A Studio for Art, Speculation & Collective Learning
Studio Art for Young Artists is a laboratory that encourages students to use art as a way of learning about the world. Together, we will co-create a space for curiosity, experimentation, research, play, and making. We will investigate questions through art and use artistic practice as a way to produce and exchange knowledge. We will learn from artists, animals, plants, places, objects, stories, ancestors, one another, and our own imaginations. Students will be encouraged to ask questions, experiment, fail, play, research, and embrace changing their minds. Rather than beginning with predetermined answers, each unit will begin with a question. Students will investigate these questions through observation, research, conversation, material experimentation, and collective making.
Pedagogical Framework:
The Lab | Experimentation
The studio is a space for experimentation and discovery. Students will engage in material investigations, drawing experiments, movement, sculpture, fiber processes, clay, collage, and mixed-media practices.
The Studio Without Walls | Learning Through Place
Learning extends beyond the studio. Students will investigate real places through observation and the senses, becoming situated within their environments, and responding to what they encounter through art.
The Archive | Collecting and Documenting
Each student will maintain an artist-researcher journal throughout the course. The journal will become an evolving archive of their process and investigations, containing:
- drawings
- photographs
- questions
- poems
- observations
- found objects
- maps
- stories
- research
- sketches
- material samples
- Conversations
The Ecological Web | Collective Making
We understand ourselves as part of a web of relationships between people, materials, places, animals, plants, and ideas. Students will participate in collective projects that require collaboration, negotiation, listening, and shared decision-making.
The Auditorium | Sharing Knowledge
Students will periodically become teachers, sharing their research, discoveries, questions, and artistic processes with the group. We will cultivate a studio culture in which every student is understood as a knowledge-holder and contributor.
Curriculum:
Each unit will be centered around a question, allowing students to investigate through an interdisciplinary approach. We will study the work and practices of 1–4 artists per unit as provocations for our own questions and experiments.
What can we learn from the land?
Who gets to imagine the future?
What can other species teach us?
A typical class will look like…
- Welcome + Community Guidelines + Introductions
- Introduction of artist
- Presentation of 2-4 artworks to act as a catalyst and provocation
- Introduce the central question of the unit
- Working within the artist-researcher journal
- Embodied investigation; a prompt, score or exercise that involves observing, listening, walking, touching, mapping and movement. This can either happen within the studio or outdoors to integrate field work/research into the classroom. The objective is to embrace experiential learning and to develop direct engagement with their surroundings
- Studio experimentation; an introduction to material and process for the students to experiment. Examples are weaving, collaging, mark-making, assemblage, handbuilding with clay, wire sculpture/ knitting, papier mache etc. The material and process will be dependent upon the artist we are studying with.
- Collective making/ Art Workshopping; Students will have time to make something that can be used, activated or contributed by the collective. For example, a score, an art object, a game etc. Or they will have time to synthesize their observations from the experimentation time, embodied investigation and working within their artist- researcher journal. We will work back and forth as a collective and on individual projects.
- The Auditorium; the sharing of knowledge to close. Students have the opportunity to share their discoveries and inquiries, one or two students will have the opportunity to become the “teacher” and expand upon a material, process, observation or question that was part of class
Studio Practices
Throughout the course, students will work across a range of artistic practices, including:
- Observational drawing from life
- Painting and pastel
- Collage and mixed media
- Fiber art processes, including sewing, natural dyeing, weaving, and fabric collage
- Mixed-media sculpture and papier-mâché
- Found objects and assemblage
- Performance and somatic-based art
- Installation and spatial practices
- Mapping and artist journals
Artists
Students will be introduced to artists and artistic practices that explore ecology, ancestry, embodiment, collective making, speculative futures, and alternative forms of knowledge, including:
- Firelei Báez
- Lygia Clark
- Cecilia Vicuña
- Wangechi Mutu
- Abdoulaye Konaté
- Carolina Caycedo
