Program Coordinator: Harrell Fletcher
Within these pages you will find the digital components of The Art + Social Practice Archive, which was founded and organized in 2018 by Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem, Roshani Thakore, Lo Moran and Harrell Fletcher in collaboration with Portland State University Library Special Collections and University Archives' Cristine Paschild and Marti Clemmons in honor of the PSU Art and Social Practice MFA program’s 10 year anniversary. The archive has grown with the assistance of many student collaborators including BB Andersson, Bri Graw, Caryn Aasness, Olivia DelGandio, Rebecca Copper, Jake Barber and Eniko Banyasz.
This is the first public archive of ephemera related to art and social practice, “an artistic approach that emphasizes collaboration, shared authorship, public participation, site-specificity, and interdisciplinarity, is often presented in non-art locations, and has no media or formal boundaries” (Harrell Fletcher).
PSU’s Art and Social Practice MFA is a 3-year, flexible residency program that combines individual research, group work, and experiential learning. The program’s blend of critical and professional practice, progressive pedagogy, collaborative social engagement, and transdisciplinary exploration produces an immersive educational environment that this archive aims to document.
The original accession of the archive focused on work related to artists who have collaborated with, graduated from, taught in, or are currently part of the PSU Art and Social Practice MFA program. As we grow our collection, the Archive content will expand to include socially engaged artists and projects from all over the world.
You can use key words, project titles or artist names to search the collection using the "Enter search terms" box in the upper lefthand corner of the page .
If you are interested in submitting materials to the archive, contact artandsocialpracticearchive@gmail.com.
In addition to the digital content found here, the Art +Social Practice Archive has a collection of physical materials not yet represented online. It can be accessed by contacting Special Collections at the Portland State University Library (specialcollections@pdx.edu). View the most recent finding aid created by Marti Clemmons with a list of artists and projects in the physical archive here.
Follow the project @artandsocialpracticearchive.
You can read more about the intentions and thought processes behind this project in this interview from 2023 between Lo Moran, Marti Clemmons, Olivia DelGandio and Caryn Aasness: The Art and Social Practice Archive: Doing Things Differently, Challenging Structures from Within and the Queerness of Archives or this interview from Assembly 2020 (page 148) between Rebecca Copper, Lo Moran, and Marti Clemmons.