The School of Making Thinking, in partnership with Abrons Art Center, offers spring and fall classes designed to bring rigorous thinking and making into conversation with experimental pedagogy.
Fall 2023 ONLINE CLASSES
HERO'S JOURNEY OUTSIDE OF GENDERONLINE ON ZOOM
Laur Lewis Neal
Tuesdays, 4-6pm PST; 7-9PM EST Nov 1 – Nov 22, 2022 |
WRITING OUR PAST & FUTURE SELVESONLINE ON ZOOM
Nia Hampton
Thursdays 6-8PM EST Oct 27th – Nov 17, 2022 |
TOUCHING THEORY
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Fall 2023 IN PERSON CLASSES
CLASS DESCRIPTIONS BELOW ARE LISTED IN ORDER BY START DATE.
WRITING OUR PAST & FUTURE SELVESThe introductory writing class series uses poetry, memoir, critical fabulation and speculative fiction to teach students the power of their own voice. Using the written word as vehicles of discovery and remembrance, students will come away from this workshop series with a strong writing community, diverse writing samples from varying genres, and confidence to read their works aloud. The class will be broken down as follows: the introductory class will focus on poetry and will explore the power of writing about mundane topics and using uncomplicated prose. We will look to the concise legend herself, Lucille Clifton, for inspiration during this session. In the second class, we’ll study shame to help break would-be writers out of the shame of not writing or not writing about the very thing that keeps them from pursuing their deepest desires. We will be reading Kettle Holes by Melissa Febos and With Violence and Doubt by Joseph Earl Thomas. In our third class we will be creating critical fabulations on the people, places and things we descend from. Students will be asked to bring something that they have inherited via their family or culture: ex. court summons, a grandparent's wedding ring, an old bible, hand-me-down socks or even a way of communicating. Participants will then be asked to tell the story of this thing. For this class, we will be reading an excerpt from Saidiya Hartman's “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals.” The final class will have us writing speculative fiction. Participants will learn how to write short speculative fiction through writing prompts created to stimulate our abstract writing senses. We will be reading work from Miranda July, Nafissa Thompson Spires and Octavia Butler in the hopes that students will be inspired to dabble in sci fi, fantasy and genre fiction writing. Students will leave this class with at least three poems and increased confidence in their poetry writing skill.
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INSTRUCTORNia Hampton is a cultural worker from West Baltimore, MD. After starring in Al Jazeera America’s viral doc about the similarities in police brutality in Brazil and Baltimore she began a career in freelance journalism. Her written work has been featured in Vice, The Village Vloice, Dazed Digital, Genius.com, Paste Magazine, GlitterMOB, and Griots Republic to name a few. Her photo and videography work has been covered by BESE, AFROPUNK and screened in the Baltimore Museum of Art. She founded the Black Femme Supremacy Film Fest in 2018.
THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE.
Thursdays 6-8 PM EST Oct 27 - Nov 17, 2022 4 sessions $160 Tuition BIPOC sliding scale available + $25 Registration |
TOUCHING THEORY (at a distance)What is touch at a distance? Can communication technologies translate touch? Can we touch each other through scores, instructions, descriptions? Do sound waves touch at a distance? How do nations/states touch at a distance? Can we touch across generations, eras? How does the past reach forward to touch us? What is a safe touch?
This workshop series is part of a larger ongoing collaborative research process called “Touch Praxis” exploring touch as a time-based medium and a form of co-creative knowledge. Touching Theory (at a distance) is an invitation to encounter theoretical writing through embodied—and playful—exercises, developing collective understanding(s) of touch as both noun and verb, process, subject and material. Together we will explore short text excerpts from queer theory, racial and disability justice, quantum physics, critical tech and ecology. Pairing improvisational touch prompts with collective reading-out-loud and discussion, we will come into contact with thinkers like Karen Barad, Hortense Spillers, Petra Kuppers, Carly Harper & Ingrid Richardson, Saidiya Hartman, Erin Manning, David Parisi and Paul Virilio. |
INSTRUCTORS
Selwa Sweidan & Nina Sarnelle are artists based on Tongva/Kizh land often referred to as Los Angeles. While our independent practices have circulated around touch and haptics, we began working together on this collaborative touch praxis at the beginning of the pandemic in Spring 2020. Together we’ve developed a research methodology consisting of workshops, prompts, interviews, reading, discussion and collaborative writing.
Nina Sarnelle is a founding member of the Institute for New Feeling. She recently had a solo video show at the New Museum (NY). Her work has also been shown at Whitechapel Gallery (London), Hammer Museum (LA), Getty Center (LA), Ballroom Marfa (TX), MoMA (NY), Recess (NY), Black Cube (Denver), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), Fundacion PROA (Buenos Aires), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Mwoods (Beijing) and many others. Selwa Sweidan is an artist and researcher of emerging technologies. She has been published in the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Journal, the Internet Policy Review Journal; and exhibited at Bevilacqua Gallery, Center Du Pompidou, HomeLA, Monte Vista Project, Spring/Break LA and UC Irvine. Selwa has co-curated exhibitions and symposia including Beyond Embodiment, Performative Computation, STACKED Expo, Super Radiance and Clustering. She is currently an Annenberg PhD Fellow at USC. THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE.
Thursdays 5-7 PST, 8-10 PM EST Oct 27 - Nov 17, 2022 4 sessions $160 Tuition BIPOC sliding scale available + $25 Registration |
BRING YOUR OWN BRAT“The dance between your desires and the authority of a room.”
Bring Your Own Brat is an ongoing performance experiment in embodied expressions of personal needs. Through a series of movement exercises, shared readings, performance lectures, and writing prompts we will collectively explore the often dismissed archetype of the brat as a persona worthy of re-articulation. Together we will build a shared vocabulary and investigate the dance your desires make when they bump up against the authority of a space or the will of a room. Influenced largely by queer performance theory, experiments in access provision, and feminist pedagogical models, this will be an alert and playful space to dialogue through the asymmetrical ways we are trained to express needs. Stemming from a craving to perform a tantrum in the face of conditioned modes of being, moving and seeing, Sacha welcomes questioning and negotiating throughout the workshop. Whether your brat emerges through foot stomping, vocal exclamation, a written decree, or total refusal - all are welcome. No previous dance or performance experience necessary. |
INSTRUCTORSacha Vega is a lens-based artist collaging across video, performance, and language with revolving questions around choreographic prompting and haptic learning. Her work has been exhibited at Mason Gross Galleries, The Rutgers Roundhouse, Baxter St at CCNY, Java Project, Pelham Art Center, and 99cent Plus Gallery. She has been featured in publications like Outline, Nylon, Lenscratch, Der Greif and Dossier Journal. She has been an artist-in-residence at Wassaic Project, Stoneleaf Retreat and ARTHA Project.
She is 1/3 of the artist-led initiative Memory Foam and collaborates on curating exhibitions, publishing, programming and producing artist interview series. She has created artist-led workshops at Performance Space New York, Zimmerli Museum of Art and AMARDV (Healing through the Arts Summer Program). She graduated with a BFA in Photography and a minor in art history from Pratt Institute. She is currently wrapping up her MFA at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE IN PERSON
AT ABRONS ART CENTER: 466 Grand Street, NY, NY Tuesdays 6-8PM EST Nov 1 – Nov 22, 2022 4 sessions $160 Tuition BIPOC sliding scale available +$25 Registration Fee |
HERO'S JOURNEY OUTSIDE OF GENDERThis is a character and story development course for anyone who creates characters. We’ll look at the building blocks of a character’s driving emotions and how they make the foundation of a compelling story. What new possibilities and depths we can find when we take these elements into realms beyond gender? We’ll take storytelling out of a cishetero-normative, patriarchal paradigm and have a lot of fun making updates to the classic Hero’s Journey that drives most American literature, film, and TV. This class will consist of lectures and discussions on Zoom, with some suggested reading. We will dissect character journeys using the collaborative format of a TV writer’s room. Each student will have the opportunity to create a character, present them to the instructor and/or class, and receive constructive notes.
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INSTRUCTORLaur Lewis Neal is a nonbinary writer and artist. They have worked on the inaugural season of Star Trek: Picard, the CBS series Clarice, and the Showtime series The Man Who Fell to Earth. Their scripts have placed in competitions by Script Pipeline, the Austin Film Festival, and Canon. Neal's writing often interrogates how physical space is gendered and raced in community building and politics. They have been published in Dissent, Guernica, and After Ellen, and their prose was a finalist for the Summer Literary Prize. Neal also explores poetry as ritual, removing it from a strictly religious context and reappropriating it as a personal form of healing inclusive of queer experience. Their piece All My Saints was presented at the Rurally Good Festival, and their piece THEIR BODY BECAME (an offering) was presented at the City of Los Angeles’s We Rise 2021. Their new booklet Surprise! You Have a Nonbinary Friend is a tool to help nonbinary people show their family and friends how to support them. They hold a B.A. in Film Studies and a M.A. in History.
THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE.
Tuesdays 4-6 PM PST ; 7-9 PM EST Nov 1 - Nov 22, 2022 4 sessions $160 Tuition BIPOC sliding scale available + $25 Registration |
DRAWING & PERFORMANCEWhat are the interactions between drawing and performance? How are both performance and dance acts of tracing and recall and ghost holders, both initiating future and surfacing past? In this class, we will gather to explore questions of performance and drawing, its lineage in art and dance, and use movement and drawing experiments to materialize these studies.
INSTRUCTORSPhoebe Osborne (b. 1984) is a choreographer and visual artist based in New York, NY. Osborne’s works have been presented across the US and Europe, including commissioned performances at Transmediale Berlin, La Caldera Barcelona, SFMoMA and Oakland Museum of California. They have exhibited at City Limits Gallery (Oakland), False Flag (Long Island City), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), and SOMArts (San Francisco). Osborne was a 2017 recipient of the DanceWEB scholarship as a resident artist at Impulstanz in Vienna. Graduating from Columbia’s Visual Arts MFA program this May, they are a current artist in the DAS Choreography Program at the Amsterdam University of Arts.
Millie Kapp is an artist based in Queens, New York. She works primarily in performance, incorporating theater, dance and sculpture. Kapp studied studio art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2012, she relocated to New York City and finished a masters in Performance Studies from NYU. Kapp has had the honor of collaborating with a wide range of artists and considers collaboration to be at the heart of her art making practice. |
THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE IN PERSON
AT ABRONS ART CENTER: 466 Grand Street, NY, NY Wednesdays 6-8PM EST, in person Nov 2 – Nov 23, 2022 4 sessions $160 Tuition BIPOC sliding scale available +$25 Registration Fee |