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Caitlin Bruce

University of Pittsburgh, Communication, Faculty Member

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Caitlin Frances Bruce is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work focuses on public art as a means of activating spaces for encounter in transnational contexts and transitional moments. Her broader research program considers urban space, art, affect theory, and critical theory, and explores circulation culture, social movements, negotiations between differences, and precarity.

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Papers by Caitlin Bruce

Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter

Grafiti legal y evolucionado

Entretextos

En este artículo explico cómo hoy en día la forma de grafiti legal en León puede ser mejorada. A ... more En este artículo explico cómo hoy en día la forma de grafiti legal en León puede ser mejorada. A través de teorías del derecho a la ciudad, críticas de la idea de “ventanas rotas” y “tolerancia cero”, así como la idea de “inclusión excluyente” de Rossana Reguillo-Cruz, desarrollo un modelo de instituto de grafiti legal. Dicho programa consta de cuatros partes: 1) espacios libres de permiso, 2) murales artísticos, 3) talleres para jóvenes, y 4) eventos y exposiciones. Este programa debería ser encabezado por los mismos artistas y jóvenes, y no los hombres y mujeres de negocios o los partidos políticos.

Mobility, Ephemerality and Tourist Economies: Graffiti Running Tours in León Guanajuato

Debats. Revista de cultura, poder i societat

In this paper, I examine the creation of a running tour showcasing commissioned Graffiti Art, or ... more In this paper, I examine the creation of a running tour showcasing commissioned Graffiti Art, or Urban Art, in León Guanajuato, Mexico. Set up in 2017, the tours are part of a larger economic and cultural shift away from the city's agricultural and industrial past. While seeking global city status since the 1990s, León is also trying to keep its traditional roots. Urban Art, as a form of creative expression, helps foster an appealing urban image. This paper argues that the tours highlight three critical issues that lie at the heart of the Creative City discourse and the institutionalization of graffiti, namely: Mobility; Ephemerality; The Economy.

Rehearsing a Cursi Commons

Routledge eBooks, Nov 22, 2022

Hemispheric Conversations Urban Art Project

Hemispheric Conversations Urban Art Project (HCUAP, pronounced "Hiccup"), is a public a... more Hemispheric Conversations Urban Art Project (HCUAP, pronounced "Hiccup"), is a public art platform that draws on the urban arts as a framework through which we can map the aesthetic, historical and cultural connections between Pittsburgh and similar post-industrial cities. HCUAP promotes urban art (graffiti, street art, and mural production) as a tool for education and dialogue about cultural expression, conscious redevelopment, and the preservation and celebration of diverse cultural identities. HCUAP partners University of Pittsburgh staff, faculty and students with arts and education organizations in the Pittsburgh area and artists and scholars from national and international institutions. We create shared opportunities for youth and adult arts education; public conversations about art, activism and social justice; mentorship and networking opportunities for underrepresented artists; and site-specific murals across the city. We offer three-pronged and synthetic programm...

Crossing Borders, Building Solidarity: Affective Labor in Shaping Coalitional Murals

Women's Studies in Communication, 2018

River of words as space for encounter: Contested meaning in rhetorical convergence zones

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2019

Public art, affect, and radical negativity: the wall of daydreaming and man’s inhumanity to man

Subjectivity, 2017

Challenging National Borders and Local Genre Forms:Declaration of Immigrationas Volatile Cultural Text

Public Art Dialogue, 2016

Tour 13: From Precarity to Ephemerality

GeoHumanities, 2016

“How Philly Moves”: from urban branding to kinesthetic sympathy through an aesthetic of blur

Text and Performance Quarterly, 2016

ABSTRACT This article investigates the production and mural aesthetic of the “How Philly Moves” m... more ABSTRACT This article investigates the production and mural aesthetic of the “How Philly Moves” mural, photography, and dance project. The project enables scholars to trace different intensities of dialogic encounter throughout its process, exploring how the remediation of a dance event leaves kinesthetic and rhythmic traces. This project, works against commodifying tendencies while within dominant frameworks and cultivates what I call “kinesthetic sympathy,” an ethic and aesthetic of rhythmic resonance that acknowledges the ongoingness of the subject while inspiring a sense of kinetic impact in the viewer or participant, part of a spectrum of affective connection constituted through rhythmic intimacies.

Texturing Space, Emplacing Gender: Claudia Mendez's “Constructing History, Constructing Identities”

Women's Studies in Communication, 2016

In March 2012 a temporary exposition took place in Mexico’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Palace o... more In March 2012 a temporary exposition took place in Mexico’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Palace of Fine Arts (PBA)—a space that, upon its inauguration in 1934, was heralded as a crucial site through which citizens and the government could advance democracy in the postrevolutionary era. The director of the space, Castro Leal, announced that Bellas Artes is a “necessary place to carry out the educational work in artistic material that the Revolutionary government has wanted to achieve,” emphasizing that the arts “are not a trivial game, nor inconsequential adornment,” but “are a weapon, a flag, a force” (“El Palacio de Bellas Artes”). Thus, PBA was inaugurated with the ambitious goal of being able to “liquidate old values, and erase the last vestige of the colonial era” (“El Palacio de Bellas Artes se inauguro”). Optimistic discourses of democracy and universal access continue to frame the space, but the reality is quite different. Between 1995 and 2010, of 105 exhibits with seventy artists, only ten of those artists were women (Liceaga Gesualdo 7–9, 57). This record suggests that old patriarchal values, vestiges of the colonial era, are very much intact. PBA, which is adorned with monumental murals by the male artists who often serve as the visible (and exclusive) exemplars for public art making, was host to a very different set of art objects in 2012. The 2012 exposition was part of an annual event, hosted by a multidisciplinary arts organization called Comuarte, or Mujeres en el Arte (Women in Art). Of the many pieces in the show, one particularly striking installation drew my eye: A taupecolored mounted wall was covered with a combination of red pillows in the shapes of vulvas, as well as three-by-five-inch photographs (distributed around the textile pieces themselves) featuring women making these objects (Figure 1). Each pillow was unique: One had a tiny plastic baby in the center; another was surrounded by faux pearls and lace; a third, dark red and covered with a bridal veil. There was something shocking about the installation: the free-floating sexual organs, hanging vertically on a display board—an aesthetic that sat somewhere between quasi-public commemorative practice of scrapbooking and the intimacy of a diary. In all their playful, explicit, shameless, stubborn presence, these pillowvaginas offered a sharp contrast to the smooth cool marble planes of the palace where loftier sentiments are privileged. This piece, titled Construyendo Historias, Construyendo Identidades (“Constructing Histories, Constructing Identities”), which foregrounds sexual organs not customarily given a place in PBA, challenges narratives of the nation starring masculine bodies as protagonists and feminine bodies as victims or villains.

Episode III: Enjoy Poverty : An Aesthetic Virus of Political Discomfort

Communication, Culture & Critique, 2015

This article considers Renzo Martens's controversial 2008 film, Episode III (Enjoy Poverty). ... more This article considers Renzo Martens's controversial 2008 film, Episode III (Enjoy Poverty). Martens's film is a conceptual film that satirizes documentaries about poverty in Africa by exposing the ways in which consumers of poverty images enjoy such images. It argues that the film, which creates troubling identifications and disidentifications for a Western spectator, offers a politically productive lesson on the power of discomfort to disrupt unethical image practices. Communication studies scholars have engaged in these conversations via studies about identification and disidentification and the documentary genre; affect in cinematic media; and more directly, through work that investigates the perils of cookie-cutter frames for representing (racialized) poverty.

The Controversy at Rockefeller Center: Phantom Publics, Aesthetic Barbarians

Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 2014

This article investigates the Rivera controversy at Rockefeller Center arguing that the controver... more This article investigates the Rivera controversy at Rockefeller Center arguing that the controversy illuminates tensions in democratic culture over the role of the masses and their relation to the “legitimate” public, exhibited in anxieties about phantom publics and barbarian crowds. Beginning with critical discourse surrounding the construction of Rockefeller Center, the mural controversy is resituated within a broader frame in which revanchist anxieties and worry about mass media play a crucial role. Appeals during the construction of the building to the “public” character of the structure took on a life of their own during the apex of the Rivera controversy.

Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter by Caitlin Frances Bruce

Visual Communication Quarterly, 2019

Public Surfaces Beyond the Great Wall : Communication and Graffiti Culture in China

The Great Wall of China is an iconic and complex sign that has been used by both state officials ... more The Great Wall of China is an iconic and complex sign that has been used by both state officials and Chinese avant-garde artists since the end of the Cultural Revolution to make claims about and on behalf of Chinese society. This state/artist confrontation around a singular, fixed object contributes to an oppositional reading of China’s public sphere, a standoff between a monolithic state and a monolithic society around a singular symbol of antiquity. Graffiti in Beijing and Shanghai complicates this reading, and throws into sharp relief China’s status as a fraught territory trying to navigate the dual tides of globalization and cultural nationalism. Projects like Zhang Dali’s “Dialogue”/Duihua endeavor in Beijing and multiple graffiti interventions like those along Moganshan Road in Shanghai highlight the development of an emerging revision of Chinese public culture, with graffiti art acting as both evidence of and communicative infrastructure for often subtle but significant chang...

Rebecca Zorach. Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965–1975. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 395 pp.; 82 color and 43 black-and-white illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $25.95 (paper)

Winterthur Portfolio

Democracy on the Wall: Street Art of the Post-Dictatorship Era in Chile by Guisela Latorre Instafame: Graffiti and Street Art in the Instagram Era by Lachlan MacDowall

Public Art Dialogue

Democracy on the Wall: Street Art of the Post-Dictatorship Era in Chile by Guisela Latorre Instafame: Graffiti and Street Art in the Instagram Era by Lachlan MacDowall

Public Art Dialogue

Hemispheric Conversations: Exploring Links between Past and Present, Industrial and Post-Industrial through Site-Specific Graffitti Practice at the Carrie Furnaces

Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture

In this article, I briefly discuss a project I co-organized this year in collaboration with Oreen... more In this article, I briefly discuss a project I co-organized this year in collaboration with Oreen Cohen, Shane Pilster, Rivers of Steel, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts, and the American Studies Association. Named “Hemispheric Conversations: Urban Art Project” we used international collaboration between artists in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and León Guanajuato Mexico as a platform for conversation about how to reimagine our shared urban spaces. In a political moment that might be a cause for despair, collaborative art practice in urban space can serve as one vehicle to reignite our shared sense of possibility and energy.

Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter

Grafiti legal y evolucionado

Entretextos

En este artículo explico cómo hoy en día la forma de grafiti legal en León puede ser mejorada. A ... more En este artículo explico cómo hoy en día la forma de grafiti legal en León puede ser mejorada. A través de teorías del derecho a la ciudad, críticas de la idea de “ventanas rotas” y “tolerancia cero”, así como la idea de “inclusión excluyente” de Rossana Reguillo-Cruz, desarrollo un modelo de instituto de grafiti legal. Dicho programa consta de cuatros partes: 1) espacios libres de permiso, 2) murales artísticos, 3) talleres para jóvenes, y 4) eventos y exposiciones. Este programa debería ser encabezado por los mismos artistas y jóvenes, y no los hombres y mujeres de negocios o los partidos políticos.

Mobility, Ephemerality and Tourist Economies: Graffiti Running Tours in León Guanajuato

Debats. Revista de cultura, poder i societat

In this paper, I examine the creation of a running tour showcasing commissioned Graffiti Art, or ... more In this paper, I examine the creation of a running tour showcasing commissioned Graffiti Art, or Urban Art, in León Guanajuato, Mexico. Set up in 2017, the tours are part of a larger economic and cultural shift away from the city's agricultural and industrial past. While seeking global city status since the 1990s, León is also trying to keep its traditional roots. Urban Art, as a form of creative expression, helps foster an appealing urban image. This paper argues that the tours highlight three critical issues that lie at the heart of the Creative City discourse and the institutionalization of graffiti, namely: Mobility; Ephemerality; The Economy.

Rehearsing a Cursi Commons

Routledge eBooks, Nov 22, 2022

Hemispheric Conversations Urban Art Project

Hemispheric Conversations Urban Art Project (HCUAP, pronounced "Hiccup"), is a public a... more Hemispheric Conversations Urban Art Project (HCUAP, pronounced "Hiccup"), is a public art platform that draws on the urban arts as a framework through which we can map the aesthetic, historical and cultural connections between Pittsburgh and similar post-industrial cities. HCUAP promotes urban art (graffiti, street art, and mural production) as a tool for education and dialogue about cultural expression, conscious redevelopment, and the preservation and celebration of diverse cultural identities. HCUAP partners University of Pittsburgh staff, faculty and students with arts and education organizations in the Pittsburgh area and artists and scholars from national and international institutions. We create shared opportunities for youth and adult arts education; public conversations about art, activism and social justice; mentorship and networking opportunities for underrepresented artists; and site-specific murals across the city. We offer three-pronged and synthetic programm...

Crossing Borders, Building Solidarity: Affective Labor in Shaping Coalitional Murals

Women's Studies in Communication, 2018

River of words as space for encounter: Contested meaning in rhetorical convergence zones

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2019

Public art, affect, and radical negativity: the wall of daydreaming and man’s inhumanity to man

Subjectivity, 2017

Challenging National Borders and Local Genre Forms:Declaration of Immigrationas Volatile Cultural Text

Public Art Dialogue, 2016

Tour 13: From Precarity to Ephemerality

GeoHumanities, 2016

“How Philly Moves”: from urban branding to kinesthetic sympathy through an aesthetic of blur

Text and Performance Quarterly, 2016

ABSTRACT This article investigates the production and mural aesthetic of the “How Philly Moves” m... more ABSTRACT This article investigates the production and mural aesthetic of the “How Philly Moves” mural, photography, and dance project. The project enables scholars to trace different intensities of dialogic encounter throughout its process, exploring how the remediation of a dance event leaves kinesthetic and rhythmic traces. This project, works against commodifying tendencies while within dominant frameworks and cultivates what I call “kinesthetic sympathy,” an ethic and aesthetic of rhythmic resonance that acknowledges the ongoingness of the subject while inspiring a sense of kinetic impact in the viewer or participant, part of a spectrum of affective connection constituted through rhythmic intimacies.

Texturing Space, Emplacing Gender: Claudia Mendez's “Constructing History, Constructing Identities”

Women's Studies in Communication, 2016

In March 2012 a temporary exposition took place in Mexico’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Palace o... more In March 2012 a temporary exposition took place in Mexico’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Palace of Fine Arts (PBA)—a space that, upon its inauguration in 1934, was heralded as a crucial site through which citizens and the government could advance democracy in the postrevolutionary era. The director of the space, Castro Leal, announced that Bellas Artes is a “necessary place to carry out the educational work in artistic material that the Revolutionary government has wanted to achieve,” emphasizing that the arts “are not a trivial game, nor inconsequential adornment,” but “are a weapon, a flag, a force” (“El Palacio de Bellas Artes”). Thus, PBA was inaugurated with the ambitious goal of being able to “liquidate old values, and erase the last vestige of the colonial era” (“El Palacio de Bellas Artes se inauguro”). Optimistic discourses of democracy and universal access continue to frame the space, but the reality is quite different. Between 1995 and 2010, of 105 exhibits with seventy artists, only ten of those artists were women (Liceaga Gesualdo 7–9, 57). This record suggests that old patriarchal values, vestiges of the colonial era, are very much intact. PBA, which is adorned with monumental murals by the male artists who often serve as the visible (and exclusive) exemplars for public art making, was host to a very different set of art objects in 2012. The 2012 exposition was part of an annual event, hosted by a multidisciplinary arts organization called Comuarte, or Mujeres en el Arte (Women in Art). Of the many pieces in the show, one particularly striking installation drew my eye: A taupecolored mounted wall was covered with a combination of red pillows in the shapes of vulvas, as well as three-by-five-inch photographs (distributed around the textile pieces themselves) featuring women making these objects (Figure 1). Each pillow was unique: One had a tiny plastic baby in the center; another was surrounded by faux pearls and lace; a third, dark red and covered with a bridal veil. There was something shocking about the installation: the free-floating sexual organs, hanging vertically on a display board—an aesthetic that sat somewhere between quasi-public commemorative practice of scrapbooking and the intimacy of a diary. In all their playful, explicit, shameless, stubborn presence, these pillowvaginas offered a sharp contrast to the smooth cool marble planes of the palace where loftier sentiments are privileged. This piece, titled Construyendo Historias, Construyendo Identidades (“Constructing Histories, Constructing Identities”), which foregrounds sexual organs not customarily given a place in PBA, challenges narratives of the nation starring masculine bodies as protagonists and feminine bodies as victims or villains.

Episode III: Enjoy Poverty : An Aesthetic Virus of Political Discomfort

Communication, Culture & Critique, 2015

This article considers Renzo Martens's controversial 2008 film, Episode III (Enjoy Poverty). ... more This article considers Renzo Martens's controversial 2008 film, Episode III (Enjoy Poverty). Martens's film is a conceptual film that satirizes documentaries about poverty in Africa by exposing the ways in which consumers of poverty images enjoy such images. It argues that the film, which creates troubling identifications and disidentifications for a Western spectator, offers a politically productive lesson on the power of discomfort to disrupt unethical image practices. Communication studies scholars have engaged in these conversations via studies about identification and disidentification and the documentary genre; affect in cinematic media; and more directly, through work that investigates the perils of cookie-cutter frames for representing (racialized) poverty.

The Controversy at Rockefeller Center: Phantom Publics, Aesthetic Barbarians

Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 2014

This article investigates the Rivera controversy at Rockefeller Center arguing that the controver... more This article investigates the Rivera controversy at Rockefeller Center arguing that the controversy illuminates tensions in democratic culture over the role of the masses and their relation to the “legitimate” public, exhibited in anxieties about phantom publics and barbarian crowds. Beginning with critical discourse surrounding the construction of Rockefeller Center, the mural controversy is resituated within a broader frame in which revanchist anxieties and worry about mass media play a crucial role. Appeals during the construction of the building to the “public” character of the structure took on a life of their own during the apex of the Rivera controversy.

Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter by Caitlin Frances Bruce

Visual Communication Quarterly, 2019

Public Surfaces Beyond the Great Wall : Communication and Graffiti Culture in China

The Great Wall of China is an iconic and complex sign that has been used by both state officials ... more The Great Wall of China is an iconic and complex sign that has been used by both state officials and Chinese avant-garde artists since the end of the Cultural Revolution to make claims about and on behalf of Chinese society. This state/artist confrontation around a singular, fixed object contributes to an oppositional reading of China’s public sphere, a standoff between a monolithic state and a monolithic society around a singular symbol of antiquity. Graffiti in Beijing and Shanghai complicates this reading, and throws into sharp relief China’s status as a fraught territory trying to navigate the dual tides of globalization and cultural nationalism. Projects like Zhang Dali’s “Dialogue”/Duihua endeavor in Beijing and multiple graffiti interventions like those along Moganshan Road in Shanghai highlight the development of an emerging revision of Chinese public culture, with graffiti art acting as both evidence of and communicative infrastructure for often subtle but significant chang...

Rebecca Zorach. Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965–1975. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 395 pp.; 82 color and 43 black-and-white illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $25.95 (paper)

Winterthur Portfolio

Democracy on the Wall: Street Art of the Post-Dictatorship Era in Chile by Guisela Latorre Instafame: Graffiti and Street Art in the Instagram Era by Lachlan MacDowall

Public Art Dialogue

Democracy on the Wall: Street Art of the Post-Dictatorship Era in Chile by Guisela Latorre Instafame: Graffiti and Street Art in the Instagram Era by Lachlan MacDowall

Public Art Dialogue

Hemispheric Conversations: Exploring Links between Past and Present, Industrial and Post-Industrial through Site-Specific Graffitti Practice at the Carrie Furnaces

Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture

In this article, I briefly discuss a project I co-organized this year in collaboration with Oreen... more In this article, I briefly discuss a project I co-organized this year in collaboration with Oreen Cohen, Shane Pilster, Rivers of Steel, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts, and the American Studies Association. Named “Hemispheric Conversations: Urban Art Project” we used international collaboration between artists in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and León Guanajuato Mexico as a platform for conversation about how to reimagine our shared urban spaces. In a political moment that might be a cause for despair, collaborative art practice in urban space can serve as one vehicle to reignite our shared sense of possibility and energy.

NCA2019Responseto Christie Paper

This is my response for the 2019 NCA Public Address Student Top Paper panel