Artists and educators Ari Wolff and Chloë Bass connected through the Social Practice MFA program at Queens College where Chloë is an associate professor. Over the last decade, Social Practice Queens emerged as a significant hub for the development of socially engaged art. With Chloë as co-director, the program has now expanded to Social Practice CUNY, a unique initiative spanning the City University of New York’s campuses to offer resources for students and faculty interested in pursuing socially engaged art.

Ari and Chloë spoke by Zoom to reflect on their time as student and teacher, the learnings they bring to their classrooms, and the set of questions Chloë developed for this issue.

, 2024. Etched stone with artist-written text, 9" x 7" x 3"

Hi, Ari. You used to be my student and now you're not, which is its own kind of interesting relationship. Can you say a little bit about how we knew each other, and then how we know each other now?

Yes! I don't actually know if you know this—I was looking at different programs andknew about your work and that you taught at Queens College. I came upon 

 and read your essay in the beginning, which included this question of how are we taking care in our relationships in the same way we are in our practice? I thought, “I really want to study with this person.” I partly chose Queens College because I read that.

I didn't know that about the book! Maybe this will accord with some of your experiences too, because you're also a teacher and a writer and a maker of art, but the work that you do, or the work that I do, has these other lives that exist well beyond us. I'm not a part of these lives—which is great. But then these very real consequences and relationships come back into my life that I'm very much a part of and I didn't know.

It's also particularly interesting to hear that now, because of the other thing that I've been doing with A Blade of Grass. The aBoG team asked me to develop a series of questions that they would send to folks participating in this publication and beyond. And the aBoG staff have started answering some of these questions themselves, which was really interesting to me.

The two questions I started with are the exact same as the questions that are in the book because they're still really interesting to me: 

What happens if we take the same care with our relationships as we invest in our practice? What happens if we take the same care with our practice as we demonstrate in our relationships?

As with any of the questions that I ask, I don't think either of these questions are necessarily positive, even if they sound nice.

Are these questions still feeling resonant to you?


I feel like they are almost more relevant and real to me now than when I read them four years ago. And I don't think I'm closer to being able to answer them either. I'm actually further away from feeling like I could solidly answer.

I also feel like I'm further away, and it's not just because I haven't been teaching this year.

I feel like I've seen so many different iterations of relationships forming and unforming and breaking. Things that maybe worked for one group of people don't work for a different group of people. Or when things sometimes create these moments of collective genius and other timesjust feel manipulative and coercive.

But your students and my students are very different ages. So I think you have different levels of responsibility too.

It's true. Something wonderful is that you actually were the type of teacher that was asking these questions. You embodied the values and questions that you were writing about.

I mean, thank you. I’m always worried about where I’m actually living these values, and where I'm just able to put language to a complicated feeling or set of dynamics. So that's really quite gratifying for me to hear. I wrote that essay 100 percent based on my classroom from that semester [Fall 2017]. It was an undergrad classroom, and it was an intro-level class. You did not need to be an art major to take it. And so I would say fully half the people in the class not only had never heard of socially engaged art, but they didn't really care about art at all. That didn't make them bad students or not nice people, but the only fundamentals that we shared were that we were all human beings in the same room for four hours a week.

So you have to start from that basis. We are people in relation to one another. What does that mean?

Which feels like the most important part of social practice and maybe also being a teacher. I will always remember watching you teach. I learned quite a bit—one of the things was that you just allowed tangents to occur. The conversation often came back to where it began, and if it really needed to come back, it would. But in our class together, sometimes we walked so far from where we were. I remember looking at you, wondering if you were going to bring us back, but you would just be watching it unfold. That stuck in my head as a kind of socially engaged way of teaching—allowing the class to have agency around the direction.

Now, when I do that with fourth and fifth graders, sometimes we get to poop really fast. But then we pass that. Letting go of conversational control is a challenge I've had as an educator that was playing out as a student in your class.

This has taken me to a tangent. My whole life is tangents. I want to go where people are going. I really like following the paths of people's desires, obsessions, and interests, which reflects some of the other questions that I put to aBoG. But the tangent that you reminded me of is something that I admired in you, and something that I have constitutionally been unable to do. You were able to be, at the same time, a full-time student and teacher. It's not to say that I haven't had full-time employment while being in school, but I have found that I cannot occupy the student and teacher roles simultaneously in such a complete way. I'm curious—you're saying some of the things from the classroom that we shared that went back to your classroom with children, but what else happened in that dynamic for you?


It kind of worked for me. Because every time I was thinking through something, it was inside of another thing—myself as a student or myself as a teacher. It felt very nesting-doll-esque. When there was learning in one space, it often had some kind of relationship in the other. In some ways, it turned me into a more active teacher because I was so distinctly aware of being in the position of the student.

But it also l broke my brain a little—it's a bit of a blur.

“A Scribble in my Brain” by Milly (4th grade), “mixed emotions” by Four (4th grade), and “Spooky” by Maia (3rd grade), at Printed Matter / St Marks, 2024. Photo: Oswaldo García

Your question also reminded me of the book launch last year. Part of my social practice project was creating a children's press called 

. You advised and supported me with the project for almost a year.

You came to the culminating book launch and met my students. Hearing me say “that's my teacher” had their heads exploding. They had so many questions for me in the next class about how I was a student and if I ever got in trouble with you. For them to hear me say, “yeah, I have a lot of homework . . . I have this essay I have to write,” there was some trust or just kind of camaraderie, I think. They were like, “oh wow, you have to participate in this sometimes tyrannical institution called school”—also as someone who's not in charge. There was reverence on their end.

That you were occupying these simultaneous positions of being a teacher and a student is as mind-blowing for me as it was for your students to hear that. I anticipate that a lot of people's life or work experiences do have these huge interplays in terms of how they relate to others, but this is a particular path.

There’s also a piece about the aversion to seeing the teacher outside of the classroom. It’s such an intense phenomenon. But I don't think I felt that way the first time we hung out outside of school. I did feel like, “oh, are we friends?”

Yeah, we're both adults. At school we're in a different generation, but in life we're not.

We are different generations in art too. I'm still coming to really calling myself an artist and stepping into the world as someone who makes art and social practice. You've been in these worlds and negotiated a lot of different situations.

Do you find that as an artist and as a maker that you have produced what you would call different generations or phases of work? Or do you feel like you're in a stream and it just keeps going?

Part of my desire in going to graduate school was to find a way, both in practice and in language, to bring my art practice and my teaching practice together. To find more connection between them and to be able to hold them together more. I feel like that's happened, but I still have a stream of work that I make that's more socially engaged and work that feels a bit more insular and personal.

Right now, I am producing an edition of artist books made by children, and that feels like my only practice, but there are pools and puddles of my personal practice that all get connected back. What’s your relationship to that distinction?

I get asked a lot, “is teaching your art practice, or is the larger project of engaging with the social practice community your art practice?” And the answer is no. Those are important things in my life and they are not my art practice. Not everything that's important to me needs to be my art practice.

But one of the things that I feel like you did really clearly is—while you were already teaching in a place, and you were even teaching art in the place—you specifically made an art project that was like a subset of your experience with the place that can be its own creative continuance.

I wonder, too, about these levels of care and relationship that differ when you have the kids who are working on 

, versus when you have the kids who are just in the classroom having a learning experience. Where do you find that you’re able to be a different portion of yourself?

It's like a bit of a costume that you wear as a teacher, especially for me, as a teacher of elementary school students. The fact that children have stayed with the project for multiple years and I have longer-term relationships—I'm able to take that costume off and be a little bit more of a person with them because of this space that we've carved out. But it's taken over a year to get there. It's partially because there are returning young people that are holding some of the space of teaching, so I don't have to hold it as much. Because they're there to show someone how to use the typewriter. Or put my code into the photocopier. And that is such a gift.

The person who knows your photocopier code is both a real asset and a real potential threat, depending on what they do.

[laughing] That is very true. I have a question for you. The quality of listening, questions, and the way that you showed up for me during my time at Queens College and in our friendship is so powerful. It feels like you bring a lot of energy and care. I remember thinking to myself after you left my studio at one point: you're going to another person’s studio to meet with them. I don't know how you don't fall down at the end of every day because of the amount of emotional energy. How do you sustain that?

Thank you for noticing it first of all, and for being in that space with me, because it actually doesn't work if I'm bringing something and the other person isn't bringing something. They will not have this same experience [that you did] even if I'm willing to offer a certain form of care or attention.

I was not planning to teach. Even when I was teaching early childhood before I went to grad school, that was also kind of by accident. It was like “jobs you can get.” “Oh, I got this job.” And that is also how I came to teaching college and grad school. But I did have a lot of experience doing socially engaged work in the world, and I knew a lot of things that kind of worked, and that kind of didn't work. So I was like, “well, I can apply those skills to the classroom and maybe that will work because I don't know how to teach.”

I found that a lot of my skills did really work, and one of those skills was that form of listening and presence. Leaving space and holding whatever is happening in the room really causes people to not just open up, but to become quite generative, whether that's creatively or interpersonally.

I wouldn't say that everybody meets me in the same ways in those conversations. That's one thing that makes it actually somewhat less exhausting. At first, I would come home after teaching two to three days a week and I would be completely pulverized. My whole body would hurt. I would feel sick. And it was as a result of not really understanding how to manage doing this in a longer-term way.

So that's one part. And then a totally different part, potentially, is that my dad is a psychoanalyst. He sees nine patients a day, every day, and he's 75. He's still doing that, and that's really cool but also, like, how do you do that? If you're a traditional psychoanalyst, you're not saying very much and your job is attentive listening just constantly.

Now I have this totally different level of understanding of what that takes from a person. And how tiring that is.

A final practical thing I’ve seen you do and have internalized around organizing and social practice is that when you invite people to something, if you determine the barriers, and thenwork to remove those barriers, they will come.

And you did that for me—you invited me to something and I wasn't sure if I could come and you were like, “let me write your boss a note.” You used every resource you could to remove the barriers that might make it so that I couldn't come to that thing.

I've been thinking about it a lot as I'm inviting families and people with many different jobs and time schedules to things. How can I do that thing that you did for me?

I'm really glad. If I'm inviting people to a thing, I genuinely want them to come. A lot of times, what I am offering is also what I want to be asked, or what I want people other than me to be asked. I want people to have the grace with each other to get each other there.

Ari Wolff is an NYC-based artist working in text, installation, photographic processes, pedagogy, and publication. Her work examines language as a visual material, states of (il)legibility, systems of learning, and sensory perception as a form of translation. In 2022, she founded 

, an intergenerational publishing initiative dedicated to the production of artist books by kids. In 2023, Wolff was a recipient of a Social Practice CUNY Fellowship and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at Collarworks, Plaxall Gallery, The Brick, Longwood Gallery, The Foundry, Glasshouse, Para//el, the New York Queer Zine Fair (NYQZF), and the East Village Zine Fair, among others. Her visual poems and writing have been published in literary journals and platforms including POETRY, Asemic Review, The Graphic Score Exchange, The Offing, PANK, and Hinchas de Poesia. Learn more at ariwolff.work.

Website

Ari Wolff

Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (

 2011–2013), followed by a study of pairs (

 2015–2017), and recently concluded an investigation at the scale of the immediate family (

Obligation to Others Holds Me in My Place, 

2018–2024). She will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on 

 (2023–ongoing), a series of works examining intimacy at the scale of the courtroom and the law. In addition to her work as an artist, she is an associate professor at Queens College CUNY, and serves as the co-director of Social Practice CUNY (along with Gregory Sholette). You can learn more about her at 

Chloë Bass

Another Way

Ari Wolff + Chloë Bass

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.”

I don’t know where I first heard this saying, somewhere near my Blue Ridge Mountain home, but I suspect it was from the fellas up at Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. It made sense. As a theater artist, I’ve been joy-struck by the untamed imagination of “let’s just play around and see what happens.” The discipline of maintaining no attachment to outcome is based on a trust that you don’t have to go looking for inspiration; it comes to find you. Any road will do.

 know where you’re going (or at least in what direction you’re headed), there’s usually more than one way to get there, and some traveling advice can be useful

: Watch out for that big ditch on your left

, it’s easy to fall into a tangle of mission creep.

People who have traveled various paths before us have wisdom to share. These “multiple knowledges, perspectives and approaches”

 not only guide our successes, they can also expand our appreciation of the journey itself: 

Be sure to stop at the bend, turn around, and look back at that patch of trillium blooming on the hillside.

But choosing a path means more than having a sure and certain destination. The choice of which path to take (or forge) is rooted in your values and vision: What is most important to you, and how do you want to be in the world? When I was younger, I’d drive home to Tennessee and my father would invariably ask me what route I took. He was always surprised that I didn’t take the interstate. He never quite grasped the appeal of the alternate route, which offered whimsies, vistas, curiosities—but that’s what I valued about the drive. If I had valued predictability, convenience, and speed, I’d have chosen a different path.

One value I’ve finally come to embrace is accepting the detour with grace and gratitude. 

: the funding didn’t come through. What pivot will move you forward? 

: a key collaborator withdraws. What new sights or insights might a detour provide? What mysteries are there to explore?

We’ve all experienced a huge detour with the COVID pandemic, and things are not as they were. We’re in new terrain, informed by 

. Our landscape and familiar markers have shifted, or disappeared. More than ever, we need to be asking questions, sharing perspectives, and A Blade of Grass (aBoG) is rising to this moment. For one thing, they are seeding conversations between mentors and mentees—people who have worn the path smooth (if not easy) and folks just setting out. Those conversations, these maps, will confirm some of what we already know; others will challenge our most dearly held practices. These dialogues will make visible the skills, strategies, and attributes needed for making art in, with, and for a community.

So, set forth on the journey, in your own way. Let aBoG be your traveling buddy. Enjoy the trip and send us a postcard.

Kathie deNobriga served as Alternate ROOTS’ executive director and planning/development director for ten years. Raised in Kingsport, Tennessee, deNobriga holds an MA in Theatre (Directing) from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a BA with honors in Speech Communications and Theatre Arts. Her early employment includes directing and managing community theaters in Smithfield and Sanford and working in the acting ensemble of the Road Company, Johnson City, Tennessee. DeNobriga was a visiting artist for two years for the NC Arts Council, and a fellow in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Next Generation Leadership program and in the first Rockwood Leadership Institute's program for arts leadership.

Kathie is now a consultant, specializing in strategic planning, building organizational capacity, staff/board retreats, and creative conflict engagement. She studied mediation at the Justice Center of Atlanta, and is a board and founding member for Alternate ROOTS. DeNobriga served two terms as council member, and was mayor for the City of Pine Lake, Georgia, from 2012 to 2015, where she still lives as an advocate for and practitioner of arts and community development.

Kathie deNobriga

What new sights or insights might a detour provide?
What mysteries are there to explore?

As the A Blade of Grass team imagined new programs to support artists, we connected with independent curator Risa Puleo. Risa’s deep and significant work with practitioners demonstrates a vision for the field that inspires us

 Her recent work as co-curator of the 2023 Counterpublic Triennial complicated the medium of public art by presenting ephemeral and immaterial forms to, in Risa’s words, “create an exhibition that does not replicate occupation and can also evade surveillance.” Her 2018 exhibition 

Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System

, curated for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and later hosted by Tufts University Art Gallery, mapped the relationship between museums and prisons while untangling the prison-industrial complex from the problem of mass incarceration and highlighting artists who make strategic interventions to these systems in pursuit of abolition. Her 2017 exhibition 

Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly

 conceptually redrew settler-imposed boundaries to reconnect the Americas as continuous Indigenous land.

Risa served as an advisor to aBoG’s team this year and worked with us to envision this publication project and bring together contributors. Risa joined aBoG Program Director Lee Heinemann to reflect on the collaboration and her work, and to answer questions from Chloë Bass’s commission for this issue.

To give some history to our readers: My colleague Ixtzel and I met with you while we were conducting a series of informational interviews and developing what A Blade of Grass would do in its current iteration. We felt so excited by what you had to share and we enlisted you as an advisor before we knew exactly what we might do together. During this period of finding our form and voice as an organization, you've been an incredibly helpful sounding board to share ideas with. A kind of funny example of you seeing us and getting what we're trying to do is your edit to our acronym for A Blade of Grass—from ABOG to aBoG. Somewhere in your notes, you had written ABOG as lowercase 

—aBoG. Lu noticed that and had a moment of being like, “oh, this feels better.” Then Ixtzel and I saw and were like, “wait, that's actually cute.”

Amazing! I’m so glad this resonated. This really makes me happy. This suggestion was a happy accident. I think I was just accustomed to uncapitalizing articles and prepositions when abbreviating the names of museums, like MoCA or MoMA, for example; it seemed the natural way to abbreviate the organization’s name. What is the difference for you between lowercase aBoG versus the all-capital abbreviation?

We're trying to be an organization that is for and by artists and works in solidarity with our peers. When A Blade of Grass was founded in 2011, socially engaged art was less recognized, and this organization was an authority. It is a different time now, and the small change to refer to our org with this jumble of lowercase and capital letters feels better to us in that way.

I'm always thinking about uncapitalizing my name; descaling and situating myself as one amongst many who is supported by a larger field is central to my work. Thank you for sharing that with me and thanks for a fun conversation and a fun collaboration.

Yeah, this has been so much fun. We definitely couldn’t have done it without you! We took you down a bit of a winding path that resulted in our collaboration on this publication project. Where we arrived seems to call upon some of the interesting experiences that you don't always get to work with.

It's true. Our collaboration has tapped into some of my lesser-known past lives. If I am known at all, it is primarily for being a curator. But there was a moment where I was known for my writing, and before that, I worked briefly at a granting agency. But I started by making exhibitions at alternative spaces and working in editorial capacities for nonprofit online and print publications in Texas. I bring these experiences into all aspects of my work. Writing is a practice that informs and structures my curatorial practice. Curating and editing, at least how I practice them, have a lot of things in common.

Your life as an editor has been extremely helpful to us as we're trying to figure out lots of things and how we communicate them to a larger world. You also have a life as an educator, and something that I've thought about throughout our time together is something I heard you say in a talk to students about an abolitionist framework not being punitive or disciplinarian. Through our work together, I've seen you demonstrate this as we took time to figure out what we could do together.

Drawing on my research for the exhibition 

Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System 

(2018), I teach a class called Keywords: Art and Justice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. If students only take away one thing from my class, I hope it’s the idea that being an abolitionist requires moving away from hierarchies and disrupting our learned tendencies to discipline. We spend a lot of time in class analyzing how all institutions are set up to discipline—in all senses of the term but especially policing—people into individuals through surveillance and how external surveillance is internalized into a self-disciplining that turns into policing of others.

This political position of abolitionism begins with a personal practice that I navigate within myself. I understand the deliciousness of anger and how yummy and good righteousness can feel. But also, how it can consume you and quickly tumbles into punitiveness. On topic with this issue’s theme of mentorship, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s work has shaped my understanding of the physical space and social life in the United States. And I had the amazing opportunity to be in conversation with her as part of the Counterpublic Triennial. Last year, at the symposium for her Whitney retrospective, Jaune said something that has stuck with me about how she has made anger her friend, which I took to mean she can access it and use it as a tool, direct and shape it, in ways that don’t take over agency. For me, abolition is a daily practice.

That is also part of what I mean about when I talk about the everyday embodied practice of abolition as one that moves away from disciplining. It’s an extension of Audre Lorde’s “master's tools” logic. You can't dismantle what you're trying to build with the same tools.

Can you talk about this framework and how it enters your work?

 for a Texas audience required me to enact this logic. 

was part of a series of exhibitions I made as test runs for 

 to practice how to engage people who might have a different set of politics into a conversation about complicated topics, like questions of mass incarceration and border politics. How do you create a field to invite people in rather than tell them that they're wrong for believing what they believe? I try to use the exhibition platform to seduce people into seeing the beauty, but also the obviousness, of the prison-free or border-free world by creating spaces that manifest this as a vision.

Another set of mentors are the curators and art workers who organized the first A Day Without Art in 1989—an event in which 800+ museums, galleries, and art organizations closed for the day to bring attention to the government's inaction around the AIDS crisis. The event succeeded in changing conservative narratives around the epidemic and getting it back into the headlines of newspapers in a moment when it was actively being erased from public consciousness. So I think a lot about what practices build the solidarity that’s necessary for mass mobilization. I try to use the exhibition as a public forum and a platform for bringing people together. Publications, and the sharing of information, can function in this way too.

Our team was so excited to dive in and start bringing artists into the project, and you, very reasonably, led us to actually begin with some of the formats and structure for the publication before inviting others to contribute.

It's interesting to hear that reflected back because the process we enacted for the publication is what I do in my curatorial practice. I don't invite artists until I’ve surveyed the larger field I’m investigating and I have a historical grounding. I then stage some kind of intervention in that field and invite artists who are asking similar questions to be in dialogue.

It is worth noting here that y’all’s goal for this first issue was to celebrate a lot of different artists who contribute to the expansive field of social practice. What do celebrations entail? In their most basic form, celebrations are some sort of party. How do you stage a party on a page? Celebrations can also be gatherings and gift offerings. And so we prioritized offering the artists we invited something that would be fruitful for them.

The theme for this first issue was y’all’s idea, too! I thought y'all came up with a beautiful idea to introduce this publication through a lens of generationality. Putting cornerstones of the field who have been practicing for decades in conversation with younger artists they have long histories with to begin to show the longevity of social practice and build out a genealogy.

Many of the contributors to this issue are cornerstones to us personally. So many of the practitioners here have contributed to my development as an artist and administrator.

It's an amazing group of people. And to be able to celebrate their contributions within the larger worlds in which they operate, and see the passing down of that knowledge.

Now that we are talking about the riches of these conversations, both Mary Patten and Avram Finkelstein are incredibly important to me and in very different ways. I have long identified Mary as—I think Mary would say that it's never a singular person, it's always a set of relationships—but I think that her life and her work, and she herself, are so remarkable. It's always really wonderful to celebrate her. And then the contributions that Avram Finkelstein has made to our understanding of the field, and his work as a graphic designer and one of the engineers of the Silence=Death Project changed the world, literally. Those posters initiated a radical shift in how we conceptualize, think about, and care for people who are HIV-positive, and our own imperative to speak out.


Chloë Bass is someone who thinks about care for others beautifully as a practice in her own life and work, so it's great then to share a conversation between Chloë and her former student, Ari Wolff. As a chair of the Social Practice Queens MFA, she brings her own long, rich history, as a mentee of Lorraine O’Grady, and is passing that wisdom down to younger voices.

These conversations are the features in this issue. Can you talk more about the formats we came to together for commissioning contributions?

We all wade through the news. We are constantly inundated with information. In this daily practice, the kinds of published information that I find particular joys in lately are advice columns, book reviews, or editorials—established forms with changing content. These formats have come to feel like safe spaces of reading in a news stream full of complications and came to inspire our design for aBoG’s publication.

We have a fairly standard division between features, which we described as “related content,” and columns. The features are thematically driven and allow readers to go deeper into topics that feel of the moment.

The columns function as containers, what we called “repeated forms,” for holding different content. In thinking about how to translate these repeated forms to aBoG’s mission, we tended toward practicality and transparency, thinking about how aBoG’s publication could provide a service to artists and art workers. In our social and professional worlds, we are all navigating tricky terrain while advocating for ourselves and our work. We hoped that aBoG could play the role of crowdsourcing and collecting different kinds of approaches to questions that we all navigate in this field.

This resulted in columns that invited artists to create a how-to guide teaching something from their practice and a process diary reflecting on the creation of a recent project. We also began highlighting practitioners through a series of questions crafted by Chloë Bass.

Chloë is really amazing at asking questions, which is why we commissioned her to write a series of questions that could be asked to a number of different people. Within her questions is a sort of understanding that language is just like an iceberg. You're only getting a certain bit. How can a question then allow you to navigate an unknown field—in this case a practice or a person in a way that's organic to them?


Well, now I can’t resist but to ask a few of these questions to you. 

Where did you learn to work, from whom, and how? And how does that impact the way you work now?

I loved this question and I had an immediate, visceral response: My mother. My body. And the land. Now that I’m thinking about it more deeply, I recognize the continuity between my three teachers.

My mother is a Virgo, and when I told her I was working in the arts, she empowered me to follow my own path as long as I learned actual, practical skills. I think I rise to that mandate by thinking of complex questions—in what ways can we utilize the public platforms that we have to generate common language to move in certain directions?


My body teaches me about limits. Having spent the past twelve years navigating chronic illness, I use my own body as a metric for understanding and articulating my own passage through the world. The things that I do to move in and around and over and beyond the limits that the world imposes on me.My attention to my body’s limits also frames my ethic toward limitations where there should not be. My ethic makes space for ideas of trespassing or shoplifting, or smuggling—navigating into places that are closed off.

And then the land has been one of my biggest teachers because so much of my practice has been about the specificities of place, and the specific histories embedded within. I am trying to bring attention to how human-centric our thinking is about the greater field in which we all share, and that is a reorientation into place.

Now that I’m thinking about it more deeply beyond my visceral response, I recognize the continuity and connection between my mother, my body, and the land as three of my most important teachers.

Does your practice work in service of its own continuance? Or seek to render itself obsolete over time?

Both/and. The work generates itself. So, I'll make a show. It'll have a set of questions. I'll propose answers that generate more questions that lead to different places that allow me to be in conversation with people asking similar questions. It self-propels.

Institutions give back new opportunities, and there's always a sort of perfect synchronicity.

I left my role as co-curator of Counterpublic asking what it would look like to dismantle all the dams along the Mississippi River as a thought project. When Mass MoCA invited me to be a curatorial fellow, I discovered that they have a river. So I asked to help dismantle the flood chutes around that river.

At the same time, I’ve long held a belief that the best use of any power I have is to give it away by empowering others and sharing power. I think that I’m always working to dismantle the systems that determine what is useful and what is obsolete.

How does obsession shape or inform your creative work? Can you share an obsession with me?

I think we would all have to be a little obsessive to keep doing this, right?


One way that I tend to work is by putting things in the back of my brain. So I'm always thinking about a project and not thinking about it directly at all times. In the same way that bird songs are always in the background of our home in Chicago.

During the pandemic, birds really made themselves apparent to me. It was an aspect of the world that was insistent on presenting itself. It turns out I live in a major bird-migration zone, but it took the enforced quiet of quarantine for me to notice them, after having not for forty years. Now I can’t not hear them and try to work outside with them. Thinking through the lens of bird-watching helped me realize how the type of looking that happens in the biennial/triennial model is a practice very much akin to surveillance. So I have been developing a method of anti-surveillant or abolitionist bird-watching that is about engendering a kind of quiet that makes space for birds to present themselves.

My contribution to Counterpublic was guided by this new obsession. I once stopped a site visit because a northern flicker joined our group; it felt momentous. I had a particular experience with a violet-green swallow that inspired the Counterpublic work. As I write about in the essay for that show, swallows are very hard to see because they are very fast. This particular swallow hovered in front of us for about thirty seconds and showed us how it was able to be so covert: its little body had coevolved with the place where it lived so that it could shift in and out of view as it wanted. And so, it was making a decision to make itself apparent. What an amazing super power! And I immediately thought: If an artwork or a person could do the same thing, it could be uncapturable. This experience inspired me to make an exhibition that could not be captured or surveyed. My contribution to that show was an attempt to articulate and describe this fleeting and ephemeral moment of magic.

My obsession with birds took on new proportions when my wife and I spent much of our quarantine road-tripping to national parks, which is its own obsession. We’ve now been to 54, and after this summer we will have been to 63 of 64. The real obsession is to always be moving. This gets me back to the land as a teacher, the value of place, and the road trip as a method of investigation. aBoG’s support is helping me get to the Arctic, where I am going to meet the Alatna River—a wild river, meaning it hasn’t been dammed or intruded upon by human intervention and its waters can flow along its meandering paths as it needs—as research for the turn in my work toward water.

Risa Puleo is an independent curator based in Chicago and, currently, a curatorial exchange fellow at Mass MoCA. Risa was part of a team of curators organizing the 2023 Counterpublics Triennial in St. Louis. Her exhibition 

 was curated for the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 2018 and traveled to Tufts University Art Gallery in 2020. 

Monarchs: Brown and Native Artists in the Path of the Butterfly

 was curated for the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art during her year as curator in residence, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Blue Star Art Space and Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, and the Nerman Art Museum in Overland Park, Kansas. Other exhibitions have been hosted by the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; ArtPace, San Antonio; the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York City, and more. Risa has master’s degrees from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Hunter College and is a doctoral candidate in Northwestern University’s art history program. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has written for Art in America, Art Papers, Art 21, AsiaArtPacific, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, and other art publications.

Risa Puleo

In our social and professional worlds, we are all navigating tricky terrain while advocating for ourselves and our work. We hoped that aBoG could play the role of crowdsourcing and collecting different kinds of approaches to questions that we all navigate in this field.