In addition to facilitating the acquisition of skills and knowledge, teachers help prepare students for academic, professional, and social challenges.

In the current climate of increased awareness about the prevalence of mental health struggles, how can positive psychology empower educators in this task?

What can educators learn from each other’s experience in their efforts to teach and support their students?

Speaker: Steven Rudin

Steven Rudin is a visual artist, art educator, and former assistant professor of clinical psychiatry. Rudin reimagines hand-cut paper collage as a metaphor for memory and identity. A blend of precision and whimsy, his multilayered compositions draw viewers into a dialogue about the dynamic nature of the mind. Rudin’s exhibitions, talks, and classes encourage participants to visualize their inner lives as collage.

In mid-2017, Rudin made the shift to art full time after nearly two decades in clinical, academic, and leadership positions at Columbia University. He holds degrees from Columbia University, Cornell University, and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. His teaching activities range from course development to group facilitation to direct observation and supervision. Currently, Rudin leads workshops delving into collage as memoir at the Art Students League of New York. He is a frequent guest lecturer in a variety of settings including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Branch Museum of Architecture and Design, and the New York Film Academy. His work has been exhibited internationally in galleries, public spaces, and art fairs in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, and Cannes.

How can art education prioritize the sustainability of artists beyond the production of art? What is academia's responsibility in creating programs that address the person as well as the artist?

What are the tools needed to be an artist that embraces personal longevity? How do we advocate for inclusive dialogues that promote diverse strategies rather than historical pathways?

Speaker: David Thomson

David Thomson is a interdisciplinary collaborative artist who has worked with Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown, Ralph Lemon, Sekou Sundiata, Marina Abramović, Deborah Hay, Kaneza Schaal, Meg Stuart, Alain Buffard, Yvonne Rainer, Okwui Okpokwasili and Matthew Barney among others. Thomson’s current artistic practice centers on the interrogation of presence and absence in the performance of identity. Awards and fellowships include US Artist, NYFA, LMCC, Yaddo, MacDowell, Rauschenberg and FCA. Thomson is a Mabou Mines Associate Artist and Danspace Research Fellow. He has served on the faculties of Movement Research, NYU, Sarah Lawrence, The New School, Barnard, Bennington, Middlebury and Pratt as well as teaching internationally. In 2017, he initiated The Artist Sustainability Project to expand the practice and discourse of financial, artistic, and personal empowerment for artists.

What is the educational potential that mentorship relationships hold, and how can they become a strategy for taking up space in academic or art institutions? How does one change the educational space within which they are teaching? How can mentorship relationships be used for community building?

Speaker: Supermrin (Mrin Aggarwal)

Supermrin is an Indian artist working at the intersections of architecture, sculpture, and landscape. Through a research-led, speculative, and site-specific practice, she creates installations and environments that seek to reconsider the values that spaces offer, and the ways through which they mediate human relationships. She is interested in conceptions of reality, pleasure, and nature within eastern practices. Supermrin is an Assistant Professor of Art at the School of Art, University of Cincinnati. She holds an MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, California and an undergraduate degree in Exhibition Design from the National Institute of Design, India. Her work has been exhibited at diverse venues including the Venice Biennale 2021, Untitled Art Fair, the Headlands Center for the Arts, The Old San Francisco Mint, The First Presbyterian Church of New York, ChaShaMa Space, Tactile Bosch, Cardiff, and the India Habitat Center. Supermrin founded Streetlight in 2017 as a critical spatial research and design laboratory for decolonizing public space. She is presently engaged in a collaborative arts project, FIELD, a critique of manicured grass lawns in public plazas.

How do students experience a learning environment that starts with mechanical technique as opposed to traditional academic learning? What are the ways in which one can foster a creative, fruitful studio space?

Speaker: Kelly Cave

Kelly Cave is a working artist born and raised in Princeton Junction, New Jersey. She received her BFA from Syracuse University, completed her MFA at the University of Cincinnati, and then served as Artist in Residence in sculpture at Northwest Missouri State University. She has attended residencies and created public artworks at Salem Art Works, Franconia Sculpture Park, the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, The Gilbertsville Expressive Movement, and participated in the 2020 Nashua International Sculpture Symposium. In the spring of 2021 she completed a major public artwork in Glenside, PA as part of the Arcadia Public Art Project. Currently, Cave is a student at Teachers College Columbia University in pursuit of a EdDCT degree in Art and Art Education. Her research examines how we navigate the unknown in creative spaces, with the intention of reorienting our perspective on moments of uncertainty. She explores painting the unknown not just as a space of unease and obstacles, but instead, as a space ripe with the potential to harvest creativity. Through this research, she hopes to shed light on the value of creative spaces and convince the world of the value of Art, especially within education systems.

How can alternative art programs outside Academia serve artists in a changing educational environment? Can new models supplement or even replace graduate degrees?

Speaker: Patricia Miranda

Patricia Miranda is an artist, curator, and educator. Her work utilizes donated repurposed lace and linens in site-responsive installations and is grounded in historic material practices, rituals of grief and mourning, and the intimacy of textile in women’s lives. She is founder of the artist-run orgs The Crit Lab and MAPSpace, where she developed residencies in Italy and NY. She has been awarded residencies at I-Park, Weir Farm, Vermont Studio Center, and Julio Valdez Printmaking Studio, and has been Visiting Artist at Vermont Studio Center, the Heckscher Museum, and University of Utah. She has received grants from Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (2021); two artist grants from ArtsWestchester/New York State Council on the Arts (2014/21); an Anonymous Was a Woman Covid19 Relief Grant (2021), and was part of a year-long NEA grant working with homeless youth (2004-5). Miranda has developed education programs for K-12, museums, and institutions, including Franklin Furnace, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian Institution. Miranda currently teaches in undergrad and grad programs at Montclair State University, New Jersey City University, and as mentor in the MFA program at Massachusetts College of Art. As faculty (2005-19) at Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts she led the first study abroad program in Prato, Italy. Her work has been exhibited at ODETTA Gallery, The Clemente Center, ABC No Rio, Wave Hill, and Rio II Gallery, (NYC); The Alexey von Schlippe Gallery at UConn Avery Point, (Groton, CT); the Cape Museum of Fine Art, (Cape Cod MA); and the Belvedere Museum, (Vienna Austria). Her solo exhibition at Garrison Art Center (2021) was featured in the Brooklyn Rail. She currently has a solo exhibition at Jane Street Art Center in Saugerties, NY, on view through May 8, 2022.

Eventbrite page

What is a museum’s responsibility to an artist’s professional development and to the public?

Speaker: Dr. Rosanna Flouty

Dr. Rosanna Flouty is the Interim Director and Clinical Assistant Professor in the Museum Studies program at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. She has worked in and with museums for over twenty-five years. Her current research interests lie at the intersection of art, technology, visitor engagement, and education, with an emphasis on experimental museum practice. She currently teaches about digital design, social justice, community engagement, and museum accessibility.

Eventbrite page

How can Art Education, using Contemporary Art as a tool, become a catalyst for critical thought— by reshaping ideas, instilling critical doubt in students?

Speaker: Yasi Alipour

Yasi Alipour is an Iranian artist/writer/educator based in New York. Her tactile works on paper uses folding to explore mathematics as a language, with all the historical, social, political, mortal, and embodied ramifications any language holds. Alipour currently lives in Brooklyn and wonders about paper, politics, and performance, probing personal history to parse issues around political instability and interrupted histories. She is a recipient of Sharpe Walentas Studio Program Award (2019/2021), Rema Hort Foundation Emerging Artist Nominee (2018/2019), and the Triple Canopy Publication Intensive (2018). Her work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, spaces including the Geary Contemporary (2021), Secca (2020), Venice Biennale (2019, IT), Hercules Program (2019, NY), 17 Essex (2019, NY), Limiditi-Temporary Art Project (2018, MR), Practice (2018, NY), Museum of Contemporary Art Vijdovina (2018, SR), Art in Odd Places (2017, NY), and PPOW (2017, NY). Her writing has appeared at the Brooklyn Rail, Spot Magazine, Asia Contemporary Art Week, Photograph Magazine, Volume One/Triple Canopy, and the Dear Dave. Her recent featured interviews include Okwui Okpokwasili, Allison Janae Hamilton, Sanford Biggers, Yto Barrada, Hans Haacke, Mark Dion, Aliza Nisenbaum, Jane Benson, and Kevin Beasley. Alipour holds teaching positions at the School of Visual Arts and Columbia University. Her courses include New Hegemonic, Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality in America (SVA), Art and Colonial experience (SVA), Global Perspective (SVA), and Seminar in Contemporary Art Practice (Columbia University) among others.

Eventbrite page

Educators as Artists V Artists as Educators. What are the transferable resources, experiences, and knowledge pools that each discipline shares with the other?

Speaker: Gabo Camnitzer

Gabo Camnitzer is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working at the intersection of education, sculpture, and video. Combining strategies of experimental pedagogy and participatory installation, Camnitzer’s work focuses on childhood as a site of ideological and material struggle. Camnitzer is Director of Foundations and Assistant Professor of Social Practice at UMass Dartmouth. He has held teaching positions at The Neighborhood Elementary School (PS 363), New York; Columbia University, New York; and Valand Academy, Gothenburg, Sweden. He is currently an artist in residence at the Queens Museum in New York. He has presented projects at venues such as Queens Museum, New York; GfZK, Leipzig; Artists Space, New York; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Gertrude Contemporary Art Center, Melbourne; Museo Blanes, Montevideo, Uruguay. He received his MFA from Valand Academy, Gothenburg, Sweden, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York. He sits on the editorial board of the art journal, Paletten.

Eventbrite page

Over the past year, the way that we teach art has seismically shifted. In a matter of weeks, our curriculums and classrooms were taken online, and we lost the most foundational resource we rely on: shared space. No longer physically in the studio, museum, gallery or classroom, our proximity to students engaging with the art process and dialogue collapsed into the distant space of remote learning.

This workshop will give educators tools and strategies to not only compensate for the shift to remote learning, but thrive in this new setting. Andrew Willgress, a founding art instructor of Gotham Professional Arts Academy in Brooklyn, and Jackie Delamatre, a freelance museum educator in New York City, will share their experiences collaborating on a program at the Whitney Museum. Throughout this process, and working within their own spheres, Willgress and Delamatre have accrued concrete techniques for and approaches to remote learning that are specific to art. They believe that remote learning has created challenges but also opportunities. Their presentation will also include best practices collected from art teachers and museum educators from all over New York City.

Eventbrite page

The Guggenheim presents a workshop that considers how thinking thematically can broaden perspectives in Teaching Modern and Contemporary Asian Art in the classroom. The program is led by Guggenheim educators with the assistance of UCAE educators and introduces a digital teaching resource that features 27 artists from the Guggenheim’s collection of Asian art. Attendees will receive a complimentary copy of the companion handbook to Teaching Modern and Contemporary Asian Art. 2 CTLE credits available.

Teaching Modern and Contemporary Asian Art is supported by a grant from The Freeman Foundation. Two Continuing Teacher and Leader Education (CTLE) credits are offered to event participants through co-sponsorship with the University Council for Arts Education (UCAE) and The School of Visual Arts (SVA).

Eventbrite page

Join us for a multinational conversation with artists and educators from around the world. Sessions will include speakers from 13 countries discussing art as social practice, personal transformation through art, leadership in education, and education in museum and curatorial spaces.

Key note speakers:

Luis Camnitzer is a German-born Uruguayan artist and writer who was at the vanguard of 1960s Conceptualism, working primarily in printmaking, sculpture, and installations. Camnitzer’s artwork explores subjects such as repression under systems of power, pedagogical norms, and the deconstruction of familiar frameworks. His humorous, biting, and often politically charged use of language as art medium has distinguished his practice for over four decades.

Claudia Alvarez was born in Nuevo Leon, Mexico and immigrated to California with her family at the age of three. Her work addresses the way social, political, and psychological structures impact our behavior and personal interactions. By imbuing sculptures of children with adult characteristics and mannerisms, Alvarez tackles issues relating to violence, empowerment, endurance and what they reveal about human nature. Her drawings and paintings depict fragmented narratives as reflection of human conduct, ethics, belief system, culture, race, assimilation, and displacement.