WOUND aims to mend time and attention by providing (1) practice spaces for groups, (2) a study center for sculptural tools, and (3) trainings in practices of listening, attention, and collaboration.
Staff
Interim Director: Caroline Woolard, caroline@woundstudycenter.com
Curator: Stamatina Gregory, sgregory@cooper.edu
Assistants: Emilio Martinez Poppe, Jordan Delzell, Anna Vila, Anna Zinovieff Papadimitriou, and Samantha Rosner
General Contact: info@woundstudycenter.com
Mission
WOUND aims to mend time and attention by providing (1) Practice Spaces for groups, (2) a study center for practice-related readings and sculptural Tools, and (3) accessible Trainings in practices of listening, attention, and collaboration.
(1) Practice Spaces: Just as dancers take classes throughout their lives, WOUND aims to become a permanent practice space for group work in the visual arts.
(2) Study Center: The study center at WOUND holds a collection of small objects, writing, and ephemera used in group work. WOUND focuses on relational, rather than autonomous, objects.
(3) Trainings: If democracy is an endless meeting and socialism requires too many evenings, then WOUND cultivates behaviors that might allow groups to gather together more carefully.
History
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.
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.
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.
Quotations
WOUND Director Caroline Woolard (caroline@woundstudycenter.com) gives the following four reasons for founding this study center:
PEDAGOGY: This study center is a demonstration of the future of art school. Art departments will be the places where interdisciplinary teams are formed, utilizing practices of listening, attention, and collaboration that this study center honors.
AESTHETICS: This study center makes impossible the fantasy of an autonomous object, removed from collective practice and historical context. Every object in the study center is called a tool, and is either "on view" or "in use," in trainings by collectives and politically engaged artists.
SOCIAL PRACTICE: How can an exhibition or short term project engage a community in a transformative manner? Social practices are long term; they must be practiced. Just as dancers take classes throughout their lives, WOUND aims to become a permanent practice space for group work in the visual arts.
DEMOCRACY: If most New Yorkers have no experiences of democracy at work, at home, in school, or online, how will we learn to work together? This study center provides a practice space for joint work and joint decision making.
Membership
To support WOUND, please become a member. Yearly membership is offered at a sliding scale, from $20 - $200, based on what you can afford. Members are notified of trainings before the general public, have access to tools on member-only days, and enable us to continue to provide trainings to the public. Please write to info@woundstudycenter.com if you would like to become a member.
Future Locations
We are always seeking short and long term space for our collection of tools and our training programs. WOUND is also seeking spaces that can host facilitation and training. For inquiries regarding travelling the study center’s collection, or to offer a space to WOUND, please email info@woundstudycenter.com.
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
References
Leemann, Judith – Reading Aloud https://archive.org/details/HairyAboutTheHeel
Shahjahan, Riyad - Being 'Lazy' and Slowing Down: Toward decolonizing time, out body, and pedagogy
Lightman, Alan – Einstein’s Dreams
Thompson, EP – Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism
Martin, Randy – A Derivative Sociality
Ingold, Tim – What is a Tool?
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Stamatina Gregory and Cooper Union for making this project possible. Thanks also to Jennifer Monson, Aaron Landsman, Risa Shoup, Abigail Statinksy, Alicia Boone Jean-Noel, Pascale Gatzen, Robert Sember, and Athena Kokoronis for introducing Stamatina Gregory and Caroline Woolard to artists, designers, dancers, and facilitators. This project would not be possible without ongoing conversations with Leigh Claire La Berge, Louise Ma, Or Zubalsky, Susan Jahoda, Emilio Poppe, and Pedagogy Group members.
The ladder furniture and stacking column stools in the study center were designed by Caroline Woolard and built by ironworkers Julia Helen Murray, Neva Kocic, and Yvonne Castellanos, and woodworkers Sean Slemon and the American Wood Column Company. The desk and chair were designed and built by Nightwood. This website was designed by Rosen Tomov and Caroline Woolard and built by Or Zubalsky.
WOUND is supported by a generous grant from the Rubin Foundation and from Cooper Union.
