The Schoolhouse and the Bus: Mobility, Pedagogy and Engagement Opening
Friday, February 9, 2018
6 to 8pm
Left: Suzanne Lacy and Pilar Rañio-Alcalá, Skin of Memory Revisited, 2011. Courtesy of the artist. [Image Description: A partial view of an aluminum shelf that features screw in lights on its edge. Behind the lights are objects: a clear plexiglass rectangle with a note etched into its surface, a stylized picture of a woman with a white lace scarf, and a framed photograph of an older woman wearing a purple top.]
Right: Pablo Helguera, The School of Panamerican Unrest, 2006. Courtesy of the artist. [Image Description: An open town square, three people walk through the foreground. At the center is a triangular structure covered in yellow fabric with scaffolding that holds a bell at its entrance. In the background is a pale-yellow Spanish-style government building with a bell tower.]
The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation presented The Schoolhouse and the Bus: Mobility, Pedagogy and Engagement, an exhibition that paired, for the first time, work by two leading artists of the social practice movement, Pablo Helguera and Suzanne Lacy. On view at The 8th Floor from February 9 through May 12, 2018, The Schoolhouse and the Bus highlighted a touchstone work by each of the artists executed in the Americas but never shown in their entirety in the United States - Helguera's School of Panamerican Unrest (2006) and Lacy's Skin of Memory (1999), a collaboration with Pilar Riaño-Alcalá. Comprised of installation, collage, sculpture, ephemera, photography, video, as well as archival documentation, this exhibition served to highlight overlapping themes in their works, which include immigration, pedagogy, violence, memory, and community organizing. The publication The Schoolhouse and the Bus: Mobility, Pedagogy and Engagement, was released December 2018 and features interviews with the artists and key collaborators, as well as essays by Shannon Jackson, and the exhibition's co-curators Elyse A. Gonzales and Sara Reisman.
Lacy, based in Los Angeles, is among the first generation of artists who began making art founded on public participation, with the goal of empowerment or change in a community. Helguera, a Mexican artist based in New York City, represents the next generation of social practice artists influenced by Lacy’s works, writings, and teachings. This traveling exhibition was co-curated by Sara Reisman, Executive and Artistic Director of The 8th Floor/The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, and Elyse A. Gonzales, Assistant Director/Curator of Exhibitions, Art Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California Santa Barbara. The first presentation of The Schoolhouse and the Bus at the AD&A Museum was part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA where it was an official participant in the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative.
Click here for the press release on the exhibition.
About the Artists
Pablo Helguera was born in Mexico City in 1971. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, both an art school and a museum, working in the museum education department while earning his B.F.A. He has since held positions in education at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Guggenheim New York, and is currently the Director of Adult and Academic Programs at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Helguera has performed and exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the Americas. His works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; and the Guggenheim, NY; among others. He is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation/Fideicomiso para la Cultura Mexico, Creative Capital, Franklin Furnace, and a Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art from A Blade of Grass.
Suzanne Lacy was born in Wasco, California in 1945. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a major in Zoology in 1968, and became a founding member of Judy Chicago’s Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College, moving with the Program when it relocated to CalArts. Lacy’s work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, London; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, LA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the New Museum, NY; MoMA P.S.1, NY; and the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, Bilbao. She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art from A Blade of Grass. Lacy was founding chair of the M.F.A. program in Public Practice at Otis College of Art and Design in California. In 2013, she received a Ph.D. from Gray’s School of Art at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, and is currently a professor at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California.