Practicing in Public (Conversations about Socially Engaged Art)

What happens when we take art out of the white cube and bring it into public life? Practicing in Public collects the conversations, insights, and projects to emerge from Social Practice CUNY, an artist-run experiment.

Described as a “dream factory during a polycrisis,” Social Practice CUNY (SPCUNY) is an artist-run network based at the CUNY Graduate Center, bringing together artists, organizers, educators, and scholars working across the university and beyond it. Operating between institutional legitimacy and activist independence, SPCUNY occupies a space in which socially engaged art has long found both its power and its precarity.

Founded in 2021, the program, which aims to amplify the collective power of socially engaged artists and advocates working for social justice, creating space for collaboration across disciplines, institutions, and communities, is winding down in 2027. Practicing in Public is one part of its afterlife. The projects gathered here take many forms: two CUNY graduates make artist books with children, a punk concept album draws on Filipino revolutionary texts, the Public Action League leave a Wall Street bull outside a New York City courthouse. The conversations move between climate justice, embodied practice, music, Palestinian solidarity, abolition, humor and grief.

What makes something art, and what makes it public? And what does it mean to work for the public when artists are already part of the communities they serve? The conversations in this book question the distance between artist and audience, institution and movement, cultural work and political action.