Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, educator, and activist. He is a Professor of Sculpture and Social Practice at Queens College, City University of New York, Co-Director of Social Practice CUNY,Social Practice Queens | Faculty and Staff". alongside professor Chloë Bass, and Headquartered in the Center for the Humanities, at the Graduate Center.Collins, Kathleen. "Episode 70: The intersection of art and social justice" Indoor Voices Podcast. February 24, 2022. Between 2011 and 2014 he served as a charter member of the Home Workspace Curriculum Committee in Beirut, Lebanon."Encountering the Counterinstitution: Led by Resident Professor Gregory Sholette," Ashkal Alwan.MA Curatorial Practice. "Local Address: In Beirut: Art, Education, Institutions, Politics." School of Visual Arts NYC, March 16, 2017.
Sholette completed his PhD in the Memory Studies and Heritage Program, University of Amsterdam, in 2017. He holds an Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, San Diego (1995); a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union 1979; and was selected to be a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies (1995–1996) at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Studies Program (ISP).
Career Sholette co-founded several New York City based art collectives and group projects, including Political Art Documentation/Distribution or PAD/D (1980-1988)"Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D) Archive - 1983." MoMA Archives, Library and Research Collections. with Jerry Kearns and Lucy R. Lippard; REPOhistory (1989-2000);Lampert, Nicolas. "Permission to Disrupt: REPOhistory and the Tactics of Visualizing Radical Social Movements in Public Space." Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling. Edited by Jennifer A. Sandlin, Brian D. Schultz, Jake Burdick. Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2009. Gulf Labor Coalition (2011-ongoing) with Naeem Mohaiemen, Andrew Ross and Walid Raad;Grant, Daniel. "Illegal Projections on Guggenheim Museum Protest Labor Practices in the Middle East." Observer, April 28, 2016. and co-organized the projects Imaginary Archive (2010-ongoing),Melcher, Henry. "Help Imagine a "Past Whose Future Never Arrived" with Imaginary Archive in Kiev," The Architect's Newspaper, March 20, 2014. It's The Political Economy, Stupid! with Oliver Ressler (2012-2016);Štula, Vladimir Hunjak. "Review: Gregory Sholette and Oliver Ressler. It's the Political Economy, Stupid: The Global and Financial Crisis in Art and Theory." Croatian Political Science Review, Volume 52, Number 4-5, 2015, pages 230–232.Markus, David. “It's the Political Economy, Stupid." Art in America, March 27, 2012. and Dark Matter Supercollider Games (2015, S.a.L.E Docks cultural center, Venice, Italy).Baravalle, Marco. "Dark Matter Games: An Interview with Gregory Sholette, Kuba Szreder and Noah Fischer." Art Leaks Gazette, September 2017, 103-116.
Sholette is also an author and editor and has written for journals such as e-flux, Afterimage, Artforum, CAA Art Journal, FIELD, Hyperallergic, Oxford Art Journal, Texte zur Kunst, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, among others.
Art and exhibitions Sholette has curated several traveling exhibitions. While he was Curator of Education"Gregory Scholette." New Museum Digital Archive. https://archive.newmuseum.org/. at the New Museum in 1998, he curated the "Urban Encounters” exhibit, which highlighted the work of six Manhattan activist art collectives "generating political ferment and a lot of good art."Cotter, Holland. "ART IN REVIEW; 'Urban Encounters'." The New York Times, August 14, 1998. His conceptual group project Imaginary Archive (2010-2015) consists of a collection of documents that suggest an alternative social reality, takes "the notion of collaboration as a living, working material to be debated, explored and tested.""Wellington Collaboratorium: An Imaginary Archive." Scoop Independent News. June 8, 2010. The installation project has traveled the cities of Kyiv, Graz, Galway, Philadelphia, Friedrichshafen, and Wellington in New Zealand."Week 25: Dark Matter Archives & Imaginary Archive." Plausible Art Worlds. June 22, 2010.
In 2017, Sholette's solo exhibition Darker, a series of ink, pencil and acrylic wash drawings based on photographs of activist art and other political protests, was presented at Station Independent Projects. The project depicted "art activism in dark tones," and examined "how dark matter is visualized and activated in mixed media works that explore recent moments of protest."Larkin, Daniel. "Dark Matter as a Metaphor for Arts Activism." Hyperallergic. January 25, 2017. In 2022, he contributed to traveling exhibition Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities with "Insurrection," which featured "a short text repeatedly silkscreened on four adjacent panels that remain half-concealed under a lush thicket of synthetic flora native to Latin America."Moalemi, Mahan. "Archived Opposition: "Art for the Future” at Tufts University Art Galleries." Art in America. April 25, 2022.
Art criticism Although his work has been criticized for primarily focusing on the New York art scene,Triantafillou, Eric. "Eric Triantafillou reviews Delirium and Resistance." Critical Inquiry. University of Chicago Press, December 6, 2017. Sholette has made three principal contributions in the field of art criticism and aesthetics.
Tactical media Building upon the concept of tactical media, Sholette, along with Gene Ray, challenged the political relevance of tactical media and DIY creative strategies in the context of ongoing privatization and securitization in 2008. Sholette first addressed this topic in 2004 with The Interventionists: A Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, co-edited with Nato Thompson.Biles, Jeremy. "Review of The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, eds. Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette." Chicago Artists News. 2004.
Collective artistic labor In Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination, Sholette and Blake Stimson argue that the true potential of artistic collectivism can only be understood if it is historicized. Sholette and Stimson both claim that collaborative collectively produced artwork emerges as a central tool in challenging capitalism’s thrive for individualism, but that its form has undergone a fundamental change in the contemporary period following the collapse of modernism. In collaboration with art critics and scholars such as Jelena Stojanović, Reiko Tomii, Okwui Enwezor, Alan Moore and Brian Holmes, the authors push for the periodization of collectivism after modernity (Futurism, Productivism, Constructivism, and Surrealism), and in the post-World War II era. In this way, the book attempts "to understand the various forms of postwar collectivism as historically determined phenomena and to articulate the possibilities for contemporary collectivist art production."Glahn, Philip. "Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette's Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945." BOMB Magazine. April 1, 2007. While the book lacks "a systematic debate on the differences between the collaborative and the collectivist," it is nevertheless "a very rich, but sometimes overdescriptive and overdetailed, survey of collectivist artistic action in all parts of the world (only China, the Islamic world and Australia are missing)."Baetens, Jan. "Review of Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945," Leonardo, volume 41 number 3, 2008, pages 291–293. Project MUSE.
Dark matter and the political economy of the art world Sholette's art focuses on the forgotten, repressed or speculative genealogies of redundant, politically invisible cultural labor that actually maintains and reproduces the mainstream high art world marketplace. Sholette uses "dark matter" as a metaphor for these artistic practices and institutions, arguing that the visible, institutional art world is actually dependent on what it marginalizes and overshadows. He further developed this concept in Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2010). This book engages with the mainstream conditions of the art system through the definition of what Sholette later describes in Delirium and Resistance (2017) as "bare art." Borrowing from Giorgio Agamben's notion of bare lifeAgamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. "as the condition of bodies reduced to biological existence through being excluded from the category of political citizenship by the state,"Brynjolson, Noni. "Book Review: Gregory Sholette, Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Kim Charnley; foreword by Lucy R. Lippard," FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, 9, Winter 2018. Sholette defines bare art as art deprived of any socially transformative capacity and dedicated to financial management and the reproduction of the status quo.
Theorist Marc James Léger describes Sholette's concept of artistic dark matter as "the work of autonomous and participatory cultural production by amateur, informal, unofficial, autonomous, activist and non-institutional workers."Léger, Marc James. "Revenge of the Surplus." Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, volume 63 number 8, January 2012. Susan Ryan, Professor of Art History at Louisiana State University, interprets the term as involving art "so embedded in reality that it is off the art radar."Ryan, Susan Elizabeth. "Social Fabrics: Wearable + Media + Interconnectivity." Leonardo, volume 42 number 2, 2009, pages 114–116. Project MUSE. doi:10.1162/leon.2009.42.2.114. Art Historian Kuba Szreder at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw writes that the "mock institutions" Sholette points to are "native to artistic dark matter—research institutes, informal universities, collectives of urban gardeners, tribes of survivalists, temporary service points—each of which tends to operate in an institutional landscape ravaged by hostile forces of late capitalism."Szreder, Kuba. "Productive Withdrawals: Art Strikes, Art Worlds, and Art as a Practice of Freedom." e-flux Journal. Number 87. December 2017. Mockinstitutions mimic institutional structures as a form of critical reinvention, see for example the projects of artist Marina Naprushkina.
Criticism of work Artist David Beech at University of the Arts London writes that while Dark Matter "is an important and timely contribution," Sholette's economic arguments are flawed. For example, "there is a fundamental problem with" his “idea of an "art strike" because "[a]rt production is not wage labor."Beech, Dave. "Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture Gregory Sholette," The Journal of Modern Craft, volume 5 number 1, pages 115–118. Taylor and Francis Online doi:10.2752/174967812X13287914145712 Richard Lloyd, associate professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University, observes that in Dark Matter "one strains…to find an alternative model for doing "art and politics in the age of enterprise culture," as suggested by Sholette's investigations and lived experience as a politically conscious and apparently marginal artist (thus part of the dark matter)."Lloyd, Richard. "Into the Dark." Art Journal, volume 70, number 4, 2011, page 123. JSTOR. Lloyd further states that Sholette's depiction of his own projects "is impersonal—there is no first-person reflection on these projects or their efficacy, though one can glean ambivalence in his depictions of how easily these moments of aesthetic resistance are ultimately absorbed by the neoliberal system." Ultimately, Lloyd critically points out that "it becomes questionable whether the most prominent of these political interventions should be classed in the dark matter at all, or whether they form another sort of illuminated sphere among the art worlds."