AASF: Dylan Gauthier w/ James Voorhies, Bureau for Open Culture

In anticipation of the Alternative Art School Fair hosted at Pioneer Works November 19-20, Dylan Gauthier interviews James Voorhies about his alternative organization, Bureau for Open Culture. Founded by Voorhies, Bureau for Open Culture is a curatorial practice, philosophy and strategy that inhabits and connects with institutions and publishers. It makes projects with artists and writers, prioritizing unexpected intersections among art, design, education, and consumer culture in order to re-envision and problematize how institutions, academies and art relate to audiences.

James Voorhies is Dean of Fine Arts and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco where he oversees the undergraduate and graduate programs in the fine arts. Prior to CCA, Voorhies was the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University where he conceived and directed a contemporary arts program dedicated to the synthesis of art, design, and education through exhibition of existing works and production of new commissions. His writing has appeared in publications by Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, Harvard Design Magazine, Sternberg Press, and Printed Matter, as well as many artist monographs and exhibition catalogues. Voorhies is the founder of Bureau for Open Culture, a curatorial practice and philosophy that inhabits and connects with institutions and publishers to make projects with artists and writers, re-envisioning intersections among art, design, education and consumer culture. He holds a Ph.D. in modern and contemporary art history from The Ohio State University. He has taught contemporary art and curatorial practice in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard and art history and critical theory at Bennington College in Vermont. His book Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968 is forthcoming from MIT Press in February 2017.

Dylan Gauthier is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator, and writer who works through a research-based and collectivized artistic practice centered around ideas of ecology, architecture, experiential pedagogy, and utopian systems. He is a founder of the boat-building and publishing collective Mare Liberum (www.thefreeseas.org) and of the Sunview Luncheonette (http://www.thesunview.org), a co-op for art, politics, and communalism in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. His individual projects and collaborations with Mare Liberum, Red76, Sunview Luncheonette have been exhibited at the Parrish Art Museum, The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, the 2016 Biennial de Paris in Beirut Lebanon, the Center for Architecture (New York), The International Studio and Curatorial Program (NY), EFA Project Space, Printed Matter, MoMA PS1, MASS MoCA, Stacion Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina, the Walker Art Center, the Bronx Museum, Parsons/The New School, Columbus College of Art and Design, 80WSE Gallery at NYU, and The Neuberger Museum at SUNY Purchase. His writing about art and public space has been published by the Parrish Art Museum, Urban Omnibus, Art in Odd Places, Contemporary Art Stavanger (CAS), and Routledge Public Art Dialogue, among others. In 2016 he is a Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellow (NY), as well as the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at the Brandywine River Conservancy and Museum of Art. In 2015 he was an NEA-supported Ecological Artist Residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), a visiting artist at Haverford College, PA, and lecturer at l’Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques (iheap) in Paris and New York. Gauthier studied French Literature, Linguistics, and Studio Art at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), and received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College in ‘12.

​Bureau for Open Culture, founded by James Voorhies, is a curatorial practice, philosophy and strategy that inhabits and connects with institutions and publishers. It makes projects with artists and writers, prioritizing unexpected intersections among art, design, education, and consumer culture in order to re-envision and problematize how institutions, academies and art relate to audiences.

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