ARTSCHOOL 2020

ArtSchool 2020 was our pilot ArtSchool project, launched following the temporary closure of Central Saint Martins during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the premises of Afterall’s One Work series, this project thinks through the generative potential of works of art themselves for stimulating critical, transformative thinking on these subjects. In collaboration with Central Saint Martins and Museu de Arte de São Paulo, ArtSchool 2020 explored works of art that engage with vital questions around teaching and learning, from a diverse but interconnected network of histories and geographies. Explore published writings and recorded video discussions that ask what we can learn from art at a time when crises of distance and shifts in technology demand that we rethink our pedagogies.

Essays

Events

on Adelita Husni-Bey

Researcher and curator Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga in conversation with Afterall Managing Editor Adeena Mey on the school as a site of transgression, emotion and radical imagination in Adelita Husni-Bey’s experimental project Postcards From the Desert Island (2010–11).

 

on Mike Kelley

Artist, critic and Barnard College Professor John Miller discusses the art school in neoliberal crisis and the role of art and the artist in the present, in light of Mike Kelley’s 1995 work of institutional critique, Educational Complex. In conversation Alex Schady, artist and Programme Director for Art at Central Saint Martins.

[Description: Photo of Dr. Yuriko Jackall.]
on Adélaide Labille-Guiard

Yuriko Jackall, Curator of French Paintings at the Wallace Collection, in conversation with artist and CSM Professor of Research Mick Finch on feminism and friendship in Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self Portrait With Two Pupils (1785).

[Description: Photo of Chris Fite-Wassilak.]
on Johanna Billing

Writer and critic Chris Fite-Wassilak in conversation with artist, filmmaker and CSM professor Graham Ellard on identity and the production of space in Johanna Billing’s 2019 video and performance piece In Purple.

[Description: Elizabeth Catlett (left), and Sylwia Serafinowicz (right).]
on Elizabeth Catlett

A conversation and Q&A with writer and curator Sylwia Serafinowicz on Elizabeth Catlett‘s 1978 work Students Aspire, made for the campus of Howard University. Serafinowicz will discuss the work and her short essay on its themes co-facilitators Alison Green, art historian, critic, curator and CSM Senior Lecturer, and creative and curator Vanessa Spiridellis, whose research covers Pan-African religions, pirate history and intersectional feminist theory.

References

Radical Pedagogies: Case Studiesarrow
Beatriz Colomina et al., Princeton University School of Architecture
Bauhaus Imaginistaarrow
Bauhaus Kooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar; Goethe-Institut; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
Capoeiraarrow
Maria Auxiliadora da Silva