n propaganda to social sculpture. Also on the faculty at UCSD are the media artist Ricardo Dominguez, who has done work around the Zapatista movement as well as locative media for border-crossing immigrants, and the innovative architectural activist and artist Teddy Cruz.
But we are getting ahead of the story. Lacy’s notion of a new genre public art had an important curatorial representative in Mary Jane Jacobs. Her landmark show in Chicago “Culture in Action” (1993) brought together mainstream public art with the subducted left-inspired currents of community art at the beginning of the Clinton presidency.
In Europe in 1991, the artistic team of Clegg and Guttman began their Open Library project, placing unprotected bookcases in grassy lots around Graz, Austria. This participatory work of social sculpture continues as they have refined and developed aspects of the project for gallery spaces.
The path towards institutional acceptance of social sculpture in the U.S., of course, had been smoothed by social activism, and by a reevaluation of the role of public art in society. Throughout a long and bitter struggle over the high modernist sculptor Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981-89), a federally commissioned public artwork protested as alienating and finally removed, Serra had argued steadfastly for his avant garde prerogatives. While Serra was generally supported, many U.S. public art advocates were cast into a reflective mood by the controversy. At the same time, culturally-based activism underwent an extraordinary amplification with the agitations around the AIDS crisis.
“We Are Living in Wartime”
As the death toll from the disease mounted during the Reagan years, the epidemic turned a civil rights crisis for gay people into a struggle for survival. Resistance by the broad ACT-UP coalition and its numerous action cells of media and graphic artists – like Gran Fury and DIVA-TV – used sophisticated means and dramatic interventions to reach a broad public. These artists gave examples of collective cultural production 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 c