Conversation led by CCS Bard’s Luma Foundation Fellow and Senior Academic Advisor Dr. Nana Adusei-Poku, with Coco Fusco, Carmen Mörsch and Mabel O. Wilson, as part of the Performa 19 Biennial.
The art school of the 21st Century has to be informed by historical foundations of art education as a contested field in which hegemonic discourses are challenged as well as perpetuated. It is timely that now in its Centennial year, we look at the Bauhaus, seldom critically discussed pedagogical foundations. This panel aims to reflect on and critically access the Bauhaus’ pedagogical approach and current art educational discourses.
What is the historical background for Gropius’s notion of the “human”? Who did he envision liberated through creative forces, understanding material, and recognizing basic laws of visual design? What were his makings of art education on his time? How can we learn, align with and continue to push the boundaries of contemporary art education?
In the spirit of the Bauhaus, this panel consists of thinkers from various disciplines in order to create a multidisciplinary conversation and debate.
Nana Adusei-Poku is a Senior Academic Advisor and Luma Foundation Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She held the position of Research Professor for Cultural Diversity from 2013 to 2014, for Visual Cultures at the Willem de Kooning Academy (2015–17), and was the Guest Lecturer at the University of the Arts, Zurich from 2012-2018. Her articles are published in Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, eflux, Kunstforum International, Flash Art, L’Internationale, and Darkmatter a.o., and translated in English, German, Portuguese, French, and Swedish. She was the curator of Performances of No-thingness at the Academy of Arts Berlin in 2018.
Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is a recipient of a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in such venues as the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, the Whitney Biennial (2008 and 1993), and BAM’s Next Wave Festival. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York and teaches at Cooper Union.
Carmen Mörsch is Professor for Art Education at Mainz Academy of Arts, Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany. Her interests lie in re/constructing histories, concepts and practices in art education starting from a queer-feminist and post-colonial/critical race perspective. From 2008 to 2018 she has been Head of the Research Institute for Art Education at the Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland. Between 2003 and 2008 she was assistant professor for material culture education at the at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. She has been working internationally as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Curatorial Research & Practice at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, USA; Fundacion Museos de la Ciudad Quito, Ecuador; Master Cultural Production, Salzburg University; Camberwell College of Art, MA Curatorial Studies, London; Wits School of the Arts, University of Witswatersrand, Johannesburg, SA; The School of the Art Institute, Chicago, MA Art Education at the NYU; OOR Gallery, Vancouver. Mörsch has been conducting the PhD programme “Art Education” at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna since 2011. Together with Nora Landkammer, she forms e-a-r (education and arts research) collective. She is a member of the network “Another Roadmap for Arts Education” which unites colleagues who seek to analyse and develop art education collaboratively in an emancipatory and decolonizing perspective.
Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor in Architecture and also a professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies at Columbia University. She has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012). With her practice Studio &, Wilson is a collaborator in the architectural team currently developing designs for the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture?, a collective that advocates for fair labor practices on building sites worldwide.
More information on Performa 19 here.
CREDITS A School for Creating Humansis supported by the Performa Commissioning Fund and Goethe-Institut New York. Special thanks to CCS Bard.