Curating Encounter in the Public Sphere

By studying a program of artist-driven think tanks at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts exploring issues of the urban future, labor, ecology and freedom, I will examine the challenges and affective capacities of a call-and-response pedagogy for action research located at a civic institution. This research, in the expanded field of socially engaged art, mines the roles of the art center as public square, the artist as public intellectual and the community as a generative culture making entity. By observing research oriented working groups engaged in collaborative knowledge production for creative public intervention and exhibition, this work explores the conditions for increased equity and operations of a civic public practice, which employs participants in a relationship of partnership with the institution.