What does a young artist need to know?
James Baldwin believed that art is something that the artist “cannot keep to himself.” Rainer Maria Rilke, too, advised young poets to “ask yourself at your most silent hour of night: must I write?”
But, beyond identifying this compulsion, the need that “stretches its roots into the deepest part of the heart,” according to Rilke, what does a young artist need to know in order to create?
This is the governing question for our course and for these pages. What artworks, histories and theories would one young artist share with another? What concepts have shaped their own creative or critical practices? What thinkers have influenced their sense of the political or ethical responsibilities of art and artists? What artists and artworks have served as role models? How do you cultivate creativity?
