#elsewhere museum

[hollowterrain]

Elsewhere Museum & Artist Residency Greensboro, NC

[elsewheremuseum]

Elsewhere's Museum and Residency connects artistic innovation and social impact. First...

- Elsewhere is everywhere, applying creativity across sectors in hospitals, businesses, city hall, schools, social services, neighborhoods, greenways, alleyways, farms, and museums!

- Over 3,000 youth each year participate in museum programming and after school activities.

- We host 67 public events a year-- that's more than one event a week!

And Foremost!

- QueerLab workshops and publications connect youth, media, and LGBTQ+ futures. 🌈

- Partnership with #BlackLivesMatter: Gate City connects artistic action with the urgency for social change. ✊

- Artist residencies at Union Square Nursing Campus will connect art and health for greater human care. 🚑

[elsewheremuseum]

Big Girl Wanna Play Too, Gina Alexandra Denton (Baltimore, MD). Baltimore Goes Elsewhere. August 2017. Installation view. Found fabric, bicycle wheel, PVC pipe, casters, poly fill.

Big Girl Wanna Play Too is a collection of modular, playable plush pieces. Denton created her interactive sculpture and accompanying jewelry forms as a reaction to the frustrations of being a larger-bodied woman in a culture that diminishes women both figuratively and literally, valuing thinness as the highest expression of feminine beauty. For more on Denton’s piece: goelsewhere.org/wanna-play-too

[elsewheremuseum]

Operations Intern #GloriaGomez’s creative practices intersect art and anthropology-- usually documenting forgotten items and archiving narratives.  Discover Gomez’s mapmaking and audio-visual work at today’s #ArtistTalks (9/23) at 5pm! 

[elsewheremuseum]

Create A Collection Vol. 1 Create A Collection was born out of a First Friday (9/4/15) activity where patrons assembled their own collections and documented them at Elsewhere Museum.

[queerlab]

Come and get it!

Contributor copies are in the mail and there are more copies available for purchase at Elsewhere.

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From July.

[elsewheremuseum]

RE: OPEN ENGAGEMENT

Reflections from Open Engagement, a national conference on Art and Social Practice.

George Scheer, Elsewhere Co-Founder + Director, June 2014

Last month a team of Elsewherians ventured to NY for Open Engagement, a three day conference on Art and Social Practice held at the Queens Museum.  It was an excellent gathering of artists from around the country doing spectacular work in the public sphere. Not only were there lectures, panels, and talks, but the conference hosted visits to fellow arts organizations, alongside opportunities for bowling and karaoke.  Our own Emily Ensminger, House(pitality) Curator, gave a wonderful presentation about hospitality as both an artistic practice and a performative feature in Elsewhere’s museum. 

A discussion about the role of artists in institutions and artist-made institutions was a significant topic of conversation in and out of conference sessions.  Throughout the weekend, artists presented their cross-over work in social justice, city planning, museum education, and endeavors to create their own institutions.  The conference showcased a broad spectrum of these practices while offering serious critique about the value of artist labor, the difficulty to monetize social capital, and need for a fair wage economy for arts workers. 

For my part, I continue to think about Elsewhere at the forefront of a movement that is creating a new kind institutional imaginary.  More than an artist space, residency, or museum, we, alongside others in the field, are pioneering the way institutions can be more responsive, participatory, and supportive of artists and publics. In this new frontier, we must re-imagine the role of an arts organization as integral to daily life. What would it look like if arts organizations were no longer a place for simply presenting artists and artworks? How could arts organizations model more integrated practices between creatives and administrations, greater connection to activism and community leadership, less hierarchical strategies for fundraising and decision making? What if arts organizations could operate more directly as producers of social action? What would an organization look like whose mission it was to place artists in all sectors of our community and in all parts of civic and public life? 

These questions are guiding what appears to be an emerging field or new wave of artist run organizations. I can only hope that the organizational practices we build today will have a far reaching effect on the way we deliver service and approach social challenges across cultural sectors. I suspect that in 20 years we will have a whole new definition for the term 'artist' and a different understanding of the role artists play in public life.