This course explores the burgeoning field of social practice art. Today artists working in the field of social practice focus on aesthetics, ethics, collaboration, media strategies, and social activism as central issues that inform their artworks and projects that are designed for public and social spaces. In the United States, visual art that engaged the public directly began in the late 1950s and coincided with the local “decentralization” efforts that, in the arts, resulted in community-based art practices that envisioned the public as diverse, socially-engaged, and contributed to an expansive aesthetic consciousness. Understanding this history contextualizes social practice art and allows us to interrogate the ways artists blur the lines between object making, performance, activism, grass roots organizing and pedagogy.