Caitlin Bruce

• PhD.
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Pittsburgh

This essay explores a word-based public art project. In its quotidian presence and its technical violation of historic district codes, the project enables varied interactions. The project requires us to revise our understanding of rhetorical situation, rhetorical space, and rhetorical ecology by understanding public art as a space for encounter: pl...

In this article, I briefly discuss a project I co-organized this year in collaboration with Oreen Cohen, Shane Pilster, Rivers of Steel, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts, and the American Studies Association. Named “Hemispheric Conversations: Urban Art Project” we used international collaboration between artists in Chicag...

In art worlds, as well as in popular representations of social movements, the product—whether it be a sculpture, painting, or performance for the former; or a demand, legislative win, or march for the latter—is often held as the measure of success for a communicative action. In this article, using the history of the collaborative United Electrical,...

“The Wall of Daydreaming and Man’s Inhumanity to Man” is a mural that was painted in 1975 at 47th Street and Calumet Avenue in Chicago by William Walker, Mitchell Caton, and Santi Isrowuthakul. It depicts violence, including images of the Ku Klux Klan, Nazis, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The mural was restored by Damon Lamar Reed...

This article explores a temporary street art project in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, Tour 13. The project, which involved more than 100 street artists taking over abandoned apartments and transforming them, to be displayed for a one-month period before the building was demolished, draws attention to the rhythms of creative destruction that underlie...

This article investigates the production and mural aesthetic of the “How Philly Moves” mural, photography, and dance project. The project enables scholars to trace different intensities of dialogic encounter throughout its process, exploring how the remediation of a dance event leaves kinesthetic and rhythmic traces. This project, works against com...

This article considers Renzo Martens's controversial 2008 film, Episode III (Enjoy Poverty). Martens's film is a conceptual film that satirizes documentaries about poverty in Africa by exposing the ways in which consumers of poverty images enjoy such images. It argues that the film, which creates troubling identifications and disidentifications for...

August 17, 2012 was a “Global Day of Action” in support of Pussy Riot, a radical feminist performance group from Russia who had been incarcerated for their “Punk Prayer” at the altar of the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow in February 2012. This paper reads the “Punk Prayer” as an image event with an extensive afterlife, mobilized through the...

This article investigates the Rivera controversy at Rockefeller Center arguing that the controversy illuminates tensions in democratic culture over the role of the masses and their relation to the “legitimate” public, exhibited in anxieties about phantom publics and barbarian crowds. Beginning with critical discourse surrounding the construction of...

The Great Wall of China is an iconic and complex sign that has been used by both state officials and Chinese avant-garde artists since the end of the Cultural Revolution to make claims about and on behalf of Chinese society. 1 This state/artist confrontation around a singular, fixed object contributes to an oppositional reading of China's public sp...