Call for Applications: Art Action Academy In Collaboration with Queens Museum

Many artists want to create work that has a social impact. Unfortunately, organizing a successful social-change campaign often isn’t part of an artist’s education. The Art Action Academy (AAA) will help socially-engaged artists make their work more impactful and better evaluate the effect of their work.

Using a range of contemporary examples of organizing and activism from around the world, participants will study the ways cultural creativity has been employed for social change. We will explore ideas from cultural theory to cognitive science to mass communications. We will learn to apply these ideas through a mix of classroom style presentations and practical exercises designed to unlock our imaginations from the prison-house of the possible – and then to figure out how to make the impossible into reality, through new strategies and tactics. The workshop will culminate in a collaborative creative action.

The goal of the AAA is not merely to impart knowledge, but to access, organize and operationalize the creative, cultural and political resources possessed by artists themselves. In brief, the goal of the AAA is to have participants own their method to further develop as successful artists and effective activists.

The Center for Artistic Activism invites artists (and creative practitioners of all kinds) to apply for a 6-week Art Action Academy to be held in collaboration with Queens Museum, as part of its Open A.I.R. Artist Services Program.  

Participants will commit to attending between Oct 8 – Nov 20th on six consecutive Saturday afternoons plus an all-day collaborative build and action the final Saturday and Sunday.

To apply, please visit this link before August 31, 2016.

The Arts Action Academy is a program of the Center for Artistic Activism and will be led by the C4AA co-founders, Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert.

Stephen Duncombe is a professor of Media and Culture at New York University. He is the author and editor of six books, including Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and the Cultural Resistance Reader, and is a life-long activist.

Steve Lambert is a conceptual artist and professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase. His art has been shown everywhere from marches to museums both nationally and internationally, has appeared in over fourteen books, and four documentary films.

The Open A.I.R. Artist Services Program at the Queens Museum draws on the institution’s resources, staff expertise, and networks to provide workshops and lectures that help artists grow their practice, advance their career, and develop sustainable lives as artists.