How Do We Study in Public?

For over two decades, Claire Bishop, Tania Bruguera, Tom Finkelpearl, Pablo Helguera, and Gregory Sholette have developed projects that simultaneously exploit and critique pedagogical methods and structures. Organized by Gregory Sholette and Tom Finkelpearl, this event brings all five together on February 12 to confront a pressing question: What becomes of counter-institutional pedagogies when the institutions housing them face fundamental transformation—not through progressive reimagining, but through systematic defunding and ideological assault? What have we learned, and what new critiques does this unsettling moment demand? Under fast-changing circumstances, exactly how do we study in public?

Claire Bishop

Claire Bishop is presidential professor of art history at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship won the College Art Association’s 2013 Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism. In 2024 she won a Guggenheim Fellowship and published two books: Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and Merce Cunningham’s Events: Key Concepts. Her books and articles have been translated into twenty languages, and she is a Contributing Editor to Artforum.

Tania Bruguera

The installation and performance artist Tania Bruguera researches ways in which art can be applied to everyday political life, focusing on the transformation of social affect into political effectiveness. Her long-term projects have been intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education, and politics. Bruguera earned her MFA in performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the founder and director of Cátedra Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art School), the first performance studies program in Latin America. She is Senior Lecturer in Media and Performance at Harvard University.

Tom Finkelpearl

Tom Finkelpearl organized fifteen shows at PS1 in the 1980s, managed over 100 public art commissions at the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) in the 1990s, spearheaded a 50,000 square foot expansion as Director of the Queens Museum (2002-2014), and oversaw the city’s cultural policy and funding when he returned to DCLA as Commissioner (2014-2020). Since then, was a consultant for the Mellon Foundation (2020-21), and was appointed Social Practice Teaching Scholar in Residence at SP CUNY (2023-present). He co-curated a show of Christine Sun Kim’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2025) and Walker Art Center (2026). Currently he is working on his third book, Recast the Museum (working title) in collaboration with the artist Pablo Helguera.

Pablo Helguera

Pablo Helguera is a visual artist living in New York. His work involves performance, drawing, pedagogy, installation, theater and other literary strategies. He has been head of public programs at various museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the MCA Chicago. He is the author of many books including Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011) and The Parable Conference (2014). He is currently Assistant Professor of Arts Management and Entrepreneurship at The College of the Performing Arts at The New School. He writes a weekly column titled Beautiful Eccentrics.

Gregory Sholette

Gregory Sholette is a New York City-based artist, author, educator, and activist. He is a co-founder of the collectives Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PAD/D, 1980-1988), REPOhistory (1989-2000), and Gulf Labor Coalition (2010-), as well as co-curator of Imaginary Archive, which documents a past whose future never arrived. His books include the highly cited Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2010), as well as Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (2017), The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art (2022), and forthcoming from MIT Press, The Radical Unpresent: Cultural Resistance in a Fractured World (2026). Together with artist Chloë Bass, he co-directs Social Practice City University of New York at the CUNY Graduate Center, a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative, where he is also affiliated doctoral faculty in Environmental Psychology.

Produced by Social Practice CUNY, How Do We ______ in Public? is a free public programming series of four experimental events taking place across New York City throughout 2026. Organized by the SPCUNY core team of artists, educators, and scholars, the series responds to contemporary crises shaping the cultural field, including the defunding and targeting of public institutions and the erosion of shared civic space. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the series tests new forms of social practice in real time, foregrounding experimentation, solidarity, and public accountability.

Across four interconnected programs, How Do We ______ in Public? asks how we study, move, keep secret(s), and continue together in public when the infrastructures that once supported those actions are fraying.

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