Making and Being: Embodiment, Collaboration, and Circulation in the Visual Arts

Please join us for the launch of Making and Being: Embodiment, Collaboration, and Circulation in the Visual Arts

Authors: Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard of BFAMFAPhD

Illustrations by: Emilio Martínez Poppe, Emily Tareila, and Topos Graphics

Making and Being offers a framework for teaching art that emphasizes contemplation, collaboration, and political economy. Authors Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard, two visual arts educators and members of the collective BFAMFAPhD, share ideas and teaching strategies that they have adapted to spaces of learning which range widely, from self-organized workshops for professional artists to Foundations BFA and MFA thesis classes. This hands-on guide includes activities, worksheets, and assignments and is a critical resource for artists and art educators today. Making and Being is a book, a series of videos, a deck of cards, and an interactive website with freely downloadable content.

Author Bios:

Susan Jahoda is Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Jahoda is an artist, educator, and organizer whose work includes video, photography, text, performance, installation, and research-based collaborative projects. Jahoda has produced works for venues in London, Paris, Basel, New York, Seoul, and Moscow. Jahoda is a core member of BFAMFAPhD and the Pedagogy Group, collectives of socially engaged artists and educators based in New York City.

Caroline Woolard is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the Hartford Art School, CT and employs sculpture, immersive installation, and online networks to imagine and enact systems of mutual aid and collaboration. Her work has been featured twice on New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS. Woolard is the 2018–20 inaugural Walentas Fellow at Moore College of Art and Design and her work has been commissioned by and exhibited in major national and international museums, including at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and Creative Time. Woolard is a core member of BFAMFAPhD.

BFAMFAPhD is a collective that formed in 2012 to make art, reports, and teaching tools to advocate for cultural equity in the United States. The work of the collective is to bring people together to analyze and reimagine relationships of power in the arts. BFAMFAPhD core members are: Susan Jahoda, Emilio Martínez Poppe, Agnes Szanyi, Emily Tareila, Vicky Virgin, and Caroline Woolard. Emilio Martínez Poppe is an MFA candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, Agnes Szanyi, is a Doctoral Student at The New School for Social Research in New York, NY, Emily Tareila is an artist and educator in Western Massachusetts, Vicky Virgin is a Research Associate with the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity in New York, NY and Caroline Woolard is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at The University of Hartford, CT. More information is online at: https://bfamfaphd.com

Contributor Bios:

Leigh Claire La Berge’s work concerns aesthetics and political economy, broadly speaking. Her first book, “Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s” (Oxford, 2014), tracked the convergences of finance, realism and postmodernism in literature and culture throughout the 1980s in the United States. La Berge just finished a second book, “Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art” which recently came out with Duke University Press. The book tracks the twin rise of new forms of socially engaged art alongside what she calls “decommodified labor,” or labor that is not recompensed. Along with Alison Shonkwiler, La Berge is the co-editor of “Reading Capitalist Realism.” Leigh Claire La Berge is Associate Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York.

Stacey Salazar is an art education scholar whose research on postsecondary and secondary art-and-design education has appeared in Studies in Art Education, Visual Arts Research, and Art Education. In 2015 she was honored with the National Art Education Association Manuel Barkan Award for research. She holds a Doctorate of Education in Art and Art Education from Columbia University Teachers College, as well as MFA and MAT degrees. She is on the art education faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she currently serves as Associate Dean for Curriculum & Assessment in Graduate Studies. Prior to joining the art education faculty at MICA, Stacey taught studio art at a community college, a public university, a private college, an art college – and a public high school. Stacey was the 2013 recipient of MICA’s Trustee Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching.

Alta Starr focuses on the inseparable and empowering connections between individual transformation and healing and the collective tasks of achieving justice through creating vigorous sustainable movements in her current work, whether teaching embodied leadership, consulting to organizations to help them build high-performing teams, or offering coaching and bodywork to individuals as a somatics practitioner. Shaped deeply by the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s and 70s, Alta worked as a teacher, parent organizer and radio news and music producer, then spent almost 25 years as a grantmaker at the New World and the Ford Foundations, where her portfolios supported community organizing, building grassroots power at the state level, and leadership development. Since leaving philanthropy in 2012, in addition to her consulting work and private practice, Alta has been a lead trainer with generative somatics as well as with BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity), which she also supports as Associate Director of Training. A devout disciple of joy, Alta relishes both reading and writing poetry, music, especially jazz; free-range explorations in mythology and tarot, and deep study of the profound wisdom teachings of dogs.

Access info:

The event is free and open to the public.

The entrance to Hauser & Wirth Publishers Bookshop is at the ground floor and accessible by wheelchair. The bathroom is all-gender. This event is low light, meaning there is ample lighting but fluorescent overhead lighting is not in use.

This event begins at 6 PM and ends at 8 PM but attendees are welcome to come late, leave early, and intermittently come and go as they please.

Parking in the vicinity is free after 6 PM. The closest MTA subway station is 23rd and 8th Ave off the C and E. This station is not wheelchair accessible. The closest wheelchair accessible stations are 1/2/3/A/C/E 34th Street-Penn Station and the 14 St A/C/E station with an elevator at northwest corner of 14th Street and Eighth Avenue.