An Endless Meeting: Featuring Caroline Woolard
Friday, October 2, 2026 - Sunday, November 15, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, October 2, 2026 6pm-10pm
An Endless Meeting: Featuring Caroline Woolard
Presented as part of An Endless Meeting: Collective Process, Artistic Labor, and the Politics of Working Together
Friday, October 2, 2026 - Sunday, November 15, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, October 2, 2026 6pm-10pm
An Endless Meeting: Collective Process, Artistic Labor, and the Politics of Working Together brings together work by nationally recognized artists and collectives exploring collective process as both a method and a subject. New Red Order, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Caroline Woolard each approach collaboration, shared knowledge, and collective action through distinct forms. Caroline Woolard's installation includes works from A Stone Holds Water (2020) and Art of Gravity (2026).
The Art of Gravity is a traveling exhibition of kinetic sculptures that appear to defy gravity—wooden poles seeming to float in mid-air, plaster arms circling stands on fingertips, and more. Using basic principles of physics (balance, gravity, connection, support), these works provide metaphors for interdisciplinary collaboration that Woolard applies at scale with multi-year collaborative initiatives such as Pollinator. Woolard brings these kinetic sculptures to workshops with interdisciplinary practitioners to prompt conversations about collaboration. For example, if the kinetic sculpture represents a collaborative team, what role is analogous to the base or support, to the center of gravity, and to the kinetic part, and why? Conversation follows. Participants ask things like: How do I find balance amidst change? Can I learn to ground myself and loosen control in order to improvise in real time without compromising my values?
A Stone Holds Water continues Woolard’s exploration of the meeting itself – the gathering of people for a formal purpose – as a site for artistic and social intervention. Themes of collectivity and political economy recur in Woolard’s work, and after more than a decade of working in arts collectives and creating socially engaged projects, she recognized that she had spent at least half of her artistic life in meetings and began to make objects for groups in gatherings. Woolard asks the viewer to consider the English language idiom “to hold water,” which refers to statements that remain true even when examined closely.
These sculptures model a formal and conceptual language that Woolard has been developing for a decade.
About the Artist
Caroline Woolard is the Director of Pollinator.coop and the Making and Being residency in upstate New York. She is the Area Head of Foundations in the Department of Art and Design at Montclair State University and the co-author of two major reports: Solidarity Not Charity (Grantmakers in the Arts, 2021) and Spirits and Logistics (Center for Cultural Innovation, 2022) and three books: Making and Being (Pioneer Works, 2019), a book for educators about interdisciplinary collaboration, co-authored with Susan Jahoda; Art, Engagement, Economy (onomatopee, 2020) a book about managing socially-engaged and public art projects; and TRADE SCHOOL: 2009-2019, a book about peer learning that Woolard catalyzed in thirty cities internationally over a decade. Woolard’s artwork has been featured twice on New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS. https://carolinewoolard.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/carolinewoolard/
Astrology: Capricorn sun, Cancer moon, Sagittarius ascendant
About An Endless Meeting
An Endless Meeting: Collective Process, Artistic Labor, and the Politics of Working Together is a multi-pronged project taking place this fall at Vox Populi that activates collective process as subject, form, and method. Spanning exhibitions, a curatorial residency, public programs, and a print publication, the project explores the politics of collectivity, inviting broad publics to reflect on their own experiences of collaboration. An Endless Meeting will be presented as part of Collective Futures, a citywide initiative bringing together artist-run and community-based organizations to examine collective cultural production.
An Endless Meeting: Collective Process, Artistic Labor, and the Politics of Working Together has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
About The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage
The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is a multidisciplinary grantmaker and hub for knowledge-sharing, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and dedicated to fostering a vibrant cultural community in Greater Philadelphia. The Center invests in ambitious, imaginative, and catalytic work that showcases the region’s cultural vitality and enhances public life, and engages in an exchange of ideas concerning artistic and interpretive practice with a broad network of cultural practitioners and leaders.
