2024 MAY 15

COMMON KNOWLEDGE. Panelists: Felipe Mujica, Artist; Savannah Wood, Executive Director, Afro Charities. Moderator: Sampada Aranke, Associate Professor of Art History and Comparative Studies, Ohio State University. April 11, 2024, EXPO Chicago.

Common Knowledge reaches into our collective past to explore the power that archives and collections have to shape our collective memory, history, and the lessons that we derive from them. The conversation ranges from the personal, thinking about artists and artist spaces as archives unto themselves and the importance of writing your own history, all the way to the communal, looking at the archive as a public service. 

From April 11–12, 2024, EXPO CHICAGO and Independent Curators International (ICI) presented Curating and the Commons, the organizations’ first-ever free, public curatorial conference on-site at the 11th edition of EXPO CHICAGO. Over the course of two days, the curatorial conference brought together over 200 attendees to explore both the civic nature and possibilities of art and curatorial practice, and was kicked off with a keynote from Miguel A. López, co-curator for the 2024 edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art. 

Following the lecture there were three panel discussions entitled Common Knowledge, Common Space, and Common Future, each conceived around key questions and organized on a loose temporal framework. Common Knowledge reached into the past, and explored how archives, collections, and libraries can shape a collective memory. Common Space was invested in how communities physically shape the present. And lastly, Common Future examined the civic role that the arts can play in not only imagining, but actively creating a better future.

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