Coco Allred | Picnic Activation Set

Workshops will begin in the ACT Gallery and are hosted the following afternoons:
3:30 – 5:00 Thursday 4/16
3:30 – 5:00 Tuesday 4/21
3:30 – 5:00 Thursday 4/23

You can sign up for a workshop here!

Picnic Activation Set is an experimental artist book at the scale of a landscape and a context to try out new social formations and interactions that are not just human but with other living beings. Together with artist Coco Allred (SMACT ’26), you will arrange and weave together the fabric to create compositional arrangements for relational experimentation to gather together and with place.

What will the workshop look like?
You will explore the history of the picnic, as a form of Victorian leisure in the development of new public spaces, within labor activism. Picnics, so often tied to lawns, become a situation to question monocultures and changing ecologies of the 21st century.

In the lineage of avant-garde artists of the 20th century, you will write poetic instructions in the format of an ‘event score.’ This means making prompts, questions, and drawings to guide the interactions with the Picnic Activation Sets. These scores can cover a broad scope, and offer entry points to orient to place, encompassing its ecological history and present, representation, sense of public, and social uses.

This project is a commission for the University Ecologies and Question of the Commons research project at Tufts, and you are also invited to join for the full debut.

Save the date: April 24th at noon on the Tufts Medford Campus for the first full lawn-sized activation of Picnic Activation Sets and lunch.
503 Boston Ave, Medford, MA 02155

A future date for a happening at MIT in May with take place with more information to come.