Art & Pedagogy

This semester I have been teaching a fun meta-class, Teaching Practicum, at Brooklyn College for MFA students in the PIMA program (Performance and Interactive Media Art). In addition to practical aspects of teaching and great learning sessions in which they each teach one section of their classes, we have been exploring some of the many recent projects in art and pedagogy, experimental and/or free schools run by artists and reading essays from Curating and the Pedagogical Turn and Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century, as well as some radical educational theory like Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster and Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

This week we had a visiting artist, Mary Walling Blackburn (http://welcomedoubleagent.com/), who shared some of her amazing projects exploring alternate strategies for disseminating knowledge, intimate interactions, subjective cultural resistance and a multidisciplinary mytho-socio-political excavation of space and place, among other things. These included the Feminist Read-A-Thon / Anhoek School, Radical Citizenship: The Tutorials, Dormitory in June, Iran, The Little Heavy Ones, Bad Dreams as Border Songs—a piece for Trade School in which she collected dreams from people living in Redford, Texas to disseminate in other places, as songs sung into the ears of willing participants—and her upcoming project for Bard College, Library In (the Land of Fuck). Very inspiring. Thanks Mary!