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ARTISTS IN CONTEXT is a flexible organizational framework designed to assemble artists and other creative thinkers across disciplines to conceptualize new ways of representing and acting upon the critical issues of our time.  The Prospectus is the main project of Artists in Context, and is a curated, multimedia collection of works through which artists collaborate with creative thinkers from other fields to propose innovative ways they and others might intervene in major debates on global, national and local/regional scales. More information on the project can be found on the current Prospectus site. Artists in Context is a project of The Arts Company.

This website is an archive of previous AIC activities.

Click here to link to the current AIC website.

 

kikuchi head shotHiroko Kikuchi combines community development strategies with conceptual and performance art methodologies to engage participants in a personal, reflective and prospective process. Her projects intervene in existing social structures and systems while creating a distinct pattern of social, cultural and economic experiences. Hiroko currently serves as the Director of Community Building for the Aichi Triennale. She also has had roles as one of the founding design and implementation team members of WAWA PROJECT, A Social Creative Platform for Opportunity, A Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami Recovery Project sponsored by the Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry; the Education & Outreach Coordinator at the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and the Teen Programs Manager at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. As a consultant, she helped develop the Chinatown Cultural Development Strategy for the Washington, DC, Office of Planning and has led projects for the Boston Public Library Foundation and the Vietnamese American Civic Association, among others. She has served as an arts educator for numerous organizations; is adjunct faculty at Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan; and is a contributing writer to Public Art Magazine, Japan. She is a cofounder and Principal of Creative Ecology Partners, a hybrid art, design and community development studio and consulting firm providing expertise and innovation in community development, public participation and arts and cultural planning to nonprofits, foundations, municipal government and others.

Through her solo work, Kikuchi builds on the legacy of Fluxus-inspired instruction work and performance art, addressing themes of cultural and social identity. Her recent solo performances have been included in festivals and shows such as Open Art International Performance Festival (Beijing, China); Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice (University of California, Santa Cruz); Deformes – Primera Bienal Internacional de Peformance (Santiago, Chile, 2007); Contaminate (Boston, USA); Corporal Heat: International Performance Festival (Boston, USA); Castle of Imagination (Poland); Tremor (Bogotá, Colombia); among others. Collaborative projects include: creating Chinatown™ , a site specific installation in Philadelphia’s Chinatown using Glidden’s stock paint color “Chinatown Orange” as a way to interrogate its naming history; cofounding The National Bitter Melon Council , an extensive project originating in the South End neighborhood in Boston that utilizes its namesake vegetable to investigate the concept of bitterness in all its forms and cultural permutations that received the Artadia Award; and designing and leading Observatory: Oakland , an experimental observation project designed to reveal the ephemeral or overlooked, and yet essential, qualities of neighborhoods throughout Oakland, CA. More information about Kikuchi can be found at: www.linkedin.com/in/hirokokikuchi and www.creativeecology.net

 

liu head shotJeremy Liu is a community builder/organizer, urban planner, real estate developer, artist and technology designer with a passion for civic, social, cultural and political entrepreneurship. He is currently Principal of Creative Ecology Partners and previously served as the executive director of two nationally recognized community development corporations. He is also a cofounder of The National Bitter Melon Council .

He has worked for and with communities to collectively and creatively confront issues of social and environmental equity, sustainable development, affordable housing and community empowerment. In community development, he implemented the formal adoption of the Social Determinants of Health as a strategic policy framework by a community development corporation, among the first to aggressively to aggressively pursue this transformative path for a 40-year-old field. He has overseen multiple business lines, 110 staff and a budget of $10 million in annual revenue and more than $150 million in assets. He also designed and raised initial capital for the first real estate investment fund to be screened for positive social determinants of health impacts. He created a lightweight, open-source tool for a distributed, crowd-sourced language interpreter services platform with the MIT Media Lab, and was part of the Knight Foundation-funded Center for Civic Media at MIT. Jeremy is one of the original designers of Participatory Chinatown, an online-offline hybrid game for community planning in Boston’s Chinatown that was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition grant. Most recently, he succeeded in shifting the overarching organizational strategy of a 36-year-old community development corporation to a social epidemiology framework.

Liu has written and lectured in the US and abroad about participatory planning, technology and the·community development role for arts and culture, and he regularly writes for Rooflines, the housing·and community development blog for Shelterforce Magazine , a publication of the National Housing·Institute. He has served on review panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National·Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the New England Foundation for·the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Commission and ArtPlace. He has received an Artadia Artist·Prize, a Visible Republic Artist Grant, LEF Foundation Contemporary Work Fund and Creative·Work Fund grants. He has also led participatory arts- and technology-based community·development projects in the US and Asia. His collaborative projects include: Chinatown™ , The·National Bitter Melon Council and Observatory: Oakland.

He chaired the successful campaigns of Sam Yoon, the first Asian American to run for and win elected office in the City of Boston in 2005 and 2007; he also chaired the groundbreaking Yoon campaign for mayor in 2008. He is a 2009-2012 Barr Foundation Fellow; he currently serves on the boards of IGO Car Sharing, The Center for Neighborhood Technology, The Interaction Institute for Social Change and The New England Foundation for the Arts.

More about Jeremy can be found at: www.linkedin.com/in/jeremycliu/ and www.creativeecology.net