WORKING KNOWLEDGE: Shared Imaginings, New Futures

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. 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.

The Bronx Museum | April 11 - July 6, 2025

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.

Bronx Museum Link

Exhibition page ↗