SPQ SEMINARS

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Every semester there is seminar that introduces students to the contemporary theory and methodologies emerging around social practice, as well as to develop their understanding of critical theory and how it relates to their future role as cultural producers.

SPQ seminars are often team-taught, partnering QC Art Department faculty experienced in social practice, with professors in adjacent disciplines, including the QC Urban Studies department, or with professionals outside the university system.

History and Theory or Social Practice Art by Gregory Sholette

In Spring 2018, Professor Gregory Sholette and guest instructor/SPQ coordinator Jeff Kasper led a itinerant course on The History & Theory of Social Practice. The course visited numerous influential figures in the field for guest lecturers and tutorials, including: Pablo Helguera, Tom Finkelpearl, Mark Read, Claire Bishop, More Art, among others. View the syllabi.

2020: http://www.sholetteseminars.com/arts-777-2020-spring/

2019: http://www.sholetteseminars.com/777-spring-2019-spq/

2018: http://www.sholetteseminars.com/history-and-theory-of-social-practice-art/

 

Public School by Claire Bishop and Paul Ramirez Jonas

PUBLIC SCHOOL is a course designed to encourage the making of, and reflection upon, art outside the gallery. Unlike a conventional CUNY seminar, we will never meet in the classroom, but instead use the five boroughs of New York as our campus—visiting sites, buildings, organizations, individuals, and situations that catalyze critical thinking about the public sphere.

https://futuresinitiative.org/publicschool2017/

Fall 2016

In Fall 2016, Professor Chloe Bass and Katherine Karl, curator of The James Gallery (CUNY Center for the Humanities) led a New Forms course on FLUXUS and the works of Allison Knowles. In discussion with Knowles and inflected by their pedagogical participation in the exhibit “House of Dust by Alison Knowles”, artists from Social Practice Queens developed their own distinct methods and forms to investigate human interaction. Variously personal, language-based, performative, or deeply labor-intensive, the projects propose artmaking as a method for navigation, reflection, and innovation in everyday life. Home of Practice extends the metaphor of the house: what does it mean to develop imaginary architectures into ways of being together? These expressions took the form of an exhibit at The James Gallery in Spring 2017. Learn more.

Spring 2016

In Spring 2016, Prerana Reddy, Jose Seranno-McClain, and Larissa Harris led a course on-site at the Queens Museum in development of the current Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art retrospective exhibition. Several SPQ​ students worked with museum Community Engagement and Curatorial staff on public programming around theories about the role of artists in city agencies, feminism, and sustainability, to name a few. Check out the upcoming events here.

Spring 2016

In Spring 2016 professor Tyrone Mitchell led a public art studio-based seminar that provided students with an opportunity to workshop public art concepts as well as an introduction to the partnership and permitting process surrounding public art. The class resulted in an online catalogue of both historical and contemporary works of public art on campus, on view here: https://qcpublicart.wordpress.com/

Fall 2014

For Fall 2014, professors Greg Sholette and Maureen Connor partnered up to teach a research seminar on the archive, called New Forms: Archive/Document/Social Policy.  Journalism has been described as the first rough draft of history and yet the same assessment could be made about the archive. What the archive contains is raw material for constructing everything from historical narratives and fictional encounters to informed public policies. At the same time the archive is of increasing interest to artists for two different reasons. First it provides insight into overlooked and/or repressed histories of workers, women and minorities among others. And second the archive has become a source of material and conceptual content as well as an artistic medium and form in its own right

View the syllabus.

Fall 2013

For Fall 2013, professor Greg Sholette partnered with Queens Museum director Tom Finkelpearl to that semester’s SPQ seminar, which critically surveyed the the theory and practice of recent, politically engaged visual culture while simultaneously locating it within the recent history of mainstream contemporary art.

View the syllabus.

Spring 2013

In Spring 2013, Professor Maureen Connor taught an experimental course, Artists as Change Agents, in which students embedded themselves in non-art contexts of their choice to do research and, where possible, to help develop creative solutions to problems they discovered there. This syllabus for this class was developed jointly with the Pedagogy Group, a collective of socially-engaged art educators in NYC who work together to develop and practice alternative methods of teaching.

View the syllabus.

Fall 2012

In Fall 2012 professor Tyrone Mitchell led a public art studio that provided students with an opportunity to workshop public art concepts as well as an introduction to the partnership and permitting process surrounding public art.

Spring 2012

The Spring 2012 Seminar “Corona Studio: Transforming Corona Plaza” was an experimental team-taught course led by Professors Gregory Sholette and Maureen Connor from the Art Department together with Professor Tarry Hum from the Urban Studies Department. In this cross disciplinary class that combined the history and theory of social practice art with aspects of urban research and design; art students collaborated with social science students to uncover the needs of various stakeholders in the community of Corona and apply their findings towards the community conversation surrounding the re-design of Corona Plaza.

View the syllabus.

*SPQ seminars are part of the regular MFA curriculum and are open to all QC MFA students, as well as select students from other CUNY schools.