field - pratt institute

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FIELD Site-in-Process Collaborative Studios| Exhibition | Expanded Field Pedagogy

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Field / Site-in-Process is a collaborative studio, exhibition, and research within Expanded Field practices. Organized by Mrinalini Aggarwal, AICAD Fellow in Fine Arts, and co-hosted by Ane Gonzalez Lara, Assistant Professor in Architecture, and Swati Piparsania, AICAD Fellow in Design, this series offers students, faculty and interdisciplinary practitioners shared spaces for experimentation and process-based inquiry. Addressing a variety of themes at the intersections of ecology, politics, technology, objects, environments and the body, the exhibition features process collaborations between students and faculty across 9 departments at Pratt and a host of invited artists, musicians, designers, educators and critical researchers. This program is part of an experimental and participatory research that aims to foster new forms of cross-pollinating pedagogy at Pratt.

DeKalb GalleryPratt Institute Nov 20-27, 2019

Opening Reception Thursday, Nov 21 5-7pm

FIELD Site-in-Process

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SCHEDULE WORKSHOP

DESCRIPTIONS

Thu

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1:30-3:30pm Unconference: Visualizing and Reframing Equitable FrameworksJudit Török & Rhonda Schaller

5-7pm Opening Reception: Recovering RecipesDawn Weleski & Kate O’ SheaFree and Open to the Public

Wed

nesd

ay

10am-1:30pmPerforming Political EducationNatalia Ivanova Mount & Marshall Trammell

1:30-4:30pm In Relationship with Technology, Time, NatureJean Shin & Natalie Moore

5-8pm Design History of Objects Erica Morawski & Swati Piparsania

Sund

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5-8pm Alien: Extraterrestrial Affairs Ana Maria Farina Free and Open to the Public

Mo

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9-12pm Edible Projects: Mold Making Candies & JelliesAmanda Huynh & Naomi Safran Hon

Tues

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9:30am-5:30pm Explore, Shift, Shape: Collaborative Drawing Machines as Predictors: Discerning ActionsRosemarie FiorePublic event at 5pm at the DeKalb Lawns

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Performing Political EducationWednesday, November 20, 10am-1:30pm

Natalia Mount, ProArts Gallery & COMMONS Marshall Trammell, Music Research Strategies

Participating Classes:

Drawing in the Expanded Field | Faculty - Mrinalini Aggarwal | Fine ArtsBig Impact | Faculty - Dina Weiss | Pratt Integrative CourseThesis | Faculty - Gaia Scagnetti | Communication Design

Professional Practice in Architecture | Faculty - Ane Gonzalez | Undergraduate Architecture

This workshop invites attendees to critique Capitalism and its machinations, through the re-design of an array of Underground Railroad quilt block codes, as an artist-driven reimagining of navigating the global economy. Participants will leave with an understanding of how we have gotten to the current predicament and how to move towards artistic and creative practices that build Solidarity, Cooperation, Mutualism, Equity, Participatory Democracy, Sustainability, and Pluralism.

The workshop will include an introduction to the Solidarity Economics (SE) framework of concepts, and an introduction to the feminist, Chicana scholar Chela Sandoval’s “Five Technologies,” from her seminal book “Methodologies of the Oppressed.” During the workshop, we will also address the polemics of the art space and new organizational formations, such as the commons. Lastly, participants will collaborate on the drafting of a pledge letter, centering on the creation of common language and vocabulary that reflect the ethos of a new, creative economy.

In Relationship with Technology, Time and NatureWednesday, November 20, 1:30pm-4:30pm

Digital detox challenge: can you go unplugged for a full day? This workshop explores our complex relationship to technology, time, and nature. Artists’ presentations will focus on site ideas, material, research process and collaborations. With ever-growing e-waste and accumulation of obsolete technology, how can we continue to innovate and work in ways that are sustainable and accountable? How can we harness the benefits of technology as a useful tool while restoring and reclaiming what it has taken from our lives, workplace, and the environment? How has technology changed the way we communicate, connect with people, and how we choose to spend our time? Participants will break up in small groups to unpack the realities and challenges we face in the digital age and climate crisis. We’ll also exchange ideas about how we can individually and collective navigate these pressing demands for our attention on our paths to building a better future.

The themes of this workshop related to Jean Shin’s upcoming solo exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco opening in Feb 2020. **Donate your old mobile phones and it’ll be incorporated into the artwork in progress.

Jean Shin, Adjunct Professor, CCE, Fine ArtsNatalie Moore, Assistant Chair of Foundation


MFA Integrated Practices | Faculty - Jean Shin | Fine ArtsSpace / Form / Process | Faculty - Natalie Moore | Foundations

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Design for India | Faculty - Swati Piparsania | Industrial DesignHistory of Industrial Design | Faculty - Erica Morawski| History of Art and Design

Design History of ObjectsWednesday, November 20, 5pm-8pm

Erica Morawski, Assistant Professor, History of Art and DesignSwati Piparsania, AICAD Post Graduate Teaching Fellow in Design

This session brings together a design studio and history of design class to collaborate on a number of activities that employ objects of memory. The activities invite participants to engage in contemplative and inquisitive conversations about people’s history, the cultural lives of objects and the sustainability practices that surround them. Through direct engagement with objects that participants bring to the workshop, we will reflect and interrogate through questions on the personal, intimate and social.

Free and open to the public

Unconference: Visualizing and Reframing Equitable Frameworks

Thursday, November 21, 1:30pm-3:30pm

Judit Török, Director, Center for Teaching and LearningRhonda Schaller, Director of Career & Professional Development, Visiting Associate Professor, Lecturer

Are you interested in engaging critically and creatively with pedagogical frameworks, but tired of the overused jargon that has come to define the field? Then this collaboration is for you! At this unconference, we will be learning, exploring and exchanging ideas to create and deconstruct a variety of frameworks for teaching and learning. Moving away from dense academic definitions of inclusive pedagogies and bullet points of empty strategies, participants in this ‘non-session interactive thing’ will be collectively creating an agenda, sharing ideas, discovering possibilities, and learning from each other. Wear your maker hats for this hands-on unconference to create physical models, prototypes, diagrams and research notes that re-think inclusive and equitable teaching frameworks in higher education.

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Community as Classroom | Faculty - Gina Zucker | Creative WritingSocial Practice | Faculty - Dawn Weleski | Art & Art History, Colgate University

Opening Reception: Recovering RecipesThursday, November 21, 5pm-7pm

Dawn Weleski

Artist and activist Dawn Weleski, in collaboration with Pratt Creative Writing students from Gina Zucker’s “Community as Classroom” elective, Colgate University Social Practice students and printmaker Kate O’Shea, will present favorite childhood foods and recipes from local food service workers and Pratt students. Evoking memories and networks of sensual relationship as medium, their collaboration will step outside of the gallery context to collectively process momentos of our shared experiences of childhood and food.

Field, Site-in-Process, Panel Discussion facilitated by Mrinalini AggarwalRecovering Recipes, Dawn Weleski in conversation with Gina Zucker, students from Pratt’s Creative Writing Program and Colgate University’s Social Practice class.

Performance by Marshall Trammell.Tibetan Tsampa Demonstration by Dolma Lhamo, Staff at Cap’t Loui on Myrtle Avenue


Alien: Extraterrestrial AffairsSunday, November 24, 5pm-8pm

Ana Maria Farina

Inspired by the title that immigrants receive in America and the alien aspects of our contemporary existence, this affair will take a sarcastic look at what being ‘alien’ means for artists and creators. Embrace your inner weird and wonderful, and join us for a night of connection and commune to share a meal, talk, and play games together. We will take over the FIELD and transform it into a whimsical alternative reality, where you will be able to play, chill, connect with others, and even collaborate in creation. This potluck is open to all - bring something to share that is a signifier of home and things far away.

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Design in Context | Faculty - Amanda Huynh | Industrial DesignMold Making | Faculty - Naomi Safran Hon | Fine Arts Tec

Edible Projects: Mold Making Candies and JelliesMonday, November 25, 9am-12pm

Amanda Huynh, Assistant Professor, Industrial DesignNaomi Safran Hon, Visiting Assistant Professor, Fine Arts

This workshop is devised as an interlude for two courses: an Industrial Design senior studio and a Fine Arts technical mold-making course. Students will have an opportunity to play with mold making and casting edible materials such as jellies and candies, and come away with the workshop with some technical knowledge as well as designed hard candies. Students will hear from Amanda Huynh about her experiences in designing for taste. We will consider the ephemeral nature of food and what it means to eat your creative outcomes.

Explore, Shift, Shape: Collaborative Drawing Machines as Predictors: Discerning Action

Tuesday, November 26, 9:30am-5:30pm

Rosemarie Fiore

This workshop will explore the space where art and engineering meet in the form of sculpture, drawing and performance. In the studio, individual and collaborative drawing machines will be engineered, designed and created from local reclaimed materials collected communally throughout the semester. As products of concept, material exploration and vision, these machines will be used as performative drawing tools to explore actions and mark making. As performers, artists will experience the contraction and lengthening of the human body through the vehicle of the drawing machines they create. The drawings generated will be a lasting record of their movement, performance and actions.


Junior Sculpture | Faculty - Analia Segal | Fine ArtsMFA Sculpture | Faculty - John Monti | Fine Arts Drawing 1 | Faculty - Mrinalini Aggarwal | Fine Arts

This workshop is co-sponsored by Legion

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COLLABORATORS

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Supermrin (Mrinalini Aggarwal) is an Indian artist working at the intersections of architecture, art and design. Her practice is an anti-disciplinary exploration of space that seeks to reconsider the ways in which urban landscapes mediate human relationships. Through re-conceptions of site and experience, she creates installations and environments that seek to shift perceptions, beliefs and assumptions about the nature of the physical world.

Supermrin has an MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and an undergraduate degree in Exhibition and Spatial Design from the National Institute of India. She worked with Abaxial Architects, New Delhi, India for 8 years before moving to California. She is the founder of Streetlight, a critical spatial research and design laboratory for decolonizing public space. She presently teaches Undergraduate Fine Arts at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.

Image: Plan View, Field and Surge, Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, Oakland.

Ana Maria Farina is a Brazilian artist and educator based in between Brooklyn and New Paltz, NY. She received her masters degree in Art and Art Education from Columbia University in 2016 and has most recently received a full scholarship to attend the MFA program in Painting and Drawing at SUNY New Paltz.

As both an artist and an educator, Ana is interested in experimentation, experiences of release and constraint, expansion and collapse. Her work investigates themes of trauma and comfort in womanhood, as well as the body and identity through the lens of feminist theory and psychoanalysis. Lately, Ana has been exploring the materiality of textiles, creating sculptural, mixed-media and textile paintings as interactive textural translations.

Ana Maria Farina

Image: Você Nunca Pediu Pra Eu Ficar (You Never Asked Me To Stay), 2018. Acrylic and pastel on canvas. 30x40”.

Mrinalini Aggarwal

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Rosemarie Fiore is a painter, sculptor and performance artist. Her studio is located in Bronx, NY. She combines painting, sculpture and performance to produce artwork out of the actions of popular technology and mechanisms. Through her work, she investigates the space that exists between chaos and control.

Fiore has worked on developing and constructing her “Smoke Painting Tools” for almost 20 years. Harnessing and mixing the colored smoke released from fireworks, these tools paint on paper. She used them to create large abstract works on paper for exhibitions, commissions and performances around the world.

She is an artist educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, serves on the Board of the MacDowell Colony and is the President of the MacDowell Fellows Executive Committee. In 2020, she will have a solo exhibition at Penn State University and performance and residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. She is represented by Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles.

Rosemarie Fiore

Image: Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville. Smoke Painting performance. Photo courtesy of Michelle Calloway, Space 42 and MOCA, Jacksonville, Florida

Ane Gonzalez Lara is the co-founder of Idyll Studio and an assistant professor at Pratt Institute with wide-ranging interests in Ibero- and Latin-American contemporary design and urbanism. Her professional work with Idyll balances social and cultural concerns with extensive formal and material research. She has developed academic research initiatives as part of her studio teaching that have examined the United States-Mexican border and the Korean demilitarized zone, and she has hosted conferences on these topics including a roundtable at last years’ Venice Biennale. She received her Master and Bachelor of Architecture degrees from the Escuela Tenica Superior de Arquitectura in Navarra, Spain. Before working at Pratt she taught at the University of New Mexico and the University of Houston.

Ane Gonzalez Lara

Image: Park Heure, Competition with Kathy Kambic and Katya Crawford

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Amanda Huynh is a Canadian product and food designer working at the intersections of community-building, social innovation, and sustainable design. Amanda’s design career has allowed her to work across a variety of sectors in Vancouver, Bali, Shanghai, and London, England.

Amanda earned a Bachelor of Design (Industrial Design) from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and worked as a professional designer for several years before realizing she could combine her love of design and food. This led her to pursue a Master’s in Food Design from Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milan, Italy.

She co-founded Edible Projects in 2015, a creative partnership which aims to bring a new perspective and experience to food, often satisfying senses other than taste. Edible Projects is two trained industrial designers who went on to study food design and pâtisserie, working to create meaningful connections using food as the material.

Amanda Huynh

Left: Prosecco and cherry blossom jelly. Image credit: Amanda Huynh.

Right: Edible Projects Vol 02: Sweet Ritual, a candle and candy pairing. Candies are cast from custom molds to enhance the experience of taste. Image credit: Mandy Chang, Edible Projects.

Visually immersive, his work represents dense amalgams of organic forms, twisting vines and flora; all made meaningful through the evocation of memories, both the mundane and the spectacular. Somewhat fetishistic, the forms are cast in resin often finished with a high-gloss and glitter derived from custom car culture. Motivated by our current social and political conditions the work metaphorically represents our contradictory sense of aspiration, loss and denial. Through metaphorical representations, his work represents visual seduction, desire, denial and loss; all speaking to the beauty of failure.

Born in Portland, Oregon, John Monti received a BS from Portland State University in painting, and later an MFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute. Monti has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally both in museums and galleries and has completed public commissions and set-designs for dance. Monti lives in Brooklyn, NY and is Professor of Graduate Fine Arts at Pratt Institute.

John Monti

Image: Heart Cluster: Magenta, 2018, 19 h x 15.5 w x 8 d inches, Urethane resin, pigment, glitter

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Natalie Moore is an artist working in Brooklyn, NY, whose primary practice is sculpture and installation. Her work is often described at an intersection between drawing and sculpture. She is interested in the transformation of materials and visual perception. Her work often employs traditional craft techniques with new materials and methodologies.

She has been featured on CNN international, and her work has been written about in Sculpture Magazine, The New York Times, New York Post, and New York Newsday. Moore has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally.

She received her Bachelors of Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her Master’s degree from NYU. Moore is currently the Assistant Chairperson of the Foundation program at Pratt Institute, where she has been teaching for many years.

Natalie Moore

Image: Wind #2, 27” x 14” x 14,” hand woven stainless steel wire, hardware cloth, acrylic paint, 2017. Photo Credit Thomas Barratt and Mark Waldhauser

Erica Morawski’s practice is dedicated to explorations in the intersection of design, politics, and identity. Her work traverses the nature of these relationships across different scales, from individual interactions with a designed object to larger national or international frameworks of trade, manufacture, and knowledge systems. She is presently completing a book manuscript that examines design and development policy in Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Cuba from roughly 1900-1950. This project focuses on design related to the tourism industry as a means to analyze Hispanic Caribbean responses to and engagement with the co-constitutive projects of imperialism/ colonialism and modernity.

Erica Morawski is Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Design Department at Pratt Institute. Her research and writing center on the history of design in the Americas, with a particular focus on the Hispanic Caribbean. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Design History, and a number of edited volumes.

Erica Morawski

Image: Havana, Cuba, January 2018. Photo by Erica Morawski.

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Natalia Ivanova Mount is a dynamic cultural organizer and sociologist of art with extensive experience in nonprofit leadership, development and strategic partnerships. She has organized numerous exhibitions and site-specific projects, experimental theatre productions, sound-based performance, film, radio, and public programs and events. In the beginning of her career, Natalia worked at MoMA PS1 and the Clocktower, both located in NYC. Currently, she is the Executive Director of Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS where she is actively engaged in the co-creation of the first art & culture commons model in Oakland. Her essay “Reframing the Value of Art and Fair Labor in the Context of a Sharing Economy” was published by the Journal for Aesthetics & Protest, Shareable.net and Project Kalahati Press (Oakland.) Natalia’s research is centered on the commons, and reframing the value of art and fair labor in the context of a sharing economy. As the Executive Director of Pro Arts, a 45 years-old independent art space in Oakland, she has worked tirelessly over the past four years of tenure with the organization to bring openness, inclusivity, and universal access to art and culture.

Natalia Ivanova Mount

Kate O’ Shea is an Irish artist with a social practice which includes printmaking, arts practice based research, the production of social spaces and publishing. From setting up a social space in the south west of Ireland in 2009 to co-producing SPARE ROOM Art Architecture Activism (www.spareroomproject.ie) with Eve Olney in Cork in 2019, Kate’s collaborative practice is based on building spaces of solidarity and dialogue in order to explore alternatives to the social relations of capitalism.

In 2018 she published the book Durty Words with graphic designer Victoria Brunetta. With 134 contributors from all over the world, this is the first book of their publishing house: Durty Books. Kate has just completed an MA by Research in Printmaking as a space for solidarity and dialogue at Limerick School of Art and Design. Kate is currently working with Dawn Weleski to develop The People’s Kitchen in Cork, Ireland which is being supported by Arts Council Ireland, managed by CREATE. Kate regularly exhibits nationally and internationally. www.kateosheablog.com

Kate O’ Shea

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Swati Piparsania is an artist and designer from India. She has worked as a material designer, product manager and developer. She works primarily with object design and creates absurd props for performances. Recurring themes in her practice include dysfunctional comedy, restrained movements, and narrative studies. She is also a researcher and writer.

Swati Piparsania

Image: Ramp no. 7, Photo by Clare Gatto

Born in Oxford, England, Naomi Safran-Hon grew up in Haifa, Israel. She received her BA Summa Cum Laude from Brandeis University, 2008, in Studio Art and Art History and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2010. Safran-Hon attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2012 and Art Omi residency in 2016.

Safran-Hon’s creative journey works hand in hand with a close examination of the history of painting and its tradition of charged architectural spaces. She uses private spaces and everyday objects in order to address the fragility of human experience and the complex nature of one’s home. Destruction—both intentional, at the hands of the artist, and incidental, as the result of time and desertion—recasts the viewer’s notion of geopolitical conflict, irresolvable nostalgia, and the personal struggle to find one’s place in the world, both physical and psychological. Through her process, Safran-Hon’s pieces challenge the viewer to reconsider preconceptions about materials, the notion of home as a physical locus, and the role of destruction as a negative force.

Naomi Safran-Hon

Image: The Memory of a Shifting Ceiling, 40x60 inches, acrylic, gouache, cement, archival ink jet on canvas, 2019

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Image: Archeology of activism, Gaia Scagnetti and Sha Hwang, 2018. Establishing A Model Of Intimacy And Bodies, A Map Of Current Additive Explorations

‘All of my projects aim to understand how visual languages can play a fundamental role in generating knowledge and be a tool for decision making and strategic planning in multidisciplinary teams; how can we interrogate visual design practices to understand our society and what is the changing role of the designer in this context.’

Dr. Gaia Scagnetti is a program co-coordinator and full-time Associate Professor at the Pratt Institute’s Graduate Communications Design department in New York. In 2009 she obtained a Ph.D. degree cum Meritus in Multimedia Communication at the Politecnico di Milano with a thesis on Visual Epistemology in Information Visualization and Mapping. Her current research projects discuss new pedagogies, strategies, and approaches for Higher education in design.

Gaia Scagnetti

Rhonda is a long time meditator, artist, author and educator teaching visualization, mindfulness and meditation as life and art practices since 1985. She is a certified visualization meditation teacher and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction trained teacher. She is a Visiting Associate Professor; Director of Career & Professional Development, founder of the Meditation Incubator project, and the Mindful Making immersion workshop for Made in NYC. She chairs the Mindfulness Initiatives in Student Affairs Committee. A recent scholar in residence and Fulbright Roster Scholar, she taught creativity and meditation at UNSW, Sydney as their artist in residence. She is the author of Create Your Art Career (2013, Allworth Press), Called or Not, Spirits are Present (2009, Blue Pearl Press), and contributed chapters for The Mindful Eye: Contemplative Pedagogies in Visual Arts Education (2018, Common Wealth Pub) and Starting Your Career in the Fine Arts (2011, Allworth Press). She is the Director of Schaller + Jaquish Art Projects; Founder of Create Meditate and Cofounder of Ceres Gallery, NYC. She was a board member/faculty of the New York Feminist Art Institute. Her works are in the permanent collections of Memorial Art Gallery University of Rochester and Dartmouth University’s Medical School Art of Healing Gallery

Rhonda Schaller

Photo: Rhonda Schaller leading meditation with Esmilda Abreu on Nov 3 2019 Deliver Meditation Incu-bator: Mindful Making immersion workshop at Pratt Institute funding provided by Made in NYC 19

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A home is a promise and a place embedded with some of our most resonant experiences. But at its core lies a paradoxical quicksand, it becomes significant and disquieting when we leave our place of origin.‘As a Latin American woman, born in Buenos Aires during the sixties, I grew up in in a country isolated from the rest of the world for political reasons. The “legacy of fear and silence” in which disappearing acts took place shaped my identity and work. Immigration also confronted me with the notion of the uncanny.

I have embarked on a quest of trying to understand life through the materials, surfaces and objects that constitute our built environment. Through different mediums I intend to question what objects reveal and conceal and how dreams and fears take material form while examining the intricacies and complexity of citizenship.’

Analia Segal is a Guggenheim Fellow, received a Masters Degree in Studio Art from New York University (2001), and a Bachelors Degree in Graphic Design from Universidad de Buenos Aires (1997). She is a professor of Sculpture + Integrated Practices at Pratt Institute, New York, where she has been teaching since 2008.

Analia Segal

Image: Solo exhibition “CONTRA LA PARED” May 20 - September 23, 2018, The Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, Ridgfield CT, Inland II, 2012–18, single-channel, wall projection, sound; 10:00 minutes, Instal-lation with wood architectural molding, wall compound, latex paint.

Jean Shin is recognized for her monumental installations that transform large accumulations of everyday objects into elaborate, labor intensive sculptures and site-specific installations, giving new form to discarded materials. The artist solicits donations from participants within a specific community and locale, creating expressions of identity and belonging. She explains, “I seek to recall an object’s past while suggesting greater connections to our collective memories, desires and failures.” Born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in the United States, and currently living in New York, she received a BFA and MS from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her work has been widely exhibited in over 150 major museums and cultural institutions, including solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

She is tenured Adjunct Professor of Fine Art at Pratt Institute and recipient of Pratt’s 2017 Alumni Achievement Award. Shin serves on the Board of Joan Mitchell Foundation. Her work is currently on view at Storm King Art Center. Next year she will be having a solo exhibition at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco curated by Marc Mayer.

Jean Shin

Image: Allée Gathering, 2019. Recycled maple wood, tree stumps, steel and maple syrup. Dimensions variable Jean Shin: Outlooks exhibition at Storm King Art Center, NY

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Judit Török is a passionate educator, feminist philosopher, researcher of learning, and a global citizen. As the founding Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Pratt Institute and with over 20 years of teaching experience, she supports collaborative faculty communities to critically reflect on, and ultimately inspire change in higher education pedagogy. In that role as a facilitator and a researcher, she strives to create... Meaningful, Embodied, Reflective, Connected, Authentic, and Relevant… learning experiences.

Judit Török

UNCONFERENCEV i s u a l i z i n g a n d R e f r a m i n g

E q u i t a b l e F r a m e w o r k s

Image by Faizal Sugi from Pixabay

Marshall Trammell is the experimental percussionist and critical ethnographer known as Music Research Strategies (MRS). The identity of this arts engagement platform began as a critical ethnographic framework bridging obsessions with strategic, or compositional, improvising strategies, organizational improvisation and psychology, and street-level, social justice, international organizing. MRS navigates the global economy as a touring musician, performing-research and -political education nationally and internationally through a battery of modular, social science-based systems producing several works for fellowships, residencies, festivals, and investigations.

MRS organizational strategy mimics scholarship embedded in indigenous technologies in professional development pedagogy (guild) and simultaneous multi-dimensionality (cognitive embodiment/Dr. Anku) to serve as an interlocutor of new language development of Warrior Ethos amongst Warrior Ecologies from the Pacific Northwest, the San Francisco Bay Area, Mexico City, the Southwest, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic.

Marshall Trammell

Image: Agatha Urbaniak (UK). Courtesy Marshall Trammell

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Dawn Weleski’s art practice administers a political stress test, antagonizing routine cultural behavior by re-purposing underground brawls, revolutionary protests, and political offices as transformative social stages. Recent projects include The Black Draft (with Justin Strong), a live mock sports draft event during which ten Black former Pittsburghers, from all professions, are drafted to return home and City Council Wrestling, a series of public wrestling matches where citizens, pro-am wrestlers, and city council members personified their political passions into wrestling characters. She co-founded and co-directed Conflict Kitchen (with Jon Rubin).

Currently, Weleski is NEH Visiting Assistant Professor of Art & Art History at Colgate University. In collaboration with CNY and Upstate New York residents, she is investigating the aesthetics and dramaturgy of historical and contemporary mutual aid societies, which will culminate in a participatory, public initiative that highlights how mutual aid contributes to belonging and othering and will problematize definitions of resiliency, community, and the rural radical.

Dawn Weleski

Image: Jon Rubin & Dawn Weleski, Conflict Kitchen Cuban, Iranian, Afghan, Venezuelan storefronts, 2010-17

SeoKyeong Lee Yoon was born in a small town in the countryside of South Korea. Her favorite toys were animals and insects. After finishing her PB at San Francisco Art Institute, she moved to Brooklyn and completed her graduate studies at Pratt Institute in 2015. Yoon makes installations, performances, videos and sculptures. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

SeoKyeong Lee Yoon

Image: Dear Lullaby, 2018, photograph - printed on metal sheet, mug cups, t-shirts. A chimera that contains life, death, love and trauma. It composes an environment of fantasy and tragedy and speaks of the vulnerability of the death and the disappointment, confusion and despair in life.

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Gina Zucker

‘I am a writer, mostly of fiction. I’m a part-time adjunct faculty member of Pratt’s Writing Department. I’m a mother and primary caretaker of two young children. Like the experience of motherhood, the practice of writing engenders feelings of torment, joy, and ambivalence in me. I would not give up either thing, though I do sometimes imagine what I would do if forced to choose, or die. This is the kind of story I might write.

‘I write when I can, which is to say, not every day. That’s unlike motherhood, which occurs every waking moment, and in sleep. I fit writing into the chopped-up hours of my weeks; sometimes the work flows; often it feels like the hours--choppy, interrupted. I have great admiration for people who work at full-time paying jobs, write copiously, publish books, and take excellent care of their children, like Toni Morrison did. I feel a kinship with Tillie Olsen, who published little, with long gaps between publications, while raising her children. I’ve been working on my first novel since 2016. It’s maybe half-way done, maybe more than that? I’m hoping to be finished with it soon. The novel is tentatively titled Panzy, after the girl who is adopted by the book’s protagonist, a woman who, in another time, might have been called a witch, and in this time, probably a slut, a cougar, an addict, a dysfunctional survivor of trauma. She is my hero. Her name is Andrea. I chose that name because it reminds me a bit of Medea, one of my inspirations for her character.

‘Before the novel, I wrote (and published) short stories and journalism. My style has been described to me as “experimental.” My writing voice has been characterized as “strange.” My subject matter is considered “dark,” or “disturbing.” I’m not consciously going for these qualities, though I don’t disagree with those descriptors. I write about what interests me: human behavior. It seems I’m particularly interested in relationships between adults and children, which I think of as a proxy for the dynamics of power between those with power and those without it. I find human behavior and its inherent dynamics of power upsetting and interesting. I should say that writing does take place in my sleep sometimes. I get good ideas from my dreams. Recently I dreamt that I’d grown a second face, on the back of my head; it looked just like me, only younger and prettier. I’m making it into a short story.’

Gina Zucker has her MFA in fiction from The New School. Her short fiction, journalism and essays have appeared in magazines and journals such as Tin House, Hobart, 05401, Salt Hill, Eyeshot, Failbetter, Opium, Esme, TueNight, Babble, Self, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, GQ, Rolling Stone, and the New York Post. Her work has been anthologized in collections such as Fantastic Women (Tin House Books), Labor Day (FSG), Altared (Vintage) and Before (Overlook Press). In 2015 the composer Libby Larsen set one of her essays to a libretto, “The Birth Project.” She teaches in the writing program at Pratt Institute, where she has been the recipient of two Mellon Foundation grants. She has been a Vermont Studio Center fellow and a resident of Hemingway House.

EXPANDEDOBJECTS

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Field is an experimental research landscape intervention at the DeKalb public lawns at Pratt Brooklyn Campus. From October 2019, in collaboration with Pratt Operations and Facilities Departments, we will temporarily pause the routine mowing and fertilizing of the public lawn. The resulting growing, decaying and living grass field will host unexpected en-counters amongst people, birds, animals, weeds, grasses, flowers, and bushes, and spawn unique conditions through which natural and constructed systems interact within this urban campus space. Through a series of collective and shared inquiries into the ambigu-ous ecologies present within this manicured grass field, we will subtly alter the perceptual field of this Plaza to create opportunities for diverse, personal, poetic and shared experi-ences of land.

This research is part of a series of ongoing collaborations with the City of Oakland and ProArts Gallery and COMMONS at the historic Frank H. Ogawa Plaza in Downtown Oak-land. The project will engage the plaza’s most abundant resource, its 20,000 sq ft mani-cured grass lawn, as an affective, speculative and experimental site for public gathering. Confronting the Plaza’s heavy modernist urban re-design and place-making schemas, Field is a call to tenderness, subjectivity, mutualism, and expanded ecology within public life.

FieldSupermrin

Grasslands

In a series of six, Grasslands made of artificial grass lay scattered between concrete and wild. These landscape interventions are designed to function as pedestals for people. Rang-ing from one inch height to soft 8 inches they elevate peoples position in open space. Its like designing heels but independent of a shoe. These casual mounds and valleys aim to adapt themselves at most flat or incline grounds. In concrete, they spurts out like green resilience and in wild, they compete for freshness. With this in place, all standing people can achieve the same height.

Funded by Academic Senate Grant, Pratt Institute

Swati Piparsania

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Responding to Supermrin’s Field project, TDICC aims to bring awareness towards oppressive and non-inclussive architectural spaces.

An even number of classical columns placed in the “non-manicured” grass will start to disappear as the grass grows and they start to get decayed by mold. In classical architecture, buildings impose order and rigidity towards landscaped spaces. However, in this project, the landscape will do the opposite to the columns, converting them into soft and non-ordered ruins in the grass.

TDICCAne Gonzalez Lara

An Unmade Shelf

On a shelf, books stand one next to each other with no space between. Complete universes, closed and bound, press against one another. Perhaps it is because their voices speak so softly that they must lean in this close. Perhaps they depend on silence to speak. Perhaps they are silent because they are asleep, resting, and waiting for activation by a reader. Marguerite Duras once said a book is the night. An open book too. But what we are looking at is not a book, is not a night, but a shelf. There is no waiting here.

This shelf is like any other. These texts were compiled casually and by methods that are not useful to reveal. But the invitation is clear. To run your finger across every title, to wear through the pages, to arrange them from tallest to shortest, to read each from cover to cover very closely, to look from the shelf to the window and back again. To add. To remove. To ignore. To envelop yourself in the darkness of night and watch the scenes of a mind unfold.

1. Mongolian cloud houses: how to make a yurt and live comfortably by Dan Frank Kuehn

2. Wind blown cloud by Alec Finlay

3. The oldest living things in the world by Rachel Sussman

4. The World is Round by Gertrude Stein

5. The Garden Squares of Boston by Phoebe S. Goodman

6. Dictionary of collective nouns and group terms ed. Ivan G. Sparkes

7. Snow crystals by W.A. Bentley and W.J. Humphreys

8. Soul of Woman by L’ombroso Ferrero

9. Maps of Consciousness by Ralph Metzner

10. Green: The History of a Color by Michel Pastoureau

11. Gulls: A Guide to Identification by P.J. Grant

12. The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys

13. Reinforced Concrete Detailing by John A. Barker

14. Of Men Only: Brooklyn Museum

15. Letterheads: A Collection from around the World ed. Takenobu Igarashi

Fulla Abdul-Jabbar is a writer and artist. She teaches in the Department of Writing at the Pratt Institute and is Editor and Curator at the Green Lantern Press.

Fulla Abdul-Jabbar

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FIELD INCLUSIVE

PEDAGOGY

Field is a research project investigating new forms for collaborative and cross-pollinating pedagogy. The project was borne out of my interests and questions while teaching an Undergraduate Fine Arts course titled ‘Drawing in the Expanded Field” in Spring 2019. At Pratt Institute this course was created many years ago by artist and professor, Martine Kaczynski. The title was inspired by Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, published in 1979, that presented new frameworks that mapped relation-ships between sculpture, architecture and landscape.

The logical expansions offered through Krauss’s deconstructivist approach (transforming a binary set into a quaternary field) created space for a variety of intersectional, fringe, and emergent forms to find situation within and in relation to disciplinary knowledge. In the context of pedagogy, this expanded field also necessitates a questioning of process and methodology - complicating, expanding, intersecting and reconsidering some of the ways in which we define classroom experiences. The weeklong series at the DeKalb Gallery offers such situation - it is a messy mixture of site, context, content, interaction, collaboration. The site offers altered relationships with landscape and ground plane. Col-laborations between workshop facilitators, many of whom teach within different depart-ments at Pratt, offer opportunities for discourse, friendship, and shared vision. Interdisci-plinary learning and shared spaces may lead to new ideas for projects and practices.

As an exploratory action-research, Field has been an imperfect and instinctive site-in-process. Through the study of the context that we have created here, I hope to find alternative frameworks for shared knowledge that complement classroom learning. As a visitor, participant, student, professor, or facilitator within this space, I welcome you to collaborate with me in this seeking.

You can do this in several ways. Please share post-session reflections, notes, and photo-graphs of process with me via email or via instagram #dekalbgallery. Please include a cap-tion if you would like to be credited. You are also welcome to hang your work in the space to share with future participants. If you do not wish to participate, be photographed, or share in any other way, please let your facilitator know and we will edit you out of any-thing that will be made public. We will have note-takers in many of our sessions, we will be taking photographs occasionally. The finished research will be presented at the Pratt Research Open House in March 2020 and may be presented in public, or published as an article.

If you have any questions, or want to connect, contact me, Mrinalini Aggarwal, [email protected].

I hope you enjoy the week!

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Field / Site -in-Process is organized by Mrinalini Aggarwal, AICAD Post Graduate Teaching Fellow in Fine Arts as part of a yearlong research in inclusive pedagogy for Expanded Field practices.

The event is co-hosted by Ane Gonzalez Lara, Assistant Professor, Undergraduate Architecture, and Swati Piparsania, AICAD Post Graduate Teaching Fellow in Design.

Field is co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the Fine Arts department, the Creative Writing department, and the Center for Teaching and Learning, Pratt Institute.

Additional support has been provided by Pratt Facilities and Operations, and the Pratt Brooklyn Library. Special thanks to Lisa Banke-Humann, SeoKyeong Lee Yoon, Kalinka Rogashka, the Inclusive Pedagogy Faculty Learning Community, and the many other faculty, students, and staff members who have contributed their time to make this collaborative series possible.

field - pratt institute

Documents