I am an art and architectural historian interested in ways to activate history and the arts in the present day, for a variety of people. I took the image above when I was a Fellow at the University of Bristol, where the mirrored 2009 work “Follow Me” by Jeppe Hein was installed on the campus.
I am a Research Affiliate in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Recent research has focused on the London-based artist Stephen Willats. That book, Concerning Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art, published by Bloomsbury in 2021, is now available in physical and e-book forms.
Krannert Art Museum hosted a book release conversation with me on Tuesday, March 9, 2021, on zoom and posted to YouTube, with two faculty, Jorge Lucero and Lou Turner, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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Concerning Stephen Willats
With the incomparable help of Mitchell Oliver, I made these three short videos in 2020-21, during the pandemic. Due to the restrictions, I used my family, my house and my neighborhood to communicate some of the key takeaways of my book project about the London-based artist Stephen Willats.
This video is a mini-biography of the artist.
This video explores key concepts from my book: cybernetics and social practice.
This video looks at the role of architecture in the work of Stephen Willats, introduces the planner and architect, Max Lock, and makes a guess about why Willats did not like my book.
Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art
My book on Stephen Willats has been published by Bloomsbury Academic (February 2021). It pulls together key strands of his practice and threads them through histories of British cybernetics, experimental art, and urban design. For Willats, a cluster of concepts about control and feedback within living and machine systems (cybernetics) offered a new means to make art relevant. For decades, Willats has built relationships through art with people in tower blocks, underground clubs, middle-class enclaves, and warehouses on the Isle of Dogs, to investigate their current conditions and future possibilities. This book demonstrates the power of Willats’s multi-media art to catalyze communication among participants and to upend ideas about “audience” and “art.”
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Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between
The central themes of my 2010 book are: using a scheme of networks to analyze Lacy’s multifaceted art; considering gendered, racialized bodies in terms of positionality and performance; and recognizing participation’s intertwining with reception.
Lacy has shown an enduring commitment to using art in public to inform people about issues of common concern to affect policy. I suggest that the “spaces between” in her art provide openings that might be transformative for selves that are permeable and multiple. Her international career has demonstrated the power, problems and possibilities of art between the spaces of our diverse lives, as she has attempted to create structures that might give shape to a non-sexist, multi-racial democracy.
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Latest Posts
Youth Advocacy and Action
In 2015, I drafted a manifesto, "Youth Advocacy and Action (Y2A)." I did not want to start another organization or youth program, but I wanted to be clear what I was looking for in …
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ReGeneration Fund
My family started the ReGeneration Fund, through the Community Foundation of East Central Illinois (CFECI) to support young people working toward racial, economic, and …
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Mutuality between campus and community?
In preparation for Sounds Like Community, an online event that the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center has been organizing ever since the pandemic started over a year ago, I …
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