Ted Purves was the founding chair of the first Social Practice graduate program in the United States, at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Central to his artistic and scholarly interests was the gift economy-- the distribution of free goods and services by artists. The majority of his most recent research explored social form and the imagined world. A utopian at heart, Ted had theorized and developed poetics about the “world behind the world,” drawing on his knowledge of, and love for, science fiction, philosophy and game culture in equal measure. He looked for ways to forge and theorize relationships between and among people and communities.

 

The son of Alan and Anita Parker Purves, Ted was born in New York and grew up in Illinois. His mother was a naturalist and an early influence on his interest in land use, parks, and documentation as well as his love of the natural world. After graduating from University High School in Urbana, IL, he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, completing a degree in Cartography. 

 

Ted was a proud Midwesterner. In the early ‘80s, between high school and college, he moved from playing D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) to punk, and became a leading force in launching a DIY punk scene in Champaign Urbana. During those years, Ted formed several bands; Two-Fat, (the) Breeders, The Bad Patch, and later in Chicago, The Deer Team, a band that notably recorded and gigged but never practiced. 

 

He received his MFA in Photography at Ohio University, Athens in 1983. His thesis project included  a year-long excursion researching and photographing the Native American burial mounds across the Ohio River valley.  This was a formative experience, and mapping, notation, and site-works became central to his own art practice and scholarly interests. This early work launched his interest in earth art and conceptual art and led to publishing (0,0) Editions (1990-2003), his own art collection of land art and works on paper, and later social projects that explored ruralism, land use, alternative economies and natural history.

 

Ted moved to San Francisco from Chicago in 1993, inspired in part by his acquaintance with conceptual art collector Steven Leiber. In 1999, Ted began working at CCA as head preparator of the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2001, he curated an artist’s social projects series and public symposium for the Wattis called Generosity Projects: Strategies for Exchange in Recent Art, which led to the book What We Want Is Free (2004), an edited collection of articles on generosity and exchange in recent art. (A second edition was published in 2014.) 

 

In 2005, he founded the country’s first program in art as social practice at CCA, designing the curriculum from scratch and hosting international faculty.  He taught as a professor in the Social Practice program for over a decade, and served as the Chair of the MFA program in Fine Arts from 2009 to 2016. During this time he mentored hundreds of students, faculty, and young artists. He felt that the job of art faculty was less about training future artists than becoming involved with students in a questioning that promised no easy answers but merely more questions.

 

Theodore Rehn Purves, artist, educator and independent curator died in Oakland, California on July 4, 2017.

He was 53.