I'll go straight into introducing Jen Delos Reyes. It's an honor to have her here. Jen is an amazing artist. She's always experimenting with social context, with what art means, with how art can be connected to different social issues and concerns. And she's also the founder and has been the director for many years of open engagement, which is at the very least, one of the two most important conferences in the US, around social engaged art. Too many people it's actually the best conference because it much more grass roots in nature, right? And it happens in a different city every year. It's a huge effort and its been running in for all this time. And so she's here, because she does what she does, she didn't just want to do a lecture, she wanted to do a lecture that is also at a performance. And so that's what we're going to have tonight. We're very grateful Jen for being here, for putting all the energy and kind of takes to do something like this and to the band, we have the numbers of depth canons here Trace, Scott and Kim. So, thank you also for joining in this adventure and welcome for the day. All right let's do this. In the last 20 years or so, you have become like a key figure in what some people call social engaged art or social practice and participatory art. So, it's great to be able to talk to you about all that trajectory. And so I thought it could be interesting to start in somewhat of a mainstream place like a museum. People don't expect social, well the field has changed. When you started doing this type of work museums were not necessarily open to social engaged art. How did you work with Portland museum in those years in helping the museum open up to these type of practices? Can you tell us a little bit about the kinds of projects and initiatives you were involved in? Yeah, for sure. So, the work with the Portland Art Museum started I think in 2008. And it was very much connected to the program at Portland State University that I was co-directing with Harrell Fletcher, an MFA in art and social practice. We got invited through the education department like most socially engaged artists, end up coming through that channel to get into the museum, because they were very interested in thinking of ways that the museum could be open to different kinds of audiences, have different kinds of engagements, and really thinking about what kind of site the museum could be for public interaction and really seeing it as a public space. And wanting to change how people interact with one another as well as with art works in the museum. And when we were invited, it was through Tina Olson, who was the new director of education at that time and she was very interested in what we were doing in the MFA program. Sort of understanding how we were working with artists, sort of embedded in communities, thinking about art outside of museums. What I liked the most about how we were talking about it internally was seeing the museum feels like a physical body. There was a lot of talk about like working different muscles within the institution that had maybe never been worked before. And so that was what we were doing was sort of like, straining muscles within the institution, making it reach and move in different ways. It ended up being a lot of silo busting too, because you would have to end up talking to so many different people in different areas. When you come up with some wacky proposal, the amount of people that need to be brought into that conversation can be very vast even if it seems like a very small request. [MUSIC] It started as my graduate thesis work. I began organizing it in 2006 actually immediately following that residency experience in New York and maybe for the first time really being connected to these people who were assembled from all these different places across the country and around the world, who were doing this work and realizing how important that was. I didn't have that before and it was really eye-opening and I felt like I knew that there were people doing this and why weren't we coming together and we were often doing all this work within our own communities but then not building up our own community to support one another, and share what we were doing. So, I decided to take on this form of a conference and frame my graduate thesis work as organizing it to bring these artists together, to present and share what they were doing. And it presented its own kind of challenges, right? Like, I don't frame open engagement right now it's like, "it is an artwork." But it is part of my work as an artist. But at the time, I had to frame it as an artwork and defend it and do the whole sort of formal defense and all that stuff. But I think one of the biggest struggles in doing that was my committee feeling like, well where's your work? And not being able to sort of value that labor of making that space as a valuable for contribution. Yeah. So, it started that way. It ended up being such an important part of my education that was very much self directed. It also brought in a lot of collaborators like a project like this even at a very small grassroots level, it's not one you can do alone. I mean, worked with different institutions, on a variety of levels. Worked with so many individuals just in the community who were helping to review proposals or literally housing people coming in from out of town, picking them up at the airport. All these sorts of small details. Anybody who's been to an audition of an open engagement knows and expects the majority of our learners are spread out around the world, are not in the US and so, most of them well have not been to the covers. So, I want to make sure that people know that this is not a conventional conference. These topics don't just get talked about, they get enacted and performed and there's this one story that I love about an apartment in one of the open engagement conference, you used basically the entire apartment building for the conference. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that worked? Yeah. So, I think that's a great example of really trying to be in a community and figuring out how to creatively use resources too and how people collectively come together to make something happen. So, it was in 2007 and we had a few people who had agreed to host out of town, presenters in their apartments and they all happened to live in the same apartment complex and so they have decided, how about for the first night of the conference, we host this big dinner that will be all throughout the apartment complex and we'll open up our doors and we'll be a potluck but we'll have food and people can just sort of meander through the floors of the building and come together in that way. And then we also had a presentation, like a slide lecture that night with so many people just crammed into someone's living room. Something that I think also has struck me about how you produce work and how you talk about is this importance of the collective voice specifically but even more the collective singing, you know, like in your lecture of the dreamers, lovers. You're actually playing the band while you lecture, and you play the drums, but you ask people to get up and sing along. Can you say a bit more about why that's so important to you, but also perhaps to others? Brian said it best that it is about this. Like in group singing, you're able to sort of subsume your own ego, you're able to feel what it's like to be part of a collective experience in a group and that partly it's about building empathy. And I think it's also in building empathy has to do with vulnerability and sort of taking a risk and trusting the other people around you because it can feel scary to have your voice be heard in public space sometimes and that we actually don't get to exercise that often. And I don't just mean singing, unfortunately. I mean, just in a lot of spaces in our everyday life, we don't feel like maybe we are heard and so it's a space of trust too, which I think is really remarkable. Picking the songs has to do a lot with like, well what are the other stories that I want to bring into it? What are the other things that I want people to be thinking about? At the same time it's not only just about connecting with the song as an individual, but connecting that song to these other kinds of like larger stories.
