Anytime, Anyplace: Art Collectives in the 21st Century - A Symposium :: March 13-14, 2008 :: Pasadena City College, Pasadena, CA :: All events are free and open to the public. Register here.

Artists’ groups representing some of the finest examples of 21st century collaborative art practice will participate in a two-day symposium. The symposium will examine artists’ collectives that focus on social, political and environmental issues and those groups’ strategies for engaging individuals and communities. “The artist groups in ‘Anytime, Anyplace’ work to challenge systems of power and accepted strategies typically adopted by young artists,” said Claude Willey, organizer of the symposium (and co-founder of the collective MOISTURE). “These cultural agents are aggressively pushing the boundaries of art, what it should do, what form it should take, and how it must interface with the struggles of our contemporary world. A network of collaborative groups has spread around the globe, exchanging knowledge, entering into conversations, and expanding the range of communication usually associated with art production.”

Keynote Speaker: Grant Kester, critic and art historian, and associate professor of art history at UCSD. A noted author, Kester’s current book project is “The One and the Many: Agency and Identity in Contemporary Collaborative Art.”

Representatives from three art collectives will make presentations to the symposium:

1. Chicago-based Temporary Services, a group of three artists, produces creative exhibitions, events, projects and publications aimed at creating socially dynamic situations and spaces for dialogue. The artists are Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer.
2. Futurefarmers, a San Francisco-based inter-disciplinary collective internationally known for a practice that extends across conventional artistic categories.
3. Temporary Travel Office is Ryan Griffis, who teaches new media art at the University of Illinois, with Sarah Ross, an artist whose works focus on myths of health, safety and cleanliness that surface in the physical and visual structures of everyday space.

The final session of the symposium will be a tour with Temporary Travel Office to former 1984 Los Angeles Olympics sites.

The “Anytime, Anyplace” symposium kicks off a week-long Artist In Residence program at the PCC Art Gallery featuring events presented by Futurfarmers including film screenings, lectures by scientists and student-centered workshops and labs.