Event Info
Debates about arts policy usually ask how government can support artists. This conversation instead asks how artists use their practice to rethink and reshape public policy.
The conversation takes place inside COUNCIL, Mauricio Delfín’s installation at BRIC, alongside Jodi Waynberg and Molly Garfinkel, curators of ART/WORK: The Practice and Politics of CETA and the Arts, 1974–1981.
ART/WORK spotlights the years in which the federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) put more than 30,000 artists and cultural workers on local government payrolls in nearly 200 cities, towns and Indigenous territories across the United States.
In COUNCIL, fifty-one folding chairs, one for each New York City Council district, hold screens on which New Yorkers recall moments when art or culture touched their lives and say what the city should do so that everyone can have experiences like these. Together, their responses ask what it means to treat culture as a public good and how people can take part in shaping it.
Drawing on both projects, the speakers will discuss art and research as critical social practice and what CETA can teach us about treating cultural work as public service.
COUNCIL is on view at BRIC and ART/WORK at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, through December 12, 2026.
Speakers
Jodi Waynberg is a New York City curator and arts administrator and the executive director of Artists Alliance Inc., a Lower East Side nonprofit that supports emerging and under-recognized artists through exhibitions, residencies and public commissions. Since 2019, she and historian Molly Garfinkel have led a multi-year study of the CETA arts programs and cultural labor, supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The project has produced nearly 200 oral histories. Their exhibition ART/WORK: The Practice and Politics of CETA and the Arts, 1974–1981 is on view at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, through December 12. The New Yorker, Artforum, and Art in America have covered her curatorial work.
Molly Garfinkel is a historian and curator who directs Place Matters, City Lore’s public history and advocacy program, which works with communities across New York City’s five boroughs. Her work spans research, publishing, cultural resource management, exhibitions, public programs and education, with a focus on building traditions, cultural landscapes and the history of urban planning and activism. Since 2019, she and Jodi Waynberg have co-led a national study of the CETA arts programs that produced the exhibition ART/WORK. She holds a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University and an MA in Architectural History from the University of Virginia.
Mauricio Delfín is an artist and researcher whose practice moves between artistic work and social research, examining how culture is organized, governed, and experienced in everyday life. For over a decade, he has worked within and alongside cultural institutions, building civic platforms, advocating for policy reform and studying how resources, authority and representation are distributed. His artistic practice approaches many of these same questions through installation, drawing, documentary and participatory work, creating situations in which people can encounter these structures, contribute their own experiences and sometimes rearrange them. He is a member of UNESCO’s Expert Facility for the 2005 Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions and Co-Directs the Culture & Arts Policy Institute. His installation COUNCIL is on view at BRIC through December 12.