Born in 2007, Open Engagement is an international conference dedicated to socially-committed contemporary art. It can count on many important backers, including Carnegie Mellon University and Carengie Museum of Art, and it will be held in Pittsburgh in April 2015, thanks to the support of these two sponsors. Why am I talking to you about this? Because it’s a conference model I’d like to see more often, especially in Italy.
This edition’s starting point is a question whose answer is not as simple as one might think: what is the role artists should cover in today’s society? What are artists doing in the communities they live in? In the three-day conference, people will try to answer those questions, with case studies carried out all around the world, bringing the creative work of small local communities under the international spotlight in order to provide them with the necessary fundings to undertake new projects focused on combining art and social responsibility.
The conference’s objective is to expand the dialogue around socially-engaged art and to offer participants the possibility of creating a network. A model that we should really try to adopt in Italy too.