10+ Years Experience
Calcagno Cullen
Socially Engaged Artist
Available For:
Custom Commission, Collaboration, Social Practice, Teaching / Residency
About the Artist
Calcagno Cullen is a social practice artist who proactively collaborates with others to make projects, systems, and organizations in order for her work to have most relevance and community impact. She is a sculptor of institutions and sees her creative work as that of making connections and fostering asset-based community development. Calcagno Cullen’s work is rooted in a deep belief in the human capacity for generosity and abundance, as well as a persistent optimism that in bringing people together, we can grow together towards a beautiful revolutionary future.In an attempt to resist the capitalistic “winner takes all” mentality, a large focus of her work is focused on generosity… generosity in a way to fills cups, not depletes them. Professionally, Cullen has recently joined the Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile Foundation as a Program Manager, and spends her days connecting with artists and arts organizations envisioning better futures and providing resources to make these futures a reality. Prior to joining the Haile Foundation, Cal spent over 8 years leading and growing Wave Pool Arts Center, a collaborative community arts organization that she co-founded in 2014 and led as the founding Executive Director. Previously she held positions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View, California, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and others. As a socially engaged artist, she sees her creative work as that of making connections, listening deeply to both neighborhood and artists’ needs, and fostering asset-based community development. She understands all of her labor as an artistic process and uses her creativity equally in the office and her studio, where she draws, makes hand-made artisanal shoes, stows make-shift instruments for her marching band, and plans future collaborative projects with neighbors and friends. She is deeply committed to developing equitable solutions to problems using art as a catalyst..
Shoes for the Landlocked
Shoes for the Landlocked works to engage participants by offering a tangible good, custom shoes and leatherwork classes, while both reconciling with past fissures and encouraging us to envision a better future through meditation and writing, for ourselves and for each other. The workshop space where these programs take place mimics a hull of a ship, transporting participants from a disinvested urban manufacturing landscape into a surreal leather-filled boat belly in which to conduct their self-transformation while I work to cover their feet for their journey. The ship installation consists of curved vertical wooden columns to make the transverse frame of the ship, and horizontal wooden plates to fill out the form. The interior is a traditional cobblers studio, equipped with anvils, hammers, leather, lasts, and the stitching machines and saws needed for shoemaking.
What We Need To Hear
In Spring 2020, Calcagno Cullen led Apprentice Artists James Bond and Candace Krois to create a participatory public sculpture project entitled ‘What We Need To Hear’ in the Avondale neighborhood of Cincinnati. We created interactive boxes that asked residents to “Write words to positively motivate” their neighbors. We placed these hand crafted boxes, equipped with lollipops and cards for submissions, around the neighborhood at the Laundromat, Library, Rec Center, and elsewhere, and as a result they received over 75 responses. Four of these submissions were selected to become permanent, large-scale, light-up sculptures at the Hirsch Recreation Center to provide both inspiration and safety along their new walking trail.
Archive As Action
From February - June 2019 I had an installation and series of activations and programs at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati as part of the exhibition ‘Archive As Action.’ Curated by Steven Matijcio, I shared the 2nd Floor of the CAC with installations by Amanda Curreri and Lindsey Whittle. I chose to use this exhibition as an opportunity to make visible my creative labor as a program developer and community organizer.
This work is rooted in my deep belief that public art institutions should be places of creative commons, and in my persistent optimism that in bringing people together, we can bridge the deep divides in our society.
The space created for this exhibition is an attempt to make visual my work as a creative organizer, and to claim this sort of fertile administration as my art practice. More importantly, this space is intended to upend the status quo of most gallery spaces by placing people at the forefront and objects as secondary, simple props to stimulate conversation.
This project is an endeavor to foster exchanges that may lead to connection, understanding, and hopefully real transformation.
Artist Run
Artists identify a void in the offerings of the cultural centers in our region and aim to fill it. Often begun with little to no experience, budget, or supplies; these spaces become the ultimate learn as you go laboratories, and being artist-run, the spaces are often more artistic endeavors unto themselves than curatorial models at all.
These spaces, consciously or subconsciously, play an impactful role in the cultural evolution of our region, the trajectory of hometown artist heroes, and the programmatic pivots adopted by some of our mainstay artist institutions. This project aims to archive these endeavors as part of the cultural legacy of Cincinnati. This is primarily a web-based work - https://www.artistruncincy.com/
