This course is focused on creating public actions in your local surroundings. We will consider our immediate neighborhoods as a place to re-embody our art making in ways that are responsive to and integrated with the natural world and the community around us. We will explore acts of reciprocity, working in concert with the environment that sustains us. This includes gift exchanges, eliciting laughter, crafting secret actions, and designing works with delayed manifestations.

Using a series of prompts, participants will create actions that allow them to practice different modes of making art in public and responding to the immediate environment. We will consider the complication of making art in and from a place that is very familiar.  It is hard to see what is in front of you when you are so used to it.  How can you see the world anew, in ways that you have never done before?   What allows you to perceive differently? Throughout the course we will discuss what participants have learned in doing the pratical exercises, what further ideas have been triggered and how that work might be expanded. In addition, participants will be asked to reflect on their practice through private writing and be given a weekly reading on the topic. 

The course follows a format of four live sessions over the course of five weeks: November 18, 25, December 2 and December 16 with the week of December 9 dedicated to the preparation of final works. Individual meetings about the final project will be scheduled in week 3.
 

Syllabus