This week: Our final installment in the Open Engagement series. This week we talk to Jule Ault!

Julie Ault
Julie Ault is a New York based artist and writer who independently and collaboratively organizes exhibitions, publications, and multiform projects. She often assumes curatorial and editorial roles as forms of artistic practice. Her work emphasizes interrelationships between cultural production and politics and frequently engages historical inquiry. Upcoming projects include “No-Stop City High-Rise: A Conceptual Equation,” in collaboration with Martin Beck for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, and recent work includes collaborating with Danh Vo on the publication Where the Lions Are, (Basel Kunsthalle, 2009). Ault is the editor of Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (Four Corners Books, 2010), Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985 (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (steidl/dangin, 2006), and is the author of Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita (Four Corners Books, 2006).

The week: More Open Engagement "SoPra"! This week we talk to Pablo Helguera!

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. Helguera’s work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction.

His work as an educator intersected his interest as an artist, making his work often reflects on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record.

Pablo Helguera performed individually at various museums and biennials internationally. In 2008 he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and also was the recipient of a 2005 Creative Capital Grant. Helguera worked for fifteen years in a variety of contemporary art museums. Since 2007, he is Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

He is the author, amongst several other books, of The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style (2005), a social etiquette manual for the art world; The Boy Inside the Letter (2008) Theatrum Anatomicum ( and other performance lectures) (2008), the play The Juvenal Players (2009) and What in the World (2010).

This week: Duncan, Brian, and Abigail Satinsky in conversation with Christine Hill at the Open Engagement conference, which took place from May 13 to 15, 2011 at Portland State University.

Open Engagement is an initiative of PSU’s Art and Social Practice MFA program that encourages discussion on various perspectives in social practice.

Christine Hill is an artist, musician, hobby librarian and the proprietor of Volksboutique, a former second-hand shop turned production facility operating out of Brooklyn, New York and Berlin, Germany.

Hill's work proposes new investigations into mixed-media installation and performance. Examining contemporary forms of popular entertainment (for example, producing a television talk show in a New York gallery, in Pilot, 2000), imitating paradigms of elite advertising, and deploying businesses as art projects (a second-hand clothing store in Berlin, Volksboutique in 1996-97, a fully operable tour guide agency in New York in 1999) Hill investigates the proximity of contemporary art to mass entertainment, consumerism, and popular culture. In the process, she proposes new roles for viewers (as consumers, tourists, members of a TV audience), redefines artistic spaces of exhibition (as stores, studios, catwalks), and reinvents a mobile artistic identity (whether as talk show host, store owner, or tour guide). She defines these interventions as 'Organizational Ventures.'

Hill has exhibited and lectured widely internationally. She has been the subject of numerous publications and she shows regularly. Recent solo exhibitions include Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; Galerie EIGEN+ART, Berlin; the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig; the MigrosMuseum in Zurich and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland. Forthcoming projects include collaboration with the curator Mary Jane Jacob for Chicago's Sullivan Galleries and a solo presentation at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, both in 2009.

She was included in documenta X in 1997, and has participated in numerous international group exhibitions. Her work has been reviewed extensively, including in Artforum, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Art in America and in considerable international publications. The "Volksboutique Style Manual" is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Volksboutique project "Minutes" was included in the 2007 Venice Biennale under the curation of Robert Storr.
Christine Hill is Professor and Chair of Media, Trend and Public Appearance at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany.

www.volksboutique.org

This week: Another chapter in our festival of social practice! We talk to Mark Allen, Founder and Director, Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA  and Allison Agsten, Curator of Public Engagement & Director of Visitor Services at Hammer Museum.

Come check us out at the shiny new DePaul museum this Wednesday at 6 PM!

This week: Duncan, Brian, and Abigail Satinsky in conversation with James Voorhies at the Open Engagement conference, which took place from May 13 to 15, 2011 at Portland State University.

Open Engagement is an initiative of PSU’s Art and Social Practice MFA program that encourages discussion on various perspectives in social practice. In this conversation, Voorhies, who was a featured presenter at this year’s conference, talks about the origin, evolution, and activities of the Bureau for Open Culture, which he founded.

The Bureau for Open Culture is a curatorial and pedagogic institution for the contemporary arts. It works intentionally to re-imagine the art exhibition as a discursive form of education that creates a kind of new public sphere or new institution. Exhibitions take shape as installations, screenings, informal talks, and performances; they occur in parking lots, storefronts, libraries, industrial sites, country roads, gardens, and galleries. In doing so, the Bureau generates platforms for learning and knowledge production that make ideas accessible, relevant, and inviting for diverse audiences. This model encourages overlaps of art, science, ecology, the built environment, philosophy, and design. Form, content and site are underlining points of critical inquiry for Bureau for Open Culture.

This  interview is part of the ongoing collaboration between Bad at Sports and Art Practical. You can read an abridged transcript of the conversation here:

http://www.artpractical.com/feature/interview_with_james_voorhies/