NOMADIC STUDIO

NOMADIC STUDIO

PORTABLE

Portable Nomadic StudioBrian McNally, Faiz Razi, and Beth Wiedner

July 8 - November 20 2010DePaul Art Museum

Curated by Stockyard Institute

Curator’s Note:

In your hands is the intro to our catalog for our exhibit, Nomadic Studio. You will find a collection of the art and an overview of the events and workshops that took place, which represents over a year’s worth of work and collabora-tion. We were thrilled to be invited to curate an exhibit at the DePaul Art Museum. As educators, we took a different approach to this art gallery.

Nomadic Studio served as one possible model for how an experimental school could function. Our four and one half month exhibition reflects provisional stu-dio spaces and the way artists work. The vision was to create an environment that not only had beautiful art on the gallery walls, but was also a welcoming place to sit, have a conversation, create, teach and learn. We did this by build-ing several types of functioning studios within the space. We also changed the gallery art thematically every month to alter the context for conversation. Nomadic Studio included a convertible stage, a home recording lounge, a radio broadcast booth, an artist workspace, a community garden and a digital pro-duction office.

Each month, we hosted a variety of events including music performances, work-shops, discussions, panels, artist features and other incidental acts of creativity. Month-to-month as the gallery changed, so did the way we used the space. July focused on the home recording studio; August featured birds and flight; September dealt with DIY art practice; October was for Teaching Artists, and November was for curriculum documentation and development.

In addition, we saw Nomadic Studio as a perfect opportunity to seed our cur-riculum project, SITE. We documented every last thing that took place in the space with the hopes that people could learn from it as much as we did. From instrument making, science, screen-printing, mural painting, interior design, conceptual art, bookmaking, food, rehearsal, recording, broadcasting, graphic design, model building, and more, our colleagues and collaborators were the perfect talent to teach us. The documentation came in the form of audio, video, design, photographs, and text. Our goal now is to compile, edit and design this content into a curriculum for artists, teachers, and thinkers that will be useful long after we have left the space.

Consider Nomadic Studio as our proposal for a model of an experimental edu-cational institution.

Thanks.

Jim Duignan, Faiz Razi and Beth Wiedner

Director’s Note:

The Stockyard Institute, a remarkable Chicago organization, invites analogies to productive spaces: a greenhouse, an incubator, an open kitchen, a hotbed of ideas. It might sustain comparison to a think tank, although not of the rarefied, scholars-in-isolation variety: its thought and action take place in the streets, parks, and schools of Back of the Yards and other Chicago neighbor-hoods. A collective of artists, teachers, and community activists runs innova-tive community-designed programs that use visual means to address issues of urban life, from gang violence to land use, and in so doing they build the kind of social and political networks that can effect change. Nomadic Studio, organized by Stockyard Institute, addresses and supports artists whose spaces of creation are provisional, simultaneously providing workspace and demon-strating that it is not always necessary.

The presence of Stockyard Institute ideas and programs inside the museum’s walls is perhaps destabilizing, even subversive. Most museum exhibitions fetishize objects, treating them with exquisite care, displaying them with rev-erence, celebrating them even above the humans who made and used them. Nomadic Studio is fluid and provisional; it is primarily about collaboration and only marginally about objects. It integrates music and performance into museum spaces. Its substance will look different every day and its trajectory will depend on the ideas of visitors as well as those of the organizers. It has the potential to make a difference in educational practice, in political organi-zation, and in individual lives.

Louise Lincoln DePaul Art Museum

Nomadic Studio is part of Studio Chicago, a yearlong collaborative project that focuses on the artist’s studio. Through exhibitions, talks, publications, tours, and research, participating organizations will celebrate the working artist and reveal their sites of creative production from historical and contemporary perspectives.

Dean Paul ZiontsLouise LincolnLaura Fatemi Greg HarrisDominic FortunatoDrea JonesLeah ______Melissa______James_______Sophia KhaleelJoe MillerRon ChennaultRoxanne Owens Stephanie ParrilloSally JulianKelsey MoherW. Keith BrownDavion MathewsBrian McNallyGwen Ihnat Marshall Preheim and Pat Kenneally of A\V AerieUnion Rock YardsElectrical Audio Forum Brendan HudsonMary Jane JacobsStudio ChicagoCarey Lovett and Distribution Services @ DePaulGeorge IhnatMichael PiazzaSusan HallJay RyanTom StackDiana SudykaNikki Jarecki and the Starling ArtistsCeleste DuignanKatrin SchnablErik StenbergWatie WhiteSimon PerutzAlbert StablerChristophe RobertsKevin CyrAnastasia MitasEric UtechAndrewandAndreaBrandon AlvendiaKelli Becker and The Arts of Life artistsConNatural artistsZebediah ArringtonLavie RavenKatMonica WaltersAdam Tinkham

Thank

YouIan Bennett and Renee Van De Kolk of Anode Gallery

the Paint Wars ArtistsDayton CastlemanJeff Zimmermann

Mike SlatteryEd Marszewski

Rob FunderburkGretchen Kalwinski

Mary MattinglySteve Albini

Bric-a-Brac (Mike Armstrong, John Connors, Matt Cook, Jason Monroe)onono (Caroline Nutley, John Goodwin, Orion Layton, Ellen Luepke)

Jim MacGregor of Small AwesomeAlex MaioloBob Farster

Greg NormanMark Greenberg

Knox RevitteJoanna Lakatos

Zikr (Joseph George, Reid Garrison, Bill Connors, Mike Frigo, Matt Shaw, Jimmy Steyskal)Baby Teeth (Abraham Levitan, Jim Cooper, Peter Andreadis)

Tim KinsellaWillis P. Jenkins

Bottomless Pit (Tim Midgett, Andy Cohen, Chris Manfrin, Brian Orchard)the Bismarck (Chris Jury, Dan Mohr, Nate Marshall, Eric Fundingsland)

Bear Claw (Scott Picco, Rich Fessler, Rob Raspolich)Mark Oster

José RosellóLiena Vayzman

Thea Liberty NicholsPatrice Connolly

Claudine IseAbraham Ritchie

Bert Stabler Jessica Taylor Caponigro

Angee Lennard of Spudnik PressTom Lucas

Wrik RepaskyCJ Mace

EEC ConferenceJerome Hausman

Nick HostertRum46

Chris SantiagoErik Wenzel

Chris ChappellSixty Inches from Center

Support provided by:School of EducationDePaul Art Museum

Chicago Arts Assistance ProgramPNC Bank

Purcell FamilyFreedman Seating

Stockyard Institute

The Rumpus Room was a replica of a basement on the Northwest side of Chicago that is used as a rehearsal space, a composing studio, a venue, a print-making, woodworking and technology workshop, a collaborative art project, classroom and gallery, and most importantly, a fully-functioning recording stu-dio that packs away in under two hours, turning the space into a social club.

Rumpus Room

The Studios:We considered the studios as art. From interior design, to furniture selection, to hand crafted elements, and at-tention to function, these studio installs were vital to the intent and spirit of the exhibition.

The atmosphere of the Original Rumpus Room has always inspired creativity, and the room at the museum was designed to do the same. This studio installa-tion was built by Brian McNally, Faiz Razi, and Beth Wiedner. Tiki Bar was built by George Ihnat in 1963.

SITE Office

SITE Office at Nomadic StudioWHO: SI

WHAT: Stockyard publication office (SITE) will include a work/pingpong table, a computer station, a projector, print electronics, including an all-in-one printer, inkjet printer, and xerox machine. comfortbale chair, a projector, and different art/office pieces created by SI.

WHEN: July 8-November 20, open to the public.

WHERE: Backroom

WHY: The classroom, or office should be considered aesthetically We would like to document all programs, discussions, performances, and turn them into some-thing useful. We want to lay the foundation for sitesite.org that we are look-ing to launch in November.

HOW: Every week, we will document, compile, organize, edit, and design the programs given. We will archive all learning documents and they will go into sitesite.org as a downloadable pdf.

It will work as a public text kitchen for how SITE will actually function. It will offer us an opportunity to talk with the community about some of the things we are working out. It will be a transparent way of building an community.

SITE OFFICE

SITE Office

DePaul Art Museum

SITE

45

The SITE Office was a physical manifestation of Stockyard Institute Teaching Ex-periments or SITE. SITE is a multi-media publication initiative that seeks to locate and combine transdisciplinary fields of knowledge in hopes of reconstituting and reimagining educational resources through the lived experiences of teachers. Productions of interest include, but are not limited to, visual art and education curriculum mapping, lesson / unit plans, scholastic research documents, educator experiences and radical experimentation. SITE reviews, revises, and accepts writ-ing, lessons, and curriculum from educators who think creatively. SITE also houses a wall dispenser that is a collection of zines on a broad range of artist profiles, col-laborative projects, community interventions, creative experiments and an ongo-ing catalog of all the individuals and groups working in and through the Nomadic Studio. Jim Duignan, Beth Wiedner and Faiz Razi designed this studio installation and project.

Workroom

Workroom was a place to sit down and make sketches and notes for the handful of projects we solicited from artists. It was also a space to gather for some of our small workshops and a public access arts studio for those who wished to organize ideas of their own. It was equipped with a variety of materials, art supplies and contemporary and historical references. This studio installation was designed by Jim Duignan.

Community Garden CanoeTeacher and artist Eric Utech passed away in 2009 at age 40, to the sadness of his many young students whom he inspired through his creative capacity for viewing the world. Eric and his students began building a wooden canoe in his classroom to learn about Native Americans. It went unfinished. That canoe has been transformed by the Stockyard Institute as a memorial gar-den to Eric and his students as a provisional vessel of living plants offered up by all who choose to contribute. This was organized by Jim Duignan and Anastasia Mitas. In addition to construction, Eric Utech and his students drew the designs and Nikki Jarecki and Kelsey Moher painted the boat.

Black Public RadioInside the Nomadic Studio was a working low-watt radio station equipped to broadcast locally, Podcast and stream online. BPR was a new radio station for Nomadic Studio and identical to the many other radio stations Stockyard Institute has built and furnished for alternative schools, community centers and public projects throughout Chicago. All were welcome to listen in, broadcast, share content and come in to learn how to build their own radio station. Brandon Hud-son spray-painted the large boom box on the back wall of the room. Black Public Radio was designed and built by Jim Duignan, with Davion Matthews, Joe Miller and Faiz Razi.

Convertible Stage

A\V Aerie

Throughout the exhibition, the convertible stage in the main gallery transformed several times to represent different venues in Chicago that have closed. A\V Aerie, the loft space in Fulton Market’s warehouse district and the underground club, Union Rock Yards in Humboldt park were paid homage through both the recreation of the venues as well as through encore performances of the bands who played the nights the venues closed.

The artists involved in these venues are still active creative forces to this day, and were given an opportunity to become nomadic and move their spaces within our walls. The stage was designed by Faiz Razi with Marshall Preheim and Pat Kenneally of A\V Aerie and Rich Fessler and Mark Oster of Union Rock Yards. Jose Rosello aided in the construction of the Union Rock Yards stage.

Convertible Stage

Union Rock Yards

In Search of Reasonable Encounters: A brief history of the Stockyard Institute(excerpt)

At our beginning (1995), the Stockyard Institute gravitated towards local activ-ists and community artists in the Back of the Yards. The educational philoso-phy of John Dewey and liberatory pedagogy of Brazilian educator Paulo Friere provided a ground to conceptualize manageable pathways with distressed youth. Jane Adams’ Hull House was a grand vision that clearly outlined how the social settlement could connect community needs with resource provid-ers, and consider a condition where the exchange of services, goods and skills could generate good will and push positive and reasonable expectations within a community about the fundamental principles of schooling. There was hope that we could inhabit a space where people from the Back of the Yards neighborhood came into our open community building and found available tools, in-kind support and seasoned guidance to make things they needed—a place of collective generosity that reframed past ideas about community building, social responsibility and the essence of being educated.

The Nomadic Studio builds on one aspect of our practice by stopping every few years to gather our thoughts in a large space, (re)connect with groups and individuals, invite local and international artists, area musicians and perform-ers, university students and youth producers to have conversations around the many curricular prototypes we have been designing for learning spaces. Chicago has been a seedbed for socially engaged work whose efforts within everyday space echo cooperative networks of knowledge. Like other groups that blend artistic and political activity, the Stockyard Institute works to build better examples of social institutions, resisting the faults and often intangible demands we have come to expect from the less trustworthy institutions that undermine the forward progress of young people who we recognize as our primary beneficiary.

Nomadic Studio continues an interrogation around the design of provisional educational materials, access and distribution of cultural content, collabora-tive publishing and radio pedagogy. The experience of working in the DePaul Art Museum each day as a center has provided a transparency to our work in cataloging both broad and detailed ideas of learning from the many informal exchanges, programs, roundtables, apparatus and work from a large group of participants who used the museum as a studio. The Stockyard Institute repurposed the museum as a transitory yet open space and an additional site for those artists, performers, speakers and producers who regard their public harbors, alleys, apartments and basements, viaducts or abandoned buildings, city parks as critical and creative structures that align with a nomadic sense of purposeful engagement.

Jim Duignan

Notes: