Fwd: Otis Public Practice Studio + 18th Street Arts Center

January 4, 2010

	Otis College of Art and Design Otis Public Practice Studio + 18th Street Arts Center Love in a Cemetery January 23 - March 26, 2010 Opens Saturday January 23, 7-10 pm The 18th Street Arts Center 1639 18th Street Santa Monica, CA 90404 http://www.18thstreet.org
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Otis Public Practice Studio and 18th Street Arts Center present Love in a Cemetery, an unprecedented visual arts learning laboratory led by L.A.-based visual artist Andrea Bowers and curator Robert Sain. Young artists from Otis College of Art and Design and community organizations from throughout L.A. are participating in this exploration of aesthetics, pedagogy, and cultural politics. The project continues through March with open classrooms by visiting professors including Sally Tallant from the Serpentine Gallery in London, artists Rick Lowe and Martha Rosler, spokespersons from collaborating partners, and representatives of L.A.'s major cultural organizations. Allan Kaprow wrote, "Life in a museum is like making love in a cemetery," metaphorically equating a museum with a cemetery -- dead, sterile and proscribed. The same could be said for classrooms. To Bowers, this seemed a fitting challenge for the multi-generational and multi-community project that also involves L.A. arts administrator Pauline Kanako Kamiyama, guest artist Olga Koumoundouros and partnerships with organizations dedicated to social issues as diverse as gang intervention, teen homelessness, ocean pollution, health care, and prisoner education.  The project features a unique take on art as examination, as investigation into the future of cultural organizations, including art schools and community-based activist groups in the same learning circle as the better known museums of L.A. Sain, founding director of the innovative LACMALab, considers the opportunity and obligation for arts organizations to be socially responsible and responsive in an age of diminished resources and uncertainty. Through questionnaires sent to over 100 artists and arts leaders, he provokes a community-wide dialogue about the role, function, and fundamental purpose of L.A.'s arts institutions. Working with Bowers and Sain, young artists from the Otis MFA Public Practice program engage immediately as professionals with an important collaborative project. In the past two years, Otis graduate students have worked in New Orleans with artist Rick Lowe and Santa Monica Director of Cultural Affairs Jessica Cusick, and in the small town of Laton in California's Central Valley, with artist and public practice founding chair Suzanne Lacy. "You're an L.A. artist from the time you enter this program," says Lacy, "and our partnership with 18th Street Arts Center emphasizes our commitment to community work. Projects such as this one demonstrate the reciprocal pedagogy at the heart of public practice, where everyone is a teacher, and everyone a learner." By transforming its exhibition space into a laboratory and classroom where all participants engage in visual production and public programming, 18th Street Arts Center's main gallery becomes a space for civic engagement, experimentation, presentation and discourse. In keeping with their theme for 2010, Status Report: The Creative Economy, Artistic Director Clayton Campbell says, "The economy, selected as a theme prior to the worldwide banking contraction, is now even more relevant as artists like Andrea Bowers proactively develop new strategies to address the dislocation of resources and entitlement by responding to a market system that privileges some while discarding others." The 18th Street Arts Center 1639 18th Street Santa Monica, CA 90404 http://www.18thstreet.org http://www.otis.edu/GPP

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