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Dorothy R. Santos

A Wikipedia Article

Dorothy R. Santos is known first and foremost for her curatorial work and writing about artwork. She often uses her works as forms of societal critique and has a strong interest in activism, artificial intelligence, new media, and biotechnology which are apparent in her work. By far her most notable work has been on her collaborative curatorial efforts on The American Gun Show with James Morgan. She has a BA in philosophy and psychology, a Masters in Visual and Critical Studies, and is currently working towards a Doctoral Degree in Film and Digital Media .

Tables of Contents 1.      Biography and Background 2.      Important Curatorial Work 2.1  REFRESH 2.2  DANM “Blindspot” 2.3  The American Gun Show 3.      References

                                                                                                     

Biography and Background

            Dorothy was born in San Francisco. She spent her childhood there and went on to secondary school within the same city . Dorothy began college in 1996, and graduated from the University of San Francisco with her BA in Psychology and BA in Philosophy in the year 2000. From 2004 onwards, she functioned as the Senior Clinical Operations Associate at Genentech, a biotechnology company, in South San Francisco, CA. In 2012 she began her masters in Visual and Critical Studies, New Media and Digital Arts at California College of the Arts. In 2014, after 10 years with the company, she left Gentech. She graduated with her masters in 2014 as well. For several months in 2015 Dorothy went on to work as Office Manager at Fusion Media Group, a media group that produces web content for young people, in Oakland, CA. From the end of her time at Fusion in 2015, to August of 2017, she worked as the Clinical Trial Management Associate at Gilead Sciences, a biotechnology company in Foster City, CA. In the meantime, she credits herself as a lecturer and curator at UC Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz, CA for the first half of 2016. Although her blog and several articles show that she collaborated on curatorial exhibitions outside of these positions in the meantime. A month after leaving her position with Gilead Sciences she began her time as a Doctoral Student at the University of California, Santa Cruz in September of 2017 . In 2017 Dorothy become the editor for CultureStrike Magazine, which has the goal of empowering artists, women, and people of color .  In 2017 She also began functioning as editor-in-chief of Hyphen Magazine a magazine devoted to complex representation of Asian Americans .

Important Curatorial Work

REFRESH

Dorothy serves as an on-going co-curator for REFRESH , a platform devoted to socially inclusive discussions about the intersections between art, technology, and science. REFRESH has the goal of exploring the ways that science and technology are rapidly changing our world and discussing the political implications of that while ascertaining that they’re included traditionally marginalized or invisible viewpoints to benefit from new perspectives. Being a curator for this platform is truly an intersection of Dorothy’s self-ascribed interests in social activism and biotechnology.

DANM “Blindspot”

In 2016 Dorothy Curated a show called Blindspot for a class of UC Santa Cruz graduating MFA students as part of a continuation of a yearly Digital Arts and New Media Exhibition (DANM) that has become tradition in their past few years. 2016 DANM, Blindspot, set out to focus on visual aspects that had previously gone unexplored in the artists’ respective medias. Dorothy Santos guided the theme for the year, with high expectations from the programs manager Felicia Rice. The exhibit was an intersection of performance art, technology and the amplification of the audiences’ sensory experience and interaction with the artwork. The venue for the event included a space called the “Dark Lab” which once student likened to a black hole, who implied that such a space would bring attention to blind spots in peoples’ proximity.

There is a hope that the nature of DANM- being interdisciplinary from art to engineering to humanities which makes the form of its artwork constantly changing in medium- can be attached to a secondary goal of expanding their artwork content wise. Like much of Dorothy’s curatorial work the program seeks to explore social issues, this time through un-conventional forms of art.

Dorothy’s influence is clear to see in the inclusion of Sean Pace’s piece “Crawler” in the exhibition. Activism, science, and political commentary are directly up her ally of interests and expertise after all.  Crawler is a military truck re-fitted to be a three-dimensional printing lab, and its eventual intended purpose is to travel to low-income communities to provide opportunities to the children of those low-income families.  Crawler has the additional goal of promoting sustainable production practices. It can print in biodegradable materials like polylactic acid, and print replacement parts for machines that might otherwise go to waste. On top of being an activist piece which works towards the goal of environmentalism, it’s also a commentary on the disparity between government spending on military and government spending on the arts .

This vein of thoughtful exploration was certainly in line with Dorothy’s ideas on what the show’s name, Blindspot, ought to allude to.  

“… the area of the eye where photo-receptors do not exist. In order to see what is in our blind spot, we must shift and alternate our positioning or gaze. In a metaphorical sense, these artists create in a space that requires the viewer to move and shift for the work to be seen and experienced.” -Dorothy Santos 2016

It’s clear from the artwork included, and her own words that Dorothy had a clear goal to shift the gaze of the audience towards socio-political discussion which might be considered a “blind spot” on the psyche or in the conversations of the exhibitions audience .

 American Gun Show

American Gun Show preceded Dorothy’s work on Blindspot, and Dorothy Santos and co-curator James Morgan began their call for artwork In August of 2015, about two months before the show was set to open. They wanted artwork that functioned as a response to the topic: guns as they interacted with and appeared in American culture. They were very interested, they said, in seeing the interplay of guns in artistic representations, in technological functionality, in the lives of queer and trans Americans, and in the lives of disenfranchised and underprivileged Americans. Santos and Morgan had great interest in hosting artistic discussion pieces from every perspective on guns.

In 2013 Cody Wilson shared a digital file with the public which would allow the user to 3D print a pistol, and sidestep gun purchase laws by creating their own guns. Dorothy Santos was highly interested in how the ordered take-down of these files, by the U.S. state department showed a potential for a clash of the first and second amendments to the United States constitution. The curators of The American Gun Show were thusly centered around exploring themes of free speech and personal liberty. Santos was actually brought onto the project by Morgan to provide additional perspective, as he felt that his alone didn’t have a wide enough span. By extension the purpose of this exhibition became freely discussing the entrenchment of guns in American culture from many lenses, but also placed focus on art which displayed an almost neutral or balanced perspective on the issue of gun distribution. The curatorial statement placed a very high emphasis on the fact that it was an intended exploration of the origins of all viewpoints, rather than an attempt to convince its audience of either anti or pro-gun sentiments .

It’s clearly recognizable that the intended purpose of their exhibition was to deconstruct the cultural weight and complexities of guns within American culture. The works in the show address the duality of the power and fear inspired by guns in a playful manner: with penis shaped guns, 3D printed prototypes, and bullet proof clothing.

Nika Cherelle’s piece, Prototype, was a phallic centerpiece to the discussion: a golden gun whose shaft was replaced with the shaft of a human penis. The piece offered to the discussion a satirization of the connections between firearms and masculinity.

In a similar address of a relationship between gender and gun culture Linda Lighton’s Love and War: The Ammunition is made to resemble bullets painted and formed to resemble lipstick. An exploration between the power that makeup might allot to its wearer.  

Micha Cardena’s Unstoppable that seeks to bring attention to the harsh reality of police brutality. It certainly paints a vision of gun technology from a particularly marginalized perspective by pointing out what might be a necessity for bullet proof clothing.

This exhibit becomes a source of dissemination for opinions and allows for a national dialogue about guns. Dorothy Santos and Morgan find this discussion imperative, and this is clear in the curatorial choices made for this exhibition.

 The intersection of technology, free speech, personal liberty, and national liberty come to a head The American Gun Show depict the important inability of the gun to outgrow the dark reality of its purpose

Artist Joseph DeLappe was selected for the show by Santos and Morgan for his work on a large AK-47 sculpture, based on date from various shooter video games. This commentary brought a “terrorist avatar” from the digital to the physical world and forces players to confront exactly who they’re becoming .

For having occurred in the wake of multiple mass shootings, namely the Charleston church shooting, The American Gun Show incurred a bit of skepticism for its timing. But Santos persisted that shootings would happen whether the exhibition was held. Her hope was that visitors would leave the exhibition having considered the necessity of legislation and dissemination of relevant safety information. Despite the goal of remaining neutral in the creation of their discussion around guns, as Santos herself points out, it’s hard to remain neutral. After all she makes clear that she finds safety improvements surrounding gun violence highly necessary, which already sets her up for disagreement with some American perspectives on guns.  She wanted for the show’s discussion to result in community efforts to curtail the danger of guns to innocent bystanders. However successful The American Gun Show might have been, its certainly clear that the elements of her interest in social activism, technology as it interacts with biology, and new media shaped the show itself .