Frances Whitehead + ARTetal Studio
Professor of Sculpture, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
contact: frances@artetal.com
Frances Whitehead is a civic practice artist bringing the methods, mindsets, and strategies of contemporary art practice to the process of shaping the future city. Connecting emerging art practices and the discourses of climate change, post-humanism, counter-extinction, and culturally informed sustainability, she develops strategies to deploy the knowledge of artists as change agents, asking, What do Artists Know?
Questions of participation, sustainability, and culture change animate her work as she considers the surrounding community, the landscape, and the interdependency of multiple ecologies. Whitehead’s cutting-edge work integrates art and sustainability, as she traverses domains to engage citizens, municipalities, and other communities of practice in order to hybridize art, design,science, conservation, and civic engagement, for public and planet.
Whitehead’s thinking has been catalyzed by several recent residencies in Aotearoa, New Zealand, from 2014-2019. Here she was introduced to the Maori walking practice, the “hikoi” as a method for embodied learning, geo-political solidarity, and spatial practice. Linking these ideas to the spirit of Zapatism, she continues to “walk with” the community of the Tukorehe Marae, the Kei Uta Collective,and the broader ecologies of Kuku, Horowhenua. From these experiences, Whitehead began undertaking “eco-hikoi”, and producing GIS/GPS maps of these walks.
Alongside the maps, Whitehead made a series of drawings of native New Zealand plants, drawn with pigment from the plants themselves. Blending botanical observation and direct encounter with the plants’ pigment and materiality, “drawing with” like “walking with” allows the plants to “speak for themselves”, in a multi-species, multi-epistemic approach. The blending of the digital, spatial, and the hand-drawn reflects Whitehead’s artistic breadth, and also her integrative perspective–that drawing is fundamental to creative practice, including ecological practices,and serves asa visual and conceptual grammar, aset of languages.
Whitehead has worked professionally as an artist since the mid 1980’s and has worked collaboratively as ARTetal Studio since 2001. She is Professor of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she founded the SAIC Knowledge Lab. She teaches Experimental Geography and other trans-disciplinary courses that engage the aesthetic, technological and geo-political dimensions of drawing as a component of spatial practice.