Choice Encounters was built from the stuff of community collaboration. In the exhibition, the artists acted as catalysts and creators for building collective spaces and challenging visitors to (re)consider their own environments and histories. Artists Krista Caballero and FreeSpace Collective duo Billy Friebele and Mike Iacovone looked specifically at narratives around urban and national landscapes, from Arlington, Virginia, to the American West.

Krista Caballero’s Mapping Meaning began when the artist found a 1918 photograph of all-female team of surveyors with very little information attached. To make sense of this lost history, Caballero put together a series of experimental workshops in Utah comprised of women from the arts, sciences, and humanities. She brought that work into Choice Encounters, by constructing an archive of her group’s surveying efforts for this exhibition, in order to question how histories are written, forgotten, and reclaimed.

FreeSpace Collective’s Billy Friebele and Mike Iacovone engaged the communities of Washington, DC and northern Virginia, becoming guides in uncovering forgotten details of contemporary life. Relying on visitor involvement, Friebele and Iacovone presented Photogrid, composed of photographs mined from social media and arranged along 18th-century boundary stones that still demarcate the nation’s capital. In Walking as Drawing, they created a map of visitor’s experiences around the Arlington Arts Center, which were funneled into an animated model of the area.

This exhibition relied on cooperation, where art took its forms from chance encounters.

Cover Image: Krista Caballero, Mapping Meaning.