John Hulsey
Department of Art, FIlm, and Visual Studies
john.hulsey [at] gmail.com
John Hulsey’s CMP capstone project is a series of long-term, collaborative, and site-specific public projects that address the crisis of place in the city of Boston following the collapse of the housing bubble. Developed together with City Life/Vida Urbana, an anti-displacement organization in Jamaica Plain, and a core group of homeowners and tenants resisting eviction, these projects use a variety of media to poetically reimagine place and intervene on sites of power. Including video-based installations (72 Hours), projections onto corporate facades (Letters to Bank of America), installations in occupied spaces (Welcome Back To What Was Already Yours), and low-power FM broadcasts in sites of struggle (Noises Over Norwell), these projects draw on traditions of socially-engaged art, multimedia practice, and popular education to reclaim spaces in the city that have been targeted by decades of discriminatory housing policy.
As a PhD student in Film and Visual Studies, Hulsey’s dissertation, Taking Place: Contemporary Art and the Tactical Occupation of Space, examines the ways in which artists and cultural practitioners in North America have staked claims to the land through performance, sculpture, and public intervention. Through cross-disciplinary analysis, his work tracks the migration of cultural forms from political organizing to artistic practice and back again, building a theoretical scaffold for understanding the ways in which artists have participated within, reflected upon, and refracted the aims of social movements.