To the members of the SF Arts Collective:
The program begins in just under a week - on Monday July 6th. This email is a run down of the program’s curriculum and design as it stands now. Keep in mind this program is organic in nature and will grow as a result of our presence in a shared space. We have selected the first round of texts for the first week and will select the texts for the second week as we develop our understanding of the themes that most concern us at this time and the evolution of the art we are creating.
Texts:
Week One - using “canonical” texts to explore Autodiegesis - writing about oneself.
Select poems by Emily Dickinson
Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (selections)
Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground” (selections)
Prologue to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew in the preface of “The Fire Next Time”
Approach to the texts:
Exploring the self from the inside out
Exploring the self from the outside in
Exploring your belief system through writing
Being misunderstood accidentally
Being misunderstood intentionally
What we reveal/what we conceal
Writing:
We look at each text as a form of personal statement and as a model for our own writing. Following these various models, we work on writing personal statements that both feed our art making and help define it.
Daily schedule:
Officially the program will run 9 - 4 Monday to Friday. That said, we are free to keep working at Workshop Residence as late as 6:00pm and on the weekends as well. There is an opportunity to work offsite at Batle Studio for people who will need to use tools to manufacture their work.
Important dates:
Open house/ final exhibit of works-in-progress and finished work on Thursday July 16th 4pm - 6pm.
Friday July 11th from 2:00 - 4:00 and July 17th from 12:00 - 4:00 we’ll work in service of Workshop Residence giving back to the space and community that has generously given us their space for this two week laboratory and seminar. Projects include painting, building, organizing and moving art works and displays.
Things to think about between now and then:
We suggest everyone start to think about a project or projects that they would like to work on during these two weeks. We imagine that there will be individual and collaborative pieces and we want everyone involved making art. We plan to break down the notion of the one way relationship of the teacher to the student the master to the apprentice the mentor to the pupil. Anyone who has taught knows this is falsely characterized. In practice, we would like to see us working as collaborators across generations and across experience (established vs emerging vs student artists) in two-way dialog and creation.
