COLLABORATIVE METHODS

ARTISTS

Aaron Landsman

New York City-based theater artist Aaron Landsman makes performances with people, language, space and time. His current work includes: Perfect City, a 20-year art and activism project about city planning, urban policy, and displacement, created with planners, activists, students and artists; Empathy School/Love Story, a diptych of monologues about landscape, nostalgia, memory and class (NY Times and Time Out New York Critics’ Pick); and SQUARES, a performance created with photographer Paul Shambroom, director Mallory Catlett and designer/director Jim Findlay, drawn from anonymous cast-off instamatic snapshots. From 2012-2014, Landsman, Catlett and Findlay presented the participatory performance City Council Meeting in five US cities. His earlier works were commissioned and presented by EMPAC, The Foundry Theatre, DiverseWorks, The Chocolate Factory, and PS122. Landsman is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow; previously he was a Princeton Arts Fellow, and the ASU Gammage Residency Artist. His work has been funded by LMCC, MAP, The Graham Foundation, Jerome, Rubin, NEFA and other funders. He has performed with Elevator Repair Service, Richard Maxwell, Tory Vazquez, and many other artists. He is a playwright in residence at Abrons Arts Center, and a Visiting Associate Professor at Princeton.

www.thinaar.com

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Adelheid Mers

Adelheid Mers engages in conversations with lay and professional cultural producers about their aesthetic practices. She uses diagrams as tools for figuring, to make cultural ecologies accessible to reflection, with an emphasis on practitioner perspectives. As a tenured professor of arts administration and policy at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mers appraises cultural processes across scales and manifold participant's interests. As a visual artist, she draws on the performative tools of studio critique to facilitate conversations. Formally, diagrams are defined by their operativity, engendering action and reflection. Mers' diagrams are deployed across media, ranging from quick sketches to freely distributed flyers to manipulable whiteboards; occasions are created for use and response.

Mers works independently, with artists, and with non-profits and their constituencies. She has explored artist's thinking about grant application processes for the 3Arts Foundation, and conducted research on cultural ecologies on Chicago's south and west sides, with the Foundation for Homan Square and the University of Chicago. As part of an ongoing project, Art Work (Visual Art/Music/Management) Mers is currently exploring the practices of sound artists, composers and experimental musicians, in collaboration with colleagues at the Institute of Cultural Management at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna. Her work is presented nationally and internationally, through conference contributions and exhibitions. She has curated thematic exhibitions, published essays on pedagogy, arts administration and art-based research and has edited and published a book, Useful Pictures.

Honors include grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the British Council, the NEA, Illinois Arts Council and DCASE. Mers serves on editorial boards, and has recently served as juror for the NEA and the Rauschenberg Foundation.

Mers works with artists and with non-profit clients: with the City of Chicago Mayor's office and department of Innovation and Technology she observed stimulus funding application and uses. She has worked with the Evanston Art Center seeking out local arts ecologies, explored grant making impacts on artists for the 3Arts Foundation and conducted projects on Chicago's south and west sides, with the Foundation for Homan Square and the University of Chicago. Her work is presented nationally and internationally, at conferences and exhibitions. She has curated several exhibitions, published essays on pedagogy, arts administration and art-based research and has edited and published a book, Useful Pictures. Honors include grants from the German Academic Exchange Service, the British Council, NEA, the Illinois Arts Council and DCASE.

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Anna Riley

Anna Riley is a visual artist whose work emerges from a strong desire for material research. By recreating or altering the circumstances of their manufacture— whether reversing the coloration in glass, or making lime using antiquated burning methods— she considers common preconceptions surrounding materials, only to attempt to do away with them and discover the materials anew. Her research, tacit and often dependent on experimentation, has been enabled by residencies at the Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass (2017), the Creative Glass Center of America Fellowship at WheatonArts (2016), the Thicket (2016), and Wave Pool Gallery (2016). She is currently a Workspace Resident at Dieu Donne creating work focused on the origin and production of lime. She will further this research as an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Art and Design (September 2017 - January 2018). Further information can be found at www.annaelizabethriley.com.

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Asha Veal Brisebois

Asha Veal Brisebois maintains a writing, editing, and curatorial practice, and has collaborated as an administrator on projects with visual, film, theater, and literary organizations and artists. She is currently developing The Tokyo Show: Black is Beautiful (2018), an experimental curatorial project to explore the following contexts: art as an instigator for cross-cultural dialogues across global space; and art as an instigator for potentially disruptive private and public conversations on the constructions of “race.”

Asha’s published work as a writer and editor has been acquired in libraries and collections including the George Gustav Heye Center at the National Museum of the American Indian Smithsonian Libraries, National Museum of African American History & Culture Smithsonian Libraries, Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives, and others. Her work in creative nonfiction has been published by Brooklyn-based Slice Literary, among others. She is the founder of The Places We’ve Been books, an independent publisher, working since 2011 with more than 48 writers from cities and countries globally.

Asha teaches "Flexible Art Worlds" and "Curating in the Expanded Field" as faculty in the Department of Arts Administration and Policy at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a BA from The Gallatin School at New York University, an MFA from the writing program at The New School, and an MA Arts Administration & Policy program at SAIC.

http://sites.saic.edu/emerge/fall2016/     http://www.ashavealb.com/ 

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Ashley Hunt and Taisha Paggett

taisha paggett (b. 1976, Fresno, California; lives in Los Angeles, California) and Ashley Hunt (lives in Van Nuys, California)

Pagett and Hunt’s collaborative practice attempts to span and challenge their respective disciplines-- spanning dance, visual art, activism, and teaching--and the demands and possibilities of political life. The set of directives presented as a “tool” at WOUND originated in Par Course A, a larger work by the artists developed in Los Angeles in 2009. Par Course A is organized as a “parcourse” fitness circuit with simple, time-based instructions, engaging the viewer/participant in a minor performance. Eleven stations provide equipment and instructions for viewers/participants to, for example dance to ambient sound, repeat habitual gestures, and track the origin of their garments through audio recordings. This work has primarily been presented as part of their ongoing research project, “On Movement, Thought, and Politics.”  The form of the parcourse allows the artists to offer the workshop without being present.

 

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Be the Change Consulting

Be the Change Consulting provides high quality learning experiences and consulting for organizations to reach their creative potential. We do this through an intentional process that connects core values to organizational outcomes while providing research-based strategies, experiential learning techniques, and live coaching on real issues. Our solutions engage clients in creative problem-solving, provide alignment to research and best practices, and offer strategies to institutionalize organizational change.

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Caroline Woolard

Caroline Woolard (b. 1984) is a New York-based artist who makes objects and systems at the intersection of art, technology, and political economy. She is the co-founder of barter networks​ ​OurGoods.org​ and TradeSchool.coop and cultural equity platforms​ ​BFAMFAPhD.com​ and​ ​StudyCollaboration.com​. 

Her work has been commissioned by MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Creative Time, the Brooklyn Museum, Cornell University, and Cooper Union. She is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships including at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2016), the Queens Museum (2014), Eyebeam (2013), Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund (2010), Watermill (2011), and the MacDowell Colony (2009).

Recent scholarly writing on her work has been published in Artforum (2016); Art in America (2016); The New York Times (2016); and South Atlantic Quarterly (2015). Woolard has been named one of 11 Artists to Transform the Art World in 2017 (2017), has been listed in ArtNet's Top 20 Female Artists (2015) and the WIRED Smart List (2013).

Woolard is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Hartford; her projects are the subject of three documentaries by PBS / Art21 for ​New York Close Up; her forthcoming book about the future of arts pedagogy, Ways of Being, co-authored by Susan Jahoda and designed by Emilio Martinez Poppe as a contribution to BFAMFAPhD, will be published by Punctum Books in 2018. http://carolinewoolard.com

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Chloë Bass

Chloë Bass is a multi-form conceptual artist working in performance, situation, publication, and installation. Her work addresses scales of intimacy, where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand, and daily life as a site of deep research. She began at the scale of the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 - 2013). Her current project, The Book of Everyday Instruction, is an eight-chapter investigation into one-on-one social interaction. Beginning in 2018, she will be making a study at the scale of immediate family units, tentatively titled Obligation to Others Holds Me In My Place. Chloë is a 2017 - 2018 Workspace resident at the Center for Book Arts, and a 2017 studio resident at Triangle Arts Association. Her projects have appeared in recent exhibitions at CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James Gallery, and elsewhere. Her forthcoming book will be published by the Operating System in December 2017; her writing is most often found on Hyperallergic. A native New Yorker, she lives and works in Brooklyn, and is an Assistant Professor in Art at Queens College, CUNY. You can learn more about her at chloebass.com. 

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Dee Hibbert-Jones

Dee Hibbert-Jones is an Academy Award nominated, Emmy® award winning filmmaker and artist. Her work incorporates animation, installation, public art and documentary film examining power and politics: how people manage and who gets heard. She explores diverse subjects from land use and wasted resources, to criminal justice and indigent rights: examining what is considered valuable and who is dismissed as valueless. Hibbert-Jones is a Guggenheim Fellow. She was most recently awarded a United States Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award in
recognition for her outstanding national commitment to civil rights, and social justice. The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke awarded Hibbert-Jones the 2015 Filmmaker Award, the California Public Defenders Association awarded them the Gideon Award for support to indigent minorities. She teaches sculpture, public art and digital art new media, film and social documentary. Her short film, installation and new media projects have been exhibited worldwide in exhibitions, museums and festivals; broadcast internationally and shown on Netflix. Her most recent animated documentary film Last Day of Freedom (with Nomi Talisman) won Best Short Documentary at the International Documentary (IDA) Awards 2015, a Northern California Emmy and was nominated for an 88th
Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. The film screened at over thirty international festivals and won eleven festival awards including: Best Short, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Best Short Documentary Hamptons International Film Festival, Golden Strands Award, Outstanding Documentary Short, Tall Grass KS, the 2015 Platinum Award Winner Spotlight Documentary Series, as well as the Award of Recognition at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards. Her work is in the collections of the Israeli Center for Digital Art, the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences, the DeRosa Preserve, Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz, Riverside and Berkeley, Duke University Library, Recology and the Savidge Collection MacDowell Colony.

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Douglas Paulson

Douglas Paulson is an artist and educator who maintains collaborative practices with many of his favorite people.  He loves drawing, making books, and creating sprawling cultural and educational projects that bring together people with disparate backgrounds.  In 2012, he partnered kids withs artists and urban planners to design and build Kitty City, a city for kittens (Flux Factory, 2012). He and Heidi Neilson recently inflated the Menu For Mars Kitchen (The Boiler, 2015) to prototype food for the Red Planet.  In 2016, Doug collaborated with refugees from the Middle East and Africa who have relocated to Germany and Norway; producing parallel projects designed to bring people face to face with their new neighbors. http://www.douglaspaulson.com/

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Emilio Martinez Poppe

Emilio Martinez Poppe is an artist, designer, and educator born in Baltimore and working between Brooklyn and Lima, Peru. Their work includes video, interactive websites, text, performance, garment design, installation and research based collaborative projects. Emilio’s practices and collaborations have been supported by the New Museum, Cooper Union, SOMA, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their work has been presented at Cornell University, MICA, Cooper Union, Creative Time, Framer Framed, Side Room, and Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond. Emilio is currently a member of the collective BFAMFAPhD and a member of NEW INC at the New Museum. http://www.emilio.click/

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Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

The São Paulo Biennial Foundation is a pulsating institution that idealizes and puts into practice artistic, educational and social initiatives. In addition to holding the event that moves the world of art every two years, its activities extend from January to January in an emblematic pavilion of modern Brazilian architecture and in actions inside and outside the country. Without political-partisan or religious ties, it is a private non-profit institution that wants to bring the new, provoke debate, educate the eye with anxieties, proposals and questions always renewed.

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Ghana Think Tank

Ghana ThinkTank is an international collective that “develops the first world” by flipping traditional power dynamics, allowing the “third world” to intervene into the lives of the people living in the so-called “developed” world. We collect problems from communities throughout the USA and Europe, and send them to think tanks we created in “developing” communities. The think tanks – which include a group of bike mechanics in Ghana, a rural radio station in El Salvador, Sudanese refugees seeking asylum in Israel, an artist collective in Iran, and a group of incarcerated girls in the Boston penal system, among others – propose solutions, which are then implemented in the “first world”.

Ghana ThinkTank’s innovative approach to public art reveals blind spots between otherwise disconnected cultures, challenges assumptions about who is “needy,” and turns the idea of expertise on its head by asking people in the “third world” to solve problems of people in the “first world.” This process helps people overcome their own stereotypes while being exposed to the stereotypes that other cultures have about them. Ghana ThinkTank was founded in 2006 by Christopher Robbins, John Ewing and Matey Odonkor. Maria Del Carmen Montoya joined in 2009. The project began with think tanks in Ghana, Cuba, and El Salvador, and has since expanded to include Mexico, Iran, Serbia, Indonesia, Sudan and Morocco. http://www.ghanathinktank.org/

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Judith Leemann

Judith Leemann is an artist, educator, and writer. Translating operations through and across distinct arenas of practice, she looks for ways to move studio teaching methodologies into other contexts and to interrupt classroom habits by bringing in carefully curated noise. A long-standing collaboration with the Design Studio for Social Intervention grounds much of this experimentation. Of particular interest is bringing non-verbal choreographies of hands moving objects into relation with verbal explanation. The resulting double descriptions foreground the relational and systemic aspects of the phenomenon under consideration, and can be used by individuals in personal study as well as by groups looking to surface system dynamics. Recent work takes up the retooling of studio critique, with an eye towards its liberatory potential in both classroom and public sphere.

Leemann is Associate Professor of Fine Arts 3D/Fibers at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and holds an M.F.A. in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her writings have been included in the anthologies Beyond Critique (Bloomsbury, 2017), Collaboration Through Craft (Bloomsbury, 2013), and The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production (School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MIT Press 2007). Leemann’s distributed audio project reading aloud is produced every spring at the intersection of her studio, teaching, and research practices. Recent exhibitions include arvensis (of the field) (Proof Gallery, Boston, 2017), WOUND (Cooper Union Gallery, New York City, 2016), Virtually Physically Speaking (A+D Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago 2014), Resonating Bodies (The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, 2013), and Imperfect Symmetry: A Compendium (A+D Gallery, 2013). Leemann is a frequent contributor to national and international gatherings, whether formal conferences or informal working groups, and offers workshops on studio critique through a social justice lens.

Leemann lives in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

 

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Kerry Downey

Kerry Downey (b.1979,  Ft. Lauderdale) is a multi-disciplinary artist who makes videos, works on paper, and performances. Downey’s work illuminates the connections between private emotion and political consciousness. Their work presents queer bodies, landscapes, and objects as intimate, sensorial experiences..  Their work is heavily influenced by gender queerness, their commitment to feminist collaborations, and their work as a caregiver and teacher of people with Alzheimer’s and other disabilities.

Downey has recently had a solo show at CAVE in Detroit and a two-person show at Knockdown Center. They have also exhibited at the Queens Museum, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, the Drawing Center, and the Paris International with Taylor Macklin.  In 2015, Downey was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant.  Artist-in-residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, SHIFT at the EFA Project Space, the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, Real Time and Space in Oakland, CA, the Vermont Studio Center. Downey participated in the Queer/Art/Mentorship program in 2013. They are currently in residence at Triangle Arts Association in Brooklyn. Downey holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Hunter College. http://www.kerrydowney.com/

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Kristen Barker

Kristen Barker is a social entrepreneur and the President and Co-Founder of the Cincinnati Union Co-op Initiative (CUCI). She leads participatory education with co-op workers, helps determine feasibility of potential co-ops, helps co-ops access capital, and helps existing business owners interested in succession determine if selling their business to their employees is feasible. She hosts delegations from around the country and helps adopt the Mondragon model to the U.S. cultural context. She is currently a BALLE fellow (Business Alliance for Local and Living Economies.) Prior to working full-time for the union co-op movement with Mondragon North America/MAPA, she spent 12 years at the Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center fostering faith, labor & community partnerships. She is the mother of a resilient daughter with special needs. She is a lifelong Cincinnati resident (except 2 years in El Salvador) and a Xavier graduate.

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Melanie Crean

Melanie Crean is an artist, educator and filmmaker whose work explores how systems of power are represented in media, culture and technology. She uses site specific performance to research and mitigate the impact that social systems of control, such as capitalism and criminal justice, have on people and their surrounding environment. Her recent work focuses on how cultural archetypes such as the hero and the criminal are conceived, and how new forms of narrative can be used to equitably shift relationships of power.

Crean is an Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design, where she teaches courses on emerging media, social engagement and visual culture. She has worked with moving image in a variety of capacities and genre, including directing the production studio at the arts non-profit Eyebeam; managing animation, motion capture and speech recognition teams at MTV Digital Television Lab; and producing documentaries in Nepal and India on the effects of women trafficking.

She has received commissions from Art in General, Bronx Arts Council & Rhizome; fellowships from Creative Capital, Franklin Furnace, Jerome Foundation, Harvestworks, NYFA & NYSCA; and participated in exhibitions with Creative Time, Performa 11, Southern Exposure and No Longer Empty.

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MirrorEchoTilt

Mirror/Echo/Tilt is a project created by artists (Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, and Sable E. Smith) in collaboration with people who are court-involved, formerly incarcerated, or otherwise affected by the criminal justice system. Through a curriculum based on visual storytelling, participants translate personal narratives into performance in order to replace a culturally embedded conception of black criminality with new language so that the mind and body may think, feel, and move in a way not defined by their previous experience with incarceration. Our goal is to facilitate participants’ agency to tell their own stories and ultimately, reframe existing narratives defining the “criminal.”

 Since 2015 we have piloted our methodology working with individuals caught in cycles of incarceration and now collaborate with the Brooklyn downtown criminal court as an arts-based diversion program for youth. When individuals successfully complete the course, their cases are closed, sealed, and do not appear on their adult record.

The immediate goal of our project is actionable impact on youth recidivism.While doing so, we refine and compile a tool kit that includes input from different populations affected by the system, archived online with visual documentation.

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Patricia Silva

Patricia Silva is a Lisbon-born, New York-based visual artist working with socially recuperative methods using photography, video, sometimes words. Earned a MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from Bard College (2013), and a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts (1999). In 2011, Patricia curated the first Luso-Brazilian Pop-Up Arts Festival in New York City. Currently faculty at The School at the International Center of Photography in New York.

Patricia's interviews and critical writings on photography and visual culture have been published in ICP Perspective, Cult Bytes, Dodge & Burn: Decolonizing Photography, Daylight, "Memories Can't Wait," and in The Portuguese American Journal.

Photographs have been exhibited in group shows at Flux Factory, USA, (2017); The International Center of Photography, New York, USA (2013); Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Germany (2012); Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley, USA (2005). Recently published in Der Grief Number 10, Jubilee Anniversary Issue.

Videos have screened in film festivals and in group exhibitions at MIT List Visual Arts Center, USA (2017);  Anthology Film Archives, USA (2017); Contemporary Centre of Arts Glasgow, UK (2017); British Film Institute, UK (2016); MoMA PS1 Theater, USA (2016); IFC Theater, USA (2016); Colorado Photographic Arts Center, USA (2016); Tengis Cinema, Mongolia (2016); Cervantes Institute, Brazil (2016); Cine 13, France (2015); and the International Center of Photography, USA (2014).

Photo books have been exhibited in group shows at The Benaki Museum, Greece (2017); Phoenix Museum of Art, USA (2016-17); The Knockdown Center, USA (2016); Ateliê da Imagem, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2015-16); The International Center of Photography (2013-14). In 2016, one of Patricia’s self-published projects earned her an invitation to the White House by the Obama Administration.

www.patriciasilva.com

 

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Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan was a video artist, writer, teacher and theoretician. Ryan was a member of the Raindance Media Collective as well as a contributor to the historic video journal Radical Software. His codification of the concept of “Threeing”--situations in which three or more people create sustainable, collaborative relationships--found sculptural expression and experimental use in multiple communities. The process developed in videos in which three people took turns playing three different roles; initiator, respondent, and mediator.

 

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Project 404

It is high tide in the digital age. Smartphones, laptops, tablets, televisions, and now watches and other “wearable technology” constantly proffer text and images, often simultaneously. We can scroll or swipe our way through the waves of rich data, but there is always another hyperlink to transport us elsewhere.

If we are to accept the presence of digital technology in our lives, we need strategies and practices that will ensure that we remain active, not lulled into passivity by these devices. Project 404 is a practice of attention that aspires to help us remain fully, creatively engaged with the world and ourselves while using the very devices that threaten us with passivity. 

The practice itself consists of two phases: a silent phase of fifteen minutes during which the participants look intently together at a single image on our individual devices. The image will be chosen by someone offsite from among the images submitted by the participants in the practice. The subsequent phase is a colloquy of between 60 and 90 minutes, during which the participants discuss their experiences of the silent phase (with devices put aside).

Project 404 rests on the belief that it is practice, rather than theory, that makes us who we are. Our practice of attention can be social as well as pedagogical; in either case, it is designed to enable us to be more fully attuned to the infinitely complex nexus of external stimuli and interior consciousness that constitutes much of our experience, and it allows us to enjoy collaborative sociability, as we discuss with one another the experience of paying focused attention to our devices and the images they display.

This practice of attention is a particular way of being and becoming, one that revolves around the twin axes of creativity and generosity. You are welcome to join us.

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Shaun Leonardo

Drawing from images and video footage of miscarriages of justice, multidisciplinary artist Shaun Leonardo breaks down media's complicity in shaping, informing and circulating racial bias, and consequently, memories of past events. Through an anatomy of scene that employs strategies of extraction, omission and the dissection of an image into a sequence of parts, Leonardo challenges the culpability of the viewer's gaze. elcleonardo.com

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Susan Jahoda

 Jahoda has organized exhibitions and screenings including Documents from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, Interference Archive, Brooklyn, (2014-15), Susan Kleckner and Documents from the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, (2013), The Martha Rosler Library, and Beyond the Instance of an Ending, (2009), Setting in Motion (2006), and Global Priority (2002), This is My body: this is My Blood, (1992), Herter Art Gallery, UMass, Amherst. She has published short stories and essays including "Spring Flowers," in Class and its Others, University of Minnesota Press, (2000) and “Theatres of Madness,” in Deviant Bodies, Indiana University Press, (1995). In 1993, Jahoda joined the collective and journal, Rethinking Marxism, where she continued to serve as arts editor until 2014.

 Her projects have received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Trust for Mutual Understanding, NYC. Jahoda is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and resides in New York City.

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The Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative

The CIHC works at the edges and interfaces of health, education and the professions to discover and share promising practices to promote interprofessional education and collaboration in areas that will enhance patient care. CIHC is the hub for Canadian interprofessional activity.

 

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The Extrapolation Factory

The Extrapolation Factory is a design-based research studio for participatory futures studies, founded by Elliott P. Montgomery and Chris Woebken. The studio develops experimental methods for collaboratively prototyping, experiencing and impacting future scenarios. Central to these methods is the creation of hypothetical future props and their deployment in familiar contexts such as 99¢ stores, science museums, vending machines and city sidewalks. With this work, the studio is exploring new territories for democratized futures by rapidly imagining, prototyping, deploying and evaluating visions of possible futures on an extended time scale.

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EVENTS

No events scheduled at the moment

RESOURCES

LESSON PLANS

Go here and here for great classroom activities and guides for teaching in higher education. 
 
Go here for a template you can use to develop a 2 hour workshop, created by artist Caroline Woolard.
 
Go here to download syllabi compiled by artist Stephanie Syjuco: Syllabi Google Doc.
 
Go here to see a lesson plan made by Art + Feminism about how to edit Wikipedia.
 
Go here to learn more about contemplative practices in higher education.
 
Go here to learn more about Generative Somatics and contemplative practices in activism and social movements.
 
Go here to read the lesson plans from a study-into-action group called challenging male supremacy.
 
Go here to read the Black Lives Matter Syllabus made by Professor Frank Leon Roberts.
 
Go here to learn about Artspace Sanctuary and Sactuary locations throughout NYC.
 

 

IN-DEPTH TRAINING IN COLLABORATION

The Laundromat Project's year-long "Create Change participants acquire necessary practical and ethical tools to critically examine the role of artists working with community members."

The Public Science Project's Critical Participatory Action Research week-long intensive "is designed to introduce the theory, methods, and ethics of critical participatory action research (CPAR) to graduate students, faculty, and members of community based organizations."

The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond's Undoing Racism three-day intensive workshop is an "intensive process that challenges participants to analyze the structures of power and privilege that hinder social equity and prepares them to be effective organizers for justice through dialogue, reflection, role-playing, strategic planning and presentations." 

RoundSky Collab101 is an online course with asynchronous videos and readings and sychronous video chats that takes three-months to complete. The course focuses on teaching effective agenda-setting, meeting facilitation, collective decision-making, and "resolving conflict while strengthening your team."

The Greenworker Co-op Academy is a "five-month training and support program that helps teams of aspiring entrepreneurs develop worker-owned green businesses."

The Center for Family Life's Cooperative Development Program "mobilizes community members and organizations to develop and launch cooperative businesses." 

The Team's Devising Within a Democracy two-hour workshop "immerses participants in a mini devising process, providing tools and strategies for solo and group creation, working through delicate issues of collaboration and authorship, and bridging into the editing and synthesizing process."

Springboard for the Arts has incredible toolkits on artist-led organizations, collaboration, and cultural organizing that you can download here

COOPERATION 

Learn about cooperatives (worker-owned businesses, member-run housing): cultivate.coop and nasco.coop.

Learn more about online collaboration through platform cooperatives.

Read the Lommio's cooperative handbook.

Order a Directory of every co-op, credit union, land trust, and solidarity organization in NYC.

Search a map and videos of co-ops, credit unions, land trusts, and solidarity organizations in NYC.

Visit places in NYC to find collaborators and interlocutors and to learn collaborative methods in context.

Find co-op friendly service providers nationally

Find co-op friendly service providers in NYC

 

FREE TEXTS, AUDIOBOOKS, FILMS

Free and low-cost MFA programs.
 
Free readings: AAARG and Monoskop.
 
Find free audiobooks: Librivox
 
Free film and video: UbuWeb.
 
 

JOBS

Find a job in a cooperative anywhere in the United States at the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives job board.

Find a job in a cooperative or solidarity economy organization at the CEANYC job board.

Give yourself a job in a freedom school or self-organized learning environment like a co-op.

Here are some sample hiring requirements from freedom schools to teaching artist gigs.

Advice from Michael Mandiberg about academic job interviews.

Find out about academic jobs in the arts: CAA.

 

TEACHERS RIGHTS

Go here to learn about adjunct labor at the New Faculty Majority.

Go here to find your union representative:

 

THE HISTORY OF THE ADJUNCT SYSTEM

Go here to learn about the field of Critical University Studies.

Go here to watch a video from Chris Newfield’s The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked the Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them.

Read: Nussbaum, Martha (2010). Not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN9780691140643.

FAQ

What is The Study Center for Group Work?

The Study Center for Group Work is an online resource and an in-person network of artists who meet to share methods of collaboration with one another. The Center provides: (1) an online resource of lesson plans, readings, and objects, (2) gatherings for artists to share resources, and (3) accessible public trainings in methods of listening, attention, and collaboration. Just as dancers take classes throughout their lives, the Center aims to cultivate a network of visual artists who are committed to group work through daily practice. It started with an exhibition. Watch a video about it, here.

  

Why does this exist? Who is this for?

We hope that art spaces, collectives, worker-owned businesses, art classes, and working-groups will use this online library of collaborative methods that have been recommended by artists. If most people have no experience of democracy at work, at home, in school, or online, how can we learn to collaborate? How do we develop a musculature of shared decision making and of shared work?


A few years ago, we began to notice that many visual artists had developed methods of listening and group work. Yet they did not have a way to share their work with one another or with the public. Just as dancers take classes throughout their lives, more and more visual artists are committed to group work through daily practice. We ran a pilot program that took the form of an exhibition called WOUND: The Study Center for Group Work, curated by Stamatina Gregory, at Cooper Union in 2016-2017. The Center was written up in The New York Times, Art in America, and Artforum; we knew it needed to continue. We are excited to share this online library of collaborative methods, and to announce that we will be working with Spaceworks at the New York Public Library to provide trainings throughout the year.

 

What is a practice or a method?  

A practice (or a method) is a way of doing things intentionally to develop an ability or awareness. 

 

What is collaboration?  

Collaboration is the action of shared work and also of shared decision making. While participation refers to involvement without shared decision making, collaboration refers to shared work and shared decision making. As Dont Rhine, a member of the collective UltraRed writes, "historically, in political struggles for democratic participation in institutions, communities typically demand civilian control and oversight. What the state delivers in response to that demand is, instead, participation." With few experiences of shared decision making at home, at school, at work, or online, people often have a hard time learning how to collaborate.
 

What is cooperation?  

Cooperation is the action of shared work and also of shared decision making for mutual aid and economic power. The International Cooperative Alliance defines a cooperative (also known as co-operative, co-op, or coop) as "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise." See the cooperative section under RESOURCES for more information.
 
 

I want to contribute a practice / method. What are the criteria? 

If you have a practice/method for listening, attention, or group work that you teach regularly, and that you would like to share freely, please email us: info@woundstudycenter.com
 
 

I want to use a method here. Who has permission to do so?

These materials are the intellectual property of the authors (with Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses) whose names are cited on the PDFs themselves. The material on this site should not be copied or used without proper citation and attribution. If you plan to use this material on your own, please cite the contributor and the creator, and consider contacting them to let them know that you plan to do so. You will learn more about the collaborative method if you attend their events and/or hire them to come into your group or classroom. If you feel that attribution has not been properly made on this site, or in an adaptation of a method from this site, please let us know: info@woundstudycenter.com.

 

Did these artists "create" the collaborative methods here?  

In most cases, collaborative methods grow out of collaborative contexts, and therefore cannot have a single author. You will notice that the site says "Contributed By" as the person who is sharing the collaborative method did not create it. The majority of these practices / methods have been passed on from group member to group member, or from student to teacher to student. That said, the artists here have put many hours into adapting collaborative methods and creating the materials here to share. Please contact them, cite their work properly, and ask them to bring the method you are interested in into your group or classroom. 
 
 

Where else can I learn about collaboration in classrooms and in self-organized groups?

See the resources page on this website.

Go here to for great suggestions about teaching in higher ed classrooms. 

Go here to learn about cooperatives (worker-owned businesses): cultivate.coop and nasco.coop.

 
 

Who built this site? 

Or Zubalsky, an artist, musician, and programmer, built this site in dialog with Caroline Woolard and Leonard Nalencz. 
 
 
 

Why focus on visual artists with practices? 

Caroline Woolard - whose opinions differ from many people on this website - says, "I think the visual arts as a field has a lot of growing to do (as compared to the performing arts) when it comes to practices. We need to build our capacity and recognize our collective need for growth, together. In the performing arts, think of the wisdom and rigor of Urban Bush Women’s Entering, Building, and Exiting Community, Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening, Sekou Sundiata’s The America Project teaching method, or Liz Lerman's Critical Response process. By narrowing this group to visual artists, or people open to practicing with visual artists, we can talk about how a dedication to practice over project can challenge many norms in the visual arts. We can notice that few visual artists (as compared to many performing artists) are dedicated to sharing their practice. We can grow a dedication to practices in the visual arts with us (ways of doing things intentionally to develop an ability or awareness)." 

 

How is this site funded?

This site was made possible at first through funding from Cooper Union for the exhibition curated by Stamatina Gregory in 2016, and after that, through a grant Caroline Woolard applied for and recieved from the New York Foundation for the Arts' Arts Business Incubator Program and from a residency at Eyebeam with Or Zubalsky.
 
 
 

Shouldn't facilitators be paid to develop and share these methods?

Yes, and the artists here have been paid by The Study Center for Group Work to teach their methods. They have chosen to provide these PDFs for free, as they hope that collaborative methods are shared. If you would like to hire someone to come to your group or classroom, please contact them directly. While the Revolution Will Not Be Funded, and collaboration must be taught, adjunct faculty and all precarious workers have a right to a living wage. Go here to learn about adjunct labor at the New Faculty Majority. Go here to find your union representative: See RESOURCES for more on this topic. 
 
 

How did this site start?

This site exists due to ongoing conversations between Caroline Woolard, Stamatina Gregory, and all the artists on this site, including Ultra-red, Shaun Leonardo, the Order of the Third Bird, Project 404, Sick Time with Canaries, Judith Leemann, Kenneth Bailey and the Design Studio for Social Intervention, the Extrapolation Factory, taisha paggett and Ashley Hunt, Jean Gardner and the estate of Paul Ryan, Asha Iman Veal Brisebois and Adelheid Mers, Christopher Robbins, Aaron Landsman, Cori Olinghouse, Melanie Crean, and Chloe Bass.

In addition to these people, recommendations and inspiration comes from Leigh Claire La Berge, Jennifer Monson, Risa Shoup, Alicia Boone Jean-Noel, the Pedagogy Group, including Maureen Connor, Susan Jahoda, Barrie Cline, Silvia Juliana Mantilla Ortiz, Laurel Ptak, James Andrews, Shane Aslan Selzer, Robert Sember, Taraneh Fazeli, Mark Read, and Sasha Sumner, BFAMFAPhD members, including Susan Jahoda, Emilio Martinez Poppe, Agnes Szanyi, and Vicky Virgin, former OurGoods and Trade School co-organizers, including Louise Ma, Or Zubalsky, Chisthian Diaz, Rachel Vera Steinberg, Aimee Lutkin, Rich Watts, Carl Tashian, and Jen Abrams, Social Life of Artistic Property co-authors, including Pablo Helguera, Michael Mandiberg, William Powhida, and Amy Whitaker, and SolidarityNYC members, including Ben Blackshear, Cheyenna Layne Weber, Evan Casper-Futterman, Lauren Taylor Hudson, Michael Johnson, Olivia Geiger, Zara Serabian-Arthur, Annie McShiras, Amelia Bryne, Caroline Woolard, Daniel Apfel, Jessie Reilly, and K. Kenneth Edusei.

2013: Caroline Woolard conceives of the study center for group work and begins writing grants and speaking with possible partners to open the center in New York City.

2015: Stamatina Gregory and Saskia Bos invite Caroline Woolard to bring the study center to Cooper Union in 2016.

2015: Stamatina Gregory and Saskia Bos invite Caroline Woolard to bring The Study Center for Group Work to Cooper Union in 2016. Stamatina Gregory and Caroline Woolard selected visual artists for the exhibition at Cooper Union based upon these criteria: (1) has a practice that has been taught to other groups and that they now use (practice over author); (2) has a practice that has been refined for years (rigor / commitment); (3) has a practice that is used within anti-racist, feminist, and/or disability justice; (4) has a practice with a beautiful sculptural tool; (5) has a practice with facilitators in NYC.

2016: WOUND: The Study Center for Group Work opens for the first time at 41 Cooper Gallery from October 13 - November 18th, 2016. The study center is featured in Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times. The exhibition website is here: Wound. After the exhibition closes, the artists gather to discuss how, and if, meetings to share practices of collaboration might be of interest. 

2016: The study center opens for the first time at 41 Cooper Gallery from October 13 - November 18th, 2016. The study center is featured in Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times.

2017: The study center moves portions of the collection to the solidarity economy meeting space at 388 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn known as the Brooklyn Commons. Portions of the collection will travel to Providence, Rhode Island.

January 2017: The Study Center for Group Work recieves a residency at Eyebeam with support from the New York Foundation for the Arts' Arts Buisness Incubator program to develop the website as an online resource. Leonard Nalencz joins Caroline Woolard to move and support The Center. The Center installs portions of the collection at the solidarity economy meeting space at 388 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn known as The Brooklyn Commons. Leonard Nalencz offers Project 404 practices at the Brooklyn Commons and at Eyebeam. Caroline Woolard hires Danielle Jackson to interview the artists from the exhibition and to facilitate a retreat to share practices with one another and to learn from Generative Somatics. 

2018: Portions of the study center move to the Glasgow School of Art and to Moore College of Art and Design.

2019: The study center opens in Glasgow and at Moore.

 

2016 EXHIBITION PRESS

The New York Times

"Wound” also shows how the art world’s breakneck schedule of exhibitions, fairs and biennials undercuts the ability of socially engaged artists to develop long-term strategies and practices. In this sense, the project works within the time-bound exhibition system while pushing back against it.

- Martha Schwendener, The New York Times 

 

Artforum

 "The word wound is one of the English language’s most powerful and contradictory homographs. As a noun it means bodily damage, a rending of the flesh or psyche; and as the past participle of wind, to have twisted something up. Artist Caroline Woolard defines her social-practice project WOUND, started in 2013, as the latter—like what one does to a clock. And yet “Mending Time and Attention,” an exhibition and a series of workshops organized by WOUND, seeks to heal the pain inflicted by late capitalism’s compartmentalization and commodification of time."

- Wendy Vogel, Artforum

 

Art in America

 "When artists create opportunities for support and mutual aid rather than unquestioningly competing with one another for meager resources, they open a small space of resistance to the divisiveness that comes from an economically precarious existence. The brainchild of Caroline Woolard, a sculptor and social-practice organizer who has initiated various barter-based endeavors in New York, and curated by Stamatina Gregory, this group exhibition with work by seventeen artists and collectives is meant to be the first incarnation of Wound, a membership-based study center whose name suggests the activity of setting a clock. Attention and time, two things atomized by digital technology, are the focus of the objects displayed on the walls and tables and in the vitrines."

- Cathy Lebowitz, Art in America

 

If you want to get in touch with the people who work on this site, or suggest a collaborative method, please email us.

 

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