“Artists Engaged with the Social”
Jason Michael Leggett
Abstract. Social practice artists imagine themselves to be “bringing about real-world instances of progressive justice, community building, and transformation” (Schollette, Bass, & Social Practice Queens, 2018, xiii) in a similar way to other “imagined communities,” who are “seeking utopias, not as lost Edens, but as contemporary societies” (Anderson, 1983,69). In the form of a digital story series, I will critically examine how artists engage with different publics, or the social, in their pursuit of justice, community, and transformation. I draw upon interviews, observations, and my own participation in these art projects to present a spectrum by which we can learn how artists seek to engage with different publics and how these publics help us better understand law and society. These digital stories will form the foundation of an interactive archive.
“Begin at the beginning, the King said gravely, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 7.
I have begun to question why I have drawn a line between public and community when approaching my work. I wonder whether I had forgotten to invite publics into my co-constructed community? Or, is it perhaps the fact that the community constructed throughout my years as an activist is always limited, fleeting, constantly changing? Lest I get lost in my self-criticism, I came to the realization that I needed an archive. As I surveyed the web for possible models, I considered what publics I was hoping to invite into my community in the making, and how they might access the content in different ways. I wondered whether I could use an inductive, evolutionary process that begins with a digital story and expands toward interactivity, ways of searching and cutting across concepts, abstractions, concrete-direct actions, and even mindless meanderings?
I would like to invite the community organizers, activists, politicians, academics and social practice artists that I have worked with into the digital space as an archival space where they can reflect upon my reflections and participate in ongoing digital story with references, supports, examples, and more. To this end, I imagine my role, as narrator, as a sort of daemon, coordinator of a structure of activities that are mostly unseen, but that provides the participant with a guide of the possible activities of the website/archive. It is my hope that this approach to building the archive, through digital stories, where I am both the observer and participant, opens up the possibility of a multi-directional project. To help visualize this goal, I settled into the idea of a collage as a starting place.
The collage consists of representations of the projects I have been engaged with social practice artists and community activists and their imagined publics. I began with UnhomelessNYC, a pedagogical exhibition that includes a selection of artworks which engage in critical discourse about social structures and the housing crisis. This exhibition began with a Humanities NY planning grant in the fall of 2019. The first exhibition of the artworks and public programming took place March and April of 2022 at the Kingsborough Community College Art Museum. The second exhibition took place at the Hudson Guild Art Gallery and Community Center in Chelsea from February to April of 2024.
We worked with a wide array of artists and community organizers. Some of the artists wanted to bring forward the daily subjectivities of those who experience homelessness. They wanted the public to experience the day-to-day social relations as the homeless population, that dehumanize but to also challenge the narrative of individual exceptionalism. Others focused on the agency of the homeless population and highlighted their creative efforts to struggle alongside the artists.
The community organizers and activists, on the other hand, were far more focused on actionable steps that both the people who were homeless, and their allies, might take immediately. The public, to them, was framed more in terms of passive, ignorant, or an obstacle. They were not concerned with changing minds; they wanted structural changes from the top elites. It was both interesting and frustrating to watch these two groups talk past one another, retreat behind egos & the professionalization of their chosen careers, and sometimes even compete over homeless individuals and allies.
I struggled to articulate which of these publics I was most engaged with. I began to examine my own history of working with different groups through political and community organizing and wondered whether I had a framing story that might bring out my own desires to connect with others. My working class parents helped me construct and decorate my first protest sign as a child. I can recall the excitement I felt at a rally to restore funding for a local park where I played little league baseball, and the sense of pride I felt while marching with my sign. Many years later, as a campaign manager, I felt the same way constructing yard signs with volunteers for a candidate for state office. As I continued to participate in political and community organizing, my working class roots of craftsmaking and collaboration nurtured my sense of self and community. Through these activities, I knew how rights could be mobilized.
Similarly, I have been engaged with artists and community organizers with the desire to merge lived experience with the creation of public messages. I began this art meets social science project with a simple inquiry: how can the arts, broadly speaking, activate rights among marginalized people? In my teaching work, I draw upon my previous experience as a community organizer and civic educator, and I integrate my legal training to bring all three perspectives into the course design process with the intent of embracing the role of legal educator and social activist. In this enterprise, I have less influence over the process, most often serve the role of documentarian-observer, and occasionally an invited participant in the co-construction of knowledge with specific groups. I wondered how this tension might work itself out through the art project(s).
During my work with the UnhomelessNYC collective, I also worked closely with conceptual artist, Maureen Connor, about reproductive rights. Maureen had been a co-curator in the UnhomlessNYC show, who provided context around the work of Martha Rosler and a group she helped co-found, Social Practice CUNY. She invited me into her studio and had me think through the artmaking process with her for over 6 months. I also served as an advisor and tutor of constitutional law. We developed Penumbra, a collaboration that resulted in a set of Curtains that contained texts from Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and Roe v. Wade, images from across time represented different eras of women’s health, showing a shift toward more control by men over women’s bodies, and images of “abortion” herbs and flowers used throughout history, usually in women’s health collectives. I facilitated a workshop that deconstructed these texts, separating them from their original contexts of supreme court cases, that asked the participants to arrange the disjointed texts in ways that was important to them, followed by a guided dialogue about reproductive justice and legal mobilization. This work is part of a larger collective, How to Perform an Abortion, that is working to expand reproductive rights through art and pedagogy, and was displayed at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn, as part of the Picturing the Constitution exhibition.
Our vision of the public in this project was muddy. Maureen, the artist, was immersed in the experience of her research and art construction. To her, the public was asleep and needed to be woken back up. She couldn’t understand how or why millions of women (and allies) had not flooded the streets after the Dobbs decision written by ultra-conservative members of the United States Supreme Court. I watched her struggle with the futility of trying to get the words right, the proper logical order, that would somehow deconstruct the legal interpretation in a way that the public would be enlightened and mobilized to restore fundamental rights, buried deep in the penumbra of the sun- liberty. The public, in this framing, seemed more of a distant audience, trapped behind a wall of hegemonic order – incapable of understanding reason. Or, perhaps, a mysterious other?
Following that project, I desired to find something that had a more concrete definition of public audience. I next worked with Sadaf Padder, of Alpha Arts Alliance – a Brooklyn-based arts agency and advisory advocating for artists of the global majority with a focus on South Asian and Caribbean women – involved a conscious choice of taking a different fork in the road. Rather than begin with an abstract problem like housing insecurity or liberty, I wanted to examine concrete, material support for artists from marginalized backgrounds. In other words, did they get paid?
I have been working with Sadaf Padder, the organization’s founder, to reflect deeply on our community experience and to theorize together about how this art-work might help address intersectional harm for communities of color in New York City. One output of this work was to produce a short video that presents related concepts to students at Kingsborough Community College. In this way, we are trying to connect similarly situated people of color who are interested in artmaking, or supporting artists, who are the subjects of social justice.
These experiences have been more humble in scope. The public(s) have always been identifiable groups: marginalized people who are undergoing an artistic journey, the friends and family who support them, gallery visitors who want to support these communities, and a social media audience that can be listed as “followers.” Together, they want to use art to share alternative perspectives of the lived experience, and often, unseen narratives, mythologies, and worlds.
While each of these projects involved different conceptions of the social, and of artmaking and artists, I found myself struggling to place myself within these projects. Was I an academic observer, a co-curator, an artist, an activist, a learner, a theorist? My academic work most consistently concerns three main audiences: practitioners and theorists of culturally responsive & sustaining pedagogies, socio-legal scholar-educators, and the marginalized students I work with, and to some extent their family and friends. Public, in this shared usage, is akin to what Patricia Hill Collins articulates as a political-temporal community:
“Community provides a window on a holistic politics drawing on its proven track record and its relational cognitive frame, to provide the hope that is needed for politics” (Collins, 2010, 26).
When I think of the public, or social, as a political community-in-the-making, I return to the idea of a daemon. I am sometimes thrust to the forefront, coordinating, leading, or directing. Most often however, I was more passive, behind-the-scenes, and coordinating from a more hidden and informal perspective. What do the represented parts say about the whole? On the one hand, as Borges observed, “The Library has existed ab aeternitate,” (Borges, 1998, 40). I, the imperfect human-librarian-archivist, am merely re-creating what already exists. I yearn and search for a pattern, a category, an index, a daemon, that restores order to what I perceive to be chaos. On the other hand, as McKittrick reminds us, “acknowledging the shared and collaborative intellectual praxis that makes our research what it is” allows me fluidity, to re-arrange objects not as they are, and to co-craft narratives, mythologies, and propositions in such a way that the visitor is welcome, sometimes redirected, and at other times right at home.
I have begun to outline the first page of the archive. This first draft of the digital story has brought clarity to the public bridge I need to build between the communities I am participating in and the intellectual work I am acknowledging and remixing with. I will work with the voices of the marginalized communities I teach, research, and explore injustices with, in my classes. I will consult them as I build out the archive and see what is useful to them. I anticipate off-shoots and detours that will help make the journey what it is.
I will also think more deeply and critically about where I see culturally sustaining pedagogies working in the rifts I saw between artists, activists, and imagined publics. How might the kind of practices I employ with students be useful to these groups? I can see this working in the digital story as a critical deconstruction of the gaps between intent and praxis as well as practical examples and references operating through hyperlinks and reference links to other pages of the website/archive.
Finally, I will practice over the summer, separating and integrating my imagined publics. Free speech can be fun! And helpful I say to readers outside my community in the making, inviting them to come see and participate. My hope is that we might re-construct our working rules in such a way that we liberate our practices from the rigid knowledge regimes that dominate our discourse and thinking in our isolated communities, I say to readers inside my co-constructed community in the making. I imagine echoes and rounds as the expression grows and more participate. I look forward to seeing how the archive develops with these divergent and emergent strains. I hope you, my imagined public, participate in the ongoing development of this archive.
References and other stories.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. Verso.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Library of Babel. 1998. Penguin.
Collins, Patricia Hill. “The New Politics of Community.” American Sociological Review, (75)1, 2010, pp. 7–30.
McKittrick, Katherine. “Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the floor)” in Dear Science and other stories. 2021. Duke University Press.
Schollete, Gregory, Bass, Chloe, and Social Practice Queens. Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the principles and practices of teaching social practice art. 2018. Allworth Press.
Image. Fragments: Books and Papers Scattered about the floor. Jason Michael Leggett
