Building Your Art World

Life, to start with, is not just about your professional life. There is so much more to it than just work. The trouble is that, when you get into art, that ‘so much more’ is precisely what you want your work to be about. Life is what you want to immerse yourself in through your work. Jan Verwoert, “Life Work”

This course is built around a series of conversations between nine scholar/critic and artist pairs. We will be entering the conversation en media res, as it were, since all of these pairs have histories together; they’ve had studio visits, late-night phone calls, email and text conversations. Usually the scholar has written about the artist and maybe the artist has suggested reading and viewing lists to the scholar. They’ve helped each other feel seen, and often be seen in a more literal way.

The conversations will concentrate on these questions: How do artists and scholars work across the divide between practice and theory? How should you build your art world and who will be in it? The pairs will discuss their respective practices (art-making, writing, researching, community-building) and engage in conversation about the artist’s work.