WORKING KNOWLEDGE Shared Imaginings, New Futures
ON VIEW: April 11 – July 6, 2025
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Black Quantum Futurism, Zainab Aliyu + American Artist and the School For Poetic Computation, Stephanie Dinkins, Melanie Hoff, Mary Mattingly, Ari Melenciano, Azikiwe Mohammed, Kite & Alisha Wormsley, Lynne Yun
A Visions2030 Project in collaboration with The Bronx Museum. Curated by Vera Petukhova.
About the Exhibition
Working Knowledge brings together artists who create modes of learning that value applied and local wisdom—including ecological knowledge, activism, sustainable design, and community-driven exchange—alongside and beyond traditional academic structures. Recognizing both the strengths and limitations of institutional education, the featured artists and collectives create alternative and self-organized knowledge frameworks—developing new models and fostering learning through inclusive, participatory practices.
The exhibited works highlight the ways knowledge and information are shared through storytelling, conversation, dance, food, ecology, and other collaborative means. The exhibition is organized around three intersecting paradigms: Critical Knowledge, where lived experiences and perspectives are considered valuable sources of information that informs traditional educational structures or book-based knowledge; Indigenous and Ancestral Knowledge, which centers oral traditions, connections with the land, and intergenerational memory; and Community / Local Knowledge—recognizing urban spaces, grassroots networks, and social practices as sites of knowledge building.
Stemming from The Bronx Museum’s longstanding commitment to serving its local community, Working Knowledge expands on the Museum’s ethos of public access, resources, and cultural exchange.
The artists in this exhibition expand upon existing educational structures, proposing alternatives that are participatory, rooted in creative exploration, and embedded in everyday life. Inspired by bell hooks’s vision of education as an inclusive and communal act of liberation and Joseph Beuys’s concept of “social sculpture” via projects like the Free International University, Working Knowledge continues the tradition of The Bronx Museum as a dynamic forum for learning, where knowledge is built through dialogue, reciprocity, and imagination.
Technology is a central tool in this context, utilized by many of the artists in the exhibition as an approachable means for imagination and collective empowerment. They use interactive AI, creative coding, graphic design, computational software, motion capture, sound design, hydroponics, and cybernetic sculpture. In addition to digital technologies, systems of publishing, agriculture, time, language, and cultural memory are reframed as communal technologies—resources that evolve through participation and social engagement.
Through community-informed installations, interactive projects, and artist-led learning spaces, Working Knowledge upholds The Bronx Museum’s commitment to learning as an interactive and evolving space—one that values local knowledge, sustains cultural traditions, and prioritizes the wisdom of lived experience over abstract concepts. Visitors are invited not just to observe, but to engage—contributing their experiences to an ongoing exchange of knowledge at The Bronx Museum.
Top Image Credit: Melanie Hoff, Dance Poem Revolution, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
