Social Strategies: Practice, Reflection, Archive February 5, 2026 5PM–7PM AOK Library Gallery How can we collect, preserve, and learn from art practices that aren’t primarily “objects”—projects that live in relationships, events, conversations, care work, and civic collaboration? This panel will open with a brief introduction to social practice as a contemporary art form and consider why archives, memory, and data are central when the work is ephemeral, community-based, or resistant to being “captured.” In a moderated discussion, participants will consider what counts as evidence, who gets to tell the story, what gets kept or lost, and how physical archives and digital collections might support community accountability—not just institutional storage. This program corresponds with “Social Strategies,” a collaborative research project organized by CADVC, and is hosted and co-sponsored by the AOK Library gallery. The public event is supported by the Orser Center for the Public Humanities and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences and the Citizens of Baltimore County. Discussants: Chloë Bass Jen de los Reyes Pablo Helguera Abigail Satinsky Daniel Tucker Dan S. Wang Introduced by Rebecca Uchill and Stephanie Smith Moderated by Beth Saunders About Chloë Bass Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She is currently working on Since feeling is first (2023 – ongoing), a series of works examining intimacy at the scale of the courtroom and the law. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent projects with Creative Time, the Buffalo AKG, Skirball Cultural Center, California African-American Museum / Art + Practice, Henry Art Gallery, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, The Kitchen, and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at chloebass.com. photo credit: Naima Green About Jen de los Reyes Jen de los Reyes is an artist, educator, writer, and community arts organizer. With roots in the Riot Grrrl and DIY music scene, her practice incorporates pedagogical, ecological, and organizational methodologies. She divides her time between Chicago, where she founded Garbage Hill Farm, and Ithaca, NY where she collaborates with artist Oscar Rene Cornejo on LAND. About Pablo Helguera Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. Helguera’s work incorporates pedagogy, sociology and theater and literary strategies. His project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between and covering almost 20,000 miles. Helguera is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received the Creative Capital, Art Matters, Franklin Furnace and Blade of Grass fellowships, as well as the First International Award of Participatory Art from the Region Emilia Romagna (Bologna). Helguera has exhibited and performed individually in many museums and biennials around the world. He is the author of several books including Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011), The Parable Conference (2014) and An Atlas of Commonplaces (2015). He holds a PhD from Kingston University, London, and an honorary PhD from the Kansas Art Institute. About Abigail Satinsky Abigail Satinsky is the Program Officer and Curator of Arts & Culture at the Wagner Foundation, based in Cambridge, MA. Formerly, she was the Curator & Head of Public Engagement at Tufts University Art Galleries where organized a variety of exhibitions and public projects including with artists Sofía Córdova, Museum of Capitalism, Faheem Majeed, Josh MacPhee, and Elizabeth James-Perry, amongst others, as well as co-curating Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities (with Erina Duganne), which toured nationally, and focused on the 1980s artist-activist campaign against US intervention in Central America and its ramifications in the present. At Tufts University Art Galleries, she was also the founding Program Director for the Collective Futures Fund, supporting artist-run projects in Greater Boston through The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. About Daniel Tucker Daniel Tucker makes documentaries, publications, classes, exhibitions and events and his writings and lectures on the intersections of art and politics and his collaborative art projects have been published and presented widely. His recent book Beyond Glass Cases (Common Ground, 2025) focused on the exhibitions lab initiative of the oldest library in the united states and his latest co-authored book “Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic” (Soberscove, 2022) was picked as a “Best Art Book of 2022” by Hyperallergic. He has led graduate programs in museum studies and socially-engaged art for the last decade and is the Research Network Chair of the international Arts in Society Research Network. He is currently a fellow with the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania and the Engaged Humanities Studio at Swarthmore College. He recently developed the Curating Engagement Retreat with support of Wagner Foundation and Public Trust and since 2023 he has organized the ongoing Eco-Social Salon, Site-Seeing, and Screening Series in Philadelphia. Daniel Tucker About Dan S. Wang Dan S. Wang is an artist, writer, and organizer. Chinese-Midwestern by birth, Dan’s art work has been shown in six solo exhibitions and scores of group shows, and has inhabited venues ranging from museums and art centers to street demonstrations and guerrilla pop-ups. His texts have been published in books, journals, webzines, exhibition catalogues, as commissioned art projects, and in many of artists’ publications. He has lectured internationally on topics ranging from the new geographies of power, to transcontextual art activism, to the contradictory cultural politics of race and identification. Dan was one of eight founding keyholders of the Chicago experimental cultural space Mess Hall. Along with Anthony Romero and Daniel Tucker, he co-edited Last-Gaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic, named by Hyperallergic as one of their top twenty art books of 2022. About Stephanie Smith Curator and writer Stephanie Smith shapes collaborative, multi-disciplinary projects that are grounded in specific contexts and linked to global practices. Her curatorial interests extend from ecology, sustainability, place, and hospitality, to her current research on Chicagoland: Property, Speculation, and Socially Engaged Art for her PhD with the University of Amsterdam. Smith has held senior roles at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and VCU’s Institute for Contemporary Art in Richmond, VA; and served as contributing editor at Afterall journal. She is a member of the collective Hase’, which works closely with the Awi’nakola Foundation. Smith is a 2025–2026 Visiting Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society Stephanie Smith; Photo: Erielle Bakkum Photography Visitor Information For links to maps, directions, and parking information, visit: cadvc.umbc.edu/visit-us Our exhibitions and events are free and open to the public for full participation by all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or any other protected category under applicable federal law, state law, and the University’s nondiscrimination policy. If you need specific accommodations at one of our events, whether in person or online, or to experience an exhibition, please contact CADVC at cadvc@umbc.edu or 410-455-3188 as soon as possible.
