Gregory Sholette

Dr. Gregory Sholette is a New York City-based artist, writer, activist, and scholar of social art theory and history. Co-founder of Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PAD/D, 1980–1988), REPOhistory (1989–2000), and Gulf Labor Coalition (2010–), he is also co-curator of Imaginary Archive, which documents a past whose future never arrived. His work explores cultural “dark matter”—the overlooked creative labor and suppressed histories that constitute art’s hidden infrastructure—and the temporal politics of what he calls the “Unpresent.” Past projects include organizing the Precarious Workers Pageant, a plenary panel at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and serving as faculty co-leader of the Social Choreography research group within the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research (2014–2016). His books include Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2010), Delirium and Resistance (2017), The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art (2022), and The Radical Unpresent: Cultural Resistance in a Fractured World (MIT Press, 2026). Together with artist Chloë Bass, he co-directed Social Practice City University of New York (SPCUNY) from 2002 – 2007, a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative housed at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is also Affiliated Doctoral Faculty in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program. He contributes regularly to the journal Labor Art Review which he co-founded, as well as FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism.