Conversation

On the occasion of the publication of What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the Queens Museum, and Creative Time present a conversation between the book’s author Tom Finkelpearl and contributors Brett Cook, Wendy Ewald, Sondra Farganis, Pedro Lasch, and Ernesto Pujol. Together, they examine the activist, participatory, coauthored aesthetic experiences of contemporary art. Carin Kuoni and Nato Thompson respond.

In What We Made, Finkelpearl suggests social cooperation as a meaningful way to think about collaborative work and provides a framework for understanding its emergence and acceptance. In a series of fifteen conversations, artists comment on their experiences working cooperatively, joined at times by colleagues from related fields—including social policy, architecture, art history, urban planning, and new media. Issues discussed in the book include the experience of working in public, working with museums and libraries, opportunities for social change, the lines between education and art, spirituality, collaborative opportunities available with new media, and the elusive criteria for evaluating cooperative art. What We Made is published by Duke University Press.

Participants:
Brett Cook, artist
Wendy Ewald, artist
Sondra Farganis, Founding Director, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School
Tom Finkelpearl, Executive Director, Queens Museum of Art
Carin Kuoni, Director/Curator, Vera List Center for Art and Politics
Pedro Lasch, Assistant Research Professor, Visual Art, Duke University
Ernesto Pujol, artist and Performance Instructor, Parsons The New School for Design
Nato Thompson, Chief Curator, Creative Time

Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in collaboration with the Queens Museum of Art and Creative Time.

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