Public Knowledge

About History People Press Resources Social Media Back to Top

Public Knowledge

About History People Press Resources Social Media Back to Top

SFMOMA Staff

Tomoko Kanamitsu is the Interim Head of Public Dialogue at SFMOMA. She is the project director for Public Knowledge and acts as editor-in-chief for Public Knowledge online publishing.
Stella Lochman is the Senior Program Associate for Public Dialogue at SFMOMA. She is the project manager and head of production for the Public Knowledge artist commissions, coordinating the various artist-driven projects, and engaging participating organizations and community members across the Library system.
Claire Bradley is the Senior Program Associate, Public Talks and Tours at SFMOMA. She coordinates programming at the Public Knowledge library.
Trina de Chalus is the Koret Education Center Assistant. She serves as steward and ambassador for the Public Knowledge Library, maintaining the space, welcoming visitors of all ages, supporting events, and taking care of the books within the Public Knowledge collection, for both children and adults.
Kaeleigh Thorp is the Project Research Assistant. She creates and coordinates email marketing and social media for Public Knowledge. She also assists with Public Knowledge online publishing and events.

SFPL Staff

Michelle Jeffers is the chief of Community Programs and Partnerships for the San Francisco Public Library, She manages the Library’s comprehensive public programming; curates and creates art exhibitions at the Main Library and in the neighborhood library branches; and engages in partnerships with cultural, educational, civic and private institutions.
Cathy Delneo is the Chief of Branches of the San Francisco Public Library. She oversees and manages twenty-seven neighborhood branch libraries throughout the City and contributes to the planning, organization, and overall administration of the Library system, including implementation of policies, services, and innovations.

Curators

Deena Chalabi is an independent curator and writer. Formerly the Barbara and Stephan Vermut Associate Curator of Public Dialogue at SFMOMA, she co-curated Public Knowledge, and is a contributing editor to The Stacks, Public Knowledge's online publication.
Dominic Willsdon is Executive Director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He was previously the Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Practice at SFMOMA and co-curator of Public Knowledge.

Participating Artists

Burak Arikan is an artist based in New York and Istanbul. His practice involves working with communities to create digital maps of complex networks of social relationships. Arikan is the founder of the Graph Commons collaborative network mapping tool.
Bik Van der Pol is an artistic team comprising Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol. They live and work in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Through their work they aim to understand how art can produce a public sphere. Their method entails creating opportunities for communicative activities that explore the histories of publics and places.
Josh Kun is a music scholar, writer, professor and curator whose work focuses on popular music and culture. In “Songs in the Key of Los Angeles” and “To Live and Dine in LA” Kun collaborated with the Los Angeles Public Library and the Library Foundation of LA and using library collections to explore, analyze and reanimate Los Angeles history and culture rendered in music, cultural ephemera and visual art. The project included a book, an exhibition, and a variety of city-wide public programs and media events. (See full biography below)
Stephanie Syjuco creates large-scale sculptures and installations composed of collected cultural objects and archival materials. Her projects often invite viewers to participate directly as producers or distributors. Syjuco is concerned with equality in access to knowledge and is based in the Bay Area.
Minerva Cuevas is a conceptual and socially engaged artist based in Mexico City who creates sculptural installations, paintings, videos and site-specific interventions in response to politically charged events.

Participating Scholars

Julia Bryan-Wilson is professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Berkeley and is also director of the Arts Research Center. Bryan-Wilson teaches modern and contemporary art, with a focus on art since 1960 in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Bryan-Wilson is a leading member of UC Berkeley’s Global Urban Humanities initiative with much of her work concerning the history and theory of art as public engagement.
Jon Christensen is an adjunct assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, the Department of History, and the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and is a a senior fellow in UCLA’s cityLAB. Christensen’s work in the digital humanities often involves collaborative research that examines how the joint application of technology and humanities ideas can intersect in the real world.
Teddy Cruz is a professor of public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, where he co-founded the Center for Urban Ecologies with urban curator Kyong Park in 2010; and co-founded the Blum Cross-Border Initiative with political theorist Fonna Forman in 2013. He was also a special advisor to the City of San Diego on Urban and Public Initiatives in 2013-14.
Fonna Forman is founding co-director of the University of California, San Diego Center on Global Justice and the Blum Cross-Border Initiative. Her current work focuses on theories and practices of global justice as they manifest at local and regional scales, and the role of civic participation in strategies of equitable urbanization. Her recent projects, with collaborator Teddy Cruz, include an exhibition on social housing in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and Visualizing Citizenship: Seeking a New Public Imagination at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Jennifer A. González is a professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation art, digital art and activist art. She is interested in understanding the strategic use of space (exhibition space, public space, and virtual space) by contemporary artists and by cultural institutions such as museums. More specifically, she has focused on the representation of the human body and its relation to discourses of race and gender.
Shannon Jackson is the associate vice chancellor of arts and design at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is a professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. In 2015, she was appointed to be the first Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts and Design. Her books include Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge 2011), and Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, co-edited with Johanna Burton and Dominic Willsdon (M.I.T. Press,). Jackson is the director of UC Berkeley’s Art Research Center and is a member of the Steering Committee for UC Berkeley’s Global Urban Humanities Initiative.
Josh Kun is a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, and also director of The Popular Music Project at USC Annenberg’s The Norman Lear Center. He is the curator of a series of musical interventions for the Getty Foundation’s 2017 PST: LA/LA initiative. His articles and essays have appeared in numerous scholarly journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogs.
Shannon Mattern is a Professor of Media Studies at The New School. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media space. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, and she contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places, a San Francisco-based journal featuring public scholarship on architecture, urbanism, and landscape.
Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006). He also worked for ten years as a journalist, writing for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Nature.