Social PRACTICE

This work operates through compound environments where public and private activity intersect. Studio practice and public-facing work form a single continuum of making, reflection, co-design, and shared authorship.

I develop collaborative studio environments with communities, working with repurposed and surplus materials. The waste stream functions as a material commons and working archive. Materials are sorted, redistributed, and reassembled through shared procedures, allowing participants to engage directly with use, value, and transformation.

These studios operate through structured participation. Activities are organized around slow-making, repetition, and collective decision-making. Participants work across differences in age, ability, and experience, producing shared forms through assembly, modification, and exchange.

Public expression within these projects functions as a material and social act. Shared making produces conditions in which visibility, authorship, and participation are redistributed. These forms—performances, parades, installations, and gatherings—operate not only as presentations, but as processes that shape how individuals relate to one another and to their environments.

The work draws on long-standing cultural practices in which making, gathering, and expression are inseparable from social and ecological well-being. Rather than isolating creativity as an individual act, these projects situate it within collective processes that sustain connection, continuity, and care.

Over the past twenty-five years, I have developed more than forty community-based studios in rural and urban contexts, often within communities with limited access to creative infrastructure. Many of these projects take place in neurologically diverse and cross-ability environments, where methods are adapted to support multiple modes of engagement.

I have also worked with New Mexico Historic Sites coordinating large-scale cultural events, and with the Northern Rio Grande National Heritage Area developing heritage-based programs and cultural festivals. This work extends my practice into regional and institutional contexts, where collaborative production, public expression, and cultural transmission operate at scale.

This work has also contributed to building reuse infrastructure, including the Chicago Creative Reuse Exchange and the Creative Reuse Warehouse in Englewood with Envision Unlimited. These initiatives extend studio practice into systems that support material circulation and access.

Social Fiber Projects connect this work across sites in the United States, Turkey, Ethiopia, Germany, and Guatemala. These projects operate through long-term collaboration, shared labor, and ongoing exchange. What develops is not a singular artwork, but a set of conditions in which materials and participants are brought into relation, producing forms that emerge through collective use over time.