From Düsseldorf, Germany. MFA Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Additional study University of Cologne, University of Düsseldorf and University of Chicago. Associate Professor, Dept. Chair, Arts Administration and Policy, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lives in Chicago, IL, USA.

Adelheid Mers engages in conversations with lay and professional cultural producers about their aesthetic practices. She uses diagrams as tools for figuring, to make cultural ecologies accessible to reflection, with an emphasis on practitioner perspectives. As a tenured professor of arts administration and policy at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mers appraises cultural processes across scales and manifold participant's interests. As a visual artist, she draws on the performative tools of studio critique to facilitate conversations. Formally, diagrams are defined by their operativity, engendering action and reflection. Mers' diagrams are deployed across media, ranging from quick sketches to freely distributed flyers to manipulable whiteboards; occasions are created for use and response.

Mers works independently, with artists, and with non-profits and their constituencies. She has explored artist's thinking about grant application processes for the 3Arts Foundation, and conducted research on cultural ecologies on Chicago's south and west sides, with the Foundation for Homan Square and the University of Chicago. As part of an ongoing project, Art Work (Visual Art/Music/Management) Mers is currently exploring the practices of sound artists, composers and experimental musicians, in collaboration with colleagues at the Institute of Cultural Management at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna. Her work is presented nationally and internationally, through conference contributions and exhibitions. She has curated thematic exhibitions, published essays on pedagogy, arts administration and art-based research and has edited and published a book, Useful Pictures.

Honors include grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the British Council, the NEA, Illinois Arts Council and DCASE. Mers serves on editorial boards, and has recently served as juror for the NEA and the Rauschenberg Foundation.

Mers works with artists and with non-profit clients: with the City of Chicago Mayor's office and department of Innovation and Technology she observed stimulus funding application and uses. She has worked with the Evanston Art Center seeking out local arts ecologies, explored grant making impacts on artists for the 3Arts Foundation and conducted projects on Chicago's south and west sides, with the Foundation for Homan Square and the University of Chicago. Her work is presented nationally and internationally, at conferences and exhibitions. She has curated several exhibitions, published essays on pedagogy, arts administration and art-based research and has edited and published a book, Useful Pictures. Honors include grants from the German Academic Exchange Service, the British Council, NEA, the Illinois Arts Council and DCASE.

Caroline Woolard makes art and institutions for the solidarity economy. Her method enjoins objects to their contexts of circulation. She builds sculptures for barter only as she also co-creates international barter networks that continue to grow; she fabricates model Shaker housing and she also co-convenes organizers of community land trusts. Her multi-year, collaborative projects include OurGoods.org (2008-present); TradeSchool.coop (2009-present); and BFAMFAPhD.com (2014-present). She is a lecturer at the School of Visual Arts and the New School, a project manager at the worker-owned design firm CoLab.coop, and is a member of the Community Economies Research Network, and the board of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. Her work will be featured in Art21’s New York Close Up documentary series over the next three years. http://carolinewoolard.com

The Extrapolation Factory is an imagination-based studio for design-led futures studies, founded by Chris Woebken and Elliott P. Montgomery. The studio develops experimental methods for collaboratively prototyping, experiencing and impacting future scenarios. Central to these methods is the creation of hypothetical future props and their deployment in familiar contexts such as 99¢ stores, science museums, vending machines and city sidewalks. With this work, the studio is exploring the value of rapidly imagined, prototyped, deployed and evaluated visions of possible futures on an extended time scale.

The Extrapolation Factory has worked with partners and organizations such as Autodesk Research, UNICEF, TED Active, Museum of Arts and Design, Eyebeam, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Columbia University’s Studio-X NYC, Z33 Hasselt, The Royal College of Art, NYU’s ITP Program, Parsons The New School for Design, SVA’s Products of Design, The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Ontario College of Art and Design, Forum for the Future and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The Core77 Design Award granted to The Extrapolation Factory in 2013’s Speculative Design category and the Extrapolation Factory was nominated for the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year award in 2015.

The Design Studio for Social Intervention is dedicated to changing how social justice is imagined, developed and deployed here in the United States.  It functions as a creativity lab for social justice work in the public sphere. The Studio is a space where activists, artists, academics and the larger public come together to imagine new approaches to social change and new angles to address complex social issues. They also design social interventions that engage populations in imagining and designing new solutions to social problems. 

Kenneth Bailey: started his activism in the early eighties as a teenager, working in his neighborhood for tenants’ rights and decent housing, targeting the St. Louis Housing Authority. He went on to work for COOL, a national campus-based student organizing program, and then moved to Boston where he worked for the Ten Point Coalition, Interaction Institute for Social Change, and Third Sector New England, as well as being on the Board for Resource Generation. Most recently he has been a trainer and a consultant, primarily on issues of organizational development and community building.

He first realized the need for a more “designerly” approach to community work while developing parts of the Boston Community Building Curriculum for The Boston Foundation. This workshop asked community activists and residents to think about creative ways to work with their community assets – existing social relationships, individual’s gifts and skills, and untapped local resources. Many community residents remained locked in conventional nonprofit approaches to working with community assets. They weren’t obliged to, they just knew no other way. He realized then that activists needed new tools to redesign approaches for community change, which led him to build a design studio for social activism.

Judith Leemann: is an artist, educator, and writer living in Boston. Moving ideas and approaches across the boundaries separating distinct arenas of professional practice, she studies the effects of the movement on both that which crosses the boundary and that which is crossed into. This might look like finding ways to translate studio teaching methodologies into other contexts and to interrupt classroom habits by bringing in carefully curated noise. It might look like reading aloud, an ongoing distributed audio work produced every spring in which texts are stripped of citational armor and fitted into recursive loops of almost-story. Or it might look like object lessons, attempts to develop form languages for behaviors, made as wordless didactics for others’ exhibitions, as experimental narratives for activists, and as autonomous choreographic works. From 2009-2012 Leemann served as Artist in Residence at the Design Studio for Social Intervention and continues to think, work, and present alongside members of the studio. This longer-term work proceeds through the careful tending of parallel interests in the role of formal thinking in a social justice context, and in a free examination of indirect procedures for surfacing and articulating systems understanding. Leemann holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is Associate Professor in Fine Arts 3D/ Fibers at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. www.judithleemann.com

Linda M. Montano, a seminal figure in contemporary feminist performance art, has been actively exploring her art/life since the mid 1960s. Her work investigates the relationship between art and life through intricate life altering ceremonies, some of which last for seven or more years. She is interested in the way artistic ritual, often staged as individual interactions or collaborative workshops, can be used to alter and enhance a person's life and to create the opportunity for focus on spiritual energy states, silence and the cessation of art/life boundaries.

There remains some confusion about the history and practices of the body known at The Order of the Third Bird, but evidence points to its having been for some time a loose network of cell-like groups (together with a penumbra of apostates and splitters) that engage in ritualized forms of sustained attention to made things—generally to works of art in the traditional sense. The canons of secrecy around these activities—their structures and purposes—have traditionally been sufficiently restrictive as to leave some doubt as to wether any individual professing knowledge of the Order could in fact be genuinely associated therewith.

It is high tide in the digital age. Smartphones, laptops, tablets, televisions, and now watches and other “wearable technology” constantly proffer text and images, often simultaneously. We can scroll or swipe our way through the waves of rich data, but there is always another hyperlink to transport us elsewhere.

If we are to accept the presence of digital technology in our lives, we need strategies and practices that will ensure that we remain active, not lulled into passivity by these devices. Project 404 is a practice of attention that aspires to help us remain fully, creatively engaged with the world and ourselves while using the very devices that threaten us with passivity.

The practice itself consists of two phases: a silent phase of fifteen minutes during which the participants look intently together at a single image, chosen from among the images submitted by the people in the group; and a colloquy phase of between 60 and 90 minutes, during which the participants discuss their experiences of the silent phase.

Project 404 rests on the belief that it is practice, more than theory, that makes us who we are. Our practice of attention can be informal and social as well as pedagogical; in either case, it is designed to enable us to be more fully attuned to the infinitely complex nexus of external stimuli and interior consciousness that is our human being, and it allows us to enjoy collaborative sociability, as we discuss with one another the experience of paying focused attention to our devices and the images they display.

Shaun Leonardo uses his body to communicate and portray imagery, in this case, hyper-masculine images of physicality – at the expense of his own physical comfort. The function of the male body has long been a signifier of self-worth. The body affirms and legitimizes his feeling of control and agency over his environment. In this sense Shaun “El C.” Leonardo is performing two very distinct actions at once. On the one hand, he uses performance as a venue for discussion of how men have internalized culture’s preconceived notions of how men should act and appear. And on the other hand, his performances call attention to how these expectations are not only strange, but also not applicable to the rest of men at large. We are not all super heroes, that these spectacles of masculinity contain elements of absurdity and arbitrariness. Leonardo’s work calls our attention to these spectacles not for their immediate content but rather as symbols of our cultural acceptance of an arbitrary and potentially irrational masculine norm.

Canaries is a network of women, femmes, and gender non-conforming people living and working with autoimmune conditions and other chronic illnesses. The group name references “canaries in the coal mine”—shorthand for those whose sensitivities are early indicators of adverse conditions in the environment. Canaries functions both as a support group with monthly meetings, a listserv of 90+ members, and an art collective. While not all of its members are artists, many are painters, actors, and writers whose somatic experiences exceed interpretation by biomedical discourse and come together to build shared language and exchange strategies for coping with and learning from their conditions.

"Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying" is Taraneh Fazeli’s ongoing curatorial project which brings together artists, disability activists, and other practitioners doing work on the body to consider the states of debility, rest, and disability (particularly their temporalities) as potentially resistive to capitalism and other forces of oppression. Grappling with the so-called “off-tempo” body that won’t efficiently labor, “Sick Time” considers how the leaky and porous body in states of debility can provide new possibilities for collectivity, privileging interdependency while also negotiating and maintaining difference through radical kinship and forms of care. “Sick Time” is structured in multiple nodes including workshops, a study group, publications, performances, and exhibitions, the first of which is at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts this coming March.

Activist art has come to signify a particular emphasis on appropriated aesthetic forms whose political content does the work of both cultural analysis and cultural action. The art collaboration Ultra-red propose a political-aesthetic project that reverses this model. If we understand organizing as the formal practices that build relationships out of which people compose an analysis and strategic actions, how might art contribute to and challenge those very processes? How might those processes already constitute aesthetic forms?

In the worlds of sound art and modern electronic music, Ultra-red pursue a fragile but dynamic exchange between art and political organizing. Founded in 1994 by two AIDS activists, Ultra-red have over the years expanded to include artists, researchers and organisers from different social movements including the struggles of migration, anti-racism, participatory community development, and the politics of HIV/AIDS.

Collectively, the group have produced radio broadcasts, performances, recordings, installations, texts and public space actions (ps/o). Exploring acoustic space as enunciative of social relations, Ultra-red take up the acoustic mapping of contested spaces and histories utilising sound-based research (termed Militant Sound Investigations) that directly engage the organizing and analyses of political struggles.