Join us Wednesday, October 12th, 2011 at 8:00pm for a conversation about artists’ collectives and art activism with Alan W. Moore, author of Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City, and David Little, curator of Photography and New Media at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The discussion will touch on how artists work as activists and in collectives today, as well as the historical legacy of groups like Colab, the Art Workers Coalition, Art & Language, and Group Material, who challenged the art world’s attitudes towards artists and the institutions surrounding them.

Alan W. Moore is an artist, critic and art historian who has worked with the artists’ group Colab and helped start the cultural center ABC No Rio. Moore has contributed to several books on activist art and art collectives of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, including Collectivism after Modernism, Resistance: A Political History of the Lower East Side, and Alternative Art NY, edited by Julie Ault. His book Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City was published this year by Autonomedia. Moore currently runs “House Magic”, a website collecting information on self-organizing, occupied social centers, at https://sites.google.com/site/housemagicbfc/.

David E. Little is Curator and Head of the Department of Photography and New Media at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He has served as Associate Director, Helena Rubinstein Chair of Education, at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was Director of Adult and Academic Programs at The Museum of Modern Art. Little wrote his Ph.D. dissertation at Duke University on Collaborative Projects, Inc., Collaborative Projects, Inc.: A History of an American Artists’ Collective, 1977-1983, and has published and lectured on artists’ groups and alternative spaces.