Artist-Led: Cultural Reimaginings in the Art World Today

The rise of global art capital in the twenty-first century is marked by a number of trends: expanding art fairs, deepening pockets of commercial galleries; increasing tourism around international exhibitions and biennials; branded collaborations; and civic investments in public art projects and museums. The reach of capital investments in the global art market enters into the urban core and sprawls outward on a global scale.

Artists and scholars such as Julie Ault, Andrea Fraser, Jan Lin, and Susanna Phillips Newbury, among others, have written about the tensions that arise in the intersections of art, capital, urban development, gentrification, and cultural identity formations. In conversation with these and other related projects, this session considers artists and arts practitioners who remain committed to alternatives to blue-chip aspirations. Artist-run spaces, not-for-profit galleries, volunteer-run art events, and warehouse studios maintain interdependent arts communities in cities all over the world, from Seoul to Los Angeles to Mexico City to Johannesburg.

Papers may address the following: How is community cultivated in studios, event spaces, and art centers outside museums and for-profit galleries? What spaces are welcoming to immigrant, BIPOC, queer and trans, disabled, and poor arts practitioners unbeholden to technocratic determinations of diversity and inclusion? How do art fairs, biennials, commercial galleries, and government-sponsored projects interface with or come into conflict with alternative sites? What kinds of ambiguous relationships exist between capitalist interventions and artist-led projects?

This session encourages submissions from a variety of arts practitioners, community-based arts workers, volunteers, freelance writers, curators, artists, and scholars.