Here and Not There is led by Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research Faculty Leader Chloë Bass (Queens College, Department of Art and Art History), a conceptual artist and an Assistant Professor of Art at Queens College, where she co-directs Social Practice Queens​.

Chloë Bass’ Here and Not There ​ is a collaborative study of the family photograph as a media form that holds significant power to broaden notions of kinship to include whole cities, shedding light on sometimes invisible structural and intrapersonal relationships. Using art and lived experience as research tools, Bass will work with collaborating individuals and institutions to gather photos and create albums that inspire private and public dialog about how socially constructed notions of “family” inform the way city dwellers understand their place in changing urban environments. Her artistic research will include elements of pedagogical engagement in partnership with the Queens Museum and Social Practice Queens.

Events, Articles, Research & Scholarship:

Art As Social Action: 10 Years of Social Practice Queens Exhibition at the Queens Museum from Wed, Mar 24, 2021 – Sun, Jul 25, 2021

Watch this video tour of Art As Social Action: 10 Years of Social Practice Queens exhibition by curator Chloë Bass:

Social Practice Queens (SPQ) is a unique degree program and partnership between Queens College CUNY and the Queens Museum, focused on the intersection of art and social justice. Art As Social Action honors this decade-long pedagogical experiment by featuring interdisciplinary projects by nine local and international SPQ alumni: Alix Camacho-Vargas, Floor Grootenhuis (with Joel Murphy), Cody Herrmann, Jeff Kasper, Naomi Kuo, Julian Louis Phillips, Erin Turner, Pedro Felipe Vintimilla Burneo, and the Workers Art Coalition.

April 29th: All Things Must Pass: Discussion led by Cristina Ferrigno as part of Art As Social Action: 10 Years of SPQ

In conjunction with the exhibition Art As Social Action: 10 Years of Social Practice Queens, celebrating the longstanding relationship between the socially engaged Queens College MFA program and the Queens Museum, we are pleased to co-sponsor All Things Must Pass. This Zoom event will take the form of a sharing circle, featuring artists who make work about grief or remembrance. Current SPQ candidate, Cristina Ferrigno will lead this conversation based on her activity zine of the same name. She will utilize the sections of her zine as a jumping off point for a dialogue on communal mourning, mental health and examining bereavement as a spectrum.

This event will take place on Zoom, to join please RSVP at this link.

Led by Cristina Ferrigno, this roundtable discussion will invite the exhibition’s curator Chloë Bass, and artists Janice Quiles Reyes, Rebecca Shapass, and Liene Bosquê to share their thoughts on individual and societal grieving over the course of the last year. The event will be followed by Q&A with attendees.

This Way to Chloë Bass’s Outdoor Art Show

Read "This Way to Chloë Bass's Outdoor Art Show," an article in The New York Times about Chloë Bass's exhibition "Wayfinding," a conceptual art installation in Harlem’s St. Nicholas Park (on view til 9/27).

“Wayfinding”revolves around three questions: “How much of care is patience? How much of life is coping? How much of love is attention?” Three billboards, positioned throughout the park, pose these queries, in gray type on mirrored surfaces. They reflect the park and the surrounding city, and can thus almost disappear. The texts can be hard to see — as such questions can be hard to answer.

“Something that reflects your landscape as it’s changing offers a gentle interpretation of what the monument can mean,” the artist Chloë Bass said of her work.

“I was creating at a monumental scale at a moment when monuments are seen as an imposition,” the artist Chloë Bass said.

Wayfinding refers to architectural and graphic features that allow people to situate themselves — like signage in large government buildings or hospitals, for example. Ms. Bass’s signs along walkways bear reflective text on matte silver backgrounds. By repeating and varying wording, Ms. Bass explores various intimacies, some ominous. One reads, “There are times when I have agreed with you only in order to goto sleep.” Another: “There are times when I have agreed with you only in order to stay alive.”

‘Language Like a Pickaxe’: An Interview with Chloë Bass

Read "Language Like A Pickaxe" an interview with Chloë Bass and Emily Raboteau in the New York Review of Books here as Bass discusses how her project fits into her larger body of work, and how her practice has changed as a result of the global pandemic.

“A huge part of my practice is to get people to look more closely at what’s around them, including, but not exclusively, at themselves.”

-Conceptual artist Chloë Bass talks about her conceptual art installation in Harlem’s St. Nicholas Park (on view til 9/27).

Queens College CUNY Mutual Aid Student Support

Chloë Bass is part of the Queens College Mutual Aid group raising money for students affected by the COVID-19 Pandemic. The Queens College Mutual Aid group is an informal coalition of faculty members, students, and staff from Queens College CUNY, and is coordinated via CERRU (The Center for Ethnic, Racial and Religious Understanding at QC). Click here to learn more about this mutual aid effort, to share, or to donate directly to the cause.

More About Chloë Bass

• To explore and learn more about the artist's work, visit Chloë Bass's website here.
  

• Click here to for an extensive bio and CV.
  

• Follow Chloë Bass on Twitter at @chloerbas
  
  
• Visit Chloë Bass: Wayfinding | presented by The Studio Museum in Harlem, the conceptual artist's first institutional solo exhibition.
  
  
• Visit Social Practice Queens, which Chloë Bass co-runs with Gregory Sholette. SPQ is pedagogical experiment and educational platform that supports the integration of studio art with interdisciplinary research, community collaboration, environmental justice and critical urbanism.
  
  
• Read a review of Chloë Bass's "Wayfinding" in Art Forum here.

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 (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), has recently concluded a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), and will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place (2018 – 2022), an investigation of intimacy at the scale of immediate families.

Chloë has held numerous fellowships and residencies: she is a 2020 – 2022 Faculty Fellow for the Seminar in Public Engagement at the Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center), a 2020 – 2022 Lucas Art Fellow at Montalvo Art Center, and was a 2019 Art Matters Grantee. Previous recent honors include a residency include a residency at Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, the Knockdown Center, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James Gallery, and elsewhere. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review, and Artnews among others. Her monograph was published by The Operating System in December 2018; she also has a chapbook, #sky #nofilter, forthcoming from DoubleCross Press. Her short-form writing has been published on Hyperallergic, Arts.Black, and the Walker Reader. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she co-runs Social Practice Queens with Gregory Sholette.