In collaboration with 25 curators from around the world, Nato Thompson selected 48 socially engaged projects produced in the last 20 years as the foundation of the exhibition Living as Form (The Nomadic Version), an unprecedented, international project exploring over twenty years of cultural works that blur the forms of art and everyday life, emphasizing participation, dialogue, and community engagement.

“Something historically unique is happening in cultural production that requires different rules for art than those of the 20th century,” says Thompson, “This culturally-savvy method of civic production has manifested in everyday urban life and growing civil unrest. Living as Form is an opportunity to cast a wide net and ask: how do we make sense of this work, and in turn, how do we make sense of the world we find ourselves in?”

Nato Thompson

Nato Thompson is Chief Curator at Creative Time, New York, as well as a writer and activist. Among his public projects for Creative Time are Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International Democracy in America: The National Campaign, and Waiting for Godot, a project by Paul Chan held in New Orleans. Thompson was formerly a curator at MASS MoCA, and he also curated ICI’s Experimental Geography, which traveled to eight venues in North America.

The Carpenter Center Lecture by Nato Thompson occurs in conjunction with the exhibition Living as Form (The Nomadic Version), on view in the Level 1 and Level 3, Sert Gallery, from Feb 7–April 6, 2014.