PAST EVENTS

Dakar Biennial

Wednesday, May 9, 12:00PM
Adelheid Mers

Shaun Leonardo, Chloe Bass, The Braid / Asha Iman Veal Brisebois, and Caroline Woolard will represent The Study Center for Group Work at the 2018 Dakar Biennial.

"The Red Hour is the coming of age. It is the moment when one emancipates oneself from what has been by transforming it and giving it a new strength. It is the hour of metamorphosis and transformation."

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Testimony #1: Interactions with Police

Saturday, December 16, 2:00PM
Shaun Leonardo

Performance Workshop | Saturday | December 16 | 2-4pm | Room: Library & Commons at the Nathan Cummings Foundation: 475 Tenth Avenue | 14th Floor | NYC

Join artist Shaun Leonardo for a closed, public-participatory performance where guests will locate intensely contested current affairs within their bodies. Utilizing the shifting perspectives embedded in testimony, news reports, and memory as a backdrop, participants will be asked to translate their experiences into performative gestures. While embodying the texts the group will enact different identities, elusively tying each person in the room to one another.

This workshop and performance will be tailored to exactly 24 guests and require that, at times, participants wear blindfolds. Those interested should RSVP below and arrive with either a written or memorized testimony connected to the prompt: Interactions with Police

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Mirror/Echo/Tilt 2

Saturday, December 9, 2:00PM
Melanie Crean

At Smack Mellon 92 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Operating out of the Recess satellite space in Downtown Brooklyn, Assembly is at once a public storefront gallery and an artist-led diversion program for court-involved youth in partnership with Brooklyn Justice Initiatives. Assembly seeks to dismantle the dominant narratives of the “criminal” through a series of workshops designed by artists Melanie Crean, Sable Smith and Shaun Leonardo, in collaboration with individuals 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 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 arrest and incarceration.

Join Smack Mellon Studio Program artist-in-residence Shaun Leonardo, along with Assembly youth, for a public-participatory performance informed by the Assembly curriculum and co-created by our collaborators.

This performance will be documented and require audience involvement.

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Ways of Being (Support )

Saturday, November 11, 3:00PM
Caroline Woolard

How can we support ourselves and each other? This workshop looks at the ways in which we meet our needs for wellbeing in order to dream, practice, and work on any project. Support extends beyond the life of our projects, often shaping the ways in which we navigate the contradictions of living and working on independent projects. Join us for a “brain massage” and mutual connection.

3-5pm at Spaceworks @ Williamsburgh Library, 240 Division Ave, Fl 2 Brooklyn, NY

Spaceworks is a welcoming space. We invite people from all backgrounds and identities to participate in our programming. This is a LGBTQIA friendly space. We feel that this clearly expresses the openness of the workshop and it's particular sensitivities to the LGBTQIA experiences. We also seek to make space for people of color, gender non-conforming folks, trans folks, youth, senior citizens, people living with disabilities, immigrants, non-English speakers, artists, and beyond. If you feel that Ways of Beingcan specifically speak to one of these communities, we are interested in developing more explicit language around that.
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Avoidance Mapping 2

Saturday, November 4, 7:00PM
Aaron Landsman
Created in collaboration with the perfect city working group and Jamel Ayala.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street
New York, NY 10002
F/M to Delancey/Essex; B/D to Grand St.; M14A to Pitt St.
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Avoidance Mapping

Friday, November 3, 7:00PM
Aaron Landsman

Created in collaboration with the perfect city working group and Jamel Ayala.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street
New York, NY 10002
F/M to Delancey/Essex; B/D to Grand St.; M14A to Pitt St.
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Support

Saturday, September 30, 5:00PM

How can we support ourselves and each other? This workshop looks at the ways in which we meet our needs for wellbeing in order to dream, practice, and work on any project. Support extends beyond the life of our projects, often shaping the ways in which we navigate the contradictions of living and working on independent projects. Join us for a “brain massage” and mutual connection.

3-5pm at Spaceworks @ Williamsburgh Library, 240 Division Ave, Fl 2 Brooklyn, NY

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ways-of-being-support-workshop-tickets-37707049801

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Project 404

Thursday, September 14, 5:30PM

Project404 is a practice of attention that aspires to help us remain fully, creatively engaged with the world and with ourselves while using the very devices that threaten us with distraction.

5:30pm to 7:30pm
Brooklyn Commons
388 Atlantic Avenue

Email project404notfound@gmail.com to RSVP

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Project 404

Saturday, July 29, 3:00PM

Project404 will present their Protocol for Attention and Adaptation at Eyebeam from 3-5pm in Sunset Park, Brooklyn (34 35th St #26, Brooklyn, NY 11232). Please RSVP to CarolineWoolard@gmail.com if you would like to attend this event.

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Retreat for Facilitators

Monday, July 10, 12:00PM

Study Center facilitators will gather at the Magnum Foundation for a day-long retreat to share their collaborative practices with one another and talk about how this resource can reflect their concerns and desires.

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Grand Opening at The Commons Brooklyn

Friday, June 9, 2:00PM

Join Caroline Woolard and Leonard Nalencz of The Study Center for Group Work to celebrate the opening of a collaboration with The Commons Brooklyn at 388 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn from 2-4pm. Practice Threeing and learn about firstness, secondness, and thirdness with a new tablecloth made for The Commons.

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Project 404

Friday, January 27, 5:00PM

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 distraction.

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I Can't Breathe

Friday, November 11, 6:00PM

I Can't Breathe is a public-participatory workshop and performance that will take the form of a self-defense class. Over the course of a half hour, participants will learn a range of self-defense technique – from purely pacifist, self-protective maneuvers (including how one may relieve the pressure of a chokehold) to more overt, defensive strategies. (Participants will not learn offensive strikes or moves.)

Participants will then be placed and paired off in a staggered arrangement. With certain cues given by the artist, each pair will enact the self-defense technique just learned, alternating in the role of the aggressor. As the artist recites a script inspired by Nina Simone, each pair will elect which action to take solely based on how he or she internalizes the words' meaning.

The overall, impromptu composition of defensive actions will, thus, create a reflection and meditation on our community's legacy of self-preservation, and continued desire/need/fight to protect and survive. The piece will be conducted in memory of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Jamar Clark, Laquan McDonald, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, Ramarley Graham, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin… and countless others.
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Operator's Manual for Context X

Saturday, November 5, 4:00PM

The Extrapolation Factory is an imagination-based studio for design-led futures studies, founded by Chris Woebken and Elliott P. Montgomery. 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 the value of rapidly imagined, prototyped, deployed and evaluated visions of possible futures on an extended time scale.

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Practice Session 3 with Ultra-red

Thursday, November 3, 6:00PM

Ultra-red’s three-part “Practice Sessions” introduces the basics of the sound art collective’s practice. The workshops walk participants through the steps in what the collective calls ”militant sound research.” In many emancipatory political histories, political education gives a great deal of attention to how people in struggle listen to each other, to spaces and events, to experiences of oppression and liberation, to silence, and how we listen to resonances of commonality and contradiction. A militant sound investigation offers organizers, cultural workers, and community people an accessible process for practicing listening and developing collectivity within the context of ongoing and long-term struggle.
 
The third video addresses putting together a listening session that generates new ideas and questions for the next stage of research.
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Analogical mapping and indirect procedures: a brief survey of working methods

Saturday, October 29, 4:00PM

An introduction to ways of surfacing systems understandings, based on work done by artist Judith Leemann in partnership with the Design Studio for Social Intervention, a creativity lab for the social justice sector. We begin with a quick tour through some of the conceptual and practical tools we have used get at and under systems: analog mapping, hacking diagrams, object choreographies, and physical model building. We offer some thoughts on what we learn about the tools themselves by watching what they do in two different contexts: in studio art classrooms where Leemann uses them in her teaching, and in activist contexts such as mobile Creativity Labs where ds4si uses them to shift habits of response within social justice circuits. We close with a facilitated run through a few of these approaches, allowing interested participants to walk their own questions through the tools on hand.

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Practice Session 2 with Ultra-red

Thursday, October 27, 6:00PM

Ultra-red’s three-part “Practice Sessions” introduces the basics of the sound art collective’s practice. The workshops walk participants through the steps in what the collective calls "militant sound research.” In many emancipatory political histories, political education gives a great deal of attention to how people in struggle listen to each other, to spaces and events, to experiences of oppression and liberation, to silence, and how we listen to resonances of commonality and contradiction. A militant sound investigation offers organizers, cultural workers, and community people an accessible process for practicing listening and developing collectivity within the context of ongoing and long-term struggle.
 
The second workshop walks viewers through the process of making audio recordings that catalyze the collective reflections of community members.
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Practice Session 1 with Ultra-red

Thursday, October 20, 6:00PM

Ultra-red’s three-part “Practice Sessions” introduces the basics of the sound art collective’s practice. The workshops walk participants through the steps in what the collective calls "militant sound research.” In many emancipatory political histories, political education gives a great deal of attention to how people in struggle listen to each other, to spaces and events, to experiences of oppression and liberation, to silence, and how we listen to resonances of commonality and contradiction. A militant sound investigation offers organizers, cultural workers, and community people an accessible process for practicing listening and developing collectivity within the context of ongoing and long-term struggle.
 
The first workshop examines how a research team organizes itself and develops a question that guides their inquiry.
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Calling in Sick

Saturday, October 15, 5:00PM

Calling in Sick

Saturday, October 15, 5:00PM 

Taraneh Fazeli/Sick Time with Canaries

**This event requires registration(see below) and asks participants to be present for the first two hours**

"Calling in Sick" is a bodily communication workshop. Grounded in acts of care and empathy, this workshop will ask participants to consider how we speak and feel about the body in states of debility through a series of partnered communication exercises. 

Organized by curator and Canaries member Taraneh Fazeli, “Calling in Sick” is co-presented by WOUND and Refuge in the Means, a Recess Session by Canaries collective that takes the form of a care center during the months of September and October. Participants in "Calling in Sick" will be invited to move through a consideration of the temporal shape of care in exercises, actions, and discussions that will prompt participants to consider the language we tend to use around illness in various contexts (personal, professional, and all the spaces in between). Asked to recollect experiences of "calling in sick" (and how you may have felt care in that moment), workshop participants will address how we do or do not feel comfortable addressing the social reproduction of our lives in work and "public" contexts.

Drawing from dialogic exercises structured to explore social group identity, artworks such as Dennis Oppenheim’s Two Way Transfer Drawing and Jesse Cohen’s I is Another, as well as excerpts from illness memoirs and open letters to various communities, “Calling in Sick” will address what has become chronic through haptic encounters that invite intimacy. By doing do so, we will work towards building a new language around bodily impairment that does not see illness as the private property of one individual but a collective concern, and find ways to support each other as existence under capitalism becomes impossible.

Please see eventbrite registration page for full access info and registration details.

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The Braid - conversations about practicing

Saturday, October 15, 3:00PM

The Braid - conversations about practicing 
Adelheid Mers 

Artist and professor of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Adelheid Mers will facilitate diagram-aided conversations about their practices with/among artists, managers, theorists and others who are open to sharing their thinking and experiences. Conversations will be fluidly traced on a Whiteboard, "The Braid",  and a supporting cast of related, laminated diagrams. The Braid diagram presents three domains that may variously combine into an individual art practice, alliteratively tagged Making, Mediating and Managing. Borrowed from Topology, this visualization is intended to serve as an opening and is itself open to transformation by its users. Documentation is encouraged.

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Protocol of Attention and Adaptation

Saturday, October 15, 11:00AM

Our digital devices—our hand-held smartphones and watches, our tablets and laptops— are often thought of as multiplying (or squaring or cubing) the problem of distraction. Project 404 teaches practices of attention using the devices that threaten to distract us, by asking participants to focus on one image for 15 minutes of silence with the phone or device in airplane mode. The ambition of the project, as the name indicates, is to reverse the “not found” message we often see when looking for a website, and to send it back— briefly— to who or whatever else wants our attention. 

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Attention Lab

Friday, October 14, 6:00PM

"Participants are requested to be available for the entire duration of the workshop."

Indiscreet associates of The Order of the Third Bird invite you to join them in an action of practical aesthesis: a collective and formal manner of giving sustained attention to Things Made to Be Looked At (in particular, to works of art). What to expect? In accordance with the Order's motto, In Practice, Practice, few details are typically circulated in advance of such a convening. As The Order of the Third Bird is a circumspect, and even elusive body, little can be said directly of its doings. Nevertheless, this much can be offered: a small number of uninhibited (indeed, even heretical) individuals, having some knowledge of The Order’s protocols and rites, here propose to break with strict tradition and share, perhaps promiscuously, what they have learned.  If experience be a guide, the occasion will combine silent and serious contemplation with playful conviviality. Temporary metempsychosis may occur but must not become permanent.

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Art / Life Counseling

Thursday, October 13, 6:30PM

Linda Montano will provide Art / Life Counseling to interested participants in the back room of 41 Cooper Gallery during the Grand Opening of WOUND. Montano performed Art / Life Counseling (1984-1991) once a month for seven years, in the windowed project space of New York's New Museum.

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Grand Opening Party

Thursday, October 13, 6:30PM

Celebrate the opening of the study center with us, from 6:30-8pm at 41 Cooper Square, NYC.

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