All these conversations, heading...

I just returned from a conversation around collaborative research at RISD, which was sponsored by the Landscape Architecture Department in honor of the 10th anniversary of Innovation Studio. These past few weeks have seen a congregation of thoughts and actions around the ways in which RISD as a community is stepping up to the social, political and design challenges of our times. Some of these other events and occasions include the panels around David Orr's visit, Marjetica Potrc's talk to the Sculpture Department on interdisciplary practice around issues of self-articulated communities, and our own office's Student Visioning Gathering this upcoming weekend.

In all of these gatherings, there exist a number of emergent themes that belie the imagined divide between the fine arts and design disciplines and offer up a compelling vision for really "what we do" here at RISD.

Just briefly, themes I took away include:

1) While innovative, integrated learning and research is happening at RISD, people are operating in discrete pods, which decreases the impact of the work. How do we create nodes of knowledge gathering and dispersal for students and caulty to know how to approach cr0ss-departmental collaboration and resource sharing?
2) As an institution RISD needs to shift gears to recognize the rapid speed at which financial, ecological, social, and political reorganization is progressing, lest we be left out of the conversation.
3) Research at RISD is classroom & studio-based, ultimately tied to the interests and passions of the student body. Therefore the school has an obligation to students to find ways of accumulating and dispersing information about what research they are doing and support faculty who are formulating new seminars and studios to push this learning.
4) The ways that we work with communities, whether local collaborations or in system analysis of developing countries, there needs to be an acknowledgement of the informal strategies (informal cities, design solutions, high-low technology interfaces, etc) that are also impacting these investigations.

With all of the incredible creativity here at RISD, there are no shortage of ideas of how to best address these issues. However, I keep returning to a place of caution - that we don't need to wait for leadership (and its subsequent financial resources) to come from above. We can do more by learning to want less, to make concrete steps forward that fit current financial realities. As an institution of creative learning, I am confident RISD can put forth innovative strategies for moving the agenda of ethical and sustainable education into the new paradigm that lies ahead.

The Nature of Teaching Exhibitions

The Tricks of the Eye exhibition evolved out of a number of conversations between our office and other departments & offices on campus on how best to foster discussions around publicly engaged art practices at RISD. Given the intense project-driven nature of studio practice and students' busy schedules, I proposed that we create an exhibit that would connect classroom learning to examples of contemporary creative practice. By working with faculty whose courses explore similar themes, students would be offered the opportunity to engage in the work on many different levels, from the intellectual to the conceptual to the aesthetic.

ceramic bowls and poster prototype for Blue Hammer, Leon Johnson

Coming from a background in dialogue-based and performative public art, I was curious about how documentation of these kinds of practices would go over with RISD students. When introducing under-explored forms of art making, there needs to be some level of education around the practices - we chose to take a multi-faceted approach using descriptive wall text, visiting artists talks and classroom visits, and guided-tours with me as curator. Given that we were highlighting documentation of past projects, rather than original work, I was concerned with how to balance the need to contextualize the documentation without having the show become overly dependent on text. I tried to address this issue by including a number of different mediums - from textile to ceramic objects to vibrant poster art, and video to audio.

Meyers-Bitter Survey and Knitting Nation installation views

Does this kind of presentation of multi-faceted art practices work as an exhibition strategy? Even though we recognized the importance of combining object-based work that taps into our desire for craft and concreteness with more conceptual and relational practices. It was also important to, as much as possible, to create opportunities for the students to meet with the artists (or me as the curator) so their critiques and questions could be addressed in real, face-to-face, time.

These conversations - with Peter Hocking and Charlie Cannon's Use of Space:Place of Campus and From Studio to Situation seminars, Marie Cieri's Social Geographies class and Christopher Ho's Competition, Collaboration and Collective seminar - proved to be rich moments of contextualized learning. Sitting in on these classes and walking classes through the exhibit, I have found myself being asked to defend a number of the projects. It was important for me to articulate that I chose to include much of the work due to its compelling problematic nature. Rather than offering answers, the projects included in the show grapple with the complexities of representation and dissemination of socially charged information. The curator's role is one of navigating and interpreting for audiences that may be unfamiliar with the ways in which the highlighted projects fit within the artists' investigative trajectories or larger social practices.

To that end, I will be hosting weekly curator tours of the exhibit on Thursday afternoons from 12:00 - 12:30 starting March 19th and continuing through April 2nd. Please feel free to RSVP to me at ssakash@risd.edu. I also welcome comments to this post or via email.