Course category: Fall 2022

Presence as Portal

In Presence as Portal Artists have used performance to engage various social and political issues through resistance practices that include protest art to public actions. In this course, we will experiment with embodiment in relationship to intervening, mediating, or deconstructing power. Students will investigate these ideas by way of individual and collective gestures and as a means of release and liberation.

Presences as Portal Office Hours: Tuesdays 1:30 – 2:30pm EST

Maria Gaspar is a Chicago-born interdisciplinary artist whose practice addresses issues of spatial justice to amplify, mediate, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Her body of work responds to the perceptual and political manifestations of place through multi-year projects that span a range of formats and scales. They include sound performances at a military site (Sounds for Liberation; New Haven, CT); long-term public art interventions at the largest jail in the country (96 Acres Project and Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall; Chicago); and audio-video works, documenting a prison demolition located in her childhood neighborhood (Ellipses; Chicago). Working within historically marginalized sites and histories, Gaspar contends with erasure, power, and proximity issues by generating liberatory actions with others. Influenced by the hyper-local, Gaspar challenges understandings of geography and the social constructions of space by mediating and subverting the familiar or unseen to provoke new interpretations.

Gaspar is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for the Creative Arts, United States Artists Fellowship, Frieze Impact Prize, Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, Art Matters Award, Imagining Justice Art Grant, Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, and Creative Capital Award. Other honors include the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar has exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1, New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; and the San José Museum of Art, San José, CA. She is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

Arts and Culture of Nature

“Art and the Culture of Nature” aims to foster a better understanding of how artists today can make work engaging the environment in a time of intensifying ecological calamity. The seminar will explore how artists have interrogated the concept of nature from pictorial traditions, through earth art and the contemporary art of environmental engagement.

Art and Culture of Nature is Guided by the artist Mark Dion, students will share work and ideas with each other around their practice as well as discuss readings and research. How does the current global ecological crisis- extinction, climate change, ocean debris, urban sprawl, etc. inform how artists respond to working on the topic of nature will be the fulcrum of the seminar. Understanding how artists have illuminated environmental issues in the past will help participants frame their own practices.
Mark Dion was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1961. He received a BFA (1986) and an honorary doctorate (2003) from the University of Hartford, Hartford Art School, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program.

Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. Appropriating archaeological, field ecology, and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between ‘objective’ (‘rational’) scientific methods and ‘subjective’ (‘irrational’) influences. Dion also frequently collaborates with museums of natural history, aquariums, zoos, and other institutions mandated to produce public knowledge on the topic of nature.