my pedagogy

Accessibility to the arts ● non-traditional archive making ● returning to child-like joy

My pedagogical approach is centered in an understanding that historically, the arts have always belonged to the people, whether through traditional craft, culture, design, or otherwise. However, in the age of contemporary arts, empire, colonialism, and capitalism, the general public feel disempowered to engage with art-making, as it has become commonly viewed as inaccessible. Inaccessibility has looked like gate-keeping tools and learning opportunities, the pressure to create profitable or “perfect” work, or feeling unwelcome in arts institutions and museums.

In both my pedagogy and my creative practice, I embody the learnings of Jack Halberstam’s “The Queer Art of Failure,” particularly, low art theory. Halberstam highlights in his writings that academic (and creative) disciplines function on “genre purity”, where they “jealously guard their boundaries” of their disciplines. In defiance of the status-quo, Halberstam encourages active failure and to be “frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant.” I view these words as an inspiration to the public, entitling us to create without expectation to make mistakes without regret, so that we may inevitably discover ourselves, our chosen tools, and our practices.

Another historically inaccessible place is the archive. The archons of history are institutive and conservative in nature. These “guardians” used their archontic power to centralize, identify, and classify documents, objects, and art. And yet, these archives were and in often continue to be private, in the hands of higher authorities, and not designed to empower the public in learning their histories. As an individual who has been struck with “archive fever”, I could not conform to the classical archival methods that often in their efforts to document, erase a multitude of living meanings and stories in their curation. I endeavor in both my creative practice and my teachings, that I do what I can to provide tools for the public to discover their own methods of non-traditional archive-making, so that they may create their own meanings and discover and preserve their histories.