Artists engaging with transitional justice fall broadly within the field of socially engaged art—a practice built on fundamentally different assumptions than art made for the market. To explore that rupture, we spoke with Gregory Sholette: an artist, writer, and prominent theorist of socially engaged practice whose decades of collective work and writing have mapped the fault lines between art world complicity and political resistance from within the belly of the New York art world.
Amelie Jackubek: How did you first realize that the conventional art world was not the place where you wanted to build your practice?
Gregory Scholette: I can trace my declining faith in mainstream art institutions back to 1979, the year I graduated from Cooper Union. No longer a student, I began to attend meetings in 1980 where artists spoke about their opposition to racism and apartheid, sexism and militarism. We aimed to forge real links between artists and labor unions, the anti-nuclear and pro-environmental movements and advocates for affordable housing. Art was a vehicle for these ends. When my previous professor Hans Haacke’s solo exhibition at the Guggenheim was cancelled over a couple of pieces that put a cold, well-documented spotlight on New York City slumlords, my generation of politically-engaged artists decided our work would have to operate outside the art world.
How did PAD/D emerge, and what was happening politically at the time?
Two things dominated the politics of the early 1980s. Reagan’s conservatism, that spurned anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist movements, especially in Central America, and the implementation of what we now call neoliberal capitalism: the cutting of the social safety net and the transfer of public wealth, resources, and space into private hands. Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D) came together in early 1980. PAD/D aspired to both produce an archive and to generate new forms of art aimed at political change. This was, unlike today, a time in Europe and the US when—as the late Tim Rollins used to say—the idea of political art was typically thought of as charcoal drawings of Lenin and clenched, muscular fists. We wanted to change that.
When did it become clear that artists needed to build infrastructures rather than just make artworks?
Less than a year after its founding, in 1980 PAD/D produced its first public statement of purpose in a four-page newsletter stating that:
Our goal is to provide artists with an organized relationship to society, to demonstrate the political effectiveness of image making, and to provide a framework within which progressive artists can discuss and develop alternatives to the mainstream art system. PAD/D, 1st Issue, New York City, February 1981.
This orientation was not new—it had crystallized through members’ prior experience in organizations like Art Workers Coalition, Heresies Journal, Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, Red Herring, and Amiri Baraka’s Anti-Imperialist Cultural Union, among other Left-activist cultural entities. PAD/D extended that lesson by opposing both the commercial and nonprofit art worlds, insisting it “Cannot serve as a means of advancement within the art world structure of museums and galleries. Rather, we have to develop new forms of distribution economy as well as art.” (ibid.)
Accordingly, within about one year, PAD/D was publishing a newsletter, programming public events, networking with other politically active cultural organizations, and producing art for street demonstrations and projects; PAD/D had become its own artistic micro-party or pseudo-union.
Why did archiving become central, and why was “distribution” added to PAD/D's name?
The PAD/D archive was intended as an instrument for expanding left-wing activism among artists. By accumulating and distributing models for politically-engaged practices, the archive would serve as a sort of tactical toolbox. Again, all pre-Internet. Quite ironic that the PAD/D archive now resides within the MoMa.
Political Art Documentation or PAD originally came together to categorize the many boxes of materials about political and activist art that Lucy Lippard had been collecting for several years. When members raised concerns about its service-oriented connotation, Distribution was added—PAD/D—opening space for active art production.
What didn’t work in PAD/D, or what assumptions turned out to be wrong?
PAD/D emerged out of the remnants of the post-1968 New Left. It maintained an alternative network of “Left culture”. It included exhibiting with the 1199 Health and Hospital Workers’ Union and its Bread and Roses art gallery. Nonetheless, with the shrinking of the US organized labor union movement in the 1980s (already well-underway since the 1950s and 1960s), together with the crash and burn of the New Left as it splintered into smaller and smaller factions—some of whose militancy led them to federal prison—PAD/D’s self-imposed separatist track kept it outside the art world even as mainstream museums and galleries began to selectively embrace socially engaged art.
The group’s collapse in 1988 was a result of its own success, at least in part. Looking back, what we got very wrong was the demise of the left and the rise of neo-conservatism. We were like the shepherdess who leads the flock from barren desert into the green pasture, but is unable to make the transition herself.
How did your experience in PAD/D lead to the concept of “dark matter” in art?
PAD/D was largely marginalized by the 1980s New York art scene. A few images appeared in Craig Owens’ Art in America piece on artists and gentrification, but when his writings were posthumously collected in 1992, all references to PAD/D were excised—though, curiously, a lone index entry remained.
So, when I developed the 2010 book Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, I used this mysterious disappearance as anti-illustration. Reconstructing the lost visibility of this missing cultural mass leads to archives.
At some very fundamental level, the PAD/D Archive represents the sheer overproduction of art necessary for the reproduction of the art world. My friend, the left-feminist art historian Carol Duncan, catalyzed the dark matter thesis by stating in 1983:
We can measure the waste [of artistic talent] not only in the thousands of “failed” artists––artists whose market failure is necessary to the success of the few––but also in the millions whose creative potential is never touched […] This glut of art and artists is the normal condition of the art market.
My question was: what positive impact might this “glut” have, leading me to explore Marx’s theory of “reserve labor” which underpins a market worth over 60 billion dollars (with contemporary art accounting for about 25% of that 2025 total). That is where dark matter makes sense—the overwhelming number of participants who purchase art supplies and journals, teach classes, attend classes, serve as interns, studio assistants, fabricators, art movers, staff at museums, and, of course, who make art that never becomes visible. Unlike astronomical dark matter, whose gravity holds the universe together, the mainstream art world ignores its own invisible mass of labor.
PAD/D established an archive of mostly unknown, uncelebrated, and forgotten artistic productivity. Multiply it by all artists at any moment and you see the scale of the market failure, as Duncan put it, that is necessary to the success of the few. This surplus of dark matter creativity runs through the art world like a multitude of veins in marble—structurally essential, everywhere present, and almost entirely unacknowledged. Dark matter remains both present and absent; detectable, but all but unnameable.
What forms of artistic labor remain invisible in today’s art world(s)?
The circumstances are both the same and profoundly altered. From Thatcher and Reagan onward, capitalism transferred wealth from public to private hands and began reaching beyond the factory and waged labor for new sources of value. Today, mobile networks and ubiquitous online advertising have completed capitalism’s total reach.
The Internet played a key role in this, combined with the neoliberal drive to monetize every aspect of our lives brought dark matter into the light. My concept of dark matter foresaw the illumination of this hidden realm. Illuminated dark matter found ways to self-visualize, form groups and collectives, and bypass the art world’s gatekeeping by hijacking neoliberalism’s digital systems to enhance artists’ agency.
How can socially engaged art build and sustain alternative or oppositional infrastructures over time?
The question of how forms of artistic practice and organized political opposition can align to resist the extractive, alienating, and disciplinary mandate of capitalist hegemony is one I've struggled with across decades of art making, collective work, and writing. Theory requires getting down into everyday life, not as it should be, but as it actually is.
PAD/D, sought to re-forge links between artists and trade unions, which were once commonplace in the late 19th and early 20th century. The online journal Labor Art Review, which I co-founded in 2024, revives these same ambitions. PAD/D’s goal: a networked, parallel left cultural art world with sustainable infrastructure. The PAD/D Archive which, despite all of its motley detail and meandering expressivity, reflects desires for solidarity across art, labor and activism.
A decade on, PAD/D’s organizational stepchild, REPOhistory, exhumed forgotten, unseen historical forces, experiments, mini-triumphs, and failures. Its urban interventions were ghostly apparitions proposing other pathways through time. When invited into city “placemaking” efforts, the group acknowledged that such projects often preceded displacement and gentrification. We produced our last public counter-historical intervention in 2000.
In 2010, Gulf Labor Coalition forced the Guggenheim to reckon with its defacto anti-union and anti-worker involvement in Abu Dhabi where the foundation (or corporation) decided to build a new museum under severely compromised working conditions that Human Rights Watch called seriously exploitative, with labor activists and government critics in the UAE facing imprisonment and other forms of repression. Such work demands living in the everyday while holding onto what the Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky labeled the “energy of delusion”, what I call the “phantom archive”.
Social Practice City University of New York (SPCUNY: 2021-2027) tried something more modest, but perhaps more durable: redistributing resources within a public institution toward communities excluded from it. It channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars directly to students and faculty, built a community of over a hundred participants, and community links several factors larger. That is real infrastructure, even if it is also fragile due to the perennial uncertainty of renewed funding; SPCUNY ran on Mellon Foundation grants, which don’t last indefinitely. The lesson isn’t that para-institutional projects within the fugitive undercommons—a concept developed by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney to describe forms of collective life and study that evade institutional capture—are doomed, but that they require either a steady influx of resources from a benevolent benefactor, or an impassive host structure, the tolerant “overcommons.” That tolerance is always conditional.
How do you position yourself within the tension between institutional critique, institutional building, and co-optation?
I fear socially engaged/activist art is heading where institutional critique has already traveled: toward becoming entertainment for sophisticated audiences between blockbuster shows. That incorporation produces what I call “bare art”. Taking Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life”, bare art names the condition where art’s protective claims to independence are peeled away layer by layer. Artistic production has been shaped by the demands of networked capitalism, including the expectation to be creative and, like an artist, to think “outside the box”.
Institutional critique has also revived through museum staff unions formed in 2019 (in the USA primarily). Many of the staff at the New Museum, Whitney Museum, and Guggenheim graduated with art degrees [and are] steeped in that legacy—and are now enacting it not as an art project, but as workers. That’s genuinely new and potentially threatening to the art establishment in a way that artistic institutional critique rarely was.
My own positioning has always been uncomfortable. At the New Museum as Chair of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—while also building alter-institutional structures that operate in the gaps and tunnels of official structures. Throughout, I’ve held onto a distinction between epistemology and ontology—from critique-as-exposure of institutional norms, towards building collective experience and group identification for itself, as a provisional dark matter constellation.
What does the trajectory from PAD/D to Social Practice CUNY reveal about the possibilities and limits of para-institutional practice?
PAD/D was extra-institutional—operating in a dark matter realm and headquartered in El Bohio on the Lower East Side. SPCUNY was truly para-institutional, like a barnacle on a rock, using its resources while maintaining its own autonomy.
Together—PAD/D, REPOhistory, Gulf Labor, SPCUNY, Labor Art Review—these form not a static archive but a dark temporality, an adjacent shadow time. That accumulated sediment of collective memory, failed experiments, partial victories, and unrealized possibilities is the most durable infrastructure of all, outlasting any institution or funding source. Accessing it requires speculation: recovery, rearrangement, repair, reactivation.
How does socially-engaged art operate across different global, political, and economic contexts, especially under conditions of precarity and conflict?
There are meaningful dissimilarities in how engaged art is practiced in the US versus Europe: the former favoring direct action and the latter more mediated. These distinctions track funding structures: the EU model of direct cultural support builds relationships with governance, while the American privatized model atomizes through individualized risks.
The asymmetries between the Global North and South are far more profound. The G.U.L.F. collective named this directly: artists in the Global North who act in solidarity with precarious Gulf laborers end up legitimizing the very institutions they set out to critique.
The phantom archive offers a way through this: not a return to the past or a leap to a perfected future, but a temporal folding that brings different moments into productive, sometimes abrasive dialogue. We live in what I call the “Unpresent”—a post-neoliberal condition where historical time no longer moves toward a clear emancipatory horizon but fragments into instability. Revolution, in this frame, is not a single decisive break but patterns of change distributed across time—traceable in the before, after, and between of major political moments. Archives matter here not only for documenting visible uprisings but for tracing the less visible: the mutual aid, informal exchange, everyday cooperation, and loosely organized collective practices that exist alongside—and are increasingly targeted by—capitalism’s extractive reach. These informal systems are not ready-made alternatives, but they are existing social infrastructures that can be observed, analyzed, and potentially redirected toward other forms of organization.
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Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and activist whose work explores cultural “dark matter”—overlooked creative labor and suppressed histories. Sholette is the author of The Radical Unpresent: Cultural Resistance in a Fractured World (MIT, 2026).
- Cover Image
TAWNA Collective, Ñuka Shuti Man, 2024. ©️and courtesy of the artists
