A 3-year MFA program that combines individual research, group work, and experiential learning through progressive, immersive pedagogy.
PSU’s Art and Social Practice MFA is composed of a unique combination of individual research, group work, and experiential learning. The program’s blend of critical and professional practice, collaborative social engagement, and transdisciplinary exploration produces an immersive educational environment. Based in Portland, Oregon, the program operates on the PSU campus, and in our space at the Kin
02/05/2023
has a show at PSU’s gallery opening this week!
Welcome to My Happy Place 💖 is an exhibition curated by Rose, a fifth grader at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School and Dr. Kiara Hill, a professor in the School of Art + Design at PSU through
See the show Gallery Feb 1- Mar 17
Reception Feb 9 from 5-7pm
Or stop by the gallery Monday-Friday noon-5pm in Smith Memorial Student Union (SMSU) 250
01/13/2023
Big congrats to our students and (along with alum ) for receiving grant funding from for their projects Kitchen and HI-VIZ!
Keep an eye on both of these exciting new works 💈🦺
Kitchen explores the relationship between hair and intimacy while centering
the experiences of Black clientele and natural hair practitioners. The project will
celebrate stories told by Black voices to archive the oral histories surrounding
the physical space, care, and intimacy that is cultivated through hair styling.
Kitchen will provide artistic form to the processes of this culture by sharing the
perspectives of clients and beauticians while recognizing the historical/political
context surrounding this specific experience.
HI-VIZ is a social practice art project with the student crossing guards
of the Dr. MLK Jr. School 5th Grade Safety Patrol at . Through monthly visual, performing, and interdisciplinary arts workshops, we explore the crosswalk
as a stage for creative expression and civic agency. This series of workshops
builds skills and understanding that will culminate in our end-of-the-year public, participatory pedestrian parade, the Hi-Vizibility Crosswalk Spectacular.
12/09/2022
Wise words from alumnae of the Art + Social Practice Program, pt. 2. .yakovenko as told to
12/09/2022
Wise words from alumnae of the Art + Social Practice Program, pt. 2. .yakovenko as told to
Read student interviews with graduates of our program in the Fall 2022 issue of SoFA Journal. Link in our bio.
12/09/2022
Wise words from alumnae of the Art + Social Practice Program. , as told to Nadine Hanson,
Read student interviews with graduates of our program in the Fall 2022 issue of SoFA Journal. Link in our bio.
12/09/2022
The Fall 2022 SoFA Journal is out! Peruse conversations between our current students and program alumni in this issue of our interview-centric online publication, Social Forms of Art. Link in our bio 📗
Interviews by Nadine Hanson with 14 program alumni from the past fifteen years.
Cover design by Gilian Rappaport and Luz Blumenfeld. Image from Tia Kramer and Amanda Leigh Evans project with students and staff at Prescott Elementary School, “When the River Becomes a Cloud,” 2022-2024. Walla Walla, WA.
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The Social Forms of Art (SoFA) Journal is a publication dedicated to supporting, documenting and contextualising social forms of art and its related fields and disciplines. Each issue of the Journal takes an eclectic look at the ways in which artists are engaging with communities, institutions and the public. The Journal supports and discusses projects that offer critique, commentary and context for a field that is active and expanding.
Created within the Portland State University Art & Social Practice Masters in Fine Arts Program, SoFA Journal is now fully online.
11/16/2022
SEEKING PARTICIPATION!
Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice Program is a flexible residency MFA program that focuses on the art of social engagement. Interested in social practice? Apply to our program!
Applications for Fall 2023 are due on January 27, 2023, 11:59pm PST.
Explore our program projects: , our program publication SoFA Journal (see our website). Links are in our bio!
If curiosity strikes and you have any questions, reply here, DM us, or email our program director Harrell Fletcher at [email protected].
11/13/2022
📡 Introducing Art & Social Practice Radio!
🗓️ Mondays 1-2pm PT on
🗣️ Hosted by MFA student and professional voice over artist Becca Kauffman
👂Listen: kpsu.org or instagram live
📞 Call: (503)-725-5669
Art and Social Practice Radio is a new weekly radio show broadcasting live from Portland State University’s student station, KPSU. Each episode opens with a working and subjective definition of “social practice art,” followed by a live reading of a published text on socially engaged art, and a ten minute call in time at the end!
This week’s episode features a live reading of performance studies scholar Shannon Jackson’s book, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. This book critically investigates the “social turn,” or the turn towards the social, in contemporary experimental art and theater.
🔊 Live stream at kpsu.org and right here on our Instagram Live.
💡 About Shannon Jackson is a Professor of Rhetoric and Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Jackson’s research focuses on two broad, overlapping domains: 1) collaborations across visual, performing, and media art forms and 2) the role of the arts in social institutions and in social change. Her most recent books are Back Stages: Essays Across Art, Performance, and the Social (Northwestern University Press, 2022), and The Human Condition: Media Art from the Kramlich Collection (Thames & Hudson, forthcoming). Other recent projects include the guest-edited Valuing Labor in the Arts with Art Practical, a special issue of Representations on time-based art, and a new online platform of keywords in experimental art and performance, created in collaboration with the Pew Center for Art and Heritage, In Terms of Performance (intermsofperformance.site). Jackson’s writing has also appeared in dozens of museum catalogues, journals, blogs, and edited collections.
Flier by with major guidance from
10/31/2022
Where were we….📖
Tune in NOW, TODAY, 1pm PT 📡 to kpsu.org (), PSU’s on-campus radio station, for the second installment of a live reading of our program founder Harrell Fletcher’s () new publication, “An Incomplete and Subjective List of Terms and Topics Related to Art and Social Practice Volume 1,” voiced by third year MFA candidate Becca Kauffman ().
Words from Harrell on the terms and topics discussed in the book, which you can buy online or download for free at harrellfletcher.com:
“Each week in the Art and Social Practice MFA Program at Portland State University we have an hour of what we call “topical discussion.” During that hour we explore a term or topic related to art and social practice. Some of the terms and topics are very basic, like collaboration, and site-specificity, but there are also less common terms like a touch of evil which we heard about from Pedro Reyes when we were visiting him in Mexico City a few years ago.
Many of the ideas we discuss are not specific to socially engaged art, but we are looking at them from a socially engaged art perspective. Several of the concepts are ones that I have used in my own work but until recently hadn’t named what they were or detailed how they could be used as strategies when developing or analyzing a project. I hope that the list might be useful to people interested in socially engaged art. I started with about sixty terms and topics that I wrote about in 2019, and now I have added an additional forty or so. I’m already working on several new ones for a second volume.”