The Social Practice Workbook – Artist Talk with Jen Delos Reyes (watch it online now!)
Posted by Josh on March 21, 2013 · Leave a Comment
Jen Delos Reyes–a Portland-based artist and educator–has curated an exhibition here at Civic Space called The Social Practice Workbook. This exhibition is a collaborative effort between students of Portland State University (PSU) and takes the form of an assemble-it-yourself display of short writings and assignments from PSU’s Art & Social Practice MFA Program. Jen took [...]
Category Blog, Slider · Tags art, Jen Delos Reyes, presentation, social, social practice, UWindsor
Upcoming Exhibition & Artist Talk: The Art and Social Practice Workbook with Jen Delos Reyes + Many More!
Posted by BCL on March 15, 2013 · Leave a Comment
Introducing: The Art and Social Practice Workbook (March 20 – April 7, 2013 @ CIVIC SPACE) A new exhibition featuring the Art and Social Practice Workbook; an edited volume of assignments from students, faculty, visiting artists, and alumni of Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice MFA Program, comes to CIVIC SPACE! Visitors of the exhibition will be [...]
Category Events · Tags BCL, civic space, Jen Delos Reyes, PSU, social practice, workbook
BCL @ PSU MFA Art and Social Practice Conversation Series
Posted by BCL on February 4, 2013 · Leave a Comment
Justin heads to Portland to present at the PSU MFA Art and Social Practice Conversation Series this week. The PASPWACS is a brand new series of presentations by people and organizations related to Art and Social Practice including artists, non-profits, writers, and architects. The presentations are free and open to the public and take place [...]
Category Blog, Events · Tags BCL, conversation, Portland, PSU, research, social practice, talk
Sue Bell Yank on Art and Social Practice
This is part of an ongoing set of one-question emails sent to people we know, or would like to get to know, about things that interest us and inform our collective practice. They’ll be featured on the site weekly, usually on Fridays. These questions are more about unfolding ideas than about the people we’re asking, but we do [...]
Category Blog, One Question · Tags BCL, interview, research, social practice, Sue Bell Yank
BCL Interview on Bad at Sports!
Posted by BCL on January 5, 2012 · Leave a Comment
Danielle and Justin were recently interviewed by Sarah Margolis-Pineo, a curator and collections fellow at Cranbrook Art Museum, Homework conference participant, and writer for Bad at Sports (an incredible contemporary art blog, podcast, and interview series). Founded in 2005 by Duncan MacKenzie, Richard Holland, and Amanda Browder, Bad at Sports (B@S) now features over 20 principle collaborators and is a weekly [...]
Category Blog · Tags Bad at Sports, BCL, discussion, interview, Sarah Margolis-Pineo, social practice
Power House Detroit: Artists as Community Leaders
Posted by Justin on November 30, 2010 · 3 Comments
I’ve written about Power House over in Detroit before. Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert of Design99 started this Hamtramck-based neighbourhood project a couple of years ago now. Able to take advantage of the radically declining real estate market, they bought up a house for $100 and have since been working in the neighbourhood on small [...]
Category Notes · Tags community, context, Detroit, leaders, neighbourhood, Power House, public art, social practice
Creative Time Summit: Some Reflection with 4 Days of Distance
Posted by Justin on October 14, 2010 · Leave a Comment
There’s a lot to say about the Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice 2, though I’m not really sure where to start. You should start by visiting the Creative Time Summit site and watching the presentations for yourself, then you should read the excellent recap essay by Gregory Sholette and the somewhat brief, but [...]
Category Blog · Tags Creative Time Summit, ideas, Nato Thompson, New York, presentations, public practice, research, social practice, theory
Open Engagement, Group Work: The Collective Impetus
Posted by Justin on May 10, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Danielle and I will head to Portland State University this weekend to participate in Open Engagement, the conference that asks questions like, “Does socially engaged art have a responsibility to create public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability?” We’ll be [...]
Category Events · Tags BCL, collectivism, conference, group work, panel, pdx, Portland, research, social practice
Save the City: an overview
The Save the City project aims to create a concentrated series of positive community-based activities facilitated by Broken City Lab in collaboration with community members. The project will address a number of issues and ideas specific to Windsor, Ontario through various collaborative community-based activities. As Windsor is situated in precarious economic, cultural, and geographic positions, the [...]
Category Blog, Save the City · Tags activities, BCL, community, Events, project, research, Save the City, social practice, Windsor, workshops
Love in a Cemetery: Art as Examination
Posted by Justin on January 5, 2010 · 2 Comments
If you haven’t already signed up for the Art&Education email list, do it now. Also, make sure you tick off at least the E-Flux list too. It’s nearly always a joy to get these in my inbox, always making me wish I had more time to read, to apply, to attend these exhibitions and schools and conferences [...]
Category Blog · Tags Allan Kaprow, art, community, context, exhibition, LA, questions, social practice, survey






![Magnetic Planters Finished! Our magnetic planters have finally been finished and installed (temporarily) along the alley that runs behind our headquarters. Consider yourself cordially invited to take a planter or two and move them to some other space in the city in need of a micro-garden. Cristina’s finally back from Italy, it was awesome to catch up and [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/IMG_9407-150x150.jpg)
![Cardstock Handwriting Stencils from our Vinyl Cutter (test phase) We’ll be picking up on this again today as we continue to experiment with cutting stencils of our handwriting on cardstock from our vinyl cutter, the Graphtec ce5000-60. These are very early tests, but will hopefully lay the groundwork for some processes and projects later on in the summer or fall. No big surprise, trying [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/wpid18816-IMG_0170-150x150.jpg)

![A Toolkit for Saving a City Though we have a lot more to say about Save the City than I’ll attempt right now, you should know that we put together a toolkit that describes the processes we figured out throughout the last five months. We put together a nice one-page fold up list of instructions, so to speak, for how one [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/IMG_9640-150x150.jpg)
![Starting New Projects: Researching the Basics of Arduino + LCDs As part of a Canada Council for the Arts Inter-Arts Research and Creation grant I received, I will be documenting my work on the project through here, as I anticipate it will cross over into other projects we work on and came out of past projects we’ve completed. This project comes out of Broken City [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_1669-sm-150x150.jpg)
![Tools for Actions I saw an ad for CCA‘s Actions: What You Can Do With the City exhibition in the current issue of Border Crossings and the title got the best of me. I quickly flipped through the rest of the magazine, then went about exploring the Tools for Actions website. On the site, you’ll find 99 actions, ranging from [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/picture-7-150x150.png)
![Learning About the Emerging Emergencies of North Bay We’re in North Bay on a residency as we prepare for an exhibition this fall at the White Water Gallery. After spending Monday getting acquainted with the downtown, we ventured further out. Of course, we had to stop at the North Bay arch. Getting a sense of these kinds of structural parts of the city [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/wpid18911-IMG_0446-150x150.jpg)
![Later Nights, since it’s summer now Michelle and I spent hours and hours together yesterday. With everyone’s schedules fairly ridiculous at the moment, we’re trying to steal what little time we can to keep working. Lately, the time that we’ve all spent together has been framed exclusively almost exclusively by planning for Save the City or organizing the Storefront Residencies for [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/IMG_9749-sm-150x150.jpg)
![How we use this site for research (in-part) Over the last week or so, we’ve added a few new things to our little website here. It’s funny because there’s a lot of research that goes on in the background, in terms of things we come across and don’t blog about, ideas that we email to one another, and documenting our process and posting [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/bcl-sidebar-dec09-150x150.jpg)
![Conflux 2009 Day 2 Day 2 of our trek to New York was filled with excellent adventures, some more great lectures, and lots of discussion. It was amazing to get to see some of the artists we’ve talked about before right here on the blog, and it continued to inform what we were continuing to try to define as [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/IMG_02913-150x150.jpg)
![Single-Use Camera Tests: Captioning the City Kevin and Josh ventured out with a single-use camera to test what the temporary installations would look like, as we continue to prep for Thursday’s launch of the Letter Library here at CIVIC SPACE. Also, film is fun. The letters look great and the photos aren’t too bad either. They definitely have a colder tone [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/43390001-150x150.jpg)
![All Tomorrow’s Problems on Holiday for Tonight, see you on April 8th All Tomorrow’s Problems take a short break this week. We’ll be back on Monday, April 8th at 7pm to tackle problems big and small. Come hang out with us. Here are just a couple of examples of the things we’ve done recently in exploring how to bring people together to talk through their concerns with [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/ATP-break-150x150.jpg)
![Oversized Envelopes: Working on Distributing an Imaginary Platform It was just Rosina and I on Wednesday night, but we didn’t let that stop us from starting some new work! I remember when I first posted / talked about the Imaginary Platform, Rosina had seemed keen on figuring out a way to distribute it. So, that’s how we spent the evening, working through ideas [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/IMG_3495-150x150.jpg)

![Anxious to Explore the Border Bookmobile’s Winter Reading Room I stopped by the Ecohouse today (where our collective studio is housed) to check out one of our new neighbours — The Border Bookmobile Winter Reading Room. Collected and curated by Border Bookmobile founder, Lee Rodney, the books assembled as part of the winter reading room are going to be incredible helpful for our upcoming [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/IMG_5136-150x150.jpg)

![9:30pm tonight, an open conversation on the walls of city hall, you’re invited It would be great if you could come. We’ll be at 350 City Hall Sq West, across the street from Charles Clark Square at 9:30pm. We’ll have a projector and a bunch of bristol board. We want to look at what public consultation could look like and how we might imagine the changes we want [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/bcl-citycounsel-150x150.jpg)