Guest artists lead the intensives in UIndy’s Social Practice Art Program

Weekend practice placements in UIndy’s Social Practice Art Program provide our graduate students with close collaboration with guest artists and the focused and intensive work of an artist residency. These hands-on opportunities are balanced by semester-long courses in social practice and place building, grant writing, and social entrepreneurship that take place during the week. On weekends, innovative internships connect students with professional artists to go beyond the gallery to engage communities and solve pressing social issues through art.

Movement Practicum is taught by choreographer and dance teacher Rebecca Pappas. Classes involve choreographers and dance companies like Allison Orr, Dance Exchange, and Urban Bush Women, and use aspects of Gibney Dance’s Institute for Community Action Training (ICAT). Pappas’ internship challenges students to take their focus off the creative process and think less about the object, artifact, and result so that they focus more on the environment and the people around them. The final project ends when each student offers a body-based, site-specific performance or public intervention.

Big Car Collaborative artist and co-founder Jim Walker has offered a variety of internships influenced by Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, and participatory art that focus on small towns and neighborhoods. Walker led the first internship to activate a vacant storefront in Union City, Indiana, for a neighborhood engagement weekend. Subsequent internships focused on the Big Car Social Alchemy Project, which focuses on utopias and the town of New Harmony, Indiana, which was itself the site of two utopian experiments in the early years. 1800. Last year, students worked with Walker to produce participatory art that aired on Big Car’s community radio station, WQRT 99.1.

Other internships focused on food systems and urban agriculture, the environment and ecology, and walking as an artistic practice. All culminate with a participatory or interactive event on site. This multidisciplinary and collaborative approach helps students connect their creative practice with broader social issues to become community leaders.

Learn more about the University of Indianapolis Master of Arts in Social Practice at uindy.edu.

No Vacancy, curated by Jody Graf, will be on view from October 26 to November 8 at the school‘s Kellen Gallery in New York City.

Francis has produced over 10,000 works of art, performed in over 100 solo exhibitions, and from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s won the highest awards of all living painters.

Brian Blomerth’s Mycelium Wassonii deploys incredible graphic storytelling to share his own exploration of mushroom history

Prospective Students: Attend the Virtual Open House on November 8 to learn more about Sam Fox School’s MFA-VA program.

More than a century after Wright designed a workplace that borrows features from the home, designers are starting again, but who’s really an intimate office?

Works by Athena LaTocha, Wendy Red Star, Marianne Nicolson, Anita Fields, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Neal Ambrose-Smith, and many more, are on view until January 2022.

Archaeologists can now prove that the Vikings made landfall in the Americas hundreds of years before Columbus reached the Bahamas.

This week, the National Gallery of Art finally acquired a major work of Faith Ringgold, director of The Velvet Underground Talks, Hindu Nationalist Problem in North America, nullifying inherited admissions, and more.

Sculptures of Oaxacan alebrijes, designed as the guardians of the country’s immigrant community, and catrinas, the Day of the Dead skeletons, can now be found in Rockefeller Center.