While he was Curator of Education[13] at the New Museum in 1998, he curated the “Urban Encounters” exhibit, which highlighted the work of six Manhattan activist art collectives “generating political ferment and a lot of good art.”[14] His conceptual group project Imaginary Archive (2010-2015) consists of a collection of documents that suggest an alternative social reality, takes “the notion of collaboration as a living, working material to be debated, explored and tested.”[15] The installation project has traveled the cities of Kyiv, Graz, Galway, Philadelphia, Friedrichshafen, and Wellington in New Zealand.
[16] In 2017, Sholette’s solo exhibition Darker, a series of ink, pencil and acrylic wash drawings based on photographs of activist art and other political protests, was presented at Station Independent Projects.
Sholette and Stimson both claim that collaborative collectively produced artwork emerges as a central tool in challenging capitalism’s thrive for individualism, but that its form has undergone a fundamental change in the contemporary period following the collapse of modernism.
In collaboration with art critics and scholars such as Jelena Stojanović, Reiko Tomii, Okwui Enwezor, Alan Moore and Brian Holmes, the authors push for the periodization of collectivism after modernity (Futurism, Productivism, Constructivism, and Surrealism), and in the post-World War II era.
Artist David Beech at University of the Arts London writes that while Dark Matter “is an important and timely contribution,” Sholette’s economic arguments are flawed.
In 2019, he guest edited a special double issue of FIELD titled Art, Anti-Globalism, and the Neo-Authoritarian turn, which reports on the rise of ultra-nationalism/authoritarianism from 30 different nations.
“Precarious Workers Pageant,” a collaborative performance intervention carried out during the Venice Biennial on the evening of August 7, 2015 that consisted of a public procession staged in solidarity with migrant laborers working on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi where a Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim Museum will soon be under construction.
The project placed new islands around the Panorama’s waterways based on proposals by Larry Bogad, Marc Fischer, Aaron Gach/Center for Tactical Magic, Ann Messner, Ted Purves, Rasha Salti, Dread Scott, Libertad Guerra, Dara Greenwald, Marisa Jahn, and several others who Sholette invited to respond to the prompt, “If you could add an island to New York City, what would that new landmass be like?” Queens Museum, 2012.