FUTURE DEFINITE
The New Administration of
a Fine Arts Education
Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven
FUTURE POSSIBLE
Last Year at Marienbad redux
Winter of Our Discontent
Why Farm?
ARCHIVE
Calling Beauty
Descent to Revolution
Agency for Small Claims
Of Other Spaces
The New Normal
To Whom Do You Beautifully Belong?
Dewey Decimal Days
Exact Imagination
Taking Shelter
Consumption Junction
Shoot the Family
Prophets of Deceit
ABOUT
CONTACT
CALENDAR
NEWS & PUBLICATIONS
LINKS
Bureau for Open Culture is the curatorial and teaching practice of James Voorhies. It is a service agency that works with contemporary artists and critical ideas to make exhibitions, courses, publications and projects for art and academic institutions. It generates learning experiences that instigate renewed forms of engagements between art and its audiences. Relying on and embracing collaboration and conviviality, Bureau for Open Culture and its associates cultivate relationships with individuals, communities and institutions to produce work inside and outside the physical contexts of galleries, academies and museums.
The work of Bureau for Open Culture sometimes takes shape as individual and group exhibitions that function as inquiries into the social, historical, economical and political conditions of the present moment. Bureau for Open Culture brings together emerging and established artists and art from national and international sources to unite with local constituents, inserting its inquiries through those new connections and original dialogues. Its intentions include re-imagining the exhibition in the form of education by creating new tools and platforms that open up multiple points of entry. This transformation simultaneously seeks to uphold rigorous and valuable contributions to contemporary critical discourse that often push theory into action.
Bureau for Open Culture functions as an economic base for social context practices that do not easily fit into traditional commodity markets. Facilitating between artists and institutions, it secures funding from various sources to realize site-specific art by the artists it supports. It prioritizes the genuine integration of the artists into the communities where projects and exhibitions occur. Repeated collaborations among Bureau for Open Culture, institutions and artists are common. An artist or collective may initially participate in an exhibition or classroom discussion on top of which subsequent experiences build. In this way mutual understanding of process evolves to allow for increasingly stronger projects to come to fruition over time. These artists are frequent flyers within the framework of Bureau for Open Culture.
Bureau for Open Culture draws on the history of curator as caretaker or organizer in charge of various public works: a bureaucrat responsible for maintaining order. Coupled with this quality, the interest in “open culture” encourages intersections between art and disciplines such as science, urban planning, sociology, geography and ecology and organizations such as libraries, experimental music venues, non-art academic departments, city agencies, alternative educational environments, gardens, social spaces and farms. The transdisciplinary quality of this work responds to the expanding—and exciting—state of contemporary art. Consequently, Bureau for Open Culture embraces the less than predictable, welcomes the less than established and encourages experimentation and risk. Its guiding premise recognizes the curator’s two positions of curator-as-agent in service to the art institution and curator-as-agent in service to the artist’s vision. As such, Bureau for Open Culture is at times a double agent working within the institution on behalf of artists who are interested in dismantling institution and convention.
----------------------------------------------
Site design by Nate Padavick
