SOCIAL PRACTICE ART!!!!!!!

The topic this week is very interesting to me, its actually quite wide open even going down to the definition of social practice.
I have been researching all over the great wide world of the internet and have found some interesting social practice art and how it can be done in a huge collaborative community of artists or just one artist trying to have an effect on society.

One really interesting Social Practice groups is called Broken City Lab. It is an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research group that tactically disrupts and engages the city, its communities, and its infrastructures to re-imagine the potential for action in the collapsing post-industrial city of Windsor, Ontario.

http://www.brokencitylab.org/about/

One of their more recent projects is Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation.

For 30 days, this project will call on over 25 different artists, writers, designers, restauranteurs, musicians, architects, archivists, and other interested parties to occupy a space in downtown Windsor for up to one month in June and July 2010 to attempt to intervene with the everyday realities of skyrocketing vacancy rates, failing economic strategies, and a place in need of new imagination. This project was made possible by the generous support from the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Windsor: Cultural Affairs Office, the Arts Council Windsor and Region, and Windsor Pride.

The other artist I found is Stephanie Diamond. She does a wide range of various social practices. One of her projects is...

It Would Look Like... (Project Row Houses), 2009
projectrowhouses.org

With It Would Look Like... I anonymously ask questions about photographs to a selected community. I use the responses to these questions as a guide to select images from my extensive personal archive of 200,000 photos.

Prior to arriving to Project Row Houses, I asked the mothers in the Young Mothers Residential Program three questions:

If you could have only one image hanging on the wall of your home at Project Row Houses, what would it look like?

If you could have had one image to welcome you when you first arrived at your home at Project Row Houses, what would it look like?

If you could choose an image for an incoming mother when she arrives at her home at Project Row Houses, what would it look like?

Based on the mother's responses to these questions, I chose a few of my photographs. Upon my arrival to Project Row Houses, I shared these images with the mothers, and invited each of them to select one image to hang on the wall of their home. This photograph currently hangs in their home; it is theirs to keep. It can be taken with them when they finish the program, and an additional print of the image will remain in the house for future resident mothers.

I wish I could post some neat images with this post but blogger is up for some maintenance! :(