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ARTMATTERS at Art Center College of Design: Curricular Notes on Art

Practice, Place, and Social Engagement

Article · May 2012

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ARTMATTERS at Art Center College of

Design: Curricular Notes on Art Practice,
Place, and Social Engagement.
Dave Bailey, Laurence Dreiband and M ariana Amatullo
 
[email protected]
1700 Lida Street
Pasadena, CA 91103

Abstract
The proposed explorative paper presents the vision, mission and key questions driving the
formation of a new socially-oriented curricular Concentration based in the fine arts
department of a prominent U.S. art and design college with an established global trajectory
in social impact design. With a faculty deeply committed to creating conditions directed to
the future, the institution embraces curricula enabling students to enact new forms of
knowledge and aesthetic production within the global knowledge economy. This developing
Concentration is anchored in a critical conception of social space, and combines theoretical
groundwork with expeditionary projects that utilize the modern megalopolis as classroom. It
will interrogate expanded audiences and specific sites, concrete and virtual, where the public
realm is now enacted. Self-reflexively and contextually, the curriculum proposes the public
staging of art education as an act of social agency in its own right. In the paper, the
authors—and curricular leads—will 1) articulate the specific curricular blueprint under
development, and 2) aim to contribute to current critical discourse about the agency and
shifting role of the artist in the 21st century.

KEYWORDS: socially-engaged art, public art, social impact design, agency, experiential
education, urbanism.

Introduction
In the 21st century global artists work in an interconnected world — a world in dramatic
political, social and economic transition. It is a paradoxical time for art makers, with, on the
one hand, escalating international art fairs and aggressively promoted celebrity artists selling
for exorbitant prices and, on the other hand, a generation of artists working outside the

page 1
marketplace and looking for increased social engagement and participatory forms of art
practice. These latter artists are working in an evolving conception of public art activity,
from site defining projects to innovative and interactive social spaces (both actual and
virtual), that may redefine the role of art and its relationship to community.

At Art Center College of Design, we are embracing this time as a contingent field of
exploration, one of emergence and flux that is also representative of new paradigms for
learning. For the past decade, we have been committed to experimenting with participatory
and project-based learning methodologies for social impact design projects through the
Designmatters Department at the college. At the core of the Designmatters portfolio of
projects lies a framework that manifests the ability of the designer to constantly reframe and
redefine the problem-space (Cross, 2007, and Schön, 1988), taking creative leaps and
generating multiple perspectives to understand people, communities and societies, and blend
strategic intent with quality execution (Boyer, Cook and Steinberg, 2011). Considering issues
holistically rather than reductively (Burns, Cottam, Vanstone, Windhall, 2006) makes
designers uniquely suited to contribute effectively to the social sector, proving that design
can play a significant role in addressing some of the world’s most critical problems, and
helping effect large-scale, sustainable change—an important aspiration of all of the portfolio
of student projects initiated through the Designmatters mantle (Figure 1).

Artists make things, and artists make things happen. Art can become a new form, as
well a new form of understanding. The experimental nature of art actively promotes
uncertainty and questions established values. At Art Center we encourage our students to
make things well and think critically, with the goal of creating compelling acts of imagination
that can stir the soul, and alter our way of seeing and thinking about the world we all inhabit.
The Fine Art department at Art Center College of Design provides a distinctive art
education, with specific programming geared toward nurturing each student’s quest for self-
discovery and excellence. The innovative curriculum, spanning drawing, painting, sculpture,
installation, film/video, photography and digital imaging, as well as many art and design
hybrids, fosters a spirit of critical thought, experimentation and innovation. Fine Art
students at Art Center additionally benefit from a responsive program that provides access to
notable design and applied-art professionals, advanced industrial shops, cutting-edge
computer labs, a vast art library and an array of interdisciplinary workshops not typically
available to students studying fine art.

This paper focuses on the vision and key aims behind the development of a new
curricular course of study that brings together the Designmatters and Fine Art Departments
and is set to launch in the 2012 fall academic term: the ARTMATTERS Concentration
(Figure 2). Specifically, the paper outlines some of the knowledge configurations that are
forming as we envision a course of study that may act as a catalyst for new hybrid forms of
productive social engagement, cultural interventions and responsible art making, both in and
outside the art world, through the creation of art projects that reimagine meaningful public
works and social engagement.

The ARTMATTERS Concentration curriculum will also recognize the role of

activist and disruptive art endeavors that confront a range of social, environmental and
political issues; that can employ diverse art practice strategies (such as performance, short-
term interventions and media events; spontaneous exhibitions, installations and social
settings; and a range of familiar mass-media communication vehicles like posters, advertising
and billboards) to promote dialogue and reflection, and sometimes sounding alarms and
calling for change.

ARTMATTERS At Art Center College of Design:

Curricular Notes on Art Practice, Place, and Social Engagement. page 2
Vision
Art Center’s mission statement is, Learn to create. Influence change. The new
ARTMATTERS Concentration is consonant with that mission in offering a course of study
that aims to nurture artists who seek to reinvent the space, and expand the audience for art
in the public sphere. ARTMATTERS offers a course of study that reconsiders the purpose
of both fine art and applied arts, and their place in the world beyond aesthetics and
commerce. Through both collective and individual art production, ARTMATTERS
examines the interdisciplinary nature of the imagination and the common ground among the
arts, humanities and social sciences.

At present, the curriculum is being designed to fit into the institutional template of a
“track,” offered through the Fine Art Department and open to students from several other
applied art-majors, including Photography & Imaging, Illustration, Film, Environmental and
Graphic Design. It is intended to foster new conceptions of socially oriented art practice that
can include a reconsideration of traditional methods of distribution, production and
communication (Figure 3). ARTMATTERS also sets out to explore a shift from individual
expression toward collective conception and execution through the realization of
collaborative projects, possibly breaking down a separation between artist and audience,
production and reception.

Though ARTMATTERS has much in common and will occasionally overlap with
Art Center’s established Designmatters department and the curriculum of its formal course
of study, the Designmatters Concentration, each track offers somewhat distinct approaches
for artists and designers concerned with ideas of social impact. The Designmatters
Concentration generally emphasizes the pragmatic problem-solving capacity of design to
offer useful and sustainable solutions to specific local and global problems, while the
ARTMATTERS Concentration sees art as an advocate for responsible and empathetic art
production and communication—one that can serve as a journey of discovery and
illumination, as well as an agency for change.

As we consider the scope of ARTMATTERS, one that can complicate the

distinction between art and life, we understand that students may produce works that no
longer resemble previous conceptions of art. Yet it is vital for students to understand that
the context for new social endeavors has undeniable roots in art history. Precedents
additionally come from political art, editorial illustration and social photography; humanist
art, muckraking journalism and independent documentary film; identity art, public art and
commemorative sites and monuments. Artists of social conscience are often motivated by a
distinctly moral point of view, and have sought greater influence in public venues beyond the
confines of art galleries and museums, sometimes in the wider public realm of
photojournalism and independent film. From its beginnings, for example, photography has
recorded the plight of the impoverished and the casualties of war. It has offered compelling
visual documents concerned with social justice, and the suffering of others.

Art in the 21st century is the beneficiary of an increased global awareness of diverse
cultures, and it seems appropriate that an ARTMATTERS course of study explore the social
repercussions of growing multiculturalism, identity politics and issues of race, class, ethnicity,
gender and sexual preference, as well as the increasing end of “Eurocentricism” and its
implications on art’s content and a widening audience. With today’s widespread movement
of peoples and broad global messaging, and after the civil rights and feminist movements’
quest for social equality and opportunity, it is an appropriate time for art to consider a more
nuanced understanding of the individual’s relation to others and to groups. We are seeing
how a new and more global sensibility enables both Eastern and Western artists (many
multi-ethnic and exposed to a variety of customs, yet informed by a common Western
modernist education) actively cross- cultural boundaries and alter traditional practices. The
effect of this hybridization and mingling of cultures is still unclear: it can promote a greater

page 3
tolerance for expanded diversity, or increase a growing conformity in a dominant universal
language of art.

Another valuable social function of art and design concerns the reconsideration of
places of remembrance. ARTMATTERS will explore how public art works in the service of
memorials can serve to mediate history and shared memory. Conceptions for memorials are
changing, and in many of the most significant recent projects we see a move away from
determined representations of heroic monumentality or tragedy to a more nuanced, abstract
and open presentation of what is to be remembered. Commemorative sites from the
Vietnam Veterans memorial in Washington D.C., the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in
Berlin, and the recent 911 Memorial in New York, eloquently demonstrate how art and
design can provide a healing space for reflection and contemplation (Figure 4). Other forms
of imaginative public work, such as New York’s evolving High Line, demonstrate how artists
and designers can collaborate with local communities and city governments to create a
landscaped park, for example, in the case of the High Line, one placed a top an obsolete,
derelict railroad, to offer city dwellers from a densely urban populated area, a delightful
experience of nature and recreation (Figure 5).

Lewis Hyde in his book The Gift sees an irreconcilable conflict between the
pressures of the commercial marketplace and the optimally open magnanimity of the artist in
society. He believes that money and power corrupt the enterprise of artists, and in our
consumerist culture, dominated by the requirements of commerce and increasingly
overwhelmed by marketing and merchandise, the creativity of the free unencumbered artist
is more important than ever. There seems to be a parallel spirit of generosity in an
ARTMATTERS social-focused art practice, one that privileges the welfare of others over
personal gain, and selflessness over self-expression.

What Do We Mean to Do?

In contemplating a new curriculum meant to foster social engagement, we come to the
logically prior question of what we might mean by “the social.” What might not be social?
Minimally, it seems a bit perverse to suggest that what our students are already making—
paintings, sculpture, photographs, etc.—is not already and ineluctably cultural, and hence
social. Less tautologically, many of these works already take on as content some issue of
overt social relevance—the oil industry, collective spirituality and gender identity, for
example, might all be variously considered in a typical art studio critique with students.
Related concerns are already happening at our school, notably and for the past decade with
increasing momentum through Designmatters, and more recently with the launch of Art
Center’s Graduate Media Program’s Media Design Matters, a dedicated MFA track jointly
conceived with Designmatters and centered on communication and its relationship to
design, technology, social justice and civic life. What more are we after?

To refine our purpose, we have framed the question slightly differently, asking
“Where is the social?” Putting things this way doesn’t overly limit the possibilities, yet
somehow seems to get at the matter a bit more directly, in that it exposes some of the
unstated subtext of the earlier phrasing. That is, the core of what we are trying to address is
art that happens “out there,” beyond the confines of the white cube, and for or with
audiences who may not frequent galleries and museums (Figure 6). But if we have learned
anything from recent art and theory, it is that the “out there” is not some pre-existing
location waiting to be discovered, catalogued and represented (to simply bring the “out
there” back to the gallery as “content” begs important questions of audience, objectification
and the “aestheticization” of real needs). Rather, it is composed of a complex series of
overlapping social spaces that are actively negotiated and contested on a daily basis. In
contemplating a curriculum of social engagement, what we are really seeking to determine is
how we can train young artists and designers to participate in the analysis and production of

ARTMATTERS At Art Center College of Design:

Curricular Notes on Art Practice, Place, and Social Engagement. page 4
concrete social situations built on very different principles, and by or for very different
constituencies, than pertain to the white cube (O’Doherty, 1976). What kind of education
can prepare them to critically participate in instantiating new social spaces, rather than simply
to represent the contents of those that already exist?

This is not to suggest that representations do not have power to alter the status quo.
Clearly in our media-rich culture they do, and this potentiality is one we intend to
incorporate into the curriculum. Yet framing the question in terms of instantiation rather
than representation pushes the pedagogical issue at hand. It makes it clear that the skill sets
and conceptual lenses of a traditional art education may not be the most useful tools. Even if
still necessary and often generative, they are not sufficient to the task outlined here. That is,
creating novel content for a highly determined cultural space (with due respect to the
contributions of institutional critique to expose the politics and economics of the white cube,
and as such to understand its continuity with other spaces of everyday life) is a very different
proposition than creating new spaces. To borrow language from an earlier paradigm, creating
new figures for a given ground requires very different skills and strategies than creating new
grounds.

Here then, and following others dealing with related questions in different contexts
(Bailey, 2009/10), this departure from our prior curricular ends leads us to reconsider our
available means, and to the conclusion that there are several tools and techniques we must
now add and invent if we are to arrive at the outcomes we desire.

Locating the “There” There

Writing this now, as Facebook is about to go public, it’s clearer than ever that purely
geographical concepts of space and place are not comprehensive. Certain “social spaces”
unfold entirely within the virtual realm and are complete within it (at least from the
standpoint of end-users, if not materialist critics or forensic economists). At the same time,
much of our daily lives unfold in concrete spaces shaped by geophysical facts, material flows,
architectural constructions and a variety of urban and landscape “vistas.” Our uses of these
places are shaped by cultural histories, community standards and individual desires. These in
turn (and in chicken-and-egg fashion) are constrained and generated by legal codes,
demographic surveys, land-use plans, tax maps, street grids and similar codifications of our
knowledge, laws and values. Phenomena such as the role of Twitter in the protests of the
Arab Spring underscore and potentially democratize the means by which actual spaces and
virtual ones are co-penetrated and co-evolving to produce community (Figure 7). Twitter
exchanges were central in free-floating social processes such as articulating and distributing
narratives, forging allegiances, generating solidarity, confirming shared values, reinforcing
ethics and helping to overcome fear. At the same time, they were essential to the nitty-gritty
articulation of geographical information (positions, meeting points, routes of access and
escape) and tactics (spatial distribution, timings of convergence and dispersion, assessment
of numbers).

In sum, to assist young artists hoping to meaningfully engage “the social” (toward
any end, disruptive or ameliorative) means developing conceptual frames and practical tools
that can help them understand the deeply interconnected processes—narrative and spatial,
virtual and physical—that actually produce social space. Here is where the paradigms of
space that anchor our foundation courses, and that shape the default horizon lines of our
current curriculum (i.e., the gallery, the market for goods, or the XYZ axes of the virtual
design environment), meet their limit points. So here is where our work must begin.

page 5
Pedagogical (and Practical) Premises
Our thinking begins from these premises, a mix of concerns borne out of teaching
philosophy, institutional priorities, practical realities, and aspirational speculation:

• Inter-disciplinarity: The curriculum should be interdisciplinary at all levels, in terms of

participants, subject matter, research methodologies and modes of production. It must help
students to correlate ideas and synthesize information from diverse sources, ways of thinking
and types of actors (individuals, groups, institutions, governments, corporations) and to
generate meanings in a wide variety of modes of address, to a range of audiences and
participants (Gomez-Peña, 2005).

• Experimental Spirit: The curriculum should provide an envelope for developing new
pedagogical approaches as much as new forms of cultural making. While it will be informed
by prior practices, models and outcomes—here we owe our students a maximum of due
diligence—we intend to break new ground and accept the risk of generative failures. We
(faculty and students) will develop our methods heuristically, realizing that one of the
greatest skills we can pass on to students is the ability to develop their own means of
investigating the ever-changing world they inherit.

• Experiential Education: Overall, our methods will favor experiential education, understood
not simply as “exposing students to new experiences” (although that will happen), but as
helping young people to value and exploit the wealth of their already-accrued experience as a
resource for learning, and for negotiating change in the world around them. As such, we
hope to both empower our students to invent and engage their worlds, and we will ask
responsibility of them for their decisions.

• Strategic Indeterminacy: Today’s students stand at the crossroads of precariousness and

innovation. This is especially true for Fine Art students. Accordingly, the curriculum
presupposes no particular forms of working, nor field of professional endeavor. It is about
inventing these. At the same time, it is built on the hard realities that our graduates leave
school with disproportionate debt, a contracting (and bifurcating) art market, and will join a
growing number of graduates from other art programs, including various earmarked social
practice courses (it is not clear that current presenting institutions can absorb a flood of
narrowly defined “social practitioners,” that U.S. federal and state budgets can maintain even
current jobs in arts education, nor that philanthropic sources can sustain vast increases in the
number of nonprofit collectives). More positively, most of our students are young (median
age is drifting lower annually), and many intend to pursue graduate work as a site of further
education and specialization. The upshot is that our first responsibility is to provide students
with an education that is focused by their current values and interests, yet pre-specific in its
skill sets and assumed destinations. Such an education empowers students to define the
future forms of cultural inquiry and expression, as much as it equips them with critical
thinking and quantitative skills to succeed in a range of fields, artistic and otherwise.

• Non-redundancy (internal): The curriculum attempts to define a new model within the
institution that is consonant with yet qualitatively different from current offerings and
structures. These differences will manifest in methods, philosophy, areas of inquiry,
community relations, partnerships, and ultimately, the kinds of students Art Center attracts.
That is, it is not simply adding “social practice” to the range of genres, styles and contexts
open to fine art students. Nor is it simply a means of encouraging fine artists to join the
student teams working for social change through Designmatters projects. Further, it is not
reducible to the function of the liberal arts curriculum. It is important to flag up the
intention to produce these differences some of which will emerge only over time, as—
especially in its early implementation—it will be necessary (and indeed desirable) to share
resources, students and faculty from existing curricular areas. If successful, it will operate as a
kind of para-institute that, among other things, generates forms, practices and modes of
knowledge-production that are relevant to each of these other areas, but duplicative of none.

ARTMATTERS At Art Center College of Design:

Curricular Notes on Art Practice, Place, and Social Engagement. page 6
• Non-redundancy (external): There are several “social practice” programs now established
in the U.S. and elsewhere. Our goal is to offer a curriculum that does not, and indeed could
not, exist anywhere else. By working in critical relation to, and in bottom-up fashion from,
the details of our location, history, particular resources, constituencies and potential alliances,
we hope to arrive at something that has unique contours and that contributes, as process and
outcome, to thinking about ways of teaching young artists and designers. (That is, our
method of developing the curriculum is a practical application of the same learning models it
will introduce—we are beginning with the details of our own specific situation, and building
toward the opportunities they propose.)

Space and Narrative…

After reflection on these particulars, the curriculum is taking shape as a form of place-based
learning about the construction of place. Here concrete place is understood as the site of the
social—the medium in which a particular community actually exists—and the motor as well:
the set of hard edges and shifting flows in dialogue with which a given social sphere
organizes itself at practical, cultural, economic and political levels. As the name suggests,
place-based learning begins from where students are located, and takes that context as the
classroom.

Responding to our situation within a sprawling megalopolis with a highly

international population whose livelihoods are inextricably linked to the media, technology
and transportation industries suggests 1) space, and 2) narrative as key organizing concepts.
This local-up approach risks myopic regionalism, yet in a globally connected city such as Los
Angeles this risk seems slim. Either way, it generates a critical vantage point from which to
try to comprehend the potentially bewildering range of recent developments within
contemporary art’s so-called social turn (i.e., the production of convivial spaces and events,
new models of collaboration, topical concerns with ecology and sustainability, community-
based practices, activist and protest art). It suggests these diverse forms share common roots
in disruptions to prior constructions of space and narrative, set in motion by processes of
globalization. These include: shifting bases for individual and collective identities; new flows
of labor, material and goods; expanding services and information technologies; growing
awareness of the limits and interconnectedness of natural ecosystems; and evolving (and also
highly interconnected) constellations of power and capital.

…and Spatial Narratives

The foregoing breaks “space” and “narrative” apart for clarity, and to acknowledge divisions
that may linger in our modernist-inspired foundation courses. Yet we quickly want to assert
their organic unity at the levels of theory and lived experience, and the importance of their
interrelationships to the project of social engagement. Indeed, theoretical and practical
knowledge of how space and narrative co-produce each other is the DNA we want to give
students the skills to access and tinker with. Put otherwise, the curriculum is built on the
exploration of lived space, positioned as a nonlinear environment where human and non-
human forces are co-evolving to shape geophysical context and built forms, as much as
individual purpose and collective memories, goals, and other public narratives of meaning
(Figure 8).

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Three Loops: Curricular Structure
In looking for pedagogic wedges into exploring the admittedly broad idea of spatial
narratives, we imagine a curriculum organized by its focus on three major feedback loops.
The first two are broadly thematic:
1) Matter/Maker: human development as shaped by, and shaper of, the non-human world;
2) Word/World: information and symbolic narratives as carriers and generators of historical
events and practical acts.
The third is more self-reflexive, in that it deals with contemporary means and
methods through which the first two loops unfold:
3) Zeroes & Ones/Sticks & Stones: digital modeling and empirical investigation.

As a school geographically located in Pasadena, a suburban city adjacent to Los

Angeles, we envision taking on LA as a diverse megalopolis for reference, interrogation and
study. As opposed to the more centrally planned, densely urban, and pedestrian-scaled cities
we encounter throughout the East Coast of the United States—where issues of public space,
gentrification and privatization, sites of public speech, etc., have received a lot of attention
from artists, designers and others—Los Angeles is a different animal that raises a lot of
special challenges to modes of analysis and intervention developed in these contexts. In the
contemporary art scene of LA, there are a robust range of practices trying to take on its
specific spatiality, mobility, diversity, its visual nature, transience, etc. But there is much that
still requires invention, especially regarding pedagogical approaches appropriate for
intervention and contemplation, which ARTMATTERS will seek to address (Figure 9).

The overall structure of the Concentration will combine history/theory primer

seminar courses with a tools generator, the Research Colloquia (RC). The idea behind the
latter is that innovation is spurred by access to tools from outside traditional boundaries. The
RC are first and foremost about providing critical access to the conceptual, quantitative,
qualitative and technical skills which not only artists, filmmakers and designers use, but also
those that social engineers, geographers, urban planners, economists, politicians, lawyers,
demographers, archivists and the like actually use to generate social space. Even if some of
the technical tools are beyond mastery in a boot camp/crash course context, it is important
to see how they work, and know the values and goals that drive them. Both seminars and
Research Colloquia are conceived as highly interdisciplinary and form the backbone from
which more specific studio courses and projects will be hinged. In practice, they will function
as resources for the entire college, rather than for the ARTMATTERS Concentration alone.

Importantly, the curriculum is designed to get students out of the studio and into
the real world, as a source of inspiration and concrete information, and as a counterweight to
the increasing virtualization of information, especially regarding the conditions of others.

Toward a Conclusion
At the risk of being reductive, the root of many developments in art’s recent social turn
might be interpreted as diverse attempts to apply the insights (if not the specific techniques)
of systems theories developed in 1960s and 70s to the problems of life under globalization
(today it is the economic, environmental and social crises precipitated by our
interconnectedness, rather than the more uplifting image of the earth from space, that
precipitates the groundswell of interest). Many of these ideas (of interrelatedness) got more
traction in the anti-institutional counterculture than in the vestiges of the avant-garde, whose
investments in art’s autonomy produced a “cellularization” of the academy. In developing a

ARTMATTERS At Art Center College of Design:

Curricular Notes on Art Practice, Place, and Social Engagement. page 8
curriculum aimed at engaging the social, we have to play catch-up for this historical bias
within the typical foundation course.

Therefore, as we have articulated, the curriculum is grounded in helping students

engage the social at a deep level—not merely in terms of isolated people, events and causes,
but as a whole system. That is, it approaches community as a collective, emergent system
that includes human intentions and inventions responding to each other, as well as non-
human entities and dynamics. In this it requires a significant shift in the reference frames of
young students whose previous educations have centered on discrete images and objects.

Ultimately, if we succeed, ARTMATTERS will move much of the social impact into
the form of the curriculum, rather than leaving it only in the content. The curriculum should
not merely be about the social, it should perform the social, and its chances to be a social
agent should be maximized. Although we cannot guarantee what that will produce, at a
minimum we believe that if education is to be of any critical value in our world, it should be
conducted in ways that might actually change the life of the community. Therein lies a deeply
significant aspiration of ARTMATTERS that shall be guiding us forward.

page 9
Figure  1.    Exemplary  Designmatters  projects  such  as  Safe  Agua  Peru,  immerse  
students  in  the  field  for  design  development  and  testing.  

 
Figure 2. ARTMATTERS Concentration logotype.

ARTMATTERS At Art Center College of Design:

Curricular Notes on Art Practice, Place, and Social Engagement. page 10
Figure 3. Poster   for   a   precursor   course   to   ARTMATTERS,   a   trans-­‐disciplinary   course  
exploring  social  engagement  in  the  LA  Watts  Tower  Community.  
 
 

page 11
Figure 4. View  of  the  911  Memorial  designed  by  architect  Michael  Arad  and  landscape  
architect  Peter  Walker.  
 
 
 
 

 
Figure 5. View   of   the   High   Line,   designed   by   James   Corner   Field   Operations   (Project  
Lead),  Diller  Scofidio  +  Renfro,  and  planting  designer  Piet  Oudolf.  

ARTMATTERS At Art Center College of Design:

Curricular Notes on Art Practice, Place, and Social Engagement. page 12
Figure  6.    "Beyond  the  White  Cube"  announcement  poster  for  2011  Fine  Art  class  at  
Art  Center.  

 
 

   

page 13
Figure  7.    A  shop  in  Tahrir  square,  Cairo,  is  spray  painted  with  the  word  "Twitter"  
during  the  Egyptian  uprising.  Photograph:  Peter  Macdiarmid  /Getty  Images  

 
Figure  8.    Fine  Art  students  from  faculty  Laura  Cooper's  studio  course  in  a  field  visit  of  
Robert  Smithson's    earthwork  Spiral  Jetty.    

ARTMATTERS At Art Center College of Design:

Curricular Notes on Art Practice, Place, and Social Engagement. page 14
  
Figure  9.    Public  Space  redefined:  panoramic  view  of  hillside  landscape  surrounding  
Art  Center  College  of  Design.    Photograph:  Taylor  Knight/Art  Center  College  of  Design.  

page 15
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Buckley, B. and Conomos, J. eds. (2009). Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the
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Burns, C; Cottam, H, Vanstone, C., Winhall, J. (2006). Transformation Design. RED. Paper
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Gomez-Peña, G. (2005). Ethno-Techno:Writings on performance, activism and pedagogy. Routledge,
New York.
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ARTMATTERS At Art Center College of Design:

Curricular Notes on Art Practice, Place, and Social Engagement. page 16

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