Randall Szott

Randall Szott lives in Barnard, VT.[1] He holds an MFA in art critical practices from The Ohio State University, an MA in Interdisciplinary Art from San Francisco State University, and a BA in Liberal Arts with a philosophy minor from the University of Central Florida.[2] He is known mostly in the field of Social practice (art).

Szott has lectured or presented at SFMOMA[3], basekamp[4], Skydive[5], California College of the Arts[6], and the Summer Forum for Inquiry and Exchange [7] among others.[8] He organized, along with Stephen Wright, the online conference "Cutting Slack: paradoxes of slackerdom." Szott was an invited participant to a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Space, Place, and the Humanities [9] and was an invited guest of the Harvard Graduate School of Education for a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study workshop, "Four Publics: Learning in Socially-Engaged, Public Participatory and Civic Art." [10]

He was a founding editor of 127 Prince (the first journal devoted to Social practice (art)), ran He Said She Said (an exhibition and event series with his wife Pamela Fraser), and co-organized the Public Culture Lecture Series at threewalls in Chicago, IL.

Szott mostly eschews formal descriptions of his activities[11] and has written anonymously for the blogs Lebenskünstler, LeisureArts and placekraft. His work has been cited hundreds of times on blogs, in interviews, etc.[12]

His writing for placekraft was cited as defining the contemporary sense of neogeography,[13]. He wrote an introduction for the book Revelry and Risk and his writing and conversations have been published extensively as op-eds,[14][15][16] books,[17][18][19][20] and online.[21][22][23]

Szott is a former merchant mariner and chef. He is now a public librarian in Weston, VT and a candidate for the Vermont House of Representatives.[24] [25]