Claire Eide
Pronouns: She / Her / Hers
MA in Socially Engaged Art
Artist Statement
I facilitate contact between the art world and people who are traditionally excluded from museum and gallery spaces. I work to bring folks from rural communities inside those places to look at, think about and do art. At the same time, I bring art making outside of institutions and into the public. I want to encourage and empower people in their creativity and break down the idea that art is only done in big cities by "professional" artists. I find joy in living and working in rural towns, and I find purpose in designing art programming for community-members.
I’ve carried this background into my time at Moore and my thesis examines the wicked problems of doing art in rural places—like lack of economic and funding opportunities and difficulties in retaining folks—and connects them to larger colonial processes in the United States. I am studying rural arts because I want to uncover how the socioeconomic and historical trends underlying rurality and art have developed and been maintained to better understand the complexities of engaging with art from rural places.
Claire Eide is an art educator and historian from unceded Sauk and Meskwaki land known as Des Moines, Iowa. She holds a BA in history with a focus on colonial theory from Grinnell College and continues to research colonial processes especially as it relates to art accessibility in rural places. Her academic and pedagogical pursuits are grounded in collaboration and process-based making with youth.
ARTIST-RUN SPACES IN THE US
Artist-Run Spaces in the US: A Conversation with Impractical Spaces was created, facilitated and hosted by Claire Eide and Megan Galardi as part of their graduate thesis work in the Socially Engaged Art program. The conversation took place on April 27, 2021. "This online conversation addresses the idea of being an artist-run project and the importance of archiving them on a national scale. Impractical Spaces co-founders Dulcee Boehm, Cory Imig, and Paddy Johnson reveal their work into compiling defunct and active spaces while discussing themes of place and culture in the artist-run scene before and after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic."A full transcript of the April 27, 2021 conversation can be read here: