​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. 

We are currently accepting class proposals for our Fall 2023 semester. 

Our Spring 2023 classes remain below as an example of our programming. Tuition is $180 + a $25 registration fee.  We offer 50% off for low income participants and a sliding scale for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) participants. Registration is through the Abrons Art Center website. 

April SPRING 2023 Classes

MEMETICS AND THE MNEMONIC MIND

ONLINE ON ZOOM
Esther Neff
Mondays, 6-8 PM EST
April 3rd - 24th, 2023

FRACTURING CARTOGRAPHIES: PRACTICING THE ANIMISM OF THE OCEAN

IN PERSON @ ABRONS ART CENTER
Clareese Hill
Tuesdays, 6-8 PM EST
April 4th - 25th, 2023

SELF-SCRIPTING THROUGH THE MOVING IMAGE

IN PERSON @ ABRONS ART CENTER
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
Wednesdays, 6-8 PM EST
April 5th-26th, 2023

D'ACTIONARY: BECAUSE THERE'S NO DICTIONARY IN THE WILD

ONLINE ON ZOOM
Sherese Francis
Thursdays, 6-8 PM EST
April 6th-27th, 2023

May SPRING 2023 Classes

MY LIGHT GOES UP IN DARKNESS:
​DIARIES, JOURNALS AND SELF-WRITING

IN PERSON @ ABRONS ART CENTER​
Parker Menzimer
Mondays, 6-8PM EST
May 1st - 22nd, 2023

HERBS FOR DREAMS: 
PLANT MEDICINE AND SHIFTING WORLDSCAPES

ONLINE ON ZOOM
Charmaine Bee
Tuesdays, 6-8PM EST
May 2nd-23rd, 2023

EXPLORING SOUND & SELF:
DEEP LISTENING, MUSIC WRITING, AND INTUITIVE PRODUCTION

ONLINE ON ZOOM
ricky sallay zoker
Wednesdays, 6-8PM EST
May 3rd - 24th, 2023

R U ONLINE?: UNDERSTANDING INTIMACY ON AND OFFLINE

IN PERSON @ ABRONS ART CENTER​
Kaiuna Odogba
Thursdays, 6-8PM EST
May 4th - 25th, 2023

CLASS DESCRIPTIONS BELOW ARE LISTED IN ORDER BY START DATE.

MEMETICS AND THE MNEMONIC MIND

Oriented around meme practices and theories of memetics, mnemonics, and mimesis, this class involves readings across cognitive science, communications, and philosophy of mind as well as practical explorations of meme creation and the performance of social media(tion) as artistic, political, and theoretical praxis. We will establish a class meme account to collectively share our work, and explore a wide range of meme accounts, investigating how "image+text" formats, social scores, and "viral" phenomena interface with our senses of identity, social belonging, meaning-making and reality-construction.
THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE. 

MONDAYS 6-8 PM EST
APRIL 3RD - 24TH
4 sessions
$160 Tuition
BIPOC sliding scale available
+ $25 Registration

INSTRUCTOR

Esther Neff is the founder of PPL (Panoply Performance Laboratory), a thinktank, performance collective, and organizational entity that culminated 7 years of operation as a physical lab site with publication of the book Institution is a Verb (the Operating System). PPL has created over a dozen “operas of operations,” as well as symposia, conferences, tours, exhibitions, installations, video, and other books, and is currently developing modes of experimental philosophy of mind. Past projects have been realized all over NYC, across the USA, and in London, Berlin, Montreal, Copenhagen, Lima (etc) in performance art, theatre, dance, philosophy, music, and poetry contexts. Esther is also the convener of PERFORMANCY FORUM, an ongoing and evolving platform for performance art, and the co-founder of MARSH (Materializing & Activating Radical Social Habitus) a biocultural food-land-labor cooperative in St. Louis. Neff’s writing has been published in the Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy (with Yelena Gluzman), The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook of Queer and Trans Feminist Performance Art, and in PAJ, Performance Philosophy Journal, Paradigm, CAESURA, Content (the Bard meme lab journal), and elsewhere online and in print.  The operating manual for their project Embarrassed of the (W)Hole is forthcoming in March 2023 from Ugly Duckling Presse as part of their Emergency Playscripts series. Neff is an adjunct professor at Hunter College, a PhD student at CUNY Graduate Center, and the "admin" of the meme account @thefenserf. ​
Image by @thefenserf

FRACTURING CARTOGRAPHIES: PRACTICING THE ANIMISM OF THE OCEAN

Learn how to be an Ocean Dweller. Over our time  together, we will learn the pedagogies of animism from  the Ocean. We will establish practices for fluidity, creating  underwater caves, riding jet streams, evaporating, and  embracing stillness. Through experimental meditations,  writing exercises, and collaborative design prompts, we  will erect shoals and submerge with them to be open to  what we can learn under the surface of the Ocean. We will  not use the Ocean as a pathway to a destination, we will  focus on an errant and discursive journey of learning and  discovering together to fracture cartographic practices. By  not focusing on territory or destination, we will operate as  re-mappers living in the Ocean as the body of water shifts from a passive entity to griot. We will learn from each  other's experiences as poetic modalities of difference to  create a collaborative text about offshore and submerged  identities. We will learn to shift between being surface  dwellers and Ocean dwellers. As Ocean dwellers, we will  learn how to create a praxis for our terrestrial quotidian  navigation of life by exploring the experimental praxis of  being.
THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE IN PERSON
​AT ABRONS ART CENTER:
466 Grand Street, NY, NY

TUESDAYS 6-8 PM EST
APRIL 4TH - 25TH
4 sessions
$160 Tuition
BIPOC sliding scale available
+ $25 Registration

INSTRUCTOR

Clareese Hill is a practice-based researcher and  Postdoctoral Research Associate at Northeastern  University. She explores the validity of the word "identity"  through her perspective as an Afro-Caribbean American  woman and her societal role projected on her to perform  as a Black feminist academic. She has performed lectures  at The Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths University of  London, University of Sussex, CUNY Graduate Center, The  Chicago Art Department, and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn.  She was also a 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital  Future fellow (Phase One). Clareese has published  academic essays in THEOREM Journal, Architecture, and  Culture Journal, and has an upcoming article in Antennae,  The Journal of Nature and Culture. Clareese holds an MFA  from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and  practice-based research Ph.D. from Goldsmiths, University  of London.
Photo credit: Clareese Hill

SELF SCRIPTING THROUGH THE MOVING IMAGE

“Self-Scripting through the Moving Image” focuses on the development of original film-works based on the students’ relationship to personal memory and history. This self-scripting workshop integrates DIY Filmmaking, performance-making devices, and intermittent writing, bridging the physical body and its relationship to text and moving image. At the core of this course lies a true spirit of introspective inquiry and experimentation, where mentorship is catered specifically to what the students' thematic, performative and aesthetic interests are. Balancing technique and improvisation, this hands-on-production course will teach students basic skills in filming, composition and editing. These techniques will be coupled with short screenings of filmworks by filmmakers and artists who engage with distinct political, social and geographical landscapes through personal memory. A DIY approach towards moving image making will invite students to use the devices they have at their reach to make short 2-3 minute films. Students will depart with basic knowledge of cinematic tools and conceptual frameworks that will familiarize them with an intuitive and personal filmmaking process. ​
THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE IN PERSON
​AT ABRONS ART CENTER:
466 Grand Street, NY, NY

WEDNESDAYDS 6-8PM EST
APRIL 5TH - 26TH
4 sessions
$160 Tuition
BIPOC sliding scale available
​+$25 Registration Fee

INSTRUCTOR

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (B. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico) is a visual artist, filmmaker, theater artist, performer and educator whose work reconstructs history through a transdisciplinary approach to research, form and narrative. Melding theatrical performance, intuitive experimental ethnography, and collaborations with non-professional performers, Natalia’s practice centers on excavating imagined and archived history, decentralizing canonical narratives through embodied reenactments, and challenging written history by foregrounding instead the creation of new mythologies. Her multi-channel films, performance works and multiplatform projects explore familial, neighborly and citizen relationships in the context of Caribbean colonial history, and the resulting imperialist oppression that has altered generations of families’ material and spiritual trajectories. Bringing the practice of theater into the camera, Natalia explores a methodology that creates its own decolonial rhythms. 

She has been an artist fellow at the Smithsonian, and participated in residencies at Amant Foundation (NY), MassMoca (Massachusetts) , Fonderie Darling (Montreal), and Pioneer Works (NY, Upcoming). She has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Museo Cabañas (Guadalajara, MX), TEA Espacio de las Artes en Tenerife (Canary Islands), SeMa (Korea), The Flaherty Seminar, the Walt Disney Modular Theatre in California, among other venues, festivals and performance venues internationally. She has taught interdisciplinary performance and film at Bard College, CalArts, and MICA. 
​
 Natalia was born in Puerto Rico, developing her practice nomadically between Puerto Rico, New York, Montréal, Miami, Los Angeles and Germany, but is currently based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. 
Photo credit: Yara Travieso

D'ACTIONARY: BECAUSE THERE'S NO DICTIONARY IN THE WILD

As a continuation of the ReVer(b)sions Lab series with Lewis Latimer House Museum, this workshop series will develop the Theory of Resonance concept and invite participants to create "D'Actionaries" with "infinitions," inspired by Black feminism's ideas around Black women's need for a verb. How does the body work with language to make meaning? What is meaning-making at the intersections of various identities and selves, and within and without oppressive systems and structures? Looking at the works of Black women poets and writers like M. NourbeSe Philip, Duriel E. Harris, Harryette Mullen, Rosamond King, Canisia Lublin, Robin Coste Lewis, Akilah Oliver, and Audre Lorde, this four-week discussion and generative writing workshop series will explore meaning-making beyond the dominant methods of doing so.
THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE. 

THURSDAYS 6-8 PM EST
APRIL 6TH - 27TH
4 sessions
$160 Tuition
BIPOC sliding scale available
+ $25 Registration

INSTRUCTOR

Sherese Francis (she/they) describes themselves as an Alkymist of the I-Magination, finding expression through poetry, interdisciplinary arts, workshop facilitation, editing, and literary curation. Her(e) work takes inspiration from her(e) Afro-Caribbean heritage (Barbados and Dominica), and studies in Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, mythology and etymology. Some of their work has been published in Furious Flower, Obsidian, Rootwork Journal, The Caribbean Writer, The Operating System, Cosmonauts Avenue, No Dear, Apex Magazine, Bone Bouquet, African Voices, Newtown Literary, and Free Verse. Additionally, Sherese has published four chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls (Three Legged Elephant, 2017), Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling (Harlequin Creature, 2018), Recycling a Why That Rules Over My Sacred Sight (DoubleCross Press, 2021) and Lady Liberty Smashing Stones (THRASH Press, 2022). Sherese also has received grant awards from Queens Council on the Arts, NYFA and NYSCA. Besides publications, Sherese has had her(e) work featured in various exhibitions and showcases from The Lit Exhibit, NY Live Arts, Queens Public Library, York College Arts Gallery, King Manor Museum, WorksOnWater, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, Jamaica Flux, Baxter St Camera Club, Bliss On Bliss, Maleza Proyectos, The Rubenstein Art Center and Ely Center for Contemporary Art.
Image credit: Sherese Francis

MY LIGHT GOES UP IN DARKNESS: DIARIES, JOURNALS AND SELF-WRITING

In an entry from October 25, 1920, Virginia Woolf described the feeling of writing in her diary: “Like a lantern stood in the middle of a field my light goes up in darkness.”

​In this class we will investigate the diary form and conceptualize a space between “public” and “private” writing. For four weeks we will record the events, locales, dramas, and banalities of our lives in detail and transform those private records into poetry and prose for possible public(s). As we write (and commune around our writing) we will discuss notable journals by artists and writers including Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Jack Whitten, Hervé Guibert, Bernadette Mayer, and Annie Ernaux.
THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE IN PERSON
​AT ABRONS ART CENTER:
466 Grand Street, NY, NY

MONDAYS 6-8PM EST
MAY 1ST - 22ND
4 sessions
$160 Tuition
BIPOC sliding scale available
​+$25 Registration Fee

INSTRUCTOR

Parker Menzimer's poetry and critical writing have appeared in BOMB, Epiphany, Tiding House, Works & Days, and elsewhere. His chapbook The Links was published by 1080press in 2022. He earned his MFA at Brooklyn College where he was a Capote Fellow and Goldstein Scholar, and where he teaches composition and creative writing. He is the Programs and Community Manager at the Poetry Society of America, an editor of Topos Press, and the founding editor of the literary listings site litevents.nyc. He was a School of Making Thinking CON/Text resident in 2017.
Image credit: © The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf.

HERBS FOR DREAMS: PLANT MEDICINE & SHIFTING WORLDSCAPES

Herbs for Dreams: Plant Medicine and Shifting Worldscapes will explore the ways that plant medicine can support us through internal and external shifts in worldscapes. Participants will explore their relationship with ancestral lineage and dream work, somatic movement, dream journaling and reflecting on building collective dream archives.  Participants will also be asked to pick a single herb to work with over the course period to ingest or meditate/ visualize daily and perform an internal herb walk during the duration of the workshop. Participants will also be prompted to draw during and create audio recordings during class sessions and create a daily drawing upon waking, creating portals (to be placed near sleeping areas or on sacred spaces) to support us in our collective processing and intention. We will set intentions born from our relationship to the plants we are ingesting to support our dream worlds. We will look at Black  texts which explore: biomedicine, wellness communities and reflections on rest and wellness by Audre Lorde, The Nap Ministry, Octavia Butler, Carolyn Lazard and other thinkers who work with land, plants and collective organizing around our environments.
THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE.
THERE WILL LIKELY BE AN IN PERSON OPPORTUNITY FOR NY-BASED PARTICIPANTS.

TUESDAYS 6-8PM EST
MAY 2ND - 23RD
4 sessions
$160 Tuition
BIPOC sliding scale available
​+$25 Registration Fee

INSTRUCTOR

Charmaine Bee (they/them) received an MFA from CalArts and is a visual artist and herbalist and uses mediums such as sound, video, writing, movement and textile. Charmaine’s work explores historically charged materials such as rice and indigo which were cultivated in the Sea Islands of South Carolina where Charmaine was raised.  Their work also explores portals as bridges and doorways that connect gaps between space and time and open up our ability to time travel as well as histories of the Black diaspora contained within portal spaces. Charmaine asks how these doorways are activated through geographic sites, material, time and spaces we may not see but can feel. Charmaine’s herbalism practice supports people in working through the dream world through lucid dreaming and dream recall, accessing personal power and voice through solar plexus and throat chakra support.
Photo credit: Jordan Ruffin

EXPLORING SOUND AND SELF: A COURSE IN DEEP LISTENING, MUSIC WRITING, AND INTUITIVE PRODUCTION

What can deep listening teach us about our sonic inclinations and relationship to sound? What does our music taste say about what we want in music, and in general?

In this course, we will use deep listening, personal music writing, and intuitive music production to better understand ourselves. 

Deep listening, in the Nameless Sound tradition, allows us to carefully distinguish sounds from one another and develop a non-judgemental orientation to music making. With a beginner’s mind, we are able to approach sound with curiosity and develop our unique sound signatures.

In addition to listening, we will write about and make music. Through writing about songs from our youth, we will reflect on our personal music histories to gain insight into who we are and what we like. 

Using Bandlab, an easy-to-use music production application, we will work on a song throughout the class to complement our writing exercises.  
​
No music production experience necessary.
THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE.

WEDNESDAYS 6-8PM EST
MAY 3RD - 24TH
4 sessions
$160 Tuition
BIPOC sliding scale available
​+$25 Registration Fee

INSTRUCTOR

ricky sallay zoker (aka. YATTA) is a writer, musician, and educator.  Under the experimental sound-making tutelage of David Dove at Houston’s Nameless Sound organization, YATTA developed a deep appreciation for free jazz and cultivated a musical improvisation practice. Over the years, they have shared the stage with musicians like Beverly Glenn-Copeland and The Sun Ra Arkestra, creating multimedia performances that tour nationally and globally. Ricky has published a chapbook with Pioneer Works’ Clocktower Radio, ran a writing series titled Big Memory through Poetic Research Bureau (LA), as well as written, directed and scored their short film, HIGHER LIFE, commissioned by Abrons Art Center. In 2019, under their music name, YATTA, Ricky wrote and produced their poetry album WAHALA (released on NYC-imprint PTP). The album served as the score for an hour-long self-written/performed theatrical production called An Episode: Ricky’s Room at The Shed. As an educator, Ricky has facilitated workshops and panels at The New School, The Brooklyn Museum, NYU, Vassar College, Bard College, and Cornell University. They hold an MFA in Music/Sound from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College.
Photo credit: Pioneer Works, ricky sallay zoker

R U ONLINE?: UNDERSTANDING INTIMACY ON AND OFFLINE

Is the internet a person or a place? Are we what we search for? Is social media a panacea or Pandora’s box for loneliness? Inspired by Joanna McNeill's book Lurking, the course “R U Online?” will investigate how social media and the internet muddy our human identities and digital personas. How does social media influence our desire to connect, our ability to organize ourselves in relation to one another, build community, and nurture lasting deep friendships or romances? We will attempt to make sense of our digitized world through group discussions of essays, films, media, and creative exercises like turning our search history into poems. Using our collective imagination, participants will become architects designing a better internet and ways to conduct our digital/physical selves and worlds. If the internet is a person, should it be friendly? If it's a place, is it an oasis or a nuclear wasteland? What if Siri loved us? Participants will have the chance to create a project in the medium of their choice in response to the course material. Together we will compile our findings, discussion, and projects into a "manifesto," i.e. e-book/zine/Tumblr on digital/physical intimacy.
THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE IN PERSON
​AT ABRONS ART CENTER:
466 Grand Street, NY, NY

THURSDAYS 6-8PM EST
MAY 4TH - 25TH
4 sessions
$160 Tuition
BIPOC sliding scale available
​+$25 Registration Fee

INSTRUCTOR

Kaiuna Odogba​ is a Brooklyn-based musician and interdisciplinary artist with an extensive foundation in 2-D studio art, videography, and photography who explores the world via traditional and unconventional video-art practices, sound, textiles and fashion, new media technologies, and artificial intelligence. Under the alias Saint Araignee, Kaiuna deconstructs the erotic as defined by Audre Lorde as a “deep sense of fullness (of which) we can require no less of ourselves.” Their practice flirts with how technology exasperates, suppresses, manipulates, and magnifies these desires, often exploring themes that juxtapose one another: brokenness/connection, the unnatural/natural, and vulnerability/strength. Kaiuna is curious about queer imagination, blackness, the natural world, memory, and all things transcendental. They have showcased work with Montez Press Radio, Creative Code Art, Laboratory Spokane, Made in Media Center NY, and St. Marks Church.

SMT'S archive of courses provides an in-depth look at embodied, experiential pedagogies combining interdisciplinary techniques from: film, visual arts, philosophy, poetry, mathematics, dance, theater, literature, and art history.