“Conversation at The Castle” was an unlikely event for Atlanta, for the Arts Festival, and for the time of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games — or so it seemed. I had been invited by the Festival to do a “public art exhibition” that would involve commissioning new projects in the community and that could gain greater exposure for the organization at a uniquely visible moment in Atlanta, while also helping to define aspects of an artistic philosophy for the Festival as it moved into the future.

As with other large-scale programs I’d organized during this decade, the original prospectus presented to me became something to bounce off of; the following year and a half was a period of many changes as I and the Festival staff learned of each other’s thoughts and needs, responded to decreasing resources in the arts — trying to see them as new possibilities rather than limitations — and sought out a form by which to best communicate the ideas that emerged in the course of our conversations. During an extended period of development and through an organic process, my institutional partners and I, always in concert with the selected artists, found that from different starting points we came together and reinforced one another’s ideas, making the program richer and more grounded.

The exhibition that resulted took place in a public space, but it was not public art — it was about public issues in art. The umbrella of the Festival proved not only to be the institutional support mechanism but also the framework for a discussion about the relationship of public and contemporary art. Such festivals are public par excellence. Atlanta’s version draws more people in nine days than attend most art museums (including the local High Museum of Art) in several years’ time. But festivals as venues for contemporary art are dismissed by the art world. Why such disdain when so many arts institutions are struggling to get larger and more diversified audiences? Their popular appeal, the mix of art, crafts, performances, food, and gaiety, seems to connote a lack of seriousness and quality. In the mass audience setting of a festival, the general assumption of contemporary art cognoscenti is that the art must be of the lowest common denominator.1 Never mind that cafes, openings, members’ parties, corporate and private space rentals, dancing, auctions, and other such activities take place in the art museum, at times forcing exhibition installations and public programming to change or be compromised. Thus, while the Festival was the initiator and organizing agent for this project, its own publicness was at the center of our inquiry: How can contemporary art and the broader, uninitiated, non-art-world public meet and to what end? Where do art experiences happen? What are the appropriate venues for contemporary art in the United States?

At one of the many fundraising visits I made over eighteen months, a foundation program officer said, “But how are you going to compete with the sound bites of the Olympics?” I replied, “We are not. We are going to have a conversation.” With the many events — cultural and other — staged to celebrate, entertain, or just occupy a space on the occasion of the 1996 Olympics, we chose to compete in a different way, first engaging a relatively small number of Atlantans as collaborators and visitors — participants in a conversation — and then the larger contemporary art field, in each arena investigating: In American culture today, are contemporary art and the general public opponents or on the same side?

There are certain suppositions among arts and education professionals about the public as an audience for contemporary art that seem to be set up as hurdles. Maybe these assumptions are even barricades to defend the positions of some camps, lending to contemporary art an air of sophistication, intellectualization, and class that, it is said, can only be appreciated by a refined and restricted group. This position promotes an image of art’s inaccessibility to the public and of its indifference to the concerns of everyday life. Who is contemporary art for? 

In designing this program, I began from the position that the same work can speak to many different audiences simultaneously and that it can have multiple points of access that draw upon the many types of knowledge we learn over the course of our lives. With the artists, I organized the program around certain concepts: that contemporary art can matter, that it can move the beholder, relate to and be a useful and necessary part of many people’s lives, irrespective of their social or economic circumstances; that it plays a role in the survival of culture and the human spirit even in the most devastating of situations; and that art is not a luxury just for those who have leisure time or can afford the acquisition of art objects. Most of all, we posited that art is not less important if it can be appreciated by a diverse or un-art-educated audience.

Proof of this position had been offered of late by new genre or community-based public art. But this art has its detractors who mistrust its alliance with the public (especially with so-called marginal sectors) and who oppose its aesthetics, or lack thereof, to their definition of art. The basic elements of the current critical debate around community-based art might be defined in three ways. First, the categorization dilemma: art or non-art? Does a work’s social content of present-day issues or its ability to aid in bringing about community development or individual self-esteem diminish its importance as an artistic statement?2 Second, the collaborative crisis. Traditionally, it has been felt that artists should maintain a distance from the masses in order to preserve the integrity of their artistic vision; in the case of public commissions, artists must have artistic authority. If we accept a social role for art, can community members have an involvement in the decision making? Can they participate in a process of using art as a means to bring about economic, political, social, or personal change? Lastly is the analysis of effectiveness. If we accept that art can have an effect on daily life, the question arises: To what end? Is it constructive enough, on enough people, and for long enough? Has the artist given enough of his or her time to the project? Are several months enough time for an artist to dedicate to a community project? A year? Several years?

To me, at this time in the discourse of international contemporary art exhibitions, it wasn’t possible to do a community-based program, a public art program, a site-specific show, or a critique of history or cultural identity (though I had been involved in organizing these kinds of projects in the past). These formats were no longer sufficiently articulate to move the dialogue in the field of contemporary art, its institutions and audiences. Not because their proliferation had made them no longer novel; to a degree they are here to stay as ways in which we present the work of living artists. But rather because new questions had emerged out of the short, about ten-year, history of such exhibitions. It was necessary instead to return to an ostensibly more traditional frame: a single location, a gallery space in which objects and installations are on view for anyone to visit. It was important to integrate aspects of new artistic and curatorial practice arising out of site or community and then link these ways of working to art conceived inside the artist’s studio, and in doing so to demonstrate that both approaches can lead to an art that connects in actual and real ways with multiple audiences. It was important to ground the experience of art in the visual evidence of the work of art and then to expand the conversation with the audience. In this way I hoped we might address the division that had arisen in the field with the advent of site-specific and new public art, while considering the distance that has long existed between contemporary art and the popular audience.

I wanted to return to a reconsideration of the nature of the art experience as an emotional and intellectual engagement whose visual clues could be personally touching, socially or politically relevant, or spiritually moving irrespective of circumstances of time and place. I wanted to create a forum where the art and the artist could come directly in touch with the audience with as little intervention and interference as possible. The nurturing of a dialogue between artists and public seemed particularly urgent at this time when this relationship was cast as fearful or frivolous in the United States. It was necessary so that the contributions of the individual artist to society at large might be better understood. Could an exhibition be a mode of communication with the public, and in what ways could its form enhance the art experience?

By opening up avenues for artists to be in dialogue with segments of the public, I hoped to locate points of meaning in contemporary art for those outside the art world. I wanted to see if we could expand the audience for contemporary art by way of the artist’s practice, that is, by bringing into the exhibition format those interactive, participatory, and generous aspects of contemporary artists’ ways of working that are rooted in performance and community models. This necessitated not only inviting artists who could have a public presence — on view in the gallery during a performance or in open dialogue with community members during the development of their work — but also bringing the artists into the very thinking around the construction of the program. Undertaking the artistic and curatorial directions in tandem, the artists and I challenged each other as we shaped our ideas and designed our work through a continuous dialogue.

The notion of conversations proved to be a workable and inspirational concept for the artists — a gravitational point. This surpassed my own expectations since the idea of conversations had originally taken the form of a community speakers program, a major educational aspect of the overall program. As a theme for the artists’ projects, conversation became a way of making art and was, at times, the work of art itself. Assuming a discursive mode enabled these projects to demonstrate some ways in which contemporary art can avoid being intimidating or irrelevant to the public. Unlike the classic museum-label dilemma centered around word count and academic grade level, and in defiance of the cardinal museum rule to simplify for the general public, the artists opened up complex ideas for dialogue, sometimes provocatively and speculatively. The conversations with the public that ensued were often multilayered, lengthy, and always surprising, leading in unplanned directions.

Public participation and investment took several forms: in the gallery as part of the artwork; in the community as a project was negotiated; through formal and informal gatherings throughout the summer; and over the Internet, reflecting the artists’ keen interest in new technologies. All the works of art that resulted were built out of direct, personal involvement on the part of audience members. Studio-based artists Regina Frank and IRWIN were encouraged to foster a greater connection to visitors and then take their responses into consideration as they molded the subsequent phases and forms of their projects; unlike most art, their work was not static, complete at the time of opening, but dependent on and shaped by conversations. Community-based artists Ery Camara, Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg, and Maurice O’Connell were asked to develop modes of presentation that would bring their work in communities back into the exhibition space and allow for the experience of visitors in addition to those with whom they collaborated.

I felt it was important to challenge the essentialist argument that only those the project is about or made with can be its audience and to show that this art can be meaningful to multiple publics. Moreover, by including different genres, I hoped to elude the equation of one type of public with a particular type of art (namely, marginal communities with community-based art) and move beyond the chasms that had developed in the contemporary art field, voiced by critics and shared by some museum professionals and others in the art world since the 1980s focus on the community-specific agendas of multiculturalism, political interventionist art, and new public art. I wanted to show how art objects and community-based process share certain aspects and goals; how each deals with aesthetic issues and the issue of the larger culture at once; and how each is significant for our understanding of the dynamic between art and audiences in institutions. As Ery Camara put it, “In breaking down the museum walls and going to the community, we find new materials and new meanings that are needed to come back into the museum.”

I thought it would be useful to enlarge this debate, which had reached a tense and confrontational point in the United States, around the idea of art or social work by featuring examples of community practice from other countries since such work was finding resonance in many places. Perhaps expanding the dialogue to an international level would offer some new ways of thinking about it. Viewed as a project during the Olympics, this direction also addressed a gap perceived in the cultural and community programming in Atlanta at the time, adding a significant international contemporary art component. This plan made connections as well to segments of the Atlanta population not directly touched by the Cultural Olympiad; even though “Conversations” involved relatively small numbers of people, it did so in substantial ways on a very personal level of exchange. Finally, this exhibition and public program lasted three months, unlike most of the Cultural Olympiad offerings, including temporary public artworks that were limited to one month around the Olympics. Thus, while the group of participating artists were from afar, our main audience was comprised of those who lived in Atlanta, either as collaborators in the projects or visitors to The Castle. Meanwhile, we saw this project as addressing ideological questions about art and audience, adding a critical edge to this moment of celebration that we hoped might in part help realize the Olympic dream of a “legacy” by having a lasting effect on the Festival’s future programming and by contributing to the dialogue in the field around issues of international vs. local and the relationship of artists, institutions, and audience.

As a new corporate mecca and fast-growing urban center, Atlanta had acquired the self-image of being an international city. But what does it mean to be international today? Atlanta is indeed a corporate center and world force of economic power. Does the meaning of international solely reside in the realm of commerce? What about the makeup of its population, which, distinct among southeastern cities, is now drawn from around the world? Or maybe its international identity is located in how Atlanta contributes to the well-being of the world, how it is affecting people’s lives worldwide and contributing to the future. Could we highlight this role, that is, Atlanta as the world headquarters of CARE rather than Coca-Cola?

Art is a way of thinking about the world. We are not only connected by new technology or transnational events of vast proportions such as wars or ecological devastation but also by our shared humanity. So rather than emphasize the uniqueness of place in a geographic or cultural sense, I looked at focusing the exhibition on common needs and concerns as addressed by artists who continue an age-old tradition of grappling with questions of human existence through art. This exhibition would depart from the Olympics’ focus as an international spectacle to address instead global social and cultural concerns. Audiences would be encouraged to think about the world through works of art, to recognize how culture is essential to the survival of every community, and to consider the role the artist serves in society. 

Coming from different hemispheres, artists would be invited to make work as citizens of the world. Through their art, visitors would learn about social circumstances in their part of the world. Most of the work would have been made in the artists’ studios, some assembled as installations on location, and a few developed out of artists’ residencies in Atlanta communities. Alliances would be made, too, with locally based humanitarian organizations whose missions relate to the artists’ own perspectives, paralleling their work in addressing the needs of humanity with the artists’ subjects.3

The proposed exhibition had to be in one location. (There were so many events and public artworks around the city that a scattered-site approach would defuse our efforts; anyway, normal routes of travel during the Olympics would be hampered.) The location had to be accessible and attractive — of compelling interest to visit in its own right. The meaning of the works on view would not be dependent on the physical description or historical associations of that place as in site-specific art. What was more important was that the place have a relationship to audience. It had to be a setting for coming together, a comfortable environment for conversation. But it could not be a museum or other established public gallery space whose identity would circumscribe its audience — a public space with privatizing connotations.

The location we found was one of the few old buildings remaining in the city center, The Castle as it is affectionately called locally. Everyone knew it, but nobody had gone inside for years. It served as inspiration, exhibition space, and center for operations and activities; it was a meeting ground, a site of inquiry. The Castle’s original use as a home was significant in that it posed a counterpoint to most public facilities in Atlanta today. Its intimate domestic interior made it a good place for sharing ideas, while also providing a psychic home for the participating artists from other countries.

Our original plan was to use the entire house with each artist occupying one of the rooms of the upper-story living quarters with a work, installation, or performance. This facility also inspired the concept of “conversations” as a speakers’ program, not an adjunct but an integral component of equal stature and significance to the exhibition itself.

Who can speak for art? Who is authorized to communicate their experience of art to others? Guides, informants, witnesses, scholars, practitioners, viewers; I imagined a hundred or more Atlantans of different backgrounds and walks of life each finding their room at The Castle, the work of art that touched them most, relating their perceptions about this work and engaging their neighbors and visitors from around the world in informal, on-the-spot discussions. They would speak less from the vantage point of art history than from knowledge and understanding gained from their own personal experiences, their particular cultures or vocations. They would activate the exhibition through dialogue, connecting art to life — their lives — and from there to the lives of others. At least one speaker would be on site at all times, but sometimes simultaneous conversations would be going on in different rooms. They could be brief or extended; the visitor could join in or eavesdrop, as we do with conversations. The conversations would be as varied as the lives of the individuals themselves.

Through participation and sharing, the “Conversations Program” would multiply the meaning of the art and offer the possibility of extending the traditional museum-going audience to other realms of the general public. Here the untrained, non-art-academic experience — often deemed less valid by the museum — would form the core. Enlightenment, education, enjoyment can be found through what one brings to the viewing of a work of art and not just in what one is instructed to get out of the work; in fact, the latter can be in direct opposition to a reaction based on personal or cultural knowledge. We believed that personal experience could provide an important entry to art.

But the cost to use the entire building proved prohibitive because of the building’s inherent, much deteriorated condition and its lack of handicap accessibility, requiring significant exterior construction of temporary structures for access and egress. With increased attention to city codes precipitated by the oncoming Olympics, other security and fire protection measures, including a sprinkler system throughout, were among the required modifications.

So a radical shift was proposed. The lower two floors could be most readily and economically made usable. They were the structural foundation of the house; they could be the place from where we would build a foundation for larger ideas. I would invite a smaller number of artists but for a longer stay, a summer residency; they would ground the project and focus on the most pressing concerns about contemporary art and its audience that had motivated us thus far. If the number of artists and works had to be reduced, then, to me, the artists most essential to represent were those whose projects could be publically interactive. And instead of an educational program based on relaying personal interpretations, conversations took on another form — metaphoric and actual — through participation routes that the artists would develop with the audience they directly brought into or engaged with their project.

There were still significant renovations to be made: most prominently, removing the theater stage and old bathroom/dressing rooms; creating a raised ceiling, in effect an elevated room between floors, for the IRWIN hanging (p. 72); and installing functional plumbing and electricity, as there was none. One of the most challenging needs was to provide a means of handicap access between the two floors. The cost of an elevator was prohibitive, so Merrill Elam of Scogin Elam & Bray, based in Atlanta, designed an exterior ramp along the side of the house. In order for a wheelchair to negotiate the steep grade, it had to switch back and forth four times. This would be a major physical and visual presence. So the question arose: how to make this architectural element express what we wanted to say with the program?

Early in 1995, Homi Bhabha and I began discussing the ideas around this project during our regular conversations since he had moved to Chicago. In spring 1996 we conducted a series of interviews in Atlanta with civic, corporate, and cultural leaders about their takes on culture, cultural events, the Olympics, internationalism, global community, and diversity. Out of these conversations the same words kept coming up, though used in different ways. Bhabha linked these words and we put them on the sides of the ramp (see cover, p. 23). Common words, they took on multiple meanings in their placement and combination row by row and across sections of ramp. They formed a curious and thought-provoking type of signage, unlike the consumer-directed graphics that filled the streets of Atlanta—and everywhere else—during the Olympics. These words stood as symbols of the ideas we were grappling with in the overall project. 

To complement the interior space, where access was now limited to half the house, and to open up the building and be more hospitable, a deck — a kind of patio — was created at the top of the ramp, covering over an unused area adjacent to the AT&T corporate tower’s service areas. This location became the site of Yukinori Yanagi’s ¿Tierra Nuestra? (pp. 26, 108–9) and a gathering point for many planned and unplanned conversations.

Talking with the audience: “Conversations at the castle”
With a shared interest in the role of art as a communication vehicle, the artists in “Conversations at The Castle” created projects that took the form of public interaction. Art, to them, was a mode of conversation. The artists’ presence, whether at The Castle or in communities and then later at the exhibition site, added a human dimension to their work that made it real and more compelling. Here the art experience, even though in a public setting, was one that touched audience members on an intensely personal level.

The artists worked in several different ways and their projects were presented in stages. In June, during the first phase, Regina Frank inhabited her installation for seven weeks. The IRWIN installation shared the same gallery; there the artists staged an opening night performance, replacing their bodies with clothed and painted plaster casts while they traveled across the United States by recreational vehicle, staging conversations that were transmitted back to this location via the Internet. At the same time, on the mezzanine above as well as in different places around Atlanta where the other artists were working, discussions between artists and others outside the art world took place daily.

In August, Ery Camara’s installation based on his residency during June and July in Reynoldstown replaced Regina Frank’s (she moved the physical location of her piece to Tokyo, remaining tied to The Castle via the Internet). The IRWIN installation remained, but the artists returned to Slovenia with their Russian colleagues and began to incorporate reports from their American travels into European exhibition contexts. Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg had completed their workshops at a youth detention center and federal penitentiary; they created two installations at The Castle that were public manifestations of their experiences aimed to further community conversations. Also during this phase, after having spent months at a Boys & Girls Club and its parent organization’s executive offices, Maurice O’Connell took up residence at The Castle. Unlike Frank’s public presence — a performance behind glass, communicating through electronic and silent gestures — O’Connell’s practice was art vérité, exceedingly vocal and verbal as visitors came to his actual, albeit temporary, office for extended times to debate questions of youth and society.

Finally, in late August, artway of thinking — the Venetian collaborative of Federica Thiene and Stefania Mantovani — orchestrated Chow, which gave life to the symposium series “Conversations on Culture.” This final coming together of the artists, staff, and many others who had been involved in the project with art professionals from elsewhere was a chance to discuss the ideas that affected each of the participants in their own work, ideas that were embodied in the artists’ projects. For this series of dinner discussions, I asked Michael Brenson to join me in inviting the guests and session leaders and in shaping the topics.4 In 1996–97, he worked as editor of the “Conversation on Culture” section of essays written by the authors in the months just following our discussions.

The projects comprising “Conversations at The Castle” cannot be summarized by a single theme but cross multiple themes that, when taken together, give a richness and depth to the whole program. The Olympics was an unmistakable backdrop. All the artists considered how the concept of international is constructed in the art world and through global events such as the Olympics. Sports as the focus of the moment in Atlanta had metaphorical implications for some of them. O’Connell used as his starting point a 1948 French document “La regle du jeu” (“The Rules of The Game”), which outlines how one should participate in society. It became a historical precedent for the sports metaphor that O’Connell relocated in the Boys & Girls Clubs’ use of sports as a means of developing the individual. This subject also led to a greater exploration of the complex social relationships that permit a child to be a player in life. Both Regina Frank and IRWIN undertook a kind of marathon: Frank traveling from Berlin to Atlanta, stopping en route in Venice for beads and in a Japanese village to make the kimono; IRWIN traveling across country.

Another element that runs through several works was youth — the hailed but often token or forgotten beneficiary of the Olympics.5 Developing strategies outside traditional routes of art education, Camara, Dias and Riedweg, and O’Connell all embraced this audience. Camara, an artist and museum professional, challenged institutional museum education through his workshop discussions and in his installation, which analyzed the politics of museum display. Dias and Riedweg combined their techniques and experience as teachers with their practice as artists. O’Connell questioned the motivations and benefits of the visible corporate-initiated Olympic youth programs, while asking others to speak with him about the ongoing work of not-for-profit social agencies devoted to youth.

For all the artists, conversation across and within cultures began with the personal (speaking directly to other individuals), moved to the more public visitor level, and arrived at the technological (the Internet) as a way of extending the conversations beyond Atlanta in place and time. And while installations were the visible result, it was the artists’ research into thinking about the experience of art by the audience that is perhaps the most valuable contribution of this program. For the Festival and myself, it was important not only to offer each artist an occasion to make a new and ambitious work — for most of them it was their first opportunity to show in the United States — but also to provide them with the physical and mental space to explore and share ideas and move the thinking in the field.

For this publication I asked the artists to reflect on the process of development of their projects and their encounters and engagement with audience. This request initiated a several-month, post-event conversation that has resulted in the writings contained in the artists section that follows. It was important that this occur after the fact; theirs were not projects that in any way could have been represented or fully considered in a catalogue at the time of the exhibition. Rather we took the months that followed, as did Michael Brenson with other authors in this book, to continue a conversation started in Atlanta. The success of our work will be measured in the new conversations it precipitates. 

Notes
1. Linda Nochlin’s study of the historic struggle over the democratization of art and of the museum as “a democratic instrument” concludes that: “What is revealed by an examination of the available material on the relation of the public to the museums from the nineteenth century to the present day is that the dimension of art works which sophisticated art historians, critics, avant-garde artists or enlightened musem workers consider ‘esthetic’ has generally been irrelevant, incomprehensible or antipathetic to the people as a whole.” Linda Nochlin, “Museums and Radicals: A History of Emergencies,” Art in America 59, 4 (July-August 1971): 37. The notion that a large, mass audience is not possible or not desirable for contemporary art, or that to serve such an audience requires a lessening of quality, is indicated by Marcia Tucker’s critique of museum practice: “Museums don’t really want to respond to what audiences want, because we have such a low opinion of what they’ll come up with. We aren’t interested in democracy, because we think it would mean ‘lowering our standards.’” Marcia Tucker, “The Art Museum Today: Who Is Its Audience?,” unpublished notes for a panel discussion, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 13, 1993.

Benjamin Buchloh posits that a new audience might be possible by changing the models for looking at art. He begins with evoking “a theory behind it, one that articulates that the traditional audience that we assume to be capable of receiving the multiplicity of aesthetic structures is a privileged audience.  This argument says, We don’t want to address this numinous ‘universal’ audience anymore. We want to address, with very clearly circumscribed statements, a different type of audience, one that is not privileged in the traditional sense of prepared reading competence. In order to reach out to that audience, in order to communicate at all, we have to make a sacrifice — a sacrifice in the range of aesthetic differentiations and subject constructions operative in the work.” He then suggests that it might be worth considering if such an argument might be “able to produce a different type of audience in the  museum, a different type of artist, a different type of communication and competence.” As for artists, he offers, “Why can’t one say, I define my project to be opening up venues, addressing new audiences, providing models of enactment, empowerment, articulation?” Finally, he states “there are other models to be constructed altogether, less obvious ones and perhaps more difficult ones, along the parameters of class. Difference can also be determined by other criteria, such as accessibility, communicability, particular targeting of audiences traditionally excluded from cultural access, whether in the institution or in production.” Benjamin Buchloh, et al., “The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation on the Whitney Biennial,” October 66 (Fall 1993): 11–12, 14.

2. The inappropriateness of social and political agendas in art has been widely held and loudly voiced by critics during this decade. Voluminous press argued this issue around the 1993 Whitney Biennial, summarized by the following remarks on the succeeding event: “This breadth of taste may be the most important thing [curator Klaus Kertess] brings to the Whitney, since the last biennial, in 1993, was one of the museum’s most embarrassing critical disasters ... it emphasized political art over all else and included considerably less painting than in previous shows, leaving critics to shriek that the Whitney had abandoned the very idea of art as a visual medium.” Paul Goldberger, “The Art of His Choosing,” The New York Times Magazine, February 26, 1995. A recent version of this sentiment can be found in Christopher Knight’s review of “Uncommon Sense,” an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1996 that tried to bring the outside (community issues and community art) into the museum: “replacing a culture of complaint with a therapeutic ideal reminds you that touting moral goodness is beside art’s point. Giving convincing visual form to ideas is what really counts.” Christopher Knight, “The Socio-Art Genre,” Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1997, F1, F9.

3.These agencies include: The Carter Center and The Martin Luther King Center for Non-Violent Social Change; the world headquarters of CARE; the national headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Habitat for Humanity; Boys & Girls Clubs; and The Friendship Force International; and regional or city offices of Amnesty International, UNICEF, Save the Children, The American Red Cross, World Relief, and the NAACP, among others.

4. Other informal sessions completing the offerings for this two-week period included: “New Curatorial Roles” led by Anna Harding, Course Director, Visual Arts Department, Goldsmith’s College, London; “Changing Critical Approaches” led by Jeffrey Kastner,

Associate Editor, ARTNews, New York; “Youth, Art and Crime” led by Bill Cleveland, Director of Education, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and “New Parameters of Public Art” led by Jennifer MacGregor-Cutting, art advisor, Hartford.