My life's work is to co-create experiences of cooperation. I offer my skills in media-making, research, teaching, sculpture, and project management to the Solidarity Economy movement. For example I have co-written 3 major reports, co-founded 2 barter networks, and created sculptures for facilitators. I love connecting people. I have been told that I have a "witchipoo" ability to manifest the future with a formidable drive. I am an introvert and a Capricorn with a love of boundaries, loyalty, sensitivity, stocism, and accomplishments. My son was born in May of 2020 and is teaching me about the wonders of the present, the flow, and the unpredictable. I am 39 and honored to regularly collaborate with babies and grandmothers of all ages.

Hello, my name is Caroline Woolard [she/her/hers]. I make sculptures, websites, and events to imagine and enact relationships of cooperation and mutual aid. I am a founding core organizer at Art.coop, on the Executive team at the tech-platform Open Collective Inc, and the 2023-2024 W.W. Corcoran Visiting Professor in Community Engagement.

I believe that art can be revolutionary when it is aligned with the global movement for solidarity economies. I work on many scales: from the scale of a sculpture to the scale of a multi-year iniative, connecting Projects, to Systems (or Platforms), to Practices. You can read more about my process, here.

Following the economic crisis of 2007/2008, I co-founded barter networks TradeSchool.coop and OurGoods (2008-2016). Today, I am focused on convening and contributing to the Study Center for Group Work (since 2016) for collaborative methods and on business models for cooperative art schools (since 2020). I helped catalyze the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative to democratically finance permanently affordable space (2015). I wrote a book for arts educators about collaboration with Susan Jahoda called Making and Being (2019). In 2021), Grantmakers in the Arts commissioned Nati Linares and me to write a report about the ways that grantmakers can support economic and racial justice in the arts. This led to the formation of Art.coop, which exists to make the Solidarity Economy irresistible. For fun, I make lots of PDFs and I work on MarxforCats.

I try to make art projects within systems that are aligned with my values. This is no easy task. While you are reading this, I am likely teaching, convening a group, speaking at an event, writing a text, or working on an interdisciplinary project. You can hear me talk about my work and my interest in collaboration here.

To find me in real time, you can email me at: Caroline Woolard [at] gmail [dot] com 

This is my personal website. Here is a free PDF of a book about my artistic practice. To see a portfolio slideshow, go to Art21. To read a recent interview, go here. To read my CV, go here. To learn more about my work as an educator, read my book about art pedagogy, Making & Being, co-authored by Susan Jahoda. To download my critique menu or other teaching and facilitation guides, go here for PDFs. 

My upcoming events, full bio, projects,  systems, writing, and video recordings of past talks are below. Download critical writing about my work here. You can learn more about my work on this site or on twitter or instagram. 

Why do you advocate for the arts?

I was told not to go into the arts, but I did it anyway. Despite a dominant culture that values reading, writing, and speaking, I made a commitment to drawing, making, and moving — to visual and embodied ways of knowing. I was told that I was stupid, passionate, stubborn, and crazy because I lived in my imagination. I was told that I would never make a living in the arts.

I began to wonder: If the artistic work required in order to collectively celebrate, to communicate without words, to draw, to dance, to sing, to build shared symbols and imagined futures, to raise children, to clean homes, to collect the garbage, to grow food, to heal, to learn, and to connect is not compensated or supported, how does it continue? Life is sustained by gift giving, by mutual aid, by lending, and by informal exchanges.

I learned that this idea — giving power and compensation to the labor that sustains life — is called the solidarity economy, and that it emerged from the global South in the 1990s, as economia solidária to describe economic practices and models which advance values of democracy, mutualism, cooperation, ecological sustainability, justice, and reciprocity. I write more about this in my work here, and you can learn more about Solidarity Economies generally here, and in the arts, here.

I work between conceptual art, service design, and political economy.

My research, practice, and pedagogy have a sculptural emphasis and employ extensive digital technology. Though I am often cited as a socially engaged or conceptual artist, I consider myself to be a cultural producer whose interdisciplinary work facilitates social imagination at the intersection of art, technology, design, and political economy.

What is unusual about my approach to art and design is that I create objects as well as multi-year, public initiatives using both online networks and sculptural environments. I co-create open source web 2.0 technology while also hand-building objects in immersive installations, often using CNC machines and 3D printers. I make objects and also contexts for the circulation of these objects. I made a dress for barter only and also two international barter networks that continue to grow. I built she-wolf tables and also convened investment platforms for community land trusts. I created sculptural objects for facilitation as I also founded a study center for group work. Together, objects and contexts create space for reflection, circulation, and social transformation.

I make speculative objects and systems for interdependence. 

The systems I co-create allow the objects I make to exist in community. For example, in 2007 I made a dress for barter only (an object), and I also co-founded two barter networks that ran from 2008-2015 (systems). I made a personal Shaker residence (an object) and I continue work to support co-ops and land trusts (systems). I make timekeeping amulets and tables for group conversation (objects) and I also convene artists to share methods of collaboration (a system). This multi-year approach to artmaking (building objects and systems) aims to create space for slow, transformative action and reflection. I make projects that reflect their own conditions of production. I think of my practice as moving from Projects, to Platforms, to Practices (click on this for a worksheet).

What are you working on now?

Right now I am focused on conflict transformation in groups. My current research asks: Can an object interrupt the unavoidable antagonisms of working together? How do workers without bosses (i.e. worker-owners in cooperative businesses) transform workplace conflict?

In my current project, tentatively called The Meeting, the U.S. Federation of Worker Co-ops and librarians at the Free Library bring sculptural objects to difficult meetings. A water clock, a blue-foam head, and a glass tooth are employed by the co-op movement. To transform present-day, inequitable social structures, groups working for social justice know that we must transform inequitable social relationships in the present moment. How can we do this? The objects I am making aim to demonstrate that interpersonal conflict is always already a reflection of structural inequities.

Even if academics and grassroots organizers acknowledge this on an intellectual level, it is hard to practice transformative organizing on a daily basis. It is my hope that objects can support this work. I believe that group work is both the most necessary and the most difficult endeavor of our time. But most people have no experience of democracy at work, at home, in school, or online. So how can we learn to collaborate? How do we develop a musculature of shared decision making and of shared work? I founded the Study Center for Group Work to share collaborative methods developed by artists, and to create a cohort of artists who are interested in tools for collaboration and deep listening.

I started making objects for meetings because I want the physical environment of the meeting itself to be as wildly imaginative as the conversations that occur in those spaces. Recently, I have focused on furniture-clocks-objects for an intimate and alternative time. I have found that by bringing sculptural objects to community gatherings, like my Capitoline Wolf tables and my Countermeasures: Water Clock timekeeping devices, I make tangible the slow temporality of community-building; people sense the care that has gone into the facilitation practices I bring to group work.

The timekeeping objects I have been making work like this: one large vessel is made, and filled with water. On the waters’ surface, a smaller vessel is placed. The smaller vessel is made with a small hole at the bottom that allows the water to flow in. One interval has passed when the bowl sinks to the bottom of the larger bowl. In this way, the passing of time is seen. Rather than understanding time as neatly divisible, linear, and disciplinary -- the project of capitalist modernization -- my latest work begins with the premise that certain sculptural tools can offer an experience of an intimate time, a time which is specifically marked by our engagement with one another.

What can art and design do?

Art and design have the capacity to shape progressive community building activities. I am interested in world-making, in visionary fictions, in prefigurative politics; my work is one of institutional possibility rather than of institutional critique. I celebrate cultures of playful experimentation and solidarity. I bring an acute attention to form, material, and poetics to visions of interdependence and economic justice. I cultivate cooperative behavior using sculptural installations and service designs that invite people to listen deeply enough to change their minds. I hope that my work contributes to a revolutionary consciousness of interdependence.

Art and design allow people to come together to make ideas tangible in an hour, a month, or over years. I carry out collaborative projects by bringing systems-thinking to traditional studio-based artistic practices. I believe that art and artistic practices can facilitate community cooperation. Great art allows people to move from vision to action, to communicate across differences of opinion, experience, and expertise, and to make something happen. What group can build something that they have not yet imagined, drawn, debated, revised, and yet still desired? To communicate dreams — to create discursive spaces for imagination — art and design are essential. 

I like to ask, "What is the economy that art wants?"

I believe that the economy art wants is one of the commons. I define the commons as shared resources that are managed by and for the people who use those resources. The commons involve shared ownership, cooperation, and solidarity; economic justice. For more about this, read my interview in CreativeCommons. Rather than believing that the economy is a monolithic entity which cannot be altered, I aim to co-create equitable systems that privilege communal wellbeing over personal gain. 

What motivates you to do this work?

I grew up in Jamestown Rhode Island, but my Dad says all Woolards are from North Carolina. According to family lore, Woolard is a made-up last name. Woolard is Willard misspelled and mispronounced by settler-colonists centuries ago, hoping for a new name and a new life as tobacco farmers on stolen land. My Dad, who claims to be the first Woolard ever to go to college, hid his tobacco-picking hands in books. Scholarships moved my Dad off the tobacco farm.

I was raised on an island in a library of a house, a place where books far outnumbered visitors. I remember my mom amidst boxes of journals and articles, finishing her PhD. I remember my dad fast asleep, a book on his chest. I sensed that, for my parents, books had always been more reliable than people. Books carried my parents out of the childhoods they felt they needed to escape and into a life together. They seemed to say to me: books are the way out. Reading is a practice of freedom.

My grandfather was a tobacco farmer who tried to rob a bank in the Great Depression to pay back debt. He failed and changed his last name; my dad was born with the fictitious surname my grandfather had made up. My dad told me this story, raising me with an acute awareness of the structural violence of poverty and also of the power of reading and imagination to motivate action. My dad was first generation to college. I know the power of learning. For this reason, and for the health of democracy itself, I am dedicated to economic justice and I advocate for cultural equity in art and design education. 

How can someone get involved, or learn more?

I made this list of places to find collaborators and interlocutors in NYC, and I helped create this map of great groups in NYC.  

From 2008-2015, I co-founded and ran two barter networks: 
OurGoods (with Jen, Rich, Louise, and Carl)
and TradeSchool.coop (with Or, Rachel, Rich, Louise, Christhian, Aimee, and many more people).

Today I am focused on:
Art.coop and Open Collective

You can write to me (caroline woolard at gmail dot com) and to current and former collaborators in the projects and systems mentioned above, including: Susan Jahoda, Emilio Martinez Poppe, Or Zubalsky, Rachel Vera Steinberg, Louise Ma, Rich Watts, Christhian Diaz, Aimee Lutkin, Jen Abrams, Carl Tashian, Vicky Virgin, and Agnes Szanyi.

More information:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Woolard

https://art21.org/artist/caroline-woolard/

My upcoming events, full bio, projects,  systems, writing, and video recordings of past talks are below. You can learn more about my work on this site or on twitter or instagram. You can email me at: Caroline Woolard [at] gmail [dot] com.