︎ My artistic practice is my pedagogy and my pedagogy is my artistic practice. Since the Spring 2021 I have been teaching and subbing on and off for classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Due to the precarity of my positions within this institution I have chosen to create this page in order to share my assignments and syllabi far and wide. I do this to create a conversation around who has access to the material I craft for my students, as well as what it means to openly share my pedagogical work. It is important that I share these things as widely as possible to both my own personal pedagogy, but also to my work as an artist. It is my hope to create a homebase for study and exploration of the artistic possibilities of all who wish to set down in it. This will continue to be updated as I am able and as I move further in my career I hope others can see the growth in my teaching.
Spring 2023
Research Studio II: THING(S) Syllabus
In this class we will begin with nothing; no thing. Do absolutely nothing and see what something arises from it. We will experience the act of making and the cerebral engagement with others art as something embedded in our bodies. This is a physical making practice and a performative practice as research. The questions at the heart of this class are: what can we learn from things, and what can things give to each other? In a world barraged by ecological and economic crisis what continues to drive us to create things as artists, and what can those things teach us about how to live in that world? Through a practice of creating things in an ensemble, in that the works meaning comes in concert together, THING(S) will attempt to understand the poetics, the narrative possibility, the evocative nature of things as comrades, as symbols, as family, as teachers.
Fall 2022
If I Could Turn Back Time
Deadlines and due dates are an inevitability we will never actually escape from, although for many of us we’d never get anything done if they didn’t exist. However, this does not mean one can never return to something thought to be finished. And for many of us there’s nothing we want more than to be able to fix or tweak something after the fact because we know the thing would have been so much better if we had. For this assignment you will pick a piece from this class or another you’ve taken this semester that you feel you could improve upon, rework, or revamp based on feedback you’ve gotten from your peers. This piece will then be reworked, redone, revamped, so that the idea has shifted, or the form more accurately reflects the idea, or you are just a bit happier with what you have created. Created for Research Studio I.
Manifesting the Manifesto
While you are probably most familiar with the Communist Manifesto, this form of writing to inspire and spread one’s ideas has been a popular form throughout 20th and 21st century art making. Most often used within the context of movements, manifestos have operated as guidelines for making, thinking, and acting. Often political, they set out parameters for artists to be able to make with a movement and have it sit within a well of political and social meaning. For this assignment you will research manifestos and narrow down your research to one in particular which you will use as your parameters to create an artwork of your own. Created for Research Studio I.
Installation Beyond the Pale
Pale, meaning fence, has had many disparate uses but most often connotes boundary, or the space within a boundary. Referring to parts of Ireland under English Law in the Late Middle Ages, and the place where Jewish people were allowed to settle in Imperial Russia, the phrase “to go beyond the pale” has come to mean going beyond what is deemed acceptable. With the English and Russian examples giving us the understanding that it is also where proper law can exist and where lawful “benevolence” occurred respectively. To work against common law, and to go beyond the designations set for someone. For this assignment you will work to craft an installation project which is not bound by laws of reality, government, or space-time. This can be explicitly political in how it works against laws, or can be ludicrous and amusing in the way it transcends reality. This will be presented in the end as a proposal presentation in whatever way you see fit. Created for Research Studio I.
Research Studio I Syllabus
A course designed for freshman to help them in the articulation of their artistic practices. This is a revamped version of my syllabus from last semester. It includes an updated note on disability and illness in the classroom as well as a diversity statement and community guidelines.
SPRING 2022
After(wards); mimicking a genealogy
Crafted as the final assignment for the class, the goal is to get students thinking about the artistic legacies they want to be a part of. They make a work in response to the ideas, forms, or pieces of those that have come before them. Created for Research Studio I.
We Think Towards Fruitful Study
Using the practice that everyone develops as an artist of sketching, planning, and researching as a form of study, this assignment asks students to think about how it is that they plan out their works of art. By focusing on study the hope is that the students could begin to think about how the work they do before making is as much an artwork if looked at from the right angle as anything else. Created for Research Studio I.
Research Studio I Syllabus
A course designed for freshman to help them in the articulation of their artistic practices. This is my second syllabi that I’ve created and while it contains a lot of boilerplate language, it includes an updated version of my critique policy, my first extended note on disability and illness in the classroom, as well as some small descriptions of the four assignments I’ve crafted for this class.
Performing (with) the Idea(s); talking is dancing is reading is writing is thinking
An assignment geared towards asking students to think more creatively and expansively about what it means to incorporate research and external ideas into their work. In what ways do performance and the lecture and their amalgamation in the lecture-performance push the ways in which we think about art’s possibilities? Created for Contemporary Practices CORE Studio class and Research Studio I.
Performing (with) the Object(s); sculpture as movement
This assignment considers the points of contact between the performer and the object-performers as fruitful spaces for inquiry and encourages students to think through their relationships to objects in general. Heavily indebted to the work and pedagogy of Gordon Hall, this assignment is a foray into sculptural performance as a way to engage questions of identity, labor, intimacy, care, and more. Created for Contemporary Practices CORE Studio class.
A Performance Lecture in 9 parts on (a history of) Performance
This performance lecture was created in conjunction with the Performing (with) the Idea(s) assignment. Its goal is to both provide a conrete, in person, example of what a performance lecture could be, as well as give students an alternate view of the history of 20th century art. Not meant to be comprehensive in any way and entirely unrigorous in its approach towards a thorough combing of this alternative history, the performance lecture rather focuses on a framework in which Performance Studies and the Black Radical Tradition can be used as lenses by which a student could discover their own genealogy of art for their practice.
SPRING 2021
Alternative Publishing Lecture
Slides
Designed to introduce students in a more general manner to the history of alternative publishing that they were now apart. Begin with the Pauper’s Bible and going through the 20th century into contemporary publishing, it is by no means comprehensive, but attempts to track a trajectory in western art of the importance of publishing.
Offset Productions Syllabus
A course designed to introduce students to the production of printed works through the Offset Lithography Machine and the Risograph Machine. Both processes lend themselves to large print runs and creative engagement with the limits of these mediums. Allowing the students to guide themselves, with various research practices involved, the assignments pushed them to trust their own desires in making while emphasizing gaining a knowledge of the processes themselves. The syllabus was itself printed on the risograph machine with evidence of its own making. The structure of the class was affected due to the COVID-19 pandemic.