Collaborations: Inside the Armory/Out On the Street

Collaborations: Inside the Armory/Out On the Street
1994
Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena

Collaborations: Inside the Armory, Out on the Street brought together five teams of artists: Anne Bray and Molly Cleator; Margaret Crane and Jon Winet; Reneé Edgington and Matthew Francis; Daniel J. Martinez, Reneé Petropoulous and Roger F. White; and May Sun and Richard Wyatt. Work created for inside and outside the gallery addressed cultural, social, and political issues such as AIDS; class, gender and race relations; authority, power and the military; mental health; media spectacle; and issues surrounding the practice and definition of public art. The artists in each team combined their respective backgrounds in painting, sculpture, photography, media, performance, writing and architecture to create interdisciplinary works.

Collaboration is anti-hierarchical, additive, and requires negotiation, but ultimately it combines the individual’s strengths to form a composite whole–it builds on a rich history extending from modernist artistic and avant-garde collectives to the present day where artists continue to perform interventions in the public arena as a response to sociopolitical conditions. Such a climate of activism, collaboration and participation motivated the artists in Collaborations. Employing different methods, the teams used a multi-leveled process of investigation, installation and intervention to stimulate dialogue amongst themselves, which they extended to viewers. The interdisciplinary installations represented the result of their topical investigative processes, thus raising ideas and questions around particular issues. Public projects brought these discourses from inside the Armory gallery space “out onto the streets” for public consideration.