Public Art—With a Focus on Small Towns
F06
Nato Thompson
A class on the canvas that is community life. We will survey public and community-based art of the 20th century. Ranging from children’s murals to inflatable homeless shelters to secessionist states in Holland, the realm of public art projects is vast indeed. In addition, the class will take these historic examples and discuss its uses in collaboration with the small towns of North Adams and Bennington. Through this lens, students will be introduced to interventionist techniques of performance, social sculpture, video, community-based practice, and experimental geography. The course will use the approach of “tactical media” where a given condition will determine the form of the work. As opposed to approaching content with a predetermined form in mind, this class will find a form based on predetermined content (the small town).

The class will be broken up into three sections. The first will survey public and community-based art ranging from the aggressive interventions of Italy’s proto-fascist futurists, to the meandering walking tours of 1950s France’s situationists, to the plop art sculpture of the 1970s, to the global protest movement of the 90s. This section will include readings of critical texts by Lucy Lippard, Rosalyn Deutsche, Critical Art Ensemble, Brian Holmes, Suzanne Lacy, and Nicolas Bourriaud. The second section will consist of a research phase where the class will discuss small-town life and brainstorm potential interventions and practices. The third portion will consist of the production of multiple community-based interventions and small-town projects. It should be emphasized that the class is highly interdisciplinary. Art students should be prepared to write and non-art students should be prepared to make. The course lends itself to students interested in new methods of expression (from video to homeless shelters to performance) on issues facing small towns. Two Monday evening class sessions will be held at MASS MoCA and two additional Saturday field trips to MASS MoCA will be scheduled as part of this course.