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R/EvolutionPart I

MagazineYoYo

Editors’ Notes

Moira Williams Hairy Vetch Exchange

Janet Owen Driggs Return of the Octopus

Dinty W. Moore Crabgrass Philip Hartigan Soldier Boy

Katherine Ross Ghosts

Janeil Engelstad’s interviews of: Interviews From Eastern EuropeRudolf SikoraEva HAnna Daučíková

Contributors

Editors’ NotesWhen we sent out the call for submissions around the theme R/Evolution, we didn’t imagine we’d receive work about the whimsy of mules shattering teacups or lawn mowing men embarking on a comedic revolt. We were delighted, however, in the deeply thoughtful interactions of Kitty Ross with her obsolete animals and fine china and to laugh at Dinty Moore’s depiction of suburban mutiny. We did predict the most obvious interpretation of our topic, of course—war—but we were thrilled to find that subject visited in the evocative, intensely personal remembrances of artists and writers who lived through the changes in Eastern Europe. These were generously shared with Janeil Engelstad, who in turn shared them with us. Phil Hartigan’s pieces made us think of how military interactions ripple through the generations, circling back to Moore’s story by zeroing in on how we construct masculinity in our culture.

Another theme in this issue, touched on by Moore and Ross, is the manipulation of our natural world. Moira William’s project “Hairy Vetch Exchange” deals with this head-on as she germinates seeds on her body and then uses the plants to remediate polluted soils. The resulting harvest is ground to make bread for a communal meal. Her project coaxes nourishment from ruin, and makes manifest, in the most literal way possible, how our environment and our bodies are inextricably entwined.

Janet Owen Driggs also draws on nature in her essay “Return of the Octopus.” From Zucotti Park to Oakland, from sea to shining sea, the Occupy movement captured the attention of the country, and Janet Owen Driggs traces the long tentacle of political imagery in “Return of the Octopus.” She documents how this iconic imagery of protest against the corrupting influence of capital has evolved over time and demonstrates how this historic trope has new resonance.

We hope you enjoy this conversation/collection.

Amber GinsburgKristin GingerRebecca Keller

And don’t forget, if any of these works resonate with yours, submit tohttp://www.yoyomagazine.org/submissions.html for the R/Evolution II issue.

Listen. Read. Think. Participate!

Hairy Vetch Exchange

Using the body as a source of architecture and sustainability, I germinate hairy vetch seeds in my armpit until the seeds sprout.

Moira Williams

I transplant these hairy vetch seedlings into my Dirt Shirt, which is filled with soil from a Su-perfund site in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I use public water sources and rain to hydrate the seedlings via an irrigation system built into the Dirt Shirt.

The seedlings are then transplanted to further detoxifiy the Superfund soil. Once the soil is amended, I harvest the hairy vetch seeds, grind them into flour, make bread for the community, and serve it.

Moira serving bread made from the ground hairy vetch seeds in a gallery at the Social Justice

High School in Brooklyn, NY.

the Federal Reserve, and the Southern Pacific Railroad (SPRR) —to name but a few.

Latterly, however, the eight-legged star has waned. Whereas the octopus was once the political commentators’first choice for a metaphor to depict the workings of power, the fat cat and the greedy pig have now muscled in. Cartoonists regularly use these domesticated animals to characterize banks, corporations, and governmental institutions asrapacious, predacious, and sleekly vicious.

While the contemporary images offer cogent commentary on the characteristics of contemporary powerbrokers, two things are being lost with the decline of the octopus. First: the creature’s multi-tentacled capacity to illustrate the systemic operations of power. Second: the opportunity to explore the octopus as a metaphor for horizontal collaboration rather than hierarchical control.

Return of the OctopusJanet Owen Driggs

The Curse of California by G. Frederick Keller – the image that started it all for Octupy – appeared in San Francisco-based publication the Wasp in 1882. It depicts SPRR as an octopus that controls production and trade in the state.

In the variety show of our political imaginary, the octopus has put in a long-running performance as a cartoon villain. For at least two centuries, propagandists have used this underwater master of disguise to portray the threat of alien forces and Machiavellian power manipulations.

Its use by American cartoonists reached a peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as they sought to describe the often-murky operations of national monopolies such as Standard Oil,

The following image essay traces a little of the aforementioned history and outlines a recent project – a giant octopus puppet – that it inspired. An attempt to revive the octopus as an illustration of power, Octupy, which I made with Matthew Driggs and about seventy-five other Occupiers, was also an effort to perform power in ways that contradicted the diagram.

While The Curse clearly references SPRR’s owners – two of them comprise the eyes, for instance – this is primarily a portrait of the structure and strategies of their corporation.

Should readers believe, for example, that SPRR merely builds railroads, the cartoon makes clear the company’s interlinked interests in finance, mining, agriculture, telecommunications, and lumber. It speaks to the corporation’s excessive control in these areas, not least by its depiction of nine life-squeezing tentacles, with a tenth lurking in reserve. And it elucidates relationships between such seemingly disparate conditions as Nob Hill wealth and the desolation of Mussel Slough, where seven people died as a result of an SPRR land dispute in 1880.

The events at Mussel Slough inspired Frank Norris, author of The Octopus, A Story of California, to describe SPRR as “the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power.1”

Politician Alfred Owen Crozier drew this devilish octopus for his 1912 book U.S. Money vs. Corporate Money, “Aldrich Plan,” Wall Street Confessions! Great Bank Combine! An impassioned argument against the Federal Reserve System, the book asserts that it would create a vast profitmaking machine for Wall Street financiers.

1 Frank Norris: The Octopus: A California Story, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1903.

Keller’s Curse helps us visualize the distributed – often seemingly unrelated – parts that comprise the corporate whole, and provides a compelling illustration of the ruthlessness with which that centralized power pursued its profits. In addition, by anchoring his image in the Mussel Slough cemetary (lower lefthand corner), Keller evokes the source of SPRR’s profit, which was not the laying of rails but the acquisition of public land.

SPRR was established in 1865 as a land holding company. Railroad building was an excellent way to acquire US land at this time because the (privately owned) nationwide rail network received massive public subsidization in the form of land grants. SPRR received almost seven million acres of public land, along with their natural resources and potential for agricultural and residential development, both of which SPRR stimulated aggressively2.

Although he later married into the Rockefeller family, it seems likely that Crozier’s drawing

2 For a fascinating account of just one of SPRR’s multi-pronged campaigns in this regard – the marketing of Southern California to potential residents as a contemporary Garden of Eden – see Douglas Cazaux Sackman’s Orange Empire, University of California Press, 2005.

influenced a 1922 speech in which New York Mayor John Hylan said: “The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation….at the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses.”3

In contrast to the previous images, which diagram exploitative systems, Schrank has drawn a picture of an exploitative relationship that suggests at least two reasons why the

relationship endures. The cat’s hulking size and latent power counterpoint the woman’sapparent affection for the creature. (Is she aware that her cat is monstrous? If she comes to realize what she is living with and declines to feed him, what then might he do?)Implying that we, all of us, have nurtured the

IPublished in The Independent on Sunday in 2009, this Schrank cartoon responds to the fact that bankers continued to receive huge bonuses despite their responsibility for financial collapse.

3 Mayor John Hylan: Hylan Takes a Stand on Nation-al Issues,” The New York Times March 27, 1922, p. 3

rapacity and power of bankers to horror-show dimensions, this cartoon also suggests that change is possible only if we understand the size and shape of power. Only if she stops being blinded by affection or familiarity will the old lady be able to recognize her condition and take action to change it.

A literary grandchild of Keller’s Curse,

Molly Crabapple’s stencil/protest sign Vampire Squid references a 2009 Matt Taibbi article in which the journalist describes Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Taibbi’s description offers a powerful moment of intellectual and visceral recognition. In addition to this (surprisingly cute) silhouette, his words have spawned grassroots vampire squid imagery. As one example: On December 12, 2012 Occupy Wall Street people wore squid hats to march in solidarity with their west coast counterparts during an action titled: “Day Without Goldman Sachs.”

Octupy was inspired by the very particular resonance that the octopus metaphor has for California. Wanting to explore some of the background to contemporary socio-political and economic circumstances in the State, and translate the nineteenth century cartoons into contemporary relevance, we initiated a public discussion at Occupy LA,. Octupy grew from that conversation.

A representation of the artificial corporate

The puppet was constructed over five-weeks at Occupy LA. We used bamboo, bicycle inner tubes, and plastic wrap for the head, and we used a process similar to patchwork for the tentacles. Cutting and piecing old plastic shopping bags to make yards of plastic “skin” created time for conversation, while the frequent question “what are you doing?” inevitably led to discussions of local history and the hierarchical operations of power. In addition, because the bulk of an octopus’s neurons are distributed throughout its body, the creature offered a wonderful metaphor by which to vision and discuss the Occupy movement’s horizontal power relations. Diagrams and construction photos are available at www.performingpublicspace.org.

body operated by over forty natural human bodies, Octupy also presented a picture of horizontality in action. Coming after the Pasadena Rose Parade’s traditional regiment of marching bands and floats, each of which carried a petalized corporate and/or military message, the wobbly-but-mostly-synchronous Octupy offered an exuberant expression of self-determined cooperation.

On November 20, 2011, as rain poured from a lead sky, a giant plastic octopus undulated out of the Occupy LA camp and up the steps of City Hall, gathering people into its maw. Adults and children, puppeteers and passersby, the people held placards that identified them as members of the 99%: “student,” “home owner,” “uninsured,” and so on. The 70-feet long, 20-feet tall octopus gobbled them all up.

The puppet undulated again on January 2, 2012 as part of Occupy the Rose Parade. In lieu of City Hall, we made puppet “accessories” that illuminated Octupy’s stance. They included a wearable house, which ran away from the “hammer of foreclosure,” which was wielded by a tentacle, and an enormous pair of pants. Blazoned with “99%,” the pant’s pocket held a dollar, which the octopus tried to extract using a massive hand.

We organized Octupy initially because we wanted to make the corporate tentacles visible by literally winding them around the columns of City Hall. However, as the project got underway, it became clear that the octopus offers a visual metaphor not just for the hierarchical operations of corporate capitalism, but for the organization of power per se.

4 Alvin Powell, “Thinking Like an Octopus”, Harvard Gazette, October 2010:http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/10/thinking-like-an-octopus/. Retreived 3.12.12

We’d like to explore that idea more fully in the future, but for now we are enjoying this octopus-like visual representation of the “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City.” Created by the Arts and Culture Group of the NYC General Assembly, its entwined threads make visual both the interlinked nature of “all our grievances,” and the workings of a collaborative, multi-vocal congregation.

In a fictional war between humans and machines in the Matrix films, the flying Sentinels, aka “squiddies,” battle human soldiers who wear clunky, bipedal metal suits. With movements that resemble those of a high-speed octopus swarm, the Sentinels’ coordinated behavior suggests that they are part of, or controlled by, a collective mind.

Representing a chilling power structure in which self-expression, self-determination and consensus building appear to have no existence, the fearsome Sentinels pose a literal threat to the human bodies on-screen, while reinforcing the off-screen paradigmatic notion that “one” is properly a radically independent individual.

Unconscious devotion to the model of the human being that Western thought has propounded for over five centuries always seems to get in the way of collaboration. In addition to helping us visualize hierarchical organizations of power, perhaps the time has come for the octopus to lend its tentacles to visualizations of collective behavior that can help us all get over our selves.

GhostsKatherine L. Ross

mule, the progeny of a Poitou donkey sire and a Clydesdale draft horse mare. Devel-oped in the Middle Ages, only about 180 Poitou donkeys remain in existence. When I bought Oopie (short for Allie Oop), she was the only Poitou/Clydesdale mule in the U.S. All equines are herd animals, and most equines develop behavioral issues, anxieties,

and health problems if isolated. I acquired an-other mule, Willibald–the offspring of a Percheron draft horse and a mam-moth jack—and Oopie and Willi soon became inseparable. For the last seven years, I have trained these mules in the dressage riding disci-pline, which began as the highest level of equine training for cavalry movements and battle-

field maneuvers. I have been training obsolete animals in an obsolete military discipline.

I have a new studio space where I am reinvent-ing my practice, free from the crowding influ-ence of work that no longer exists. Porcelain is my material of choice, and the teacup serves as a point of fusion, a rotational concept, for my investigation of hybridity and obsolescence. The porcelain teacup was developed for use in tea rituals intrinsic to elite social hierarchies, and as those elitist social structures have de-composed, the social role of the tea cup has nearly disappeared. The once ubiquitous in-dustrial production of bland and banal porce-lain ware continues today as a flood of plastic and disposable utilitarian ware that chokes landfills and oceans. The teacup is the ceramic equivalent of the mule.

Three years ago, my studio burned to the ground—taking thirty years of my work with it. All that remained were hundreds of porce-lain shards, the wreckage of sculptures, and my two mules, which lived in a section of the studio. The pair stood calmly nearby as the building burned.

This fire arrived on the heels of my years-long interest in hybridity, genetics, and the manipu-lation of the natural world. I sought out what was likely the first manmade animal hybrid: the mule, a cross between the horse and the donkey. Being sterile, they exist only for the labor of man, who created a creature which is, on average, stronger, healthier, and smarter than a horse or donkey. Just 100 years ago, 25 million mules worked in the U.S., but by the end of WWII, they had been rendered obsolete by heavy mechanical equipment. Now, they have all but disappeared in the U.S. Having lost their original purpose, they are now bred primarily for appearance—for delicate, chis-eled heads and fine-boned legs.

To find out what it would be like to be wholly responsible for an animal that exists entirely for my own purposes, I bought a yearling

Both the teacup and the mule are the ghosts of their own histories. In the video on the next page, they perform a dressage dance interac-tion, a mule performs a piaffe (a calm, com-posed, elevated trot in place) over a single un-fired porcelain teacup and saucer. The equine knows there is something underneath him, and he tries to avoid it. However, the propulsion of the piaffe movement and his awkward at-tempts to avoid the cup cause him to lose track of where it is, and he smashes it—animating the inanimate, forming a synergy of their obso-lescence.

Interspecies collaborations in art are often one-sided. The human usually uses the animal without levying its decision-making abilities or eliciting active, volitional contribution to the project. Desiring a more collaborative effort, I have allowed my mules unrestricted access to my studio to investigate ceramic materials and objects. They are curious ani-mals and want to understand objects in their environment; it is a survival skill for them.

When confronted with danger, horses usually run, while donkeys often stay and fight—a mule, equal parts horse and don-key, has both instincts. Through investigation, it determines what is safe and what is not, then decides how to respond. I set up situations, but let my mules decide what to do in them. Neither of us completely understands the other’s intentions, agenda, or umwelt, but we have learned to trust each other when it comes to our reactions.

This synergy creates a new way for us to work toward an unknown outcome. It is anyone’s guess what comes after the collapse of all so-cial, historical, and cultural relevance and ref-erence to the mule, the teacup, and dressage. As our societies have moved from these social artifacts to a more conjugated meaning of life and art, our historical referents may falter—or they may find a way to preserve themselves.

Click the above photo to view a video of three dressage dance interactions in which the mule performs a piaffe (a calm, composed, elevated trot in place) over a single unfired porcelain teacup and saucer).

mimics a man being strangled, his arm hold-ing the rope, his tongue lolling out of the left side of his mouth. “We come home, our wives pick up the slack. ‘Mow the lawn,’ and we mow. ‘Take out the rubbish,’ and we drag plastic sacks out the door as fast as our chubby little legs can carry us. ‘Spend time with Ju-nior,’ and we hit the floor making truck noises and getting rug lint on our good clothes. We’re like trained dolphins at the circus, the ones that ride bikes and balance balls on their noses.”

“I think those are seals.”“Men used to be men, Hamilton. We’d

frolic in the woods, eat live chickens with our teeth. We did as we pleased, when we pleased.”

“And?” Mort is a queer guy, even for a neighbor.

“And I’m gonna grow me a jungle, set a lawnchair dead in the middle. At night I’ll light torches.” Mort’s eyes flare. “I’ve got these Kon-Tiki jobbers that Wendy made me buy, and we never use ‘em because who the hell can we invite for a picnic? And, Ham . . .”

“What?”He gets teary-eyed, throws his pudgy

arms around my neck. “You’ve saved my damn life. Just this little talk between guys, regular guys, has made me feel so emascu-lated.”

“Emancipated, Mort.”He doesn’t hear. Instead, he turns,

springs through my door and down the steps, dances a jig on my small front patch of un-tended turf.

As if on signal, all the mowers in the neighborhood click off at once.

Bob across the street grins and waves.

Crabgrass Revolution

Dinty W. Moore

I’m half-awake, making coffee, vaguely registering the drone of neighborhood lawn-mowers, when I realize someone’s knocking at my door.

“Wait a minute,” I holler.But Mort comes in anyway.“Good news,” he shouts. Mort wears a

red t-shirt that doesn’t quite reach the waist-band of his corduroy shorts. His tummy is pale, like the underside of a fish.

“Mort,” is all I manage to say in re-sponse.

“Really good news.” My neighbor’s left hand runs over his yellow hair. His t-shirt rides up his belly and rests on the shelf below his breasts. For a moment, he looks panicked.

“Mort,” I say. “Spit it out.”“It’s like this, Ham. I’m not mow-

ing my lawn either. Been looking at your yard, all weedy, au naturel, and I’m do-ing the same.” He pauses, pulls himself up straight. “I told Wendy this morning.”

“Mort,” I say.He grins. “Hell, I’ve told everyone.

The guys are psyched. It’s a brave thing you’ve done. A far braver thing than ... than whatever.”

“Mort.” He stops, grins. “This is big, Hammer-

man. This is about more than just crabgrass and dandelions.”

“What are you talking about?” “Revolution! What do we do all day?

We sit at desks, wear ties, grow hemor-rhoids. Some jerk-off tells us what to do. A tie is just a polyester noose, Hambone!”Mort

Interviews From

Edited by Janeil Engelstad

In 2006 I arrived Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak Republic, to teach a course in social practice and arts management as a Fulbright scholar at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design. My aim was to teach students how to produce social practice projects that engaged communities and made positive change in the world.

In Bratislava, I began to talk with my new neighbors and colleagues about their experiences during the Cold War. People expressed their opinions about communism, democracy and capitalism. They spoke about revolution and how daily life had changed since 1989. Many of the stories were so compelling that over time I shaped them into what would become Voices From the Center. As the project developed, I expanded my research from Slovakia to Hungary, Czech Republic and Poland, which gave a broader view of the various types of communism throughout the region, and exposed the cultural differences in the various revolutions

that swept throughout the Eastern Bloc countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Criss-crossing Central Europe, I met and talked with people in large cities, such as Budapest, Warsaw and Prague and also in small, rural villages hidden in the various corners of each country. Often, I was welcomed with regional specialties such as halušky (potato dumplings) and homemade slivovitz (plum brandy) and at other times, I was met with scepticism and restraint, which would eventually vanish over the course of a conversation. One interview led to another. I talked with former dissidents and communist party apparatchik, married couples and, in an unusual and highly engergized group interview, a dozen people from a village that was known for its anti-communist stance throughout the Socialist period. In each of these conversations, my objective was to gain a deeper understanding of the culture and people. The content is theirs—their stories, their dreams, their fears and hopes for the future.

Eastern Europe

Rudolf SikoraArtist, former dissadant Bratislava, Slovak Republic

In the early days of the revolution we had no idea what was going to happen, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour. More and more people were demonstrating every day and we feared that the government would turn the army against us. But the pressure coming from the tribunes and from the people on the squares was enormous. The result of this pressure was a breakdown of the power of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It was very important to have this breakdown for the new government

was formed without any of the attributes from socialism. In the first days after the revolution there arose an amazing solidarity among the citizens. People who didn’t know each other were joining hands. If we would have been orbiting the Earth during this time and we would have looked down at Czechoslovakia, we would have seen a country that was glowing and shining with love. It was so strong that I feel it even now, twenty years later.

Exclamation Mark VI, by Rudlolf Sikora

Eva H. AuthorBudapest, Hungary

The Hungarian society is in trouble.

When everything was privatized, it was all sold to the West. Very few Hungarians own anything. We are a colony of England, Germany and Austria. The Koreans, they took all of the car factories.

We don’t have our own industry or agriculture anymore. Our agriculture was world famous. Unemployment is high. And the richest 100 Hungarians? They all live abroad.

Without having information we are not informed.

We don’t know what the political parties really want. There are people who are liars, fascists, dictators, still. They do whatever they want.

There is no responsibility.

The government makes many promises. Promises cost nothing.

We live today we want to eat today.

We were not ready for capitalism. Not ready to handle it.

The dictatorship before, we could bear that one. Now, there is much more crime. Much more violence. We are the victims and we are the witnesses.

Otherwise nothing has changed. We are still living with Socialism.

Truck from the series Abandoned Toys by Miklós Surány

Anna DaučíkováArtist, Activist, ProfessorBratislava, Slovak Republic

In 1968, I was 18. In Czechoslovakia there was, like many other places, a hippie movement. There was the Iron Curtain and we were isolated, but … there was a youth movement where sexuality was set free.

But…this is my criticism of the 1960s, is that this sexual revolution was a revolution for heterosexual men and those women who were able to go with them. There was a certain sexual freedom, which I could call bi-sexuality, but this bi-sexuality had a condition and the condition was that there had to be a man and then you can be free… There is a dark part to it, which was that women had to be obedient to the imperative of making love to a man. …It was a sexual revolution with conditions.

People in Soviet Union, generally, had less prejudice about sexual life then here in Czechoslovakia. They had a different moral structure ... And, many people understood same sex relationships as love. … At the same time, there was in the Soviet Union a law against same sex relationships so you had to be somewhat careful or you could go to prison.

In the ‘90s you would never see gay people holding hands on the street and now you can see it. People are much more open. …So it is getting better. There is still a long way to go and a lot of work to be done, but it is getting better.

The material from Voices From the Center, originally used to produce an interactive web based project, has generated exhibitions, public art, transit posters and community programs throughout Central Europe and the USA. For more information: www.voicesfromthecenter.net

Portrait of Anna Daučíková by Janeil Engelstad

Be Groovy to Each Other & Soldier BoyPhilip Hartigan

I find that the answers I have stumbled upon in my work over the last ten years have all been rooted in personal experience, memory, and an attempt to balance explicit narrative content with the vaguer symbolic possibilities of art. Small moments of personal evolution absorb me, rather than moments of grand revelation. I end up telling stories about my childhood: my father was in the military, and he died on active duty in the 1960s. After he died, my mother, brother and I moved in with my grandfather, a coal miner. We lived in a house with no bathroom and only one tap, and we bathed a tin tub in front of a coal fire. With my grandfather’s bust, nestled in coal, and in other work, I have found myself narrating childhood memories, mostly grim.

Click the photograph to hear “Soldier Boy.”

ContributorsDinty W. Moore

Dinty W. Moore, is author of The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life, as well as the memoir Between Panic & Desire, winner of the Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize in 2009. He worked briefly as a police reporter, a documentary filmmaker, a modern dancer, a zookeeper, and a Greenwich Village waiter, before deciding he was lousy at all of those jobs and really wanted to write memoir and short stories.

Janet Owen Driggs is a writer, artist and cura-tor who, along with Matthew Owen Driggs, frequently participates in the collective identity “Owen Driggs.” Her interests focus on those physical sites where “one” meets “the other”, and their relationship to life experience and so-cial organization.

Individually Janet has exhibited her work inter-nationally, including in the United States, Eu-rope, Scandinavia and Brazil. She has curated exhibitions and screening programs in the Unit-ed Kingdom, United States, People's Republic of China and Mexico. Janet is a co-author of “Pre-serving a Home for Veterans” (Les Figues Press, 2012) and editor of “Not A Cornfield: History/Site/Document” (Annenberg Foudation, 2006). Her writings have been published most recently in: Artillery, ArtUS, The Guardian, Art Review, and KCET’s “Artbound” blog, in addition to the volumes “How Many Billboards? Art In Stead”, “Hammer Projects 1999-2009”, and “Heike Baranowski – Kolibri”.

Janet Owen Driggs

Collaboratively and independently, Janeil Engelstad has produced exhibitions and multiform projects throughout the world. Her creative practice and community advocacy work often dovetail into projects that address political, social and environmental concerns. Her process includes embedding herself in communities, extensive research and building working coalitions between arts institutions, universities, government agencies, NGOs, communities and individuals.

She is the Founding Director of MAP - Make Art with Purpose, an innovative, international platform and virtual resource center for artists, designers and architects working in social practice. Engelstad’s work has been supported by numerous foundations, government agencies and corporations and featured

in media outlets, such as Art News, Flash Art, Metropolis, Timeout, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, NBC Nightly News, and the NBC Today Show. She has taught and lectured at universities throughout North America and Europe.

Katherine RossKatherine has been a member of the School of the Art Institute faculty since 1981. She is currently the Chair of the Ceramics Department. From 2008 to 2010 she served as the Interim Dean of Graduate Studies at the SAIC. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1976 from the State University of New York at Fredonia and her MFA in 1980 from Tulsa University. Previous to SAIC she taught briefly at the University of Delaware.

Recent exhibitions include the 65th Scripps Annual, Jing-dezhen National Ceramic Museum, China; Sanbao Ceramic Art Museum, China; The Centers For Disease Control Museum in Atlanta; NYSC of Ceramics at Alfred University, NY; Kohler Art Center, WI; San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, TX; and the Urban Center For Contemporary Art, MI. Katherine is the recipient of many awards and grants including the Arts Midwest/NEA Grant, Indiana State Arts Commission Master Fellowship, Banff Center for the Arts Residency, and the Williamson Memorial Artist In Residence at Indiana State University. She has been named a Walter Gropius Master Artist by the Huntington Muse-um. She is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics, Geneva, Switzerland.

Janeil Engelstad

Philip Hartigan is a multimedia artist work-ing with personal narratives. He was born in the UK, and now resides in Chicago, USA, where he is part of the adjunct faculty of Columbia College Chicago.

Philip Hartigan

Moira Williams’ performance-based work invites public interactions and gestures of exchange. She is currently a fellow in the Laundromat Project’s Cre-ate Change Program, Bronx, NY. She is a founding member of the walking cooperative Walk Exchange at walkexchange.org. Her Recent work has been seen at No Longer Empty’s This Side of Paradise Bronx, NY, The Dorsky Curatorial Gallery, NY, The Brooklyn Food Conference, NY, Rumite Nether-lands, D.U.M.B.O. Arts Festival, NY, Flux Factory, NY, and the Philadelphia Marathon. Moira is pres-ently working on a living, mobile shelter for her upcoming New York to New York Walk. She can also be found walking to the DeKalb post office in Bushwick, NY, where she mails her daily letters to the Milky Way.

Moira Williams holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, a Certificate in Spatial Politics and an MFA from Stony Brook University.

Moira Williams