The Decentralization of the Southeast Asian Art Scene With Gridthiya Gaweewong course description

The Southeast Asian contemporary art scene has emerged asynchronously since the dawn of globalization. This class will unfold the entanglements of contemporary art scenes from different loci on the Southeast Asian peninsula and the archipelago. It will explore the decentralization process of the contemporary art activities in the region. Many key players are artists – curators who initiate the collectives, art festivals and socially engaged art in their hometowns. These emerging practices, started in the 1990s, have resurfaced and are slowly spreading like networks of mushrooms in the forest. The vibrant art scene escalated when Indonesian artists collective, Ruangrupa curated the recent Documenta Fifteen, when many Southeast Asian collectives participated in the Lumbung (rice barn) concept of sharing resources within their community and beyond, and have continued their collaboration back home.

The class will be a combination of lectures and conversations with guest artists and curators who play critical roles in driving their local scene in the region and beyond. Questions to explore include: What kind of feedback and strategy have they used to continue their collaboration and expand their network across the universe? How have they dealt with the struggle to sustain themselves in today’s context? What are their major concerns, discourses and engagement with the regional and global art community? How did they deal with the after effects of colonial and cold war history? What’s their reaction and strategy to decolonize and decentralize from major power within their own nation/state and beyond? How can they survive in the post-Covid period and what are their expectations for the future?

***ALL Classes include FREE & Continuous Membership Access to our virtual campus Programming called Student Life
** Payment Plans Available

Gridthiya Gaweewong co-founded the Bangkok-based independent art organization Project 304 in 1996. Her curatorial projects have addressed issues of social transformation confronting artists from Thailand and beyond since the Cold War. Gridthiya has curated various regional and international exhibitions including Under Construction, Tokyo Opera City Gallery and Japan Foundation; Forum Japan (2003). She has co-curated with regional curators on several occasions, including ‘Politics of Fun’, an exhibition of artists from Southeast Asia, with Ong Keng Sen at Haus Der Kulteren der Welt, Berlin (2005), with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, ‘Bangkok Democracy’, and the 4th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, Bangkok (2005), and with Rirkrit Tiravanija on Saigon Open City, Ho Chi Minh City (2006). She curated Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s The Serenity of Madness at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiangmai, which toured Asia, Europe and the USA (2016-2019) (Commissioned by ICI, New York); and served as a member of the curatorial team for Imagined Borders, the 12th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2018). Her recent exhibition was entitled Errata, Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiangmai, initiated by the Goethe Asia Pacific regional office in partnership with Singapore Art Museum, National Gallery, Jakarta, and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2021-2022). Gridthiya is currently serving as co-artistic director (with Rirkrit Tiravanija) of Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai 2023. She lives in Bangkok, where she works as an artistic director of the Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok.

Inspired by The Colored Girls Museum this writing workshop invites participants to engage with home space as the muse – All Spaces Speak.

In this eight-week course co-facilitators Vashti and DaSaint invite participants to create poetry inspired by spaces that speak. Participants will engage in being and seeing themselves in those spaces and speak back through poetic prose. We invite participants to explore the various spaces we call home, rather known or unknown and speak of its story in a poetic format.

Artists will learn fundamental poetry genres and styles but this is not the focus of the course, rather we will focus on what happens when we bring this knowledge into the spaces that speak to us.
Office Hours: Thursdays at 12 or 5pm
***ALL Classes include FREE & Continuous Membership Access to our virtual campus Programming called Student Life
** Payment Plans Available

Vashti DuBois, Founder & Executive Director
Prior to creating The Colored Girls Museum (TCGM), Vashti DuBois held leadership positions at a number of organizations over the span of her 30-year career in non-profit and arts administration. DuBois’ work focused primarily on issues impacting girls and women of color at organizations such as The Free Library of Philadelphia, Tree House Books, the historic Church of the Advocate, the Children’s Art Carnival in New York City, the Haymarket People’s Fund in Boston, Congreso Girls Center and The Leeway Foundation.

In 2015, DuBois opened TCGM to “honor the stories, experiences and history of Colored Girls throughout the African Diaspora.” It is the first memoir museum of its kind offering visitors a multi-disciplinary experience in a residential space. TCGM initiates the ordinary object, submitted by the colored girl herself, as a representative of an aspect of her story and personal history which she finds meaningful. Dubois was awarded the Arts and Business Leadership Award for Outstanding Dedication to Women and Girls of Color, and providing agency and visibility for the practices and histories of artists often excluded from the canon.

TCGM has been engineered to pop up in other cities and neighborhoods around the country, transforming ordinary spaces into Colored Girls Museum outposts that collect, archive and share the stories of indigenous Colored Girls.

DuBois is a graduate of Wesleyan University and a NAMAC Fellow. She is currently working on a book about the making of The Colored Girls Museum.

DaSaint is an artistic minister and spiritual alchemist who loves to learn about the world and people by experiencing it for Herself through travel. She has been living in Philadelphia since the summer of 2015, after completing seminary in Atlanta. She was born and raised in Miami, Florida where most of her family still reside. DaSaint is a lover of words and rhythms, and has been writing poetry and music since high school. Her undergrad degree is in English/ Creative Writing and Africana Studies. Dasha has authored two poetry books and is currently writing her third. She has recorded and performed some of her work through various creative outlets and can be found on several social media platforms. Currently, she is on a playcation where she believes she is making it a life quest to Live, Love, and Liberate herself and others. DaSaint is enjoying the season of leaning into more play with ease and peace. During her down time she enjoys a good bottle of red wine and listening to a groove that she can dance to. Her overall mission for her life comes from the charge given by the late Rev. Dr. Katie G. Canon, to “to do the work that your soul must have.”

Studio Practice at the End of Who’s World With Tiago Gualberto

An ongoing global crisis, The Apocalypse – The End of the World as we know it – looms as a very real threat. The question we ask is: how does one make art and a life in these times? Furthermore, who’s world will end and how will art be made? We turn for guidance from artistic communities where apocalypse has been part of their culture for some time such as black and indigenous artists.

Studio Practice at the End of Who’s world will focus on lesser known Black and Indigenous contemporary artists and ways of art making from Brazil. We will look at current and historical art procedures developed by Black and Indigenous Brazilian artists. We will explore what the motivations were for crafting these procedures as a way of forming art practices, as well as how the artwork that came out of them reflected the political and cultural contexts the artists found themselves within. Artists will also explore the procedures from their own stances, by making their own work based upon the procedures and approaches we cover in the course.

Office hours: TBA

***ALL Classes include FREE & Continuous Membership Access to our virtual campus Programming called Student Life
** Payment Plans Available

Born in 1983, Tiago Gualberto is an Afro-Brazilian visual artist. He is also a researcher at the Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo, where he lives. He graduated from the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and studied Textile and Fashion Technology at the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of São Paulo (EACH-USP). Gualberto has participated in several group shows both in Brazil and abroad, such as: “A Nova Mão Afro-brasileira” (São Paulo, 2012); “Osso: exposição apelo ao amplo direito de defesa de Rafael Braga” (São Pa ulo, 2017); “Encuentro entre dos mares”, Valencia Biennial (Spain, 2007); “AfroBrasil: Art and Identities” (USA, 2015). Some of his solo shows include: “Negra é a Cor do meu Coração: Instalações e objetos” (São Paulo, 2010); “A Clothesline to the Past: Rhode Island Takes on Brazil” (USA, 2016); “Passagens sob(re) a Terra: Lembranças, memória e territorialidade” (Minas Gerais, Brazil, 2016). There are certain recurring themes in his work, such as the relationship between memory and history, the social uses of language, and narrative erasure.

Post-Human Infrastructure 2.0
In this online course, we will explore the concept of post-human infrastructure through the construction of speculative ecologies centered around water-based eco-zones. We will start by examining the ways in which human infrastructure has impacted these eco-zones and identify the challenges they face. Each student will choose a specific eco-zone and explore it in-depth, asking themselves what their biggest concern for this area is.
We will be reading James Bridle’s Ways of Being and other essays by other authors that focus on water and the under-land to provide a theoretical foundation for our exploration. Students will work together in groups to create solutions embedded in speculative ecologies, incorporating insights from their individual research and group discussions.
By the end of the course, students will have developed a deep understanding of the complex relationships between human infrastructure and natural systems. They will have developed the skills to imagine and create innovative solutions that prioritize sustainability and the well-being of the ecosystems they inhabit. This course is ideal for those interested in environmental studies, architecture, engineering, or urban planning.
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Office Hours: Thursdays 3:30 – 4:30 EST
***ALL Classes include FREE & Continuous Membership Access to our virtual campus Programming called Student Life
** Payment Plans Available

Lauren Bon is an environmental artist from Los Angeles, CA. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Some of her works include: Not A Cornfield, which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in downtown Los Angeles into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Her studio’s current work, Bending the River, aims to utilize Los Angeles’ first private water right to deliver 106-acre feet of water annually from the LA River to over 50 acres of land in the historic core of downtown LA. This model can be replicated to regenerate the 52-mile LA River, reconnect it to its floodplain and form a citizens’ utility.

At Home in The Body will be part laboratory, part playground, part archeological dig: a place to relate, to connect, and to honor difference. Where are we politically, geographically, and culturally? Where are we in terms of our gender and belief systems? How does this affect our making? We will start with the experience of our body, focusing on its function as tool and receptor. We will explore embodiment and the boundaries between inside and outside. We will investigate the veil that we look through and how that affects what we see. We will hone our receptivity. We will understand witnessing not as a passive act, but as a call to action.
What is the meaning in the making? What is intuition? How do we nurture the creative process; how do we trust its unfolding?
What is your calling?

At Home in the Body Office hours: Mondays 1:00 – 3:00pm EST – Each student gets a 1-1 studio visit with Janine.

***ALL Classes include FREE & Continuous Membership Access to our virtual campus Programming called Student Life
** Payment Plans Available

Janine Antoni is a visual artist who was born in Freeport, Bahamas in 1964. She received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Antoni has been featured in numerous international biennials including documenta14, the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial, the Kwangju Biennial, the Prospect.1 Biennial in New Orleans and the SITE Santa Fe Biennial. Antoni is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship (1998), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award (2011), Creative Capital Grant (2012), and Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2014).

Her most recent major exhibition, I am fertile ground, was presented at The Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, NY in 2019. Antoni currently resides in New York and is represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York, and Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco.

Janine Antoni is known for her unusual processes. Her body is both her tool for making and the source from which her meaning arises. Antoni’s early work transformed materials like chocolate and soap and used everyday activities like bathing, eating, and sleeping as sculptural processes. She carefully articulates her relationship to the world, giving rise to emotional states that are felt in and through the senses. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body.