ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to consider the proposition that in order to implement successful critical pedagogy within social practice art, history and racial politics will need to play a significant role. This chapter briefly looks at the history surrounding Casitas in New York City focusing on the community’s motivation to build them and the 1991 Smithsonian Institute exhibition Las Casitas: An Urban Cultural Alternative in Washington DC. While touching on the discourse of multiculturalism from the mid- to late 1980s and 1990s to underscore the political nature of the Casitas’ presence, this chapter takes into consideration the influx of Puerto Rican migrants and their building of Casitas as survival tactics in response to urban blight as part of the radical art politics of the 1960s and 1970s forming social practice art history. Additionally, the author considers the visibility of artists of color within the larger context of the art establishment at this time, a factor influencing the ways in which the exhibition is seen as both art and intervention. To support her case of Casitas as foundational to socially engaged art, Grullón considers how they contested political and historical power as public art, which, for the purposes of this chapter, includes the crafts, memories, and experiences of a community as fundamentally connected to socially engaged art concepts today.
