Modernist Crafting: Crossing the Material-Digital Divide | MSA/BAMS Collaboration | Kick off and Wrap up: Oct 2 & 21 , 10 am - 12pm EST / 3 - 5pm BST | Two drop in craft in community sessions in weeks of Oct 5 and 12 TBD | Facilitators: Diana Proenza (U of Maryland, MSA), Jade French (U of Loughborough & Decorating Dissonance, BAMS), and Molly Volanth Hall (RISD, MSA)
Inspired by modernist makers and waste-pickers like Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Kurt Schwitters, and Virginia Woolf, this series of workshops, with asynchronous activities to be completed in between opening and closing sessions, brings together attendees to explore process, reflexivity, and slow attention, attuning our thinking, teaching, and writing about modernism with our personal and professional practice as makers and mediators of knowledge. Participants will be invited to explore how contemporary practices and pedagogies anchored in the geopolitics and aesthetics of waste and reuse extend the modernist impulse to remediate, reuse, and recycle, or make new, from reparative design to visible mending, or the Latin American labor/environmental justice movement of binding books from recycled cardboard (cartonera publishing).
We suggest that sitting with such practices is one way of recovering an ethic of sustainability at the heart of modernist aesthetics and histories, though not always expressed in directly environmental terms. As we invite participants to redirect attention from product to process, we also ask colleagues to consider this part of a turn towards rest as resistance, rethinking the sites from which knowledge emerges, and perhaps discovering some that are new to us.
The workshop series will take place over four sessions. Participants are welcome to join one, all, or a handful of sessions.
In an opening session on October 2 (10am - 12pm EST / 3 - 5pm BST) we will discuss our process–whether that be pedagogic, scholarly, or creative (such as these can be separated): how do your classroom practices form and revise across semesters? What is your writing and research process? How do you go about making? Participants should come prepared to discuss their process. After an opening discussion of the plans and intentions we have for the workshop series, we will share and reflect on our own processes together, as modernist makers.
In the second half of the first session, we will lead a book making workshop. This portion is designed to help you create a space devoted to your workshop labors. This can be a process journal, or a commonplace book; a sketchbook or a notebook. Please come prepared with materials at hand, much of which can be gathered around the home:
1) cardboard, wood, or paperboard for covers,
2) thread, string, or yarn for binding,
3) a needle large enough to thread your binding material through,
4) glue or double sided tape,
5) larger sheet of cloth or paper cover book,
6) at least 8 sheets of paper, folded in half,
7) scissors or knife
[For later sessions you will want some sort of writing/drawing/painting/collaging materials].
Book creation is optional. You are welcome to bring something pre-made, or use loose paper.
During the two drop in sessions in mid-October (dates TBD), you will come and craft in community with your fellow modernist makers. Work quietly. Ask questions. Share progress. However you find the space useful. But, the primary aim will be to use this time to work on your crafting, in your book or other media.
We encourage you to find time to work on these between sessions if you can. We also encourage participants to post pictures and other process notes to the shared padlet we will be using to document our collective work. (PADLET LINK TBA)
The final session will be held October 21st 10am - 12pm ET/3 - 5 pm BST. There, we will reflect on and view the work we have done, and have a final discussion reflecting on process and practice.
For information about previous and upcoming workshops, see here.