Uncommon Sense assembled six experimental, social practice-based projects by Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom, Mel Chin and the GALA Committee, Cornerstone Theater Company, Karen Finley, Rick Lowe, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Uncommon Sense constituted a major exhibition in the “relational aesthetics” movement of the 1990s.
Among the works shown at Uncommon Sense were Carlson and Strom’s West, Finley’s Go Figure, Ukeles’s Unburning Freedom Hall, and Cornerstone Theater Company’s Token, Alien, all 1997. The GALA committee, comprising over fifty students, artists, and teachers overseen by Chin, presented various paintings, photos, and sculptures created by the group for the prime-time soap opera Melrose Place; Lowe’s plywood shotgun house contained plans and proposals to transform the Watts Towers in LA into a community arts center, as the artist had done with Project Row Houses in Houston.
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue.
Uncommon Sense was organized by Julie Lazar, The Museum of Contemporary Art, and Tom Finkelpearl, Curatorial Fellow, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Executive Director, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.