GAC 355G—Art and Design as Community Practice

Students participate in micro-residency with Snowtown Research Collective and devise art, design, action, curatorial projects that engage with Snowtown, a demolished multi-racial neighborhood in PVD.

In this project-based course, students participated in a micro-residency with the Snowtown Research Collective, a group of local community historians, archivists, and activists engaged in a multi-year effort to produce new research on Snowtown, a multi-racial Providence neighborhood (steps from RISD) that was demolished towards the end of the 19th century.

The course explored histories, theories, methods and strategies of community practice, centering critical questions about ethics, relationality, perception, and power hierarchies. What are ethical guidelines for community practice art and design? What do we mean by the word “community,” and how do we situate ourselves as insiders or outsiders in relation to perceived communities? These questions of community also shaped the 2023 lecture series and have been in dialog with our work on Systems of Care.

Spring 2023 — 3 Credit Studio

Faculty
Marisa Brown

Partners
Snowtown Research Collective
Public Archaeology Lab