(Susie Husted is a Boston-based social justice activist who acted as a community advisor to Artists in Context’s conference planning. Susie’s been a strategic player in the planning of many Boston-based events including the annual HONK! Festival, 2010 Food not Bombs 30th Anniversary Festival and A People’s Celebration of Howard Zinn, as well as city-wide student teach-ins and regional anti-war demonstrations.)

Hybrid practice is not new, but in Boston, a community of practice around inter-disciplinary, inter-sectional, collaborative and socially engaged art is emerging.  In that respect, Boston-based arts organization, Artists in Context, forged new ground this weekend.  Over 100 local activists, academics and artists gathered at Artist in Context’s Connected & Consequential conference to witness each other’s work, and begin laying the ground from which to develop and understand the mechanisms, scope, and intentional practice of hybrid art in greater Boston.

Founded by Louisa McCall and Marie Cieri in 2009, AIC seeks to support the research-based, multidisciplinary, embedded practices of contemporary artists and other creative thinkers who seek to invent alternative approaches to existing societal challenges. Connected & Consequential in Boston was AIC’s first large city-wide event to develop a community of practice in New England. Additional gatherings on the same theme are planned for the fall 2011 in Providence, Rhode Island, Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley and Maine, as well as workshops and community dialogues to further explore the specificity of hybrid practice in greater Boston.

What follows is a summary of the Greater Boston Connected & Consequential events in the participants own words.

“Bearing witness takes a long time, “but is necessary “to let the call from the community be authentic, and our answer be authentic.”

Michael Dowling, Medicine
Wheel Productions, Stories from
the Field panel

“The question from the community wasn’t ‘what will [the project] look like?’, but ‘what will it say?’”

Gavin Kroeber & Dan Borelli
Case Study: Crossing the Rubicon, a project-in-progress with the community of Ashland, MA about the Nyanza Superfund Site.

“I don’t want to be a ‘parachute’ artist.”
                                              John Osorio-Buck
                                              Stories from the Field panel

 

Kelly Dobson’s “Blendie Diagram” (2003-2004). Dobson joined Artistic Director of Artlink, Edinburgh, Alison Stirling, and artists Steve Hollingsworth and Wendy Jacob on AIC’s Ideas Team case study.

We sought to “make machines with the agency of care.”
                              Kelly Dobson, Case Study: Ideas Team 

“We reached organizational overwhelm. We said, ‘we’re doing a lot of stuff – but is it effective?”

“We want to address huge issues and how they trickle down into our neighborhoods,” but by silo-ing our different practices (cultural organizing, arts and activism), “we structurally set ourselves up to not meet our goals. We have to think more deeply about how we connect these issues.”
                              Mariamma White-Hammond, Project HIP HOP,  
                              Stories from the Field panel

We “embrace complexity and find a container that creates connections”
                               Andi Sutton, National Bitter Melon Council
                               Stories from the Field panel

Video clips, conference findings and future programs will be posted at the Artists in Context website this summer.