The Alternative Art School Past Online Art Courses

Spring 2024

Professional Practice for Artists

with Lexa Walsh

March 29th - May 10th | Fridays 3:30 - 6 pm EST

$1,250 New Student
$1,000 Returning Student

In this 7 week class, we will move intently toward building our professional practices as artists. We will cover the many ways to be in the Art World(s), and how to get there: Goal Setting, Grants, Budgets, Pricing, Residencies, Open Calls, Artist and Project Statements, Elevator Pitches, CVs, Documentation, Websites, Networking and Promotion, and the importance of Community. We will share tips and strategies to help define and finesse each of these, by identifying our audiences, contexts, processes, research and challenges.

Spring 2024

Monuments

With Krzysztof Wodiczko

April 3rd - May 15th | Wednesdays 5 - 7:30 pm EST

$2,000 New Student
$1,750 Returning Student

In “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” Friedrich Nietzche asked, “What is the use to the modern man of this ‘monumental’ contemplation of the past, this preoccupation with the rare and classic?” That was 1874. Today, monuments to racism, white supremacy, colonialism, war, patriarchy, and oppressions across the world are toppled, disgraced, vandalized, and defaced. The course will provide space for an informed and open discussion and for development and sharing of the artistic concepts, and proposals for monuments.

Spring 2024

Agripocene

With Amy Franceschini

March 25th - May 6th | Mondays 12 - 2:30 pm EST

$1,500 New Student
$1,250 Returning Student

The Agripocene* course will look at different forms of art and activism that address issues of land use, climate change and environmental justice with a focus on strategies of collaboration, durational approaches and methods for developing unconventional partnerships to realize the unthinkable. Lectures and invited guests will demonstrate how to move, be moved and to move mass(es) - from the small gesture to large-scale productions that overturn policy, food systems and practices of everyday life to form new paths of resistance, mutual aid and reciprocal engagement.

Spring 2024

Meaningful Marks

Contemporary Painting Workshop with Erlin Geffrard

March 25th - May 6th | Mondays 3 - 5:30 pm EST

$1,250 New Student
$1,000 Returning Student

Meaningful Marks is a contemporary painting workshop, wherein you will learn contemporary painting techniques, theory, and principles while exploring the power of marks to convey meaning and emotion in your artwork. In this course, you will create three paintings that build on the skills and concepts covered in class.

Winter 2024

Maximum Magic

with Aaron Gach

Jan 23rd - March 5th | Tues 6 pm - 8:30 pm ET

$1,250 New Student
$1,000 Returning Student

In Maximum Magic Online Art course, artists will get feedback on their art through various exchanges and explore their art practice’s connection with magic. From smoke & mirrors to spirits & mysticism, this course will be engaging all kinds of magical arts in relation to diverse creative practices, historical developments, and current cultural expressions.

Winter 2024

Professional Practice:

The Pursuit of Authenticity in the Arts with Epiphany Couch

Jan 19th - March 1st | Fridays 12:30 - 3 pm EST

$1,250 New Student
$1,000 Returning Student

What does it mean to be an artist today? How do we navigate the changing art landscape? How do we seek opportunities that feel authentic to our goals as artists and creators? This course blends playful exploration with practical skill-building to provide artists with the tools and insights needed to navigate their artistic journey with authenticity, integrity, purpose, and resilience.

Winter 2024

Meaningful Marks:

Contemporary Painting Workshop with Erlin Geffrard

Jan 15th - March 4th | Mondays 4 - 6:30 pm EST

$1,250 New Student
$1,000 Returning Student

Meaningful Marks is a contemporary painting workshop, wherein you will learn contemporary painting techniques, theory, and principles while exploring the power of marks to convey meaning and emotion in your artwork. In this course, you will create three paintings that build on the skills and concepts covered in class.

Independent Study Program

Carving Connections

An independent study workshop with Amber Imrie

Jan 13th - June 28th | Saturdays 12 - 2pm ET

$300 per month
with a 6 month commitment

In Carving Connections, we will be following the threads through our practice, into our community and out into the world. Everything is connected, but to see through the chaos we must move with clarity, intention and passion. Over six months we will engage in exercises to further illuminate your authenticity through your art. We will focus on strengthening your daily art practice routines to build resiliency, confidence, and self-assurance.

Fall 2023

Something out of Nothing

Experiments in Quick Thinking and Quick Working With Mark Dion & Lenka Clayton

November 1 - 10th | Wed, Thurs, Fri 1:00 - 3:30pm EST

$2,000 New Student
$1,750 Returning Student

The class would focus on brainstorming and problem solving to materialize conceptual solutions to site specific art making problems. The methodology would be fast paced, down and dirty and rather fun. We'll explore intuitive reasoning, improvisation, and bricolage. Students will be guided to make a series of works in response to prompts, questions and challenges that aim to condense the process of ideation to realization in order to explore and expand an art making practice.

Spring 2023

At Home in the Body

with Janine Antoni

October 17th - November 28th | Tuesdays 2:30 - 5 pm EST

$2,000 New Student
$1,750 Returning Student

This class 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?

Fall 2023

Art, Climate & Land-Use

Socio-Environmental Imagination in the age of the Agripocene With Amy Franceschini

September 28th - November 9th | Thursdays 12 - 2:30 pm EST

$1,500 New Student
$1,250 Returning Student

The Agripocene* course will look at different forms of art and activism that address issues of land use, climate change and environmental justice with a focus on strategies of collaboration, durational approaches and methods for developing unconventional partnerships to realize the unthinkable. Lectures and invited guests will demonstrate how to move, be moved and to move mass(es) - from the small gesture to large-scale productions that overturn policy, food systems and practices of everyday life to form new paths of resistance, mutual aid and reciprocal engagement.

Fall 2023

Projection/ Memory/ Monument

With Krzysztof Wodiczko

September 26th - November 7th | Tuesdays 4 - 6:30 pm EST

$2,000 New Student
$1,750 Returning Student

The course, Projection/ Memory/ Monument, will introduce the participants to the process of development of artistic concepts and proposals for the interior and outdoor projections that examine, engage, and transform the meaning of the forms of existing environment such as domestic and workspaces as well as architectural, sculptural, and natural monuments.

Fall 2023

Art & Gender

Exploring Gender in Art and Life With Amber Imrie

September 25th - November 6th | Mondays 1 - 3:30 pm EST

$1,250 New Student
$1,000 Returning Student

We live in a world organized by gender. As artists this affects the work we make, the opportunities we get, and the lens through which others view our work. In this course, artists will workshop their own projects with a cohort of artists also interested in discussing the ways gender frames us and our work.

Fall 2023

Making A Life of Art

with Nato Thompson

September 13th - October 25th | Wednesdays 12:30 - 3pm EST

$1,500 New Student
$1,250 Returning Student

In this course, Thompson will address and workshop the complexities of living an artistic life. Ranging from practical issues like artistic work routines and navigating the art world to more philosophical issues of community, sustainability, and life-work balance; the course is meant as a hands-on workshop for artists and curators interested in making a cultural life amidst a difficult and socially arduous world. The course will also include visiting artists, readings, and discussions.

Fall 2023

Meaningful Marks:

Contemporary Painting Workshop with Erlin Geffrard

September 11th - October 23rd | Mondays 4 pm - 6:30 pm EST

$1,250 New Student
$1,000 Returning Student

Meaningful Marks is a contemporary painting workshop, wherein you will learn contemporary painting techniques, theory, and principles while exploring the power of marks to convey meaning and emotion in your artwork. In this course, you will create three paintings that build on the skills and concepts covered in class.

Summer 2023

Art in Public Space – Between Mission & Commission

Intensive with Dmitry Vilensky of Chto Delat

July 11th - Aug 1st | Tuesdays 11am - 1:30 pm ET

$1,000 New Student
$750 Returning Student

In this course we analyze a broad variety of different public art projects. We trace the differences in approaches to the politic of commemoration, gentrification, the difference between agonistic and consensual work.

Spring 2023

The Decentralization of the Southeast Asian Art Scene

With Gridthiya Gaweewong

May 16th - 25th | Tues & Thurs 8 - 10:30 am EST

$750

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.

Spring 2023

Spoken Spaces

With Vashti DuBois & DaSaint

April 12th - May 24th | Wednesdays 5:30 pm - 8pm EST

$1,250

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.

Spring 2023

Post-Human Infrastructure 2.0

with Lauren Bon

March 30th - May 11th | Thursdays 12:30 - 3 pm EST

$1,500

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.

Spring 2023

Studio Practice at the End of Who’s World

With Tiago Gualberto

March 14th - April 25th | Tuesdays 6:30 - 9 pm EST

$1,250

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.

Winter 2023

Gendered Performance Intensive

with Alicia Framis

Jan 24 & 26th, Feb 7th & 9th | Tuesdays & Thursdays 12 - 2:30 pm EST

$1,250

Gender inequality is the subject of public debate. Everywhere in the world, real calamities are happening, dead women, anti-abortion, homophobism, issues that already seemed solved - from one day to the next has eroded, and we have lost our space in freedom. How do we put our convictions into practice, and go from theory to action, now?

7 Week Course

Presence as Portal

With Maria Gaspar

Sep 27th - Nov. 8th | Tuesdays 11 am - 1:30 pm EST

$1,250

Artists have used performance to engage various social and political issues through resistance practices that include protest art to public actions.

2 Week Intensive

Arts and Culture of Nature

with Mark Dion

Dec 5th - 14th | Mon, Tues, Wed 12:30-3 pm EST

$2,000

“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.

2 Week Intensive

Guadalupe Maravilla

Intensive with Guadalupe Maravilla

Feb 14th - Feb 25th | Mon, Tues, Wed 10:00 am - 12:30 pm EST

$1,500

- ENROLLMENT CLOSED - Art is in a constant process of expansion and is constantly absorbing new materials, media, strategies, and ideologies. In general terms, the goal of this class is to teach students about art as a living contemporary practice and the importance of self-care. The class will focus on information and techniques that are relevant to the present.