Curriculum

Infrastructure

Directed by Linda Goode Bryant

For centuries, the infrastructure that props up today’s global production and market for art has been based on a business model that adheres to the fundamental principles and values of material gain and worth. Despite changes in the ways cultures and art have evolved during that same period, this infrastructure has essentially remained the same.

What if a different type of infrastructure were to be envisioned? One that is as antithetical as David Hammons’ Concerto in Black and Blue (2002) was to the relationship and expectations between artist and commercial gallery and to the core purpose and intent of the business of art?  What if that infrastructure were based on a cultural or creative model? Would it adhere to principles and values shaped by its care for humanity?

Could this infrastructure adequately and effectively support the life needs and creative practices of 21st century artists? How would it value art works and art makers? What would its structure, facilities, and operations need to be? Would art be discovered or happened upon by people going about their daily routines, such as with the wine bottle and snowball sales of David Hammons, or Senga Nengudi’s freeway performances, or Lorraine O’Grady’s Art Is?

Would it offer public programs? Would its installation of art be contextual, like footnotes in a David Foster Wallace story, instead of disassociated from the time, circumstances and conditions when the work was made and where it is engaged? Would the purpose, roles and power of curators and critics, museums and galleries, dealers, collectors and the donor class change with regards to their relationship with art, artists and the public?  

What if the value of art was based on its human and social impact rather than its value as a commodity? Fundamentally, can we imagine infrastructure that would be permeable to and informed by methodologies of artistic practice itself, in a reversal of today’s prevailing, dominant model? What would it resemble if informed by the structure of Lawrence “Butch” Morris’ method of conduction, the visual cacophony of Arthur Jafa’s moving images, or the organizational logic of Janet Henry’s Black Currant magazines, to name but a few examples of artistic practices that generate a different type of infrastructural form.

Using the public art museum as both a point of connection and departure from art’s current infrastructure, and situated at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Philadelphia, Session 9 fellows will engage with and begin to answer these questions as they envision and conceive of an infrastructure that supports and expands the level and degree to which artists pursue a perpetual need to create and create anew. A structure that diversifies the ways and means for making artists more self-sufficient in meeting their living and creative needs, drawing on knowledge born from the artists and their works themselves. An infrastructure that can exist as creative hubs within local communities and that expands ongoing access and direct engagement with art as a natural, daily part of life.

The curriculum will include discussions, presentations, and workshops with invited faculty, visits to cultural institutions seeking answers to similar questions, and the mounting of an evolutive exhibition at the ICA, beginning March 16th 2022.

Invited faculty members are the collective Gudskul, artist Arthur Jafa, designer Bryant Wells, filmmaker Louis Massiah, curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and arts administrator Sarah Workneh.