This assignment asks you to use primary source records to answer several questions: how do makers construct their communities in personal, local, or professional terms? How do geographic and cultural identities shape artistic communities? And how have community spaces engaged with terms that we use to discuss contemporary art and design, such as system, network, or stack? 

As Raymond Williams and Lucy Lippard both note, community is often understood in idealized terms. Some of the primary sources you’ll examine in this assignment will outline certain communities in similarly positive ways; others will be frank about the fissures and conflicts that generated artists’ relationships to space or to one another. This assignment allows you to attend to, and even be critical of, such narratives. 

The three main goals for the assignment are

• to help you examine artists’ working documents such as letters, exhibition records, sketches, and brochures in an effort to locate and articulate complex formations of community; 
• to reinforce the importance of space, place, and community for artistic movements after 1970; and 
• to accustom you to incorporating primary and archival sources into your final paper research.

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