The BASEKAMP team derived their name from the exhibition space which members the group founded in 1998 and continue run in Philadelphia. The BASEKAMP exhibition space focuses on collaborative projects by contemporary artists, and the BASEKAMP team facilitates these projects as part of the the exhibition program. The idea is to provide a home base for inviting domestic and international collaborative groups in a joint experiment to develop new models of relations within overlapping art communities. The BASEKAMP team also participates in other initiatives by creating collaborative projects which exhibit internationally, often working with other artists and groups.
The BASEKAMP team's participation in critical curating is approached as an interdisciplinary team of artists and not necessarily as curators. A majority of the BASEKAMP team's cultural involvement has taken the form of exhibition-making, reinventing who-does-what and reexamining artist roles and relationships. This manner of practice is viewed by the team as a natural outcome of their participation in the do-it-yourself alternative art space boom of the 1990's. This in addition to an exclusive emphasis on collaboration has led the BASEKAMP team to hybridize the roles of curator, archivist, artist and audience in their work - illuminatiing the possibilities of agency and autonomy in cultural co-production.