaluating publicly engaged social practice projects. The Matrix looks at eight separate points of assessment that map a project’s potentials and limitations as inherent to its intended scope of work and objectives. These assessment nodes explore topics particularly relevant to socially engaged practices—priorities like participatory agency, scale of impact, and working with or against power structures, among others. This tool was developed as a part of Leonardo’s A Social Practice Laboratory, hosted in Dekalb Gallery, as part of his PROJECT THIRD summer residency of 2019.
Holly Adams, BFA Digital Arts ’20
School of Art
BetaSpace is a place for exploration and play, with many learning resources at arm’s length.
Mrinalini Aggarwal
School of Art, Fine Arts
Seed Grantee 2019-2020
Field is a research-led visual arts project within the public realm. Investigating systems of power embedded within the architecture and forms of contemporary public plazas and civic parks, the project will result in a landscape intervention in the historic site of the Frank H. Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, California, in June 2020.
Rachel Hines, Marta Kostrzewa, Phillip Hunter (P.H.) Lawson, Suparkan (Pink) Niruktisart, and Carmen Noguera, MPS Arts and Cultural Management ’19
School of Art
Fusión is a capstone project that defines and explores the role that cultural resilience plays in the US-Mexico border at San Diego | Tijuana.
Xingze Li, MFA Fine Arts ’19 and Jackie Slanley, MFA Fine Arts ’20
School of Art
We believe that glass has the potential to be a critical player in the contemporary dialogue surrounding fine art and will open doors for artists in their own investigations.
Sydney Ellison, BFA ’22 Photography
School of Art
Intersections of Gaze and Agency in Sotheby’s Auction Catalogs is a fictional Sotheby’s catalog that contains three groups of images intended to criticize the history of the nude in art and the dichotomy between male and female nudes.
Morgan Miller
School of Art, Digital Arts
Seed Grantee 2019-2020
Margin of Error is an examination on how polling affects our democracy. Extensive research and interviews inform the creation of a documentary that includes animated sequences, with the intention of entering the production phase with as much research and knowledge as possible.
Chloe Smolarski
School of Art, Digital Arts
K-12 Seed Grantee 2019-2020
NYC Immigrant Youth Stories: A Youth Participatory Research and Media Art Project blends participatory research methodologies, oral history processes, and the media arts to further understand the lived experiences of Latinx, immigrant youth at Gregorio Luperón High School and empower them to respond to social injustices through media art.
Connie Fu
School of Art, Fine Arts
Trust-Events in the Art of Pedagogy is the culmination of the inaugural Pratt/VACI Fellowship and is also supported by the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Department of Fine Arts. This project introduces trust-events to the field of art pedagogy, providing examples and analysis.
