NGO Art Education

Overview & Synopsis

How is art education being put to use today? To explore this provocation, I read between the lines of teaching for civic literacy through visual arts education in the United States as mandated by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. I consider an art education of social practice's utility within this mandate. In order to accomplish this, I describe artist Rick Lowe's "Trans.lation:" Vickery Meadow social sculpture project and then analyse this through a service aesthetics' lens and neoliberal motives. In the process of overlaying social practice within the Partnership for 21st Century Skills as a model for visual arts and citizenship education toward globally competent graduates, I articulate the possible limitations of such micro-utopian ventures for art education that amount to NGO-esque art, making the case that these efforts, while facilitating a feeling of civic engagement, only further intensify the depoliticisation of art education acting as a form of Rancière's better police in reasserting the neoliberal status quo. I sound a cautionary note about such a pragmatic turn risking the exacerbation of our collective interpassivity through aligning art education too closely to our apparent use value for late capitalism.