Our Work
We see our artist-led talks, workshops, critiques, and studio visits as tools not only for artistic development, but also as vital spaces for fostering critical and open dialogues between young artists.
At the heart of this work is a commitment to providing students with the individualized resources they need to create their own value systems both within their work as artists and as members of a responsible and caring society. Through demonstrating how our artists-in-residence go about producing their worldview as artists, we hope to instill in students a sense of responsibility toward cultivating and defending the logic that guides their thinking and artistic practice.
Our work is centered around our studio visit program, where our artists-in-residence work with one-on-one with students to offer focused guidance and visual resources tailored specifically to their interests. Through the development of critical analytical skills, we teach students to become sharp analysts of their own work and to speak clearly and confidently about their practice and the artists and artworks that inform it. Combined with lectures and workshops, all led by the artist in residence, our program aims to provide students with an environment for practicing the essential tools required to sustain a lifelong process of art making.
We believe that supporting our artists-in-residence through funding their teaching practices strengthens our communities by providing students with a space for critical self-reflection and growth while also creating a space for artists to deepen their commitments to public arts education. By partnering with high school teachers, we allow educators to host artists in residence as mentors, guides, and co-teachers within their classrooms. Some schools may support our residencies through their own budgets, while others partner with us through grants, philanthropic support, or other funding opportunities.
As a nonprofit program, we're committed to finding pathways that make our artist mentor residencies accessible to as many schools as possible. Our primary goal is to provide public schools with high quality and low-cost, or in many cases, completely cost free artist-in-residence programs and workshops.
Our Method
We facilitate our studio visits and critiques using a semiotic and phenomenological method, inspired by the pedagogies of artists and thinkers like Mary Kelly and Roland Barthes.
We see the work we do as semiotic, meaning that it is focused on the study of the signs and symbols within a work of art. This method sees every aspect of an artwork as a sign, and pays close attention to the multifaceted meanings they give rise to. Aimed at highlighting connections between image, ideology, history, and aesthetics, our method provides students with the tools needed to analyze the context of meaning in which their work is being made.
At the same time, our work is also phenomenological, meaning that it opens our dialogue up to any observations present within our experience of viewing a work of art. For example a viewer might notice that an artwork is larger than the scale of the human body, or that an image makes their heart race. This practice provides students with a framework for looking at and speaking clearly about the work that is in front of them, not through an art historical lens, but rather through their own experiences in the world.
Lastly, our work is oriented toward an analysis of the value systems present within a work of art. This method asks students to question what kind of moral and aesthetic judgements arise from an artist’s practice and provides a framework for looking closely at how an artwork carries out the value system it proposes. In practice, this method encourages students to form their own criteria for establishing worth and challenges them to defend their own line of thinking both within the context of art making and the broader social framework that art resides within.