(Re)Making Modernism Workshops

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 - This series of workshops is inspired by modernist makers and waste-pickers like Mina Loy and Richard Bruce Nugent, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Kurt Schwitters, and Virginia Woolf, and explores 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). Across four sessions (come to one or all), we invite 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. We open by discussing our process and completing a bookmaking workshop, followed by two drop in sessions to fill your books, and closing with a session to share and reflect together on process and practice. See here for more information and what materials to gather in advance: https://sites.google.com/risd.edu/modernism-and-environment/crossing-the-material-digital-divide. 

Tallahassee, Florida, US, December 2 - 5, 2027 | Details Forthcoming

Participants are invited to join a collective making experiment in modernist material praxis, collaboratively reworking found objects and materials into new, strange forms to reflect on the role of sustainability in modernist scholarship and pedagogy. We invite participants to scour their surroundings before or during the conference to collect trash, keep train tickets, repurpose notes, gather odds and ends, and bring everyday objects to the session to use as art materials. The session invites participants to explore the reflective and embodied practices of modernism’s multimedia forms through an act of cultural re-making. Furthermore, we invite participants to explore the connection of modernist found objects, collage, assemblages and readymades with contemporary practices and pedagogies also anchored in the uncanny aesthetics of waste and reuse.Our workshop emphasizes the ways modernist waste-picking and (re)making recovered the eccentric, magical, and weird art, environments, and communities often discarded to the margins of canonical modernism. Following the hands-on portion of the workshop, the co-facilitators will lead a discussion reflecting on how the principles of slowness, fluidity, and plurality inherent to the models of modernist handiwork and craft (see: Elkins, 2022) and media production (small presses, little magazines, pamphlets, etc.) offer reuse and recycling as a weird intervention that lets us encounter the everyday in new ways. 

Attendees participated in a collective book arts experiment in modernist material praxis, collaboratively producing collaged pages which were then bound into a book that stands as a manifesto of sustainability in modernist scholarship and pedagogy. Beginning with an introduction to modernism, sustainability, and craft, Diana Proenza and Jade French invited participants to connect modernist found materials, collage, and readymade poetry with contemporary practices and pedagogies also anchored in the geopolitics and aesthetics of waste and reuse, like reparative design, visible mending, or the Latin American labor/environmental justice movement of binding books from recycled cardboard (cartonera publishing). Following the hands-on portion of the workshop, the co-facilitators led a discussion reflecting on how the workshop centered principles of sustainability, accessibility, collaboration, and reuse within, as a legacy of, and beyond modernist making.