in social service which Ben Shepard credits with crucially influencing the cultural activism of the 21st century.
Groups worked like advertising agencies for their cause, striving always to reach a broad audience. During this pre-internet era, media activists worked regularly on public access cable television. This opportunity, secured by an earlier generation of activists in film and video – like Third World Newsreel (1960s), Videofreex (1970s), and Paper Tiger (1980s), had been sustained and developed by successor groups of video artists committed to documenting social movements. (AIDS activists also made important interventions in national broadcast television.)
During the high tide of the AIDS campaigns, radical forms of creative activism directly served the aims of a dynamic social movement. A new strong bond was forged between social movements and practitioners of new genres of public aesthetic and cultural practice.
In addition to impassioned activism from the community of professional artists, the epidemic called up an extraordinary work of collective mourning rooted in popular creativity – the AIDS quilt project. Inspired by the sight of a sea of placards carried by memorial marchers in San Francisco in 1985, the Quilt is simply a collation of commemorative fabric pieces made to remember those who died. The Quilt was spread out in public places around the country, starting with the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1987. Tens of thousands of individual remembrances have become part of the largest community art project in the world.
The category of social sculpture broadens considerably when vernacular art is included. One well-recognized example is the Heidelberg project in Detroit begun in 1986. Working with his grandfather, Tyree Guyton started painting polka dots on the sidewalks of this distressed African-American community. They went on to put toys and household goods onto signposts and the facades of many abandoned houses. Guyton was joined by others, and his enterprise of decoration became a collective creation.
Talking in the Gallery
Between 1987 and 1990 Group Material produced a project called “Democracy” in New York, seeking to represent a kind of ideal public sphere. This complex event included frequent roundtables within a multimedia exhibition, climaxing in town meetings. The gallery space of the Dia Art Foundation became a center for meeting and discourse around matters of political and social concern.
Years later Doug Ashford of the group said he thought this exhibition format was Group Material’s principal achievement. The format of an active continuously utilized exhibition space was adapted by Martha Rosler for her 1989 exhibition around the issue of homelessness, “If You Lived Here.” The crowded installation was like a little village, including setups and booths by artists, media producers, photographers, architects and planners, homeless people, squatters, activist groups, and schoolchildren. This exhibition format was emulated by engaged curator Nato Thompson in the 2008 “Democracy Convergence” produced by Creative Time in the cavernous Armory on 68th Street in New York.
When Mary Jane Jacobs put together her “Culture in Action” show in 1993, she could draw on a prominent body of artists working in the genre of social sculpture. Among these, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle produced a video workshop and street exhibition block party with Chicago gang members. The collective HaHa built a hydroponic garden in a storefront to grow organic vegetables for AIDS patients. Both these art projects, intimately involved with community groups, rolled forward after the exhibition was over.
During the 1990s, ideas and initiatives that had become almost commonplace in the world of community art became the concern of mainstream curators of public art, both in the United States and abroad. Curators and cultural administrators in the United Kingdom dedicated substantial resources to community art, recruiting many new artists into this way of working. Still community art, unconnected to the marketplace and museum ga