Art escapes the museum

Socially engaged art will hit Portland State in full force this weekend during the 2012 Open Engagement conference.

This free, three-day conference will take place Friday, May 18, through Sunday, May 20, with events spread throughout campus. Developed by the students and instructors of Portland State’s art and social practice Master of Fine Arts program, the conference will feature an array of projects, panels and keynotes exploring the many facets of socially engaged art.

“Since it’s been happening at PSU, the conference theme and direction is really guided by the MFA students in the art and social practice program,” said Jen Delos Reyes, associate professor of the program and director of the conference. “We talk about those themes that they feel are relevant and coming to the fore for people that are working in this socially engaged way.”

The conference will include events exploring four themes of socially engaged art as envisioned by the graduate students: economies, education, politics and representation. The students and other participants will host panels, lead group art projects and screen films about topics related to these themes.

The scope of featured events is quite broad. Examples of projects include the Emancipation of Money, which will involve the circulation of an alternate form of currency without the concept of “spending.” Another is the Practical Joke Class Final, which will explore comedy as a tool for creating art and ideas.

Also featured will be three keynote speakers, Shannon Jackson, Paul Ramirez Jonas and Tania Bruguera. Jackson is director of the Arts Research Center at University of California, Berkeley; Jonas is an artist and 15-year professor; and Bruguera is an established performance artist.

“One of the great things about the conference is that the speakers spend time instructing on campus throughout the year, running up to the event,” said Eliza Gregory, a graduate student involved with the conference and the art and social practice program. “A great aspect of conference’s structure is that it is able to bring these exciting people to the program and also to be available to a much broader audience.”

Gregory will host a panel Sunday, May 20, exploring curatorial work titled “Inside and Outside the Contemporary Art Museum: Questions of Curation and Representation within Social Practice.”

This year’s conference will be the third of its kind to be hosted at PSU. Previous conferences have attracted hundreds, including people from abroad in addition to students, according to Reyes.

The event also draws other learning institutions, such as the Pacific Northwest College of Art and Lewis & Clark, which have formed partnerships with the program in the past.

“It’s always surprising to me how far away people are coming from to engage in this conversation, and not necessarily as presenters, people coming from Korea, the United Kingdom or Denmark—a really broad swathe of people,” Reyes said. “I always feel like we have a nice representation of students from here at PSU and the greater Portland area.”

PSU’s art and social practice program has been on campus for five years. As its name suggests, the program explores the concept of social engagement in the arts.

“It was really born out of the idea that artists don’t need studios in which to make work, but they can make their work out in the world, and that art can emerge from the context in which the artists find themselves and put themselves,” Reyes explained. “In my opinion, that work can be a lot more meaningful and a lot richer.”

The Open Engagement conference will have something for everyone, and, to be sure, there will be plenty of art making. To Reyes, this remains a key component to the conference’s success.

“One of the most important things about this conference is that it’s not just talking—there’s actually a lot of doing,” Reyes said. “There are things that manifest and happen at this event. It is about the production of art as much as it’s about the discussion of art.”