2024 Unstoppable Voters Faculty Fellow Gregory Sale
Collaborating with individuals and communities on aesthetic responses to social challenges, artist, educator Gregory Sale (he/him) creates and coordinates large-scale and often long-term public projects. For close to 20 years, his work has focused on issues of mass incarceration. System-impacted individuals and communities help conceptualize social-aesthetic structures, co-produce artistic components, and direct the advocacy intention of the work.
More specifically, Sale has undertaken a series of projects focused on reframing the narrative of reentering society after incarceration, culminating in Future IDs at Alcatraz (2018-2019). This yearlong, socially engaged project, exhibition, and programmatic series was created with core-project collaborators Dr. Luis Garcia, Kirn Kim, Sabrina Reid, and Jessica Tully and in partnership with National Park Service, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, and 20 community organizations.
Since the onset of the pandemic, Sale and a group of system-impacted leaders have formed the Future IDs Art and Justice Leadership Cohort to expand their understanding of the power of artistic production to support justice reform and to further their effectiveness as catalysts of social change.
His work has received support from Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Creative Capital, A Blade of Grass/David Rockefeller Fund, Art Matters, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and artist residency awards (Yaddo, MacDowell, Grand Central Art Center, Headlands, Montalvo, and Ucross).
Based in Phoenix and Los Angeles, Sale is Professor of Expanded Arts and Public Practice for the School of Art, Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts, Arizona State University. His goal as an educator is to provide a supportive yet critically astute environment for students. He utilizes a collaborative, transdisciplinary methodology to develop innovative courses and initiatives. His courses are designed to provide students with model practices, not only for developing an aesthetic approach, but also to awaken an ethics of practice to create a more just society.
About Arizona State University
Arizona State University is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and health of the communities it serves. ASU’s Herberger Institute of Design and the Art is built on a dynamic combination of nine schools. School of Art graduates are engaged and socially responsible creative professionals who produce groundbreaking and impactful research that addresses today’s pressing challenges, shapes the cultural narratives of our time, and influences systems that define our world.
Faculty Fellowship Focus
RT 621 – Practice: Art for Justice and Social Change (Spring 2024) is conceived as both a seminar and a studio. The seminar component will examine how artists have been using civic engagement, social art practices, community organizing, and activism to address racial injustice, rethink structural power relations, and engage in communal healing. The studio component will support students in incorporating some aspects of creative civic engagement into their own artistic practices. The course is designed to highlight some of the prevalent issues contemporary artists address, including the global pandemic, racial unrest, climate disasters, and, most importantly, political participation and strife.
“Given our developing involvement with voting rights organizations and a vitally important social/political issue in our country being the quickly approaching 2024 election cycle, Abby and I see becoming Faculty Fellows as the perfect opportunity to hone our skills and widen our sphere of influence, and to add to our skill-set and knowledge base to create artistic expressions that can be far-reaching and poignant.”
– Gregory Sale, Professor of Expanded Arts and Public Practice, Arizona State University
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