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  1. Kafka's Animal Stories
    Seminar with Anelise Chen 
    Dates: Thursdays, October 3-17
    Time: 7-9pm 
    Capacity: 15 participants
    Cost: $90-$180 (sliding scale, $30-50/session)
    Register here

    One morning, some years ago, the instructor of this course awoke to find herself transformed into a clam. This event triggered an extended survey into all varieties of animal tales as she sought understand what happened to her. Why had others before her assumed animal forms? What precipitated their enchantment or disenchantment? Was there some hidden poetic logic at play? 

    It seems any exploration into metamorphosis must begin with Franz Kafka and his canonical story—“Metamorphosis”—about a man who turns into a cockroach. However, Kafka also wrote several other stories featuring non-human narrators, including “A Report to the Academy,” narrated by a cultivated monkey exhausted by the arbitrary cruelty of human society, to “The Burrow” about a fearful, paranoid animal enclosed in his own elaborate tunnels of reason. Over the course of three weeks, we will read and discuss five of these stories and look at the various cultural works these animal stories have since inspired. 

    As Donna Haraway has said: We polish an animal mirror to look at ourselves. This course offers a postscript: We become animal to become ourselves. What can we learn from becoming our animal kin? Moments of metamorphosis are risky and often violent, but in the aftermath, wondrous new shapes emerge. Perhaps at the conclusion of this course, we can begin to imagine our way into new paradigms, new bodies, and new ways of being, more fitting for the challenging times ahead. 

    - Instructor -

    Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press, 2017), a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is currently at work on a memoir, Clam Down (One World Random House), based on her mollusk column for the Paris Review. Chen’s essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, such as the NY Times, New Republic, Village Voice, and BOMB Magazine. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Blue Mountain Center, Banff Centre, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and she is currently a 2019-2020 Literature Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Columbia University. 


    Image: Robert Crumb, Kafka, The Metamorphosis

  2. Caribbean Poetry in Translation 
    Workshop led by Raquel Salas Rivera
    Saturday, September 28, 2-5pm 
    Capacity: 15 participants
    Cost: $50-90 total (sliding scale)
    Register here.

    This class will focus on Caribbean poetry and translation practices. Participants will engage in a variety of linguistic and extralinguistic translations. All will be asked to examine how translation mediates colonial relations. We will be working with texts by Kaiama Glover, Frankétienne, Urayoán Noel, Carina del Valle Schorske, Gaddiel Francisco Ruiz Rivera, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Nicole Delgado, Mara Pastor, Aaron Coleman, and others.

    Raquel Salas Rivera is the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. They are the inaugural recipient of the Ambroggio Prize, for their book x/ex/exis, and the Laureate Fellowship, both from the Academy of American Poets. They have received fellowships and residencies from the Sundance Institute, the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts, the Arizona Poetry Center, and CantoMundo. From 2016-2018, they edited The Wanderer and Puerto Rico en mi corazón, a collection of bilingual broadsides of contemporary Puerto Rican poets. They are also the author of six chapbooks and five full-length poetry books. Their fourth book, lo terciario/the tertiary, was on the 2018 National Book Award Longlist, was selected by RemezclaEntropy, Literary HubmitúBook Riot, and Publishers Weekly as one of the best poetry books of 2018, and is a Finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. Their fifth book, while they sleep (under the bed is another country), was published by Birds, LLC in 2019. They received their Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Raquel loves and lives for Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, and a world free of white supremacy.

    //

    Esta clase estará dedicada a la poesía caribeña y a prácticas de traducción. Los participantes se verán involucrados en una variedad de traducciones lingüísticas y extralingüísticas. Se pedirá a todos que examinen cómo el acto de traducir media relaciones coloniales. Trabajaremos con textos de Kaiama Glover, Frankétienne, Urayoán Noel, Carina del Valle Schorske, Gaddiel Francisco Ruiz Rivera, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Nicole Delgado, Mara Pastor, Aaron Coleman y otros.

    Raquel Salas Rivera es la Poeta Laureada de la ciudad de Filadelfia del 2018-19. Fue la recipiente inaugural del Premio Ambroggio, por su libro x/ex/exis y la Beca de Laureada, ambos de la Academia de Poetas Americanos. Es la recipiente de becas del Instituto Sundance, el Centro Kimmel para las Artes Performáticas, el Centro de Poesía de Arizona y CantoMundo. Del 2016-2018 sirvió de editora para la revista literaria The Wanderer y Puerto Rico en mi corazón, una colección bilingüe de volantes de poetas puertorriqueños contemporáneos. Cuenta con la publicación de seis plaquetas y cinco poemarios. Su cuarto libro, lo terciario/the tertiary, fue finalista para el Premio Nacional del Libro del 2018, fue seleccionado por RemezclaEntropyLiterary HubmitúBook Riot y Publishers Weekly como uno de los mejores poemarios del 2018 y es finalista para el Premio Literario Lambda a una obra de poesía transgénero del 2019. Su quinto poemario, while they sleep (under the bed is another country), fue publicado por por Birds, LLC en el 2019. Recibió su Doctorado en Literatura Comparada y Teoría Literaria de la Universidad de Pensilvania. Raquel ama y vive por Puerto Rico, Filadelfia y un mundo libre de la supremacía blanca.

    Photo credit: Paloma Alicea

  3. Composition and Compresence: A Workshop for a We
    Led by Jaime Shearn Coan
    Date: Saturday, September 14
    Time: 2-4:30pm 

    Capacity: 15 participants
    Cost: $50-90 (sliding scale)
    Register here.

    "We can never simply be the ‘we’ understood as a unique subject, or understood as an indistinct ‘we’ that is like a diffuse generality. 'We’ always expresses a plurality, expresses ‘our’ being divided and entangled." (Jean-Luc Nancy)

    In this workshop, we will try on various practices that mobilize language as a vector for knowing and unknowing each other. How does language travel from body to body? How does language affect, alter, create, validate a body? We will move between being spectators and performers to being translators and interpreters and editors to being an entangled mass of awkward angles and odd syntactical twists. We will attempt to invite in pleasure, erotics, confusion, and frustration. In passing language and interpretation between us, we will visibilize and challenge what often happens without our consent as we are read in the streets, on stages and on pages. We will co-create without attempting to produce a unitary voice or narrative. No experience in writing or performing necessary, only a willingness to experiment and contribute to this temporary collective structure.

    Jaime Shearn Coan is a writer, editor, and PhD Candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is completing a dissertation titled "Metamorphosis Theater: Performance at the Intersection of HIV/AIDS, Race, and Sexuality." A current 2019-2020 CUNY/Schomburg Center Archival Dissertation Year Fellow, Jaime previously served as a Mellon Public Humanities Fellow at The Center for the Humanities, CUNY and has taught literature, composition, and creative writing at City College, Hunter College, and Queens College, CUNY. Jaime’s writing has appeared in publications including TDR: The Drama Review, Critical CorrespondenceDrain Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket2Movement Research Performance JournalGulf CoastOn CuratingWomen & Performance, and Bodies of Evidence: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Movement. Jaime is a co-editor of the Danspace Project 2016 Platform catalogue: Lost and Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now and author of the chapbook Turn it Over, published by Argos Books.

    Image: Tuesday Smillie, Sometimes, 2016. Textile, 49 x 108 inches. Courtesy of the Artist.

  4. Writing for a Performance Persona
    Workshop with Jibz Cameron
    Sunday, June 9, 1-4pm
    Capacity: 15 participants
    Cost: $50-90 (sliding scale)
    Register here.

    During the Writing for a Performance Persona workshop we will dive into exercises designed to help you access deep crevasses of your personal experiences to spark performance persona ingredients. Learn some new ways of accessing material within yourself. Leap over or crawl under creative blocks to your inner goldmine. Writers, performers, dancers, drag showgirls, thinkers, visual artists all welcome! This is a fun based workshop.

    Here are some of the activity titles (without explanations!)
    • Why don't you tell me who I am
    • Ultimate fighting machine
    • Personal ad for dad

    Jibz Cameron is a performance/video artist and actor living in Los Angeles. Her work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has been presented at such institutions as MOCALA, PS1, Joe's Pub, The Kitchen, REDCAT, The Broad Museum, Hammer Museum, New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, among other institutions great and small. She has been heralded by the New York Times as "the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years" and "outrageously smart, grotesque and innovative" by The New Yorker. She has written and produced 7 evening length performance pieces and countless short works. She has produced numerous award winning video pieces and 2 albums of original music. In addition to her work as Dynasty Handbag she has been seen acting in films, theater and television (internet web series no one has seen). She also works as a professor of performance and comedy related subjects, formerly at Cal-Arts and NYU, as well as lecturing at institutions such as Cornell University, Wesleyan University, Yale, among others. Cameron also produces and hosts Weirdo Night, a monthly alternative performance and comedy event in Los Angeles.

    Photo by Charlie Gross

  5. a fervent accumulation: returning to the unwritten and the unsaid
    Seminar led by Asiya Wadud
    Saturday, June 15, 2-5pm 
    Capacity: 15 participants
    Cost: $25-50 (sliding scale)
    Register here

    Verso 0.1
    “Strophe, turning from one side to the other of the orchestra, the act of turning”
    - Dionne Brand

    Of The Blue Clerk, Dionne Brand notes “The things one has left unwritten or unsaid [in earlier work] would lead to a set of confrontations that would expose all the compromises, self-corrections, self-censorships, and sometimes nefarious and cowardly reasons for leaving the things unwritten and unsaid. So that’s a difficult process: to revisit the decisions of language, to revisit and critique the choices made even if those choices seemed, at the time, perfectly legitimate.”

    This seminar uses The Blue Clerk as a point of departure to delve into our own personal inventories, the ones that “expose all the compromises”—the inventories that have accumulated for long spells but perhaps were never even written. What are your left-hand pages—the pages you avoid, rescind, or altogether abandon? What nascent knowledge exists there? What would it mean to etch these pages into some kind of existence? What does it mean to turn and return to an idea and what accumulates in the act of turning?

    In addition to reading excerpts from The Blue Clerk, we will explore short selections from John Keene’s Annotations and Inger Christensen’s Alphabet as examples of possible ways to inscribe left-hand pages.

    This seminar is open to all, with the only requirement being a commitment to exploring the unwritten and the unsaid in your own work and the desire to begin to say it. Through a series of prompts and short exercises, participants will accumulate their own left-hand pages, or revisit previously written ones.

    Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, published by Nightboat Books in 2018. Her book Syncope (Ugly Duckling Presse) will be out later this year and No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body is forthcoming in 2020. She teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School and leads an English conversation class for new immigrants at the Brooklyn Public Library. She is currently working on a collaboration with choreographer and writer Okwui Okpokwasili.

  6. The Heart of the Matter: A Workshop for Writings in Progress
    Led by Jackie Clark
    Dates: Sundays November 4, 11, 18, and December 2
    Time: 1-3:30pm
    Capacity: 12 participants
    Cost: $100-200 total (sliding scale, $25-50/session)
    Register here.

    Part of the challenge that a poet faces is the need to distill their work down to the essence of whatever feeling or experience they are trying to capture/convey—what Graham Greene calls "the heart of the matter,”—while at the same time seeking to gain a fuller understanding of what is going on in their writing that they might not yet be fully aware of. Often, turning to reading that one feels a kinship to and discussing it with others can help generate new entries into one’s own work, bringing its gestures and objectives into clearer focus. 

    This four-week poetry workshop invites participants to share a specific work-in-progress of no more than 10 pages (chapbook excerpt, long poem, manuscript…), which could benefit from dialogue with others. We will think about how to construct this dialogue in studying writing we feel our own works have particularly affinity to, and developing vocabularies to discuss these kindred approaches and aesthetics together. 

    During our first meeting, participants will bring and share a piece of writing (of no more than 2 pages) by a writer other than themselves, whose work seems to exhibit the "heart" or aesthetics of what they are looking to achieve in their own writing. Together we will determine a vocabulary for what we value in that writing and discuss how we try to exhibit those values and make use of those strategies in our own work. We will then use this collaboratively generated vocabulary as a resource for understanding and talking about each other’s' writing. The second and third sessions will be dedicated to workshopping each participants’ work, while the fourth will serve as a platform to share our newly edited drafts together during a group reading. 

    "If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?"

    Jackie Clark is the author of Aphoria (Brooklyn Arts Press) and the chapbooks Office Work (Greying Ghost), I Live Here Now (Lame House Press), and Sympathetic Nervous System (Bloof Books). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, The Tiny, and the anthology Ritual and Capital co-published by Wendy’s Subway and Bard Graduate Center. A new chapbook, Depression Parts, is forthcoming from dancing girl press. She works at Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts at The New School and teaches writing in New Jersey. She can be found online at nohelpforthat.com

    Image: Ellie Ga, Remainder, 2010. Courtesy the artist and Bureau, New York.

  7. Show Thyself! 
    Workshop with Jibz Cameron 
    Date: Sunday, October 28
    Time: 12-4pm (4 hours)
    Cost: $40-70 (sliding scale)
    Capacity: 12 participants
    Register here

    Many creative people have a hard time getting “out there” and being seen as the brilliant makers that we are. In this workshop, we’ll work through some of the roots of these false narratives that help keep us hidden--untangling what get's us stuck and staying stuck, what inspires us and what our biggest fears around art making are. We will also learn basic marketing tips and practical steps for growing a project and a practice (time management, social media outreach, asking for help from your community and helping your community). Bring a notebook and something to write with and your big questions! 

    Jibz Cameron is a performance/video artist and actor living in Los Angeles. Her work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has been presented at such institutions as MOCALA, PS1, Joe's Pub, The Kitchen, REDCAT, The Broad Museum, Hammer Museum, New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, among other institutions great and small. She has been heralded by the New York Times as "the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years" and "outrageously smart, grotesque and innovative" by The New Yorker. She has written and produced 6 evening length performance pieces and countless short works. She has produced numerous award winning video pieces and 2 albums of original music. In addition to her work as Dynasty Handbag she has been seen acting in films, theater and television (internet web series no one has seen). She also works as a professor of performance and comedy related subjects at Cal-Arts and NYU, as well as lecturing at such institutions such as Cornell University, Wesleyan University, Yale, among others. Cameron also produces and hosts Weirdo Night, a popular monthly alternative comedy and performance event. 

    Photo: Dynasty Handbag by Charlie Gross

  8. Writing for a Performance Persona
    Workshop with Jibz Cameron 
    Date: Saturday, October 27
    Time: 12-3pm (3 hours)
    Capacity: 12 participants
    Cost: $40-70 (sliding scale)
    Register here.

    During the Writing for a Performance Persona workshop we will explore various exercises designed to help you access deep crevasses of your personal experience that can become the driving desire behind a performance persona. The goal is not to leave the workshop with a developed piece of work, but rather to learn some new ways of accessing material within yourself. Writers, performers, dancers, drag showgirls, thinkers, visual artists all welcome! This is a fun based workshop.

    Here are some of the activity titles (without explanations - you can just use your imagination for now)
    • All about my mother
    • Ultimate fighting machine
    • Personal ad for dad
    • Heartbreaking singer/songwriter

    Jibz Cameron is a performance/video artist and actor living in Los Angeles. Her work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has been presented at such institutions as MOCALA, PS1, Joe's Pub, The Kitchen, REDCAT, The Broad Museum, Hammer Museum, New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, among other institutions great and small. She has been heralded by the New York Times as "the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years" and "outrageously smart, grotesque and innovative" by The New Yorker. She has written and produced 6 evening length performance pieces and countless short works. She has produced numerous award winning video pieces and 2 albums of original music. In addition to her work as Dynasty Handbag she has been seen acting in films, theater and television (internet web series no one has seen). She also works as a professor of performance and comedy related subjects at Cal-Arts and NYU, as well as lecturing at such institutions such as Cornell University, Wesleyan University, Yale, among others. Cameron also produces and hosts Weirdo Night, a popular monthly alternative comedy and performance event. 

    Photo: Dynasty Handbag by Charlie Gross

  9. Oral History for Artists and Writers 
    Workshop led by Svetlana Kitto
    Date: Saturday, October 6
    Time: 1-4pm (3 hours)
    Cost: $45-85 (sliding scale)
    Register here.

    Oral history is an interdisciplinary tool that has the power to bring more complexity, multivocality and urgency to work of any genre. For makers interested in documenting unheard voices, undertold stories, or generally enlivening their work with the historical phenomenon of everyday speech, this workshop will introduce oral history interviewing techniques as both a theoretical and practical mode of writing about the world. Students will practice interviewing and writing using oral history methods, as well as engage texts from a variety of periods and perspectives to get them thinking about their own complex points-of-view in this historical moment.

    Svetlana Kitto is a writer and oral historian in New York City. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, The New York Times, VICE, Salon, ART21, and the book Occupy (Verso, 2012) among other publications and anthologies. Currently an interviewer on the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Visual Art and AIDS Epidemic Oral History Project, she has also contributed interviews to projects with the Museum of Arts and Design, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, and the Brooklyn Historical Society, where she developed and taught a writing workshop called “Racial Realities: Writing About Race in the First Person.” Additionally, she has taught or lectured at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, and Rutgers University - Newark. She co-curates the reading and performance series Adult Contemporary, which released its first book of art and literature in the fall. In early 2017, her oral history for the book Ken Tisa: Objects/Time/Offerings, published by Gordon Robichaux and Pre-Echo Press, was called a "genius catalog" by Holland Cotter of the New York Times.

  10. Writing for a Performance Persona
    Workshop with Jibz Cameron

    Date: Monday, August 20th
    Time: 6:30-9:30pm (3 hours)
    Capacity: 12 participants
    Cost: $25-55 (sliding scale)
    Register here: https://goo.gl/forms/EoLOJufY7uDctfLt1


    During the Writing for a Performance Persona workshop we will explore various exercises designed to help you access deep crevasses of your personal experience that can become the driving desire behind a performance persona. The goal is not to leave the workshop with a developed piece of work, but rather to learn some new ways of accessing material within yourself. Writers, performers, dancers, drag showgirls, thinkers, visual artists all welcome! This is a fun based workshop.

    Here are some of the activity titles (without explanations - you can just use your imagination for now)

    • All about my mother
    • Ultimate fighting machine
    • Personal ad for dad
    • Heartbreaking singer/songwriter

    Jibz Cameron is a performance/video artist and actor living in Los Angeles. Her work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has been presented at such institutions as MOCALA, PS1, Joe's Pub, The Kitchen, REDCAT, The Broad Museum, Hammer Museum, New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, among other institutions great and small. She has been heralded by the New York Times as "the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years" and "outrageously smart, grotesque and innovative" by The New Yorker. She has written and produced 6 evening length performance pieces and countless short works. She has produced numerous award winning video pieces and 2 albums of original music. In addition to her work as Dynasty Handbag she has been seen acting in films, theater and television (internet web series no one has seen). She also works as a professor of performance and comedy related subjects at Cal-Arts and NYU, as well as lecturing at such institutions such as Cornell University, Wesleyan University, Yale, among others. Cameron also produces and hosts Weirdo Night, a popular monthly alternative comedy and performance event.

    Image: Backstage at Joe's Pub, Photo by Charlie Gross

  11. Show Thyself! 
    Workshop with Jibz Cameron 

    Date: Sunday, August 19th
    Time: 12-4pm (4 hours)
    Cost: $40-70 (sliding scale)
    Capacity: 12 participants
    Register here: https://goo.gl/forms/hwVN8JSuuBLHwVb83

    Many creative people have a hard time getting “out there” and being seen as the brilliant makers that we are. In this workshop, we’ll work through some of the roots of these false narratives that help keep us hidden--untangling what get's us stuck and staying stuck, what inspires us and what our biggest fears around art making are. We will also learn basic marketing tips and practical steps for growing a project and a practice (time management, social media outreach, asking for help from your community and helping your community). Bring a notebook and something to write with and your big questions! 

    Jibz Cameron is a performance/video artist and actor living in Los Angeles. Her work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has been presented at such institutions as MOCALA, PS1, Joe's Pub, The Kitchen, REDCAT, The Broad Museum, Hammer Museum, New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, among other institutions great and small. She has been heralded by the New York Times as "the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years" and "outrageously smart, grotesque and innovative" by The New Yorker. She has written and produced 6 evening length performance pieces and countless short works. She has produced numerous award winning video pieces and 2 albums of original music. In addition to her work as Dynasty Handbag she has been seen acting in films, theater and television (internet web series no one has seen). She also works as a professor of performance and comedy related subjects at Cal-Arts and NYU, as well as lecturing at such institutions such as Cornell University, Wesleyan University, Yale, among others. Cameron also produces and hosts Weirdo Night, a popular monthly alternative comedy and performance event.  

    Image: Backstage at Joe's Pub, Photo by Charlie Gross

  12. Writing Toward an Aesthetic of Adaptation
    Workshop led by Corina Copp

    Dates: Saturdays, June 9-23 (3 weeks)
    Time: 2-5pm
    Capacity: 12 participants
    Cost: Sliding scale, $25-50/session ($75-150 total)
    Registration deadline: June 8
    Register here

    What kind of future does adaptation make possible, what kind of new subject, making of knowledge, or condition for listening? How might it act as a critique or disavowal of origin, fidelity, identification, and authenticity? And less theoretically, how does one reenvision a text, and practically transition from 2D to 3D? In this three-session workshop, meant for prose writers, poets, script-writers, those more involved in dance and theatrical arts, or anyone dedicated to or interested in movement across forms, we'll look at aesthetic theories and strategies of adaptation, translation, reenactment, nomadic poetics/new materialisms, transmediality, and related contemporary live art, film, and writing practices. In-class writing exercises may be inspired by short readings and screenings of work by Walter Benjamin, Nicole Brossard, Jacques Rivette, Mac Wellman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Moyra Davey, Marguerite Duras, Quinn Latimer, Yvonne Rainer, Kathleen Collins, Lisa Robertson, Eve Sedgwick, José Munoz, Chantal Akerman, Anne Carson, Raúl Ruiz, Big Dance Theater, and Maria Irene Fornes. We will also look closely, time permitting, at modes of making and writing performance that relies on other art forms or nonfiction and documentary strategies. Guest artists who operate between literature and stage-work, or literature and film, or in and around other media, are possible for first 2 sessions. The last workshop will be constructively dedicated to students' writing or personal projects related to adaptation. 

    Corina Copp is a New York-based writer working at the intersections of performance, film, and poetry. She is the author of The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015); a three-part play inspired by the successive forms of the work of Marguerite Duras, The Whole Tragedy of the Inability to Love; and chapbooks including All Stock Must Go (Shit Valley Verlag, 2014), and Pro Magenta/Be Met (UDP 2011). Recent writing appears in Hyperallergic, Hix Eros, BOMB, and elsewhere. Performance work: The James Gallery – CUNY Graduate Center, Artists Space, Home Alone 2 Gallery, NYC Prelude Festival, E. 13th Street Theater, Dixon Place, The Invisible Dog Art Center, and through Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace (Writer-in-Residence, 2013-14). Her talk, “Goodnight, Chantal”—on voice, sleep, and Charlie Chaplin as consolations in Chantal Akerman’s films—was presented at After Chantal: An International Conference (U. of Westminster, London, 2016) and published in Pelt v. 4: Feminist Temporalities (Organism for Poetic Research). Translations of Akerman's own writing, the play Hall de nuit (Night Lobby) and Ma mère rit (My Mother Laughs) are to be published soon by e-flux journal and The Song Cave, respectively; and other writing on film can be found in Frieze and forthcoming in Outsider Films on America (ed. Shanay Jhaveri, fall). She received her MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College, working with Mac Wellman, and is soon pursuing a PhD in Critical Studies at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. She is a 2014 NYFA Fellow in Poetry and former curator at The Segue Foundation.

    Image: Jennie Richee—or Eating Jalooka Fruit Before It's Ripe. Based on the Life History and Art of Henry Darger. St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn, 2003.

     

  13. What Wild Ecstasy? An Ekphrastic Workshop
    Led by Amy Lawless

    Dates: Tuesdays, April 17-May 22, 2018 (6 weeks)
    Times: 7:00-9:30pm 
    Capacity: 12 participants
    Cost: sliding scale, $25-50/session ($150-300 total)
    Registration deadline: April 15th
    Register here

    Experiment with a range of generative writing exercises in this six-week poetry workshop. Ekphrasis is the process of responding to works of art, images, media, and music through writing. We will use this as a jumping off point as we collaborate with each other and the library at Wendy’s Subway. We will also study performance of all sorts (e.g., film, virtual performances) for rhetorical insight into generating new texts.

    By journaling before/in front of/with books and art with glee, shock, and ardor, students will gain an audacious authority over their given subjects. This may lead to a high output of writing (poems) and a toolkit for creative composition. In collaborating with each other, we will dip our toes into a version of a “creative communism” that prompted Robert Rauschenberg to reflect that “ideas are not real estate.”

    Students’ poems/hybrid writing will be workshopped in small groups, in full class workshops, and by Amy Lawless individually. Readings will be drawn from poems, short stories, multimodal/virtual sources, and essays.

    Required Tools: A poetic impulse and writing utensils.

    Amy Lawless is the author of the poetry collections My Dead (2013) and Broadax (2017), both from Octopus Books. With Chris Cheney, she is the author of the hybrid book I Cry: The Desire to Be Rejected from Pioneer Works Press' Groundworks Series (2016). Her chapbook, A Woman Alone, was published by Sixth Finch in 2017. Poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry (a collaboration with Angela Veronica Wong), Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion, and the Brooklyn Poets Anthology. Individual poems have appeared widely in print and online publications. Her collaborative poems have appeared in The Volta (with Chris Cheney), Pinwheel and The Common (with Angela Veronica Wong), and The Fanzine and forthcoming in Wendy’s Subway’s Ritual and Capital anthology (with Jeff Alessandrelli). She received a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2011, and has recently taught poetry workshops at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Pioneer Works, Bowery Poetry Club, and Poets House.

  14. Getting Real with Money 
    (a 2-Part Workshop for Writers and Artists)
    Led by Beth Pickens 

    Dates: Saturday, April 14 (Part 1) and Sunday, April 15 (Part 2)

    Times: 1:30-4:30pm (each day)
    Capacity: 20 participants 
    Cost: $75 total
    Register here.

    Capitalism got you down? Does money make you panic? Do you avoid bills or hide mail? Does the phrase ‘Roth IRA’ confound you? Are you convinced everybody learned how to be an adult with money except you? Time to do something different in this judgment-free environment where you will confront feelings and fears while gaining some practical personal finance skills.

    • In Part 1 we will dive into your emotional experience of money and personal finance. You will examine your family’s financial legacy and identify its impact on your present. Examining fear, shame, and guilt, we will use the power of a group experience to disrupt emotional cycles trapping you in money anxieties. You will learn some fundamental exercises to manage the feelings that come up when you think about money.

    • Part 2 focuses on practical skills including gathering data about your financial picture, creating a realistic budget, steps for moving out of debt, increasing earned income, and establishing achievable, personalized goals for the near future.

    Beth Pickens is a Los Angeles-based consultant for artists and arts organizations. Her book Your Art Will Save Your Life (Feminist Press) comes out April 2018. She provides career consultation, grant writing, fundraising, and financial, project and strategic planning services for clients throughout the US. Pickens integrates person-centered Rogerian therapy training, financial management and fundraising, feminist analysis and capitalist critique, and goal-oriented actions to move her clients in the direction of their ambitions. She specializes in supporting queer and trans artists, women, and artists of color.

    She earned her M.Ed. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Before relocating to Los Angeles in 2014, Pickens was based in San Francisco where she served as Senior Program Manager at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Managing Director of both RADAR Productions and the Queer Cultural Center.

  15. SLIME TIME: exploring feminist aesthetics and new materialism
    A one-day workshop led by Megan Toye

    Date: Sunday, April 8

    Time: 12:30-4:30pm
    Cost: $25 (includes materials and supplies)
    Capacity: 10 participants
    Registration deadline: April 6th

    Register here.

    This one-day workshop, 4-hour workshop, will take up the phenomenon of slime creation within pre-teen girl culture. Prolific on Instagram and YouTube, girls aged 8-12 have begun making heterogeneous forms of ‘slime’ by combining beauty products such as shower gel, shaving cream, and eye contact solution mixed with Elmer’s glue and borax. Once the base slime is created, the girls add extra objects/accessories to their slime to customize it, such as plastic pearls, tiny Styrofoam balls, glitter and food coloring, all of which help to establish a variety of textures (each characterized as either ‘buttery’ ‘fluffy’ and/or ‘crunchy,’ respectively) and smells (often sweet and associated with food and/or drink). A multi-million dollar industry has formed around these household creations: YouTuber Karina Garcia, for example, has retired her parents and has bought a six-bedroom home with the money made from corporate advertisements on her slime videos (The New York Times). In slime culture, domestic beauty products, normally regulated to the ‘feminine’ sphere, are radically re-imagined and re-materialized. The association of ‘slime’ with grossness, disgust and filth is re-signified by young girls to connote beauty, fun, and creativity. 

    Participants will take up the phenomenon of slime creation by making a variety of forms of slime themselves. We will discuss what slime is and how it potentially functions culturally and politically by looking at a number of texts read in the workshop. Topics for discussion include: 

    - Feminist aesthetic philosophy
    - New materialism 
    - The abject and politics of abjection
    - Psychology of disgust, repulsion
    - Affect theory and ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response)
    - Haptic / embodied spectatorship in visual culture
    - Cripistemologies and critical disability studies
    - Why now? the emergence of slime within current political context 

    Cost of workshop is $25 and includes all the materials necessary to make up to two batches of slime (2 cups of glue, 10 oz can of shaving cream, 4 oz bottle of contact solution, baking soda, corn starch and access to multiple accessories such as food coloring, glitter, beads)

    --

    Megan Toye is a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture at York University in Toronto, Canada. Megan specializes in the history of feminist conceptual art, and is currently writing on the Downtown New York scene in the late 70s. She has been published in Drain Magazine, the Journal of Curatorial Studies and Studies in Visual Arts and Communication: An International Journal. She has curated numerous exhibitions over the past 5 years in the Toronto area and has presented her research at multiple international conferences, including the Canadian Philosophical Association, the International Communication Association and the 10th annual Media Art Histories conference. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, Max Stern Art History Award, Media@McGill Grant and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship.

  16. Dialogue, Listening, Timing
    Workshop led by Lucy Ives
    Emily Harvey Foundation
    537 Broadway #2, New York, NY 10012
    Saturday, March 31st, 5-7pm 
    Cost: $20
    Register here.

    What can everyday conversation and overheard speech teach us about writing—particularly since writers of prose sometimes struggle with the strange and unpredictable dynamics of dialogue? In this workshop, we will explore improvisational techniques, transcription, as well as acts of appropriation, in an effort to imbue talking on the page with quickness, languor, urgency, and meaning, among many other qualities and quantities. Most of all, we will remind ourselves of the remarkable literary and artistic resource that is, simply put, speaking with others. Participants will receive a bibliography of resources, as well as a packet of suggested exercises for continued independent work after the workshop.

    Lucy Ives is the author of the novel Impossible Views of the World (2017), as well as several books of poetry and short prose. In 2019, her second novel, Loudermilk, or the Real Poet, or the Origin of the World, will appear. She is currently Fellow-in-Residence at the Center for Experimental Humanities at NYU.

    This workshop is curated by Rachel Valinsky and organized on the occasion of the program While I Was Listening to... NY, produced by La Criée centre d'art contemporain, in collaboration with Wendy's Subway.

  17. On Telling
    Workshop led by Julien Bismuth
    Emily Harvey Foundation
    537 Broadway #2, New York, NY 10012
    Saturday, March 31st, 2:30-4pm
    Cost: $20
    Register here.

    How to tell a story when put to the task? How to think on your feet and construct a thought on the spot? In this workshop, participants will develop tools for improvisation in storytelling, with an emphasis on the parallel and simultaneously unfolding processes of thinking and telling. Drawing on work and writing by David Antin, as well as Bismuth's own practice, participants will consider ways in which to get comfortable with spontaneity. This is not a workshop on improvisation, but on what Heinrich von Kleist called the “gradual construction of thoughts in speech.”

    Julien Bismuth is an artist and writer who currently lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Bismuth is also the co-founder of Devonian Press with Jean-Pascal Flavien, and the author of A cover to cover (uncover) and Pages with Motto Press in Berlin. Upcoming projects include participation in the 2018 Cuenca Biennale as well as solo project at the Nomas Foundation in 2019.

    This workshop is curated by Rachel Valinsky and organized on the occasion of the program While I Was Listening to... NY, produced by La Criée centre d'art contemporain, in collaboration with Wendy's Subway.
  18. Oral History for Artists and Writers 
    Workshop led by Svetlana Kitto
    Emily Harvey Foundation
    537 Broadway #2, New York, NY 10012
    Saturday, March 31st, 12-2pm 
    Cost: $20
    Register here.

    Oral history is an interdisciplinary tool that has the power to bring more complexity, multivocality and urgency to work of any genre. For makers interested in documenting unheard voices, undertold stories, or generally enlivening their work with the historical phenomenon of everyday speech, this workshop will introduce oral history interviewing techniques as both a theoretical and practical mode of writing about the world. Students will practice interviewing and writing using oral history methods, as well as engage texts from a variety of periods and perspectives to get them thinking about their own complex points-of-view in this historical moment.

    Svetlana Kitto is a writer and oral historian in New York City. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, The New York Times, VICE, Salon, ART21, and the book Occupy (Verso, 2012) among other publications and anthologies. Currently an interviewer on the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Visual Art and AIDS Epidemic Oral History Project, she has also contributed interviews to projects with the Museum of Arts and Design, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, and the Brooklyn Historical Society, where she developed and taught a writing workshop called “Racial Realities: Writing About Race in the First Person.” Additionally, she has taught or lectured at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, and Rutgers University - Newark. She co-curates the reading and performance series Adult Contemporary, which released its first book of art and literature in the fall. In early 2017, her oral history for the book Ken Tisa: Objects/Time/Offerings, published by Gordon Robichaux and Pre-Echo Press, was called a "genius catalog" by Holland Cotter of the New York Times.

    This workshop is curated by Rachel Valinsky and organized on the occasion of the program While I Was Listening to... NY, produced by La Criée centre d'art contemporain, in collaboration with Wendy's Subway.

  19. Mentor Meditation: The Book of the Dead
    Workshop led by Emily Brandt

    Dates: Thursdays, March 22-April 19, 2018 (5 weeks)
    Times: 7:00-9:15pm
    Capacity: 12 participants
    Cost: sliding scale, $125-250 total ($25-50/session)
    Registration deadline: March 20th
    Register here

    Rukeyser writes: “The men and the water are never idle / have definitions.”

    In this 5 week course, we will explore Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead via obsessive reading, re-reading, imitating, resisting, meditating, and discussing. While discussion will of course center around Rukeyser’s craft and content, it will also allow us to track our relationship to a single text as it deepens, shifts, and inspires. The reading practices undertaken here aim to challenge and provoke our creative practices. To that end, we’ll spend class time generating and workshopping poems that grow out of our shared reading and meditation on Rukeyser’s work.

    Rukeyser wrote The Book of the Dead in response to one of America’s worst industrial catastrophes, the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster in Appalachia. How does this text, written in the spirit of 1930s radicalism, read in our present catastrophic socio-political climate? And how does an intentional practice of re-examining its various parts and their methodologies contribute to our understanding of the whole, and by extension, our understanding of our own creative practice.

    As part of a stimuli-cleanse (or durational performance piece), participants are invited to immersively read only The Book of the Dead and related criticism, repeatedly, over the course of the 5 weeks.

    During the first week, we’ll read The Book of the Dead in its entirety and discuss the scope of her project as well as some of its criticism. As the course progresses, we’ll revisit individual poems and excerpts. For instance, one week we may examine her inclusion of court documents in text, and another week we may examine the caesura in her tercets. All exploration is intended to deepen our relationship to this text as a means of galvanizing our own work.

    Emily Brandt is a poet, editor, and educator. She’s the author of three chapbooks, including Sleeptalk or Not At All (Horse Less Press). Her poems have appeared in Gigantic SequinsLitHubThe RecluseThe OffingApogeeWashington Square Review, and other journals, and were recently anthologized in Inheriting the War (W.W. Norton). She earned her MFA from New York University where she facilitated the Veterans Writing Workshop for veterans of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She’s been in residence at Saltonstall Arts Colony and was a 2016 Emerging Poets Fellow at Poets House. Emily is a co-founding editor of No, Dear and Web Acquisitions Editor for VIDA.

  20. A Verse Record: Poet's Journals / Journal Poems
    Workshop led by Stacy Szymaszek

    Dates: Sundays, March 4-18 (3 weeks)
    Time: 2-4pm 
    Capacity 12 participants 
    Cost: Sliding scale, $75-150 total ($25-50/session)
    Registration deadline: February 18th
    Register here

    What does time show in our lives? How does poet-logic (sequencing) run amok with temporal order and reveal multidimensionality? What is a momentous event? We’ll consider writing that takes time (years to hours and minutes of the day) as a basis of composition, starting with some examples from the Japanese poetic diary tradition (Ki no Tsurayuki’s The Tosa Diary and Masaoka Shiki’s The Verse Record of My Peonies) as well as work by Kamau Brathwaite, Robert Grenier, Joanne Kyger, Harryette Mullen, Bernadette Mayer, Jonas Mekas, Harry Mathews, Hannah Weiner, Ted Berrigan, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, and others. In class reading, discussion, wandering, and writing.

    Stacy Szymaszek is a poet, and arts administrator/organizer. She is the author of the books Emptied of All ShipsHyperglossiahart island, and Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books. Her book A Year From Today is forthcoming in 2018 with Nightboat Books. She is a regular teacher for Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, and mentor for Queer Art Mentorship. She is the Executive Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.

  21. MAGE SPEAK
    Workshop led by Rachel James and Georgia Wall

    Dates: February 12-March 26 (8 weeks)
    Public screening at Spectacle Theater on April 9
    Time: Mondays, 7-9pm
    Cost: Sliding scale, $200-400 total
    Capacity: 12 participants
    Registration deadline: February 10th

    Register here

    First offered in the fall of 2017, IMAGE SPEAK is back by popular demand! This 8-week course delves into the world of video art, specifically works with little hierarchical delineation between text and the moving image. In addition to making video essays, we will discuss texts that address the theoretical underpinnings of the medium and screen seminal and experimental works in the field. Examples include videos by Moyra Davey, Peggy Ahwesh, Hito Steryl, Martine Syms, Ismail Bahri, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Harun Farocki. The course will culminate in a public showcase of student work at Spectacle Theater.  

    Does the moving image become an illustration of text, or is text created in response to footage? What does a process look like in which the text and image is being developed simultaneously? Exploring these processes together, the eight weeks will include many experimentations in writing and image making. Students will be asked to self-generate material as well as respond using the video essay form. Each participant will have the opportunity for group critique. By the end of Image Speak students will have produced at least one video essay for public screening and a series of written, video, and response pieces as potential material to develop in the future.

    Participants will ideally have access to:

    • a computer with video editing software (iMovie or another free video editing software)
    • a device to record footage (smartphone or camera)

    If you would like to sign up for this course yet access to equipment is prohibitive, please contact Wendy’s Subway (programs@wendyssubway.com) as limited equipment is available.

    -

    Rachel James is an artist and poet with a background in cultural anthropology and experimental ethnography. She has exhibited or performed throughout the United States, Canada and Europe, including at Essex Flowers, La MaMa, Situations, Spectacle, and Recess in New York City, The New Gallery in Calgary, Totaldobze, in Riga, and Kamppi Chapel in Helsinki. She is an MFA Candidate at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts and curates exhibitions and performance events in Mexico City and New York, where she lives and works.

    Georgia Wall is an artist based in New York. Wall’s videos have been exhibited at Team Gallery, Document Space, Faena Art Center, Anthology Film Archives, Spectacle Theater and Flux Factory. In New York she has presented her performance work at New York Live Arts, HERE, US Blues, Dixon Place, Movement Research at Judson Church, Ortega y Gasset Projects and CATCH at The Invisible Dog. Her work has been written about in publications including, ARTnewsMousse Magazine OnlineThe New YorkerHemispheric Institute E-Misférica, and Time Out Chicago. Wall also has a curatorial practice and is part of Bottom which has organized events at Abrons Art Center, Spectacle Theater, Glasshouse Projects and Essex Flowers. Wall holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

  22. Black Feminist Praxis
    Led by Olaronke (Founder, The Free Black Women's Library)
    Sunday, December 3, 4-6pm
    Capacity: 20 participants

    Cost: $15
    Register here.


    All are welcome to this interactive workshop led by Olaronke that offers an opportunity to examine rituals, actions, and sacred practices rooted in Black feminist thought. We will look at the history and ongoing themes of this movement, and examine it as a spiritual belief system that is rooted in fairness, compassion, and truth. Black feminism is not just a political or social movement, it offers a deep, complex, and inclusive framework that can be used to shape our goals and ideas around personal growth, social justice, art-making, and community
     building. It confronts patriarchy, violence, capitalism, anti-Blackness, and so much more.

    In this session we will write and reflect on the teachings and lives of radical Black feminist authors, organizers, and activists like Audre Lorde, Fannie Lou Hamer, June Jordan, bell hooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler. Please bring an open mind, a journal/notebook and your favorite pen or pencil.

    Olaronke is a Brooklyn-born Nigerian installation artist, cultural worker, Black Feminist/Womanist scholar, social coordinator, mama, yoga teacher and world traveling with. She is also an award winning set decorator and scenic artist for Film and TV, yoga teacher. In 2015 she started The Free Black Women’s Library, a mobile library that features a collection of 800 books written by Black women as well as performances, film screenings, writing workshops and critical conversations.

  23. Out of Body, Experience
    Workshop led by Deirtra Thompson

    Dates: November 16-December 14 (5 weeks)*
    Time: Thursdays, 7:00-9:30pm
    Capacity: 18 participants 
    Cost: $25-50 per session ($125-250 total)
    Registration deadline: November 10
    Sign up here.

    Stop torpor! Evolve the feeling of a persistent nameless dread into a creative life worth living.

    If starting or completing a project is increasingly difficult for you this workshop will help.

    The Out of Body, Experience procrastination workshop for artists and writers is not about time management, willpower, or other ineffective strategies that attempt to curb the body’s natural response to threat. Resistance exists for a reason.

    This workshop locates the relationship between procrastination, trauma, and its manifestation as a freeze response within your body and your creative process. Starting a project or releasing work into the world is the ultimate experience in vulnerability. For those who have experienced ptsd, c-ptsd, adverse childhood events, and/or traumatic rejection — there is a way to make work without the chaos of procrastination. And it can happen quickly without needing years of forensic work to figure out why you procrastinate.

    Over the course of five weeks, a small supportive group will work together to clarify the relationship between trauma, family systems, and the inability to start or complete a project. Through psycho-educational readings, writing exercises and experimental workshops we will:

    • become our own best detective, teacher, and parent
    • gain clarity about the roots of our procrastination while maintaining privacy
    • spot and shift emotional dysregulation before it derails your work
    • learn immediate tools and action planning to start, pick up, or finish work now
    • acquire skills to transform developmental gaps and self-negating patterns into agency
    • find community and the inner resources to create a life worth living

    Kafka did it and so can you.

    *Thanksgiving Thursday will be rescheduled. 
    **This workshop welcomes all procrastinators; however those procrastinators with autoimmunity or chronic illness may find its body logic particularly useful.

    All participants sign a confidentiality agreement and privacy is a priority. Although you will likely gain insight, substantial relief and a new approach to working from this workshop, it isn’t therapy and I’m not a licensed therapist. I can help you locate resources for further processing of what comes up.

    -

    Deirtra Thompson is an artist and writer who lives in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from Bard College, a BFA from MICA, with residencies at Skowhegan, etc and has been a visiting artist at Pratt and the Maryland Institute of Art. The stress of her own avoidant behavior contributed to a series of autoimmune diseases and other major personal losses. Combining psycho-research and forensic skills, she saw clearly that chronic avoidance is actually a survival response with more advantages than disadvantages. Traditional approaches to procrastination (time management, admonishing a lack of willpower or self-discipline or laziness) increasingly make procrastination worse until the underlying issues are out in the open. Talk therapy, CBT, DBT, and other forms of traditional therapy are mildly useful adjuncts but in her experience are not enough to effect meaningful change for a chronic procrastinator until the problem is addressed in the body, not in a day planner.

  24. Introduction to Oral History for Writers
    Led by Svetlana Kitto

    Date: Sunday, October 29

    Time: 2-5pm (3 hours)
    Cost: $100
    Capacity: 12 participants 
    Registration deadline: October 25
    Register here.


    Oral history is an interdisciplinary tool that has the power to bring more complexity, multivocality and urgency to writing of any genre. For writers interested in documenting unheard voices, undertold stories, or generally enlivening their work with the historical phenomenon of everyday speech, this workshop will introduce oral history interviewing techniques as both a theoretical and practical mode of writing about the world. Students will practice interviewing and writing using oral history methods, as well as read texts from a variety of periods and perspectives to get them thinking about their own complex points-of-view in this historical moment.

    Svetlana Kitto is a writer and oral historian in New York City. Her fiction, journalism and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Salon, VICE, the New York Observer, the Huffington Post, ART21, BOMB, Buzzfeed and the book Occupy (Verso, 2012) among other publications and anthologies. She has contributed interviews to oral history projects with the Museum of Arts and Design, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, and the Brooklyn Historical Society, where she developed and taught a writing workshop called Racial Realities: Writing About Race in the First Person. Additionally, she has taught or lectured at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, and Rutgers University - Newark. She co-curates the reading and performance series Adult Contemporary, which will be releasing its first book in the fall. In early 2017, her oral history for the book Ken Tisa: Objects/Time/Offerings, published by Gordon Robichaux and Pre-Echo Press, was called a "genius catalog" by Holland Cotter of the New York Times. 

  25. Image Speak
    Led by Rachel James and Georgia Wall
    In collaboration with The School of Making Thinking 

    Dates: October 16-December (8 weeks)
    Time: Mondays, 7-9pm
    Cost: $25 per session ($200 total)
    Capacity: 15 participants

    Sign up here.

    Image Speak delves into the world of video art, specifically works with little hierarchical delineation between text and the moving image. In addition to making video essays, we will discuss texts that address the theoretical underpinnings of the medium and screen seminal and experimental works in the field. Examples include videos by Moyra Davey, Ismail Bahri, Anicka Yi, Trinh T minh ha, and Chris Marker. The course will culminate in a public showcase of student work at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn.  

    Does the moving image become an illustration of text, or is text created in response to footage? What does a process look like in which the text and image is being developed simultaneously? Exploring these processes together, the eight weeks will include many experimentations in writing and image making. Students will be asked to self-generate material as well as respond using the video essay form. Each participant will have the opportunity for group critique. By the end of Image Speak students will have produced at least one video essay for public screening at Spectacle Theater and a series of written, video, and response pieces as potential material to develop in the future. 

    Participants will ideally have access to:

    • a computer with video editing software (iMovie or another free video editing software)
    • a device to record footage (smartphone or camera)

    If you would like to sign up for this course yet access to equipment is prohibitive, please contact The School of Making Thinking as limited equipment is available. 



    Rachel James is an artist and poet with a background in cultural anthropology and experimental ethnography. She has exhibited or performed throughout the United States, Canada and Europe, including at Essex Flowers, La MaMa, Situations, Spectacle, and Recess in New York City, The New Gallery in Calgary, Totaldobze, in Riga, and Kamppi Chapel in Helsinki. She is an MFA Candidate at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts and curates exhibitions and performance events in Mexico City and New York, where she lives and works.

    Georgia Wall is an artist based in New York. Wall’s videos have been exhibited at Team Gallery, Document Space, Faena Art Center, Anthology Film Archives, Spectacle Theater and Flux Factory. In New York she has presented her performance work at New York Live Arts, HERE, US Blues, Dixon Place, Movement Research at Judson Church, Ortega y Gasset Projects and CATCH at The Invisible Dog. Her work has been written about in publications including, ART-News, Mousse Magazine Online, The New Yorker, Hemispheric Institute E-Misférica and Time Out Chicago. Wall also has a curatorial practice and is part of Bottom which has organized events at Abrons Art Center, Spectacle Theater, Glasshouse Projects and Essex Flowers. Wall holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

  26. Introduction to Oral History for Writers
    Led by Svetlana Kitto

    Date: Sunday, August 13th

    Time: 3-6pm (3 hours)
    Cost: $100
    Capacity: 12 participants 
    Registration deadline: August 10
    Register here.


    Oral history is an interdisciplinary tool that has the power to bring more complexity, multivocality and urgency to writing of any genre. For writers interested in documenting unheard voices, undertold stories, or generally enlivening their work with the historical phenomenon of everyday speech, this workshop will introduce oral history interviewing techniques as both a theoretical and practical mode of writing about the world. Students will practice interviewing and writing using oral history methods, as well as read texts from a variety of periods and perspectives to get them thinking about their own complex points-of-view in this historical moment.

    Svetlana Kitto is a writer and oral historian in New York City. Her fiction, journalism and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Salon, VICE, the New York Observer, the Huffington Post, ART21, BOMB, Buzzfeed and the book Occupy (Verso, 2012) among other publications and anthologies. She has contributed interviews to oral history projects with the Museum of Arts and Design, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, and the Brooklyn Historical Society, where she developed and taught a writing workshop called Racial Realities: Writing About Race in the First Person. Additionally, she has taught or lectured at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, and Rutgers University - Newark. She co-curates the reading and performance series Adult Contemporary, which will be releasing its first book in the fall. In early 2017, her oral history for the book Ken Tisa: Objects/Time/Offerings, published by Gordon Robichaux and Pre-Echo Press, was called a "genius catalog" by Holland Cotter of the New York Times. 

  27. All Inseparable Now
    A Workshop led by Sara Jane Stoner

    Dates: July 10-August 14 (6 weeks)
    Time: Mondays, 7-9:30pm
    Capacity: 20 participants 
    Cost: $25-50 per session ($150-300 total)
    Registration deadline: July 1
    Sign up here.

    Urgently, with the belief that poetic practices have the power to inform and transform all kinds of life practices, this workshop will seek to actively and collectively identify and write through/toward some of the lessons delivered in recent poetic work by living poets about the inseparability of politics and aesthetics in language (and beyond). I propose this workshop out of the desire to create a space in which we individually and collectively identify ways to acknowledge the affective, intellectual, and cultural labor of these writers, and develop and practice forms of listening, attentiveness, and reflective consciousness in reading which will foster critical modes of response in discussion, in writing, and in life that speak to what these poets honor, question, trouble, represent, and demand. 

    To ask: what are poems doing in the world right now? (what powers do they speak to, what powers do they name, refuse, and wield?); what conditions and forms of consciousness do recent poems represent and raise through what they’re doing with form, sound, and language? For me, these questions foreground a need for individuals, and this workshop, to practice an awareness of the ethics of readership: i.e. what a reader brings to texts in terms of their desires, assumptions, identity and background, access to forms of capital and privilege, “literary” and social contexts, prior knowledge and experience. To this complex end, this workshop intends to embrace all kinds of poetic energies in reading, writing, and discussion—spiritual and material, sharp and gentle, formative and destructive, centering and decentering, choral and particular, structural and post-structural, affirmative and negative, personal and theoretical, in ambivalence, in alignment, and in conflict—with the hopes that the implied and constructed values of some of these binaries reveal themselves, merge, collapse, and/or re-form, and that we might better account for ourselves as readers and writers.

    Meetings may be structured around the following ideas, all of which bear different inflections as they are relevant to particular poets: word as action; poetic simultaneity; elemental lyric identity; boundaries, borders, and protectionism; un-/non-sovereign subjects; poethics of care; the big NO; poems as acts of re-creation, re-imagination, and/or refiguring of readers, audiences, and/or populations; pleasure, play, and punishment; how to speak to violence and/or how to refuse to speak to violence; voicing singular collectives; bodying the neoliberal bureaucracy; (not) fucking with institutions; figuring the ongoing colonial project and the poetics of decolonization; the anthropocene, the capitalocene, the NO-cene; endings and infinities; protest and eventness; movement and Movement; “random” acts of revolutionary being; the stakes (problems/possibilities) of (il)legibility and (in)coherence. Working list of poets/writers to be read and responded to: Ari Banias, Hannah Black, Daniel Borzutzky, Chia-Lun Chang, CA Conrad, Natalie Diaz, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Marwa Helal, Terrence Hayes, Rickey Laurentiis, Layli Longsoldier, Dawn Lundy Martin, Lara Mimosa Montes, Fred Moten, Hoa Nguyen, Morgan Parker, Tommy Pico, Nina Puro, Claudia Rankine, Raquel Salas Rivera, Solmaz Sharif, Danez Smith, Oki Sogumi, Christopher Soto, TC Tolbert, Wendy Trevino, Alli Warren, Laurie Weeks, Maged Zaher.



    Sara Jane Stoner is a PhD Candidate in English at CUNY Graduate Center, who holds an MFA from Indiana University and a BA from Smith College, and is currently working on a dissertation focused on critical pedagogies and queer theory, particularly in the context of contemporary experimental writing. She has taught or currently teaches at Brooklyn College, Baruch College, and Cooper Union, where she worked in the writing center for almost a decade. Her first book, Experience in the Medium of Destruction (Portable Press @ YoYo Labs, 2015) was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Her reviews and criticism can be found or are forthcoming in the Poetry Project Newsletter, Sinister Wisdom, Brooklyn Rail, and The Fanzine. A chapbook of poems titled Grief Hour was published in the Spring 2017 issue of Black Warrior Review.

    This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

     

  28. Cave Small Cave Big Screening and Children's Screenwriting Workshop
    April 8-9, 2017

    Screening
    Saturday, April 8, 4-6pm

    Join us for the American premiere of the film Cave Small Cave Big at Wendy’s Subway on Saturday, April 8th with the director, Toronto-based artist Joële Walinga. Doors will open at 4pm with an introduction, screening (11 mins) and Q&A, followed by a reception.

    Cave Small Cave Big is the first in a series of short films written by children and directed by artist Joële Walinga. In this story by 5-year-olds Madeline Harker and Adelaide Schwartz, we follow a Butterfly Girl's journey through inspiration and loss, and veer away to follow the lost object itself. The film jumps from character to character as they cope with the transience of ownership. Cave Small Cave Big had its grand premiere at the Art Gallery of Ontario in February 2017, followed by a Halifax screening in March. The film will be presented in New Mexico, Chicago and Los Angeles in the spring.

    Watch a trailer here.

    Screenwriting Workshop
    Sunday, April 8, 10am-5pm
    Capacity: 8 children
    Ages: 5-7 years old
    Free, register here.

    Cave Small Cave Big 
    Workshop is a screenwriting workshop for kids aged 5-7, where we explore how storytelling can grow from the page to the screen. During this workshop, children will work collaboratively to write the kind of movie that they would like to see on the big screen. Visual artist and filmmaker Joële Walinga will adapt each script from the Cave Small Cave Big Workshop into functioning screenplays, and apply for funding to turn them into professional live-action films.

    Please sign up here or contact us at info@wendyssubway.com if you would like to register your child for the workshop or if you require further information. The workshop runs 10am-5pm on Sunday, April 9, 2017, can hold a maximum of 8 children ages 5-7 and is completely free to register. It takes place at Wendy’s Subway and will be facilitated by Joële Walinga and Daniel Warth, both of whom are experienced filmmakers. Walinga and Warth are also experienced with childcare, have criminal background, and vulnerable sector and child abuse register checks. We will prioritize workshop participation from children who come from low income and immigrant/refugee households. Snacks for throughout the day and lunch will be provided by Wendy’s Subway. Please specify your child's dietary restrictions and preferences so that we can accommodate.

    Joële Walinga is a Toronto-based artist whose work shuffles the roles of art-maker and art-viewer, using community collaboration to explore the visual world of the public. Her goal is to stimulate inclusive dialogues in contemporary art-making and receivership. Her work has been shown at The Art Gallery of Ontario, The Khyber Centre for the Arts, Narwhal Contemporary, Xpace Cultural Centre and The Roundtable Residency, and has been featured in Canadian Art, CBC Arts, Art Matters and Daily VICE.

    Since studying film at Sheridan College, Daniel Warth has worked on over forty short films as writer, director, editor, actor, producer and/or composer. His film work has screened at festivals across North America, including Worldwide Short Film Festival, Rhode Island International Film Festival, and, most recently, Slamdance Film Festival, where his first feature, "Dim the Fluorescents", won the Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature.


    www.joelewalinga.com
    www.cavesmallcavebig.com
    www.nightmarehere.com


    Press:
    Daily Vice
    Art Matters
    CBC Arts
    Canadian Art



  29. Drawing for Poets, Writing for Painters
    A workshop with Nicole Eisenman and erica kaufman 
    Friday, October 14, 7-9pm

    Registration fee (sliding scale): $50-100
    Capacity: 15 participants
    Register here.

    Revolution is in the air! Unfetter yourself from the restrictive manacles of left-brain thinking as we draw from life. Frolic in the halcyon glades of the right brain imagination. This two-hour class involves drawing from life with some guidance and some lexical interventions, writerly interruptions. We will explore the fundamentals of figurative drawing: gesture, line, proportion, and shadow. We will also introduce language into figure: word as gesture, line as limb, punctuation as proportion, shadow as shadow. No experience necessary. You may leave this class with a migraine or an epic.

    This workshop is organized as a fundraiser for Wendy's Subway.  The registration fee is determined on a sliding scale by the participant; all fees are donated to Wendy's Subway. 

    Nicole Eisenman is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited widely, both in the United States and internationally. Recent one-artist exhibitions have been held at the New Museum, NY (2016); the Institute of Contemporary Art and at the Institute for Contemporary Art, PA (2014). She is currently in the group shows Painting 2.0 at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich,  The Montreal Biannual, and These Strangers... Painting and People, S.M.A.K., Ghent.

    erica kaufman is the author of INSTANT CLASSIC (Roof Books, 2013) and censory impulse (Factory School, 2009). she is also the co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards (Venn Diagram, 2009), and of Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968-1974 (Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, 2014) . Prose and critical work can be found in: Rain Taxi, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Jacket2, Open Space/SFMOMA Blog and in The Color of Vowels: New York School Collaborations (ed. Mark Silverberg, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). Additional critical work is forthcoming in  Despite the Possible: 15 American Women Poets (ed. Mary Biddinger, University of Akron Press, 2015) and in the MLA Guide to Teaching Gertrude Stein (eds. L. Esdale and D. Mix). kaufman is the Director of Faculty and Curriculum for the Institute for Writing & Thinking at Bard College, and teaches in both the Master of Arts in Teaching and First Year Seminar Programs.

    Image: Nicole Eisenman, woodblock print, 2012. 

  30. Spring-Summer Writing Seminar
    "Postcolonialims" Reading & Discussion Group

    April 22 - August 26, 2016 

    Meets biweekly, alternating Fridays, 7-8:30pm 
    Facilitated by Kevin Antranik Cassem and Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves
    Register by April 18 by contacting info@wendyssubway.com
    Limited to 12 participants 

    This seminar aims to immerse its participants in postcolonial inquiry through written engagement with an ambitious reading list and biweekly meetings offering support and critical reflection.

    ● Participants begin this 20-week seminar by meeting to share with the group a central question they will ask of the 10 texts we will engage over the course of the spring and summer.

    ● Participants will then read contemporary works of postcolonial inquiry and — from this intake  monthly generate their own 500 to 800 word responses to the reading in a shared Google Document.

    ● Participants will meet twice in a month on alternate Fridays: first to discuss the reading and then again, two weeks later, to engage a critique of one another’s written responses.

    ● Two titles will serve as channels for additional consideration alongside the monthly readings:

    ○ Eduardo Galeano. (Cedric Belfrage, trans.)  Memory of Fire. Trilogy.

    ○ Edouard Glissant. (Betsy Wing, trans.)  Poetics of Relation.


    Image caption: Wangechi Mutu, "Le Noble Savage," 2007, ink and collage on Mylar

  31. Letterpress Workshop
    Led by Emily Toder
    Sunday, March 20, 2016: 1-2:30pm 
    Cost: $10 (free for members)

    Registration deadline: Thursday, March 17, 2016
    To register: email info@wendyssubway.com with subject line: "Letterpress" 


    In this workshop, participants will receive a basic introduction to letterpress printing. Learn how to set type, ink up the press, print and proof pages, and, of course, clean up!! The workshop will be fun, informal and eminently hands-on, so that everyone gets a chance to do everything, ask as many questions as they like, and leave with enough familiarity to come back and use the press independently and at their leisure for special projects.

    Emily Toder is a poet, translator, archivist, and printer. She is the author of the poetry collections Beachy Headand Science, from Coconut Books, and the translator of various prose and poetry collections, among them The Errant Astrologers, by Felipe Benítez Reyes (Ugly Duckling Presse). A graduate of the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, she also holds degrees in Literary Translation and Archives Management, and currently works as registrar and librarian at an art consultancy in Long Island City. In 2008 she founded Nor By Press, a tiny publishing outfit producing chapbooks, broadsides, and special ephemera on a Kelsey tabletop press.

  32. Artists' Books: Book-Binding Workshop
    Led by Chang Yuchen
    Sunday, March 20, 2016: 3-6pm
    Cost: $35 (includes tool kit) 

    Registration deadline: Thursday, March 17, 2016

    To register: email info@wendyssubway.com with subject line: "Artists' Book"

    Program:

    -Brief overview of the history of artists' books in modern and contemporary art
    -Basic knowledge of paper and tools
    -3 ways to make a book out of a single sheet of paper (useful for posters or fliers)
    -Pamphlet stitching (3 holes)
    -Long stitch

    Chang Yuchen (b.1989, China) graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (BFA) in 2011 and School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA) in 2013. She currently lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions include Chang Yuchen: Barbaric Poetry at Between Art Lab, Beijing (2015) and Chang Yuchen: Snake and Othersat Fou Gallery, New York (2013). Group exhibitions include: 29th Kyoto Art Festival, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art (2015), Intaglio, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York (2015), North American Print Biennial at Boston University (2013), Superstition at San Francisco Center for Books (2013), Gwangju Biennale 2011 at Gwangju Kunsthalle, Martell Focus on Talents Project at Today Art Museum, Beijing(2011). Her works are collected by Museum of Modern Art library, New York; Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Chicago.changyuchen.com

  33. Let's Get Better at This: A Writing Circle for Journalists
    Workshop led by Max Pearl

    Schedule: Tuesdays, bi-weekly, for twelve weeks
    Start date: July 14-September 23

    This workshop will bring together a group of working journalists so that we can share pitches, workshop each others' stories, and pool knowledge and resources collectively among our peers. It will emphasize reported and investigative work over analytical writing ("thinkpieces"), and offer writers an opportunity to explore a more literary style that might otherwise not fit within the language of web writing. Participants will bring stories in progress to be workshopped with the group; we will all complete an assignment or two; we will probably have a guest speaker and read assigned materials together. At the end, authors can submit their workshopped articles for a printed collection.

    Applicants must submit a recent piece of reporting or non-fiction by June 15th to be considered for the writing circle, which will be limited to eight members. Radio journalists and podcasters are also eligible to participate; please send a transcript or audio file. We'll meet every other week for twelve weeks, and figure out which day of the week and time is best once we have all the applicants chosen. 

    The workshop is facilitated by Max Pearl, an independent journalist, editor and documentarian. He founded the quarterly magazine Cluster Mag and his features have appeared in VICESalonThe Fader and The New Inquiry
  34. Artists' Books: Book-Binding Workshop
    Led by Yuchen Chang 
    Sunday, July 19, 1:30-4:30pm
    Cost: $20 (includes tool kit) 

    Register by July 12th by emailing info@wendyssubway.com with headline "Artists' Books" 

    Program: 
    -Brief overview of the history of artists' books in modern and contemporary art
    -Basic knowledge of paper and tools
    -3 ways to make a book out of a single sheet of paper (useful for posters or fliers)
    -Pamphlet stitching (3 holes)
    -Long stitch

    Chang Yuchen (b.1989, China) graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (BFA) in 2011
    and School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA) in 2013. She currently lives and works in New York. Chang Yuchen works with a wide range of media: printmaking, artists’ book, video, sound performance and among others. Her recent shows include Chang Yuchen: Snake and Others at Fou
    Gallery, New York (2013), Boston Printmakers 2013 North American Print Biennial at Boston University College of Fine Arts, Superstition at San Francisco Center for Books, Gwangju Biennale 2011 at Gwangju Kunsthalle, Martell Focus on Talents Finalists Exhibition (2011) at Today Art Museum and A Decade Long Exposure at Central Academy of Fine Arts and Contemporary Chinese Photography (2010). Her work is collected by Museum of Modern Art Library, New York and Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Chicago. 

  35. READING POETS BY THE SUN SIGN
    Workshop led by Filip Marinovich


    Class size: up to 12
    Dates: Begins March 12-end date TBA
    Schedule: Thursdays, 7-9pm, Weekly 

    Registration deadline: March 1st. Email info@wendyssubway.com with subject line: "Reading Poets by the Sun Sign"

    *

    This ongoing workshop, which started in February 2013 at the Poetry Project, concerns itself with the question of time in poetry, namely, what it is. How do we feel it season to season, day to day, minute to minute. What archetypes arise in each sign that we can inquire into through poetry. An operating theater where archetypes are on the table. We end up operating on ourselves. Trance the only anesthetic. Breath the awakener. In Pisces we read Kerouac's "Mexico City Blues" and write to the blasts of Ornette Coleman and Lou Reed. The trident as guitar in the water. Pisces rules the feet so we will dance with the feet of poetry, the ICTI. Dreamwork encouraged. We will read texts together aloud and allow whatever rises to the top in our discussion to become the focus of our writing, or the starting point for adventure. 

    *

    Filip Marinovich est l'auteur de "WOLFMAN LIBRARIAN" now available at Ugly Duckling Presse. 

  36. THE FLOWER AND THE TANK: DOCUMENTARY POETICS
    Workshop led by Wendy Xu


    Class size: 5-8 students
    Dates: February 21-March 21
    Time: Saturdays, 2-5pm, Weekly

    Register at Brooklyn Poets here. Registration is $295. 
    Registration deadline: Sunday, February 15. Earlybird discount $20 off by Sunday, February 1.

    *

    Poetry bears witness to history. The poet Liu Xiaobo wrote in response to the 1989 Tian’anmen Square protests of existing “between the flower and the tank,” a sentiment we will take up in this workshop as emblematic of the collision between first-person experience and overwhelming political reality. In these five weeks we will explore the generative possibilities of using poetry to document a historical moment and/or self, a personal psychology/pathology, a process of thinking acted upon by the forces of time—most likely where all of these things intersect. Taking a second cue from Lyn Hejinian’s idea of the “open text,” one in which “all the elements of the work are maximally excited,” students will experiment with and borrow from the language of mainstream documentation and use it to a different end. How can poetry speak on (and against) the contemporary moment with a different mouth than corporate reportage? Where do the myriad concerns of a modern first-person self merge with journalistic intention? Students will situate themselves as poet, archivist, historian, narrator and critic. Texts will be considered by Lucy Ives, Anna Moschovakis, Liu Xiaobo, Claudia Rankine, Lyn Hejinian, Aaron Kunin, Danez Smith, Myung Mi Kim and various others.

    *

    Wendy Xu is the author of You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013) and several chapbooks. Selected by D.A. Powell for the 2011 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, her recent work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Hyperallergic, The Voltaand elsewhere. She was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2014. She lives in Bushwick and teaches writing at CUNY.

  37. **

    TWITTER AND TYPEWRITERS: WRITING IN A HYPERCONNECTED WORLD
    Workshop led by Melissa McDaniel

    Class size: up to 12
    Dates: February 23-March 30
    Time: Mondays, 7-9:30pm, Weekly

    Registration deadline: February 16th. Email info@wendyssubway.com with subject line "Twitter and Typewriters"

    *

    We are now living in a postdigital world, where the question of whether to adapt to or disregard technology is no longer relevant. Instead, we are faced with a different predicament: what is our role in this world as writers? The internet has revolutionized the way we absorb and create content, and literature is facing a major transition.

    In this 6 week workshop, we will consider how digital technology has helped or hindered our ability to create and experience what we call literature. As writers, we will examine how we can respond to this brave new world of digital technology, focusing on literature’s power to transform. In our quest for answers, we will read and discuss internet poetry, scientific findings, experimental prose, social commentary, and student work. Each class will be divided between discussions and workshops. Throughout this course, participants will have several opportunities to submit work for group critique. In addition to readings and workshops, we will also complete digital writing exercises (including writing a collaborative piece in a Google Doc) and conclude with a public reading at Wendy’s Subway (date TBA).

    *

    Melissa McDaniel is a southern transplant currently living in Bedford-Stuyvesant. She is a staff editor at theNewerYork Press, and her work has been published in Be About It PressLuna Station QuarterlyLiars’ League NYCWendy’s Is, and elsewhere. She is fond of both Twitter and typewriters. 


  38. Deconstruct | Reconstruct: Critiquing the MFA
    Led by Adjua Greaves

    Dates: October 28 - December 16, 2014
    Schedule: Weekly, Tuesdays 7-9pm

    Deconstruct | Reconstruct — Critiquing the MFA is a reading-and-discussion group culminating in a symposium on the topic of extra-institutional higher education. The program evolves out of facilitator Adjua Greaves’ durational performance, unschoolMFA, in which she works to identify the constitutive elements of higher education in the visual and performing arts in order to develop a rigorous, self-directed, program of study. 

    The first of the eight weekly workshops will be an opportunity for participants and the facilitator to co-curate the texts to be engaged during the first half of the meetings. During the second half of the workshop, participants will begin to specialize in topics related to extra-institutional higher education in order to develop a response project to present at a symposium in early 2015. Greaves will be available in the weeks leading up to the symposium to give feedback to those presenting. 

    This 8-week workshop will begin on Tuesday, October 28th at 7 PM. Participants are encouraged to review the facilitator’s proposed syllabus and to arrive at the first meeting prepared to engage as suggested. We will be gathering in the enclosed meeting room. Meeting-room doors open at 6:30 PM, and discussion will begin promptly at 7 PM. 

    We look forward to your contributions to Deconstruct | Reconstruct — Critiquing the MFA.


    CALENDAR AND SYLLABUS


    October 28

    INTRODUCTIONS

    • Facilitator, Adjua Greaves—uMFA_1, gives brief overview of history of unschoolMFA and her intent in collaborating with Wendy’s Subway to host Deconstruct | Reconstruct — Critiquing the MFA
    • Participants share their educational histories, current creative practices and interests, and the questions and concerns that lead them to join this reading-and-discussion group.
    • Participants review reading list provided by facilitator, contribute additional material, consider the logistics of collective/individual coverage of reading material and decide on workshop pace.
    • Participants identify through-line questions for these discussions.


    November 4

    LEARNING AND EDUCATION

    Education — Primer” (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art) (Allen [ed], 2011), Experience and Education (Dewey, 1938)Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (Freire, 1970), Education Automation: Comprehensive Learning for Emergent Humanity (Fuller, 1962),Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education (Haworth [ed], 2012), The Undercommons: Fugitive Learning and Black Study, (Harney & Moten, 2013), Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of Freedom (hooks, 1994)Lapham’s Quarterly: Ways of Learning (Lapham [ed], 2008), The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education (Llewellyn, 1998),  Cabinet Magazine: Learning (Najafi, 2010).


    November 11

    ART SCHOOL

    Education (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art) (Allen [ed], 2011), Rethinking the Contemporary Art School (Buckley, 2010), Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education (Chicago, 2014)Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art (Elkins [ed], 2014), Black Mountain College (Katz, 2013), Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) (Madoff [ed], 2009)Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Assignment (Paper Monument, 2012), Seven Days in the Art World — “The Crit” (Thornton, 2008), 101 Things to Learn in Art School (White, 2011), 


    November 18

    WRITING PROGRAMS

    Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Graff, 2007), MFA vs NYC: Two Cultures of American Fiction (Harbach [ed], 2014)The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and The Rise of Creative Writing (McGurl, 2008), The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 (Myers, 2006), 

    November 25

    INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE 

    Institutions by Artists (Khonsary & Podesva [eds], 2012), Should I Go to Grad School?: 41 Answers to an Impossible Question (Loudis, et al [eds], 2014)Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will be Made Not Managed (Ohanian, 2013), The New Administration of a Fine Arts Education (Voorhies, 2011)

    December 2

    PARTICIPANT SPECIALIZATION

    December 9

    PARTICIPANT SPECIALIZATION

    December 16

    PARTICIPANT SPECIALIZATION

    January 6

    PRESENTATION FEEDBACK

    January 13

    PRESENTATION FEEDBACK

    January 20

    PRESENTATION FEEDBACK

    TBA

    S Y M P O S I U M


    COMPREHENSIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY


    Allen, Felicity, editor. Education. Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Iwona Blazwick. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2011.

    Aurobindo, Sri. The National Value of Art. 1910.

    Chicago, Judy. Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education. The Monacelli Press, 2014.

    Dewey, John. Experience & Education.  New York: Touchstone, 1938.

    Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

    Fuller, R. Buckminster. Education Automation. Comprehensive Learning for Emergent Humanity, edited by Jaime Snyder. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010.

    Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.

    Harbach, Chad, editor. MFA VS NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction. New York: n+1 & Faber and Faber, 2014.

    Haworth, Robert H., editor. Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education. Oakland, California: PM Press, 2012.

    Katz, Vincent, editor. Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013.

    Khonsary, Jeff and Kristina Lee Podesva, eds. Institutions by Artists: Volume One. Filip Folio Series: C. Vancouver, British Columbia: Fillip Editions & the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centers, 2012.

    Lapham, Lewis H., editor. Ways of Learning. Lapham’s Quarterly. Volume 1, Number 4. New York: American Agora Foundation, Fall 2008.

    Llewellyn, Grace. The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to quit school and get a real life and education. Revised edition. Eugene, Oregon: Lowry House, 1998.

    Jessica Loudis (et al), editors. Should I Go to Grad School: 41 Answers to an Impossible Question. TKTKTKTK: Bloomsbury, 2014.

    Madoff, Steven Henry, editor. Art School: (propositions for the 21st century). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2009.

    McGurl, Marc. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009.

    Myers, David Gershom. The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006.

    Najafi, Sina, ed. Learning. Cabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture. Issue 39. New York: Immaterial Incorporated, Fall 2010.

    O’Hanian, Alexis. Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century will be made, not managed.  New York: Business Plus, 2013.

    Petrovich, Dushko and Roger White. Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment. n+1 Foundation: Brooklyn, New York, 2012.

    Thornton, Sarah. “The Crit.” Seven Days in the Art World. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.

    Voorhies, James and Lisa Dent, curators. The New Administration of a Fine Arts Education. Bureau for Open Culture & Columbus College of Art and Design, 2011.

    White, Kit. 101 Things to Learn in Art School. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2011.

     

  39. READING POETS BY SUN SIGN: WHITMAN THE GEMINI 
    Workshop led by Filip Marinovich
    June 2014: Wednesdays, 7-9pm

    Free and open to all: sign up by emailing wendys.subway@gmail.com

    Like the song says: I LIKE WHITMAN IN JUNE! / HOW ABOUT YOU? / I LIKE A WHITMAN TUNE! / HOW ABOUT YOU? Join us for four Wednesdays (days of Mercury, Mercredi, ruler of Gemini,) in June as we celebrate Whitman by tearing his textual body apart like the hot Osiris he is! And then we reassemble him and ourselves in our own writing. How can we re-map Manhattan and Brooklyn through a Whitmanic gaze? Will Uncle Walt turn us queer? We certainly hope so! For tis the season of Twins! Twins! And we shall thrive thorough it. If SONG OF MYSELF is the seed text for so much of what has flowered since, what kind of Venus flytraps can we cultivate now in this our hothouse planet of glass and gas. Poets to the Emergency Room!   

    Filip Marinovich is the author of ZERO READERSHIP, AND IF YOU DON'T GO CRAZY I'LL MEET YOU HERE TOMORROW, and the forthcoming WOLFMAN LIBRARIAN, all from Ugly Duckling Presse. He worked as librarian at The People's Library at Occupy Wall Street Zuccotti Park and as co-compiler of the OCCUPY WALL STREET POETRY ANTHOLOGY with Steven Boyer. In February 2013 he began to teach READING POETS BY SUN SIGN, an ongoing workshop at the intersection of poetry, astrology, and archetype study. 
  40. Mapping Reading: Wandering through Art Books
    Saturday, April 15, 4-6pm 

    Led by Jorge Munguía
    Ages: 14-18
    Limited capacity: 10 participants
    Email info@wendyssubway.com to register

    This workshop will explore different ways of freely approaching and interpreting art and poetry books. In collaboration and conversations with others, participants are asked to turn a book of their choosing into a collective map. We will experiment with different ways of mapping and representing ideas using landscape as a metaphor for the exercise. The resulting maps will become part of an internationally shared network of rotating shows and digital exhibitions for future readers. 

    Bring along a book you like or choose one from our collection! All other supplies will be provided.


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