Gregory Sholette
Artist, writer, activist and teacher Gregory Sholette specializes in the history and theory of contemporary socially engaged art. His research and artistic practices focus on issues of equitable labor justice for artists, the activist agency of “dark matter” art, critical pedagogy and organizing counter-institutional resistance to authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and oppressive, racialized historical narratives. A co-founder of several artists’ collectives including Political Art Documentation/Distribution (1980), REPOhistory (1989), and Gulf Labor Coalition (2010), as well as the curator of Imaginary Archive, a collection of documents about a past whose future never arrived, his publications include a special double issue of FIELD Journal of Socially Engaged Art with over thirty global reports focusing on “Art, Anti-Globalism, and the Neo-Authoritarian Turn,” and the books Art as Social Action (with Chloë Bass, 2018, Skyhorse Press); Delirium & Resistance: Art Activism & the Crisis of Capitalism; Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. (Pluto Press 2017 & 2010); Collectivism After Modernism (U. Minn., 2006); The Interventionists with Nato Thompson (MIT 2004). Sholette is a graduate of the Whitney Program in Critical Theory (1996), did his MFA at UC San Diego (1995), BFA at The Cooper Union (1979), and received his PhD in Heritage and Memory Studies from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2017). He is associate faculty at the Art, Design and the Public Domain program of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and the past decade he has co-directed the pedagogical art and social justice initiative Social Practice Queens where he is a professor of art. Sholette blogs at Welcome To Our Bare Art World: gregsholette.tumblr.com