Summer Sessions

Risk, Learning, and Creativity

July 8-12, 2012

2012 Summer Conference Presenters and Workshop Leaders

CHRISTINA BERTONI is an artist and a Professor at RISD. Her work—the focus of which centers on giving physical and material form to notions of remembering, transformation, and transcendence involves aspects of ceramics, painting, and sculpture. Christina Bertoni’s work is in national and international collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

What are you curious about? What is it that you can’t not do? What do you do that you love that feels like cheating because it’s too much fun or “not hard enough” or “serious” enough? When we follow our curiosities we risk going in odd directions that might not seem sensible or practical or beautiful. Destinations are not predictable or obviously pleasing to others. This workshop will help you find the courage to take a chance in a new direction and find the clues that will enable you to continue your vital journey. One foot in front of the other!

In addition to a career in design, JOHN BIELENBERG created a program called Project M that is built to inspire and educate young designers, writers, photographers, and filmmakers by proving that their work—especially their wrongest thinking—can have a positive and significant impact on the world. Project M has developed projects to help a conservation area in Costa Rica, Micro-financing in Ghana, New Orleans after Katrina, the community of East Baltimore, connecting households to fresh water in Hale County Alabama, and addressing the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Alabama.

John Bielenberg’s workshops will focus on When Wrong is Right. What John Bielenberg does best is help organizations, and their people, find the courage and the sense of humor to consider whole new, “Wrong” ways of bringing their stories, ideas, and innovations out into the world. Thinking Wrong can help pull us out of the ruts of the status quo and towards a positive sustainable future.

JUDITH BURTON is Professor and Director of Art and Art Education, Columbia University Teachers College. She received an Ed. D. from Harvard University; her research focuses on the artistic-aesthetic development of children and adolescents and the implications this has for teaching and learning. Dr. Judith Burton cofounded the Center for Research in Arts Education at Teachers College, and she founded the Heritage School, a comprehensive high school located in Harlem, New York. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts in Great Britain, a Distinguished Fellow of the National Art Education Association, and serves as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing, China. Dr. Judith Burton is a trustee of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

Risk taking is synonymous with learning and the arts offer the most fertile arena for this activity of the mind. The pattern is set in earliest infancy when play opens a world of investigation, exploration, and discovery providing the grounding for the emergence of imagination and creativity that will follow as children grow towards adulthood. Yet, it is precisely these activities of mind that are most at risk in today’s schools with their scripted curricular and fact based assessments. Dr. Judith Burton’s presentation will suggest that this disjunction has serious implications for the education of artists, teachers, and young people in schools.

MEREDITH HALL’s memoir, Without a Map, was published by Beacon Press in 2007. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Fourth Genre, and in many other journals and anthologies. Meredith Hall is the recipient of a Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation, the Maine Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Fellowship, and her essays have won a number of awards including the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. In 2008, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses honored her as their Emerging Writer in Nonfiction. Meredith Hall teaches in the MFA Writing program at the University of New Hampshire. meredithhall.org

When the Writer is Present Everywhere and Visible Nowhere: Daring to Trust the Story

What happens if the writer dares to disappear from the page, abandoning exposition and relying instead, as filmmakers do, on story to open the world of memory? Like filmmakers, memoirists locate and mine sensory images for meaning, and use the essential elements of narrative writing to create story from those images. In Meredith Hall’s workshop we will do a lot of writing play, using the tools of filmmaking to forge memory images into focused, convincing scenes. We will share our work, and writers will leave with ideas and prompts for future writing.

LIZ LERMAN is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator, and speaker. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976, and in July 2011 handed the artistic leadership of the company over to the next generation of Dance Exchange artists. Liz Lerman is pursuing many new projects with fresh partnerships, the first of which took place last fall as she was visiting lecturer hosted by the Department of Music at Harvard University. She has received a number of honors, including a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, and her work has been commissioned by many organizations, including the Lincoln Center, American Dance Festival, and the Kennedy Center. Liz Lerman’s most recent created work is The Matter of Origins, and Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), is a collection of her essays.

Liz Lerman’s presentation is entitled Hiking the Horizontal: Making rules, breaking rules, and creating the conditions for the power, usefulness, and beauty of artistic practice.

SUGATA MITRA is Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, UK and is Visiting Professor at MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, USA. He holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Solid State Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Dehli and works in the areas of Cognitive Science, Information Science and Educational Technology, Physics and Energy. He is credited with having started the database publishing industry (particularly the Yellow Page industry) in India and Bangladesh, as well as having implemented the first applications of digital multimedia and internet based education in India in the late 1980s. Through this work Sugata Mitra discovered that the Internet, computers and children are literally “made for each other,” with cognitive processes so similar that children need little or no instruction to master computing at the basic level. He is currently designing hardware and software that enable children to reach the intermediate to expert level on their own. Sugata Mitra’s work, which started in developing and deprived areas has produced pointers to how schooling can be improved anywhere. His method is currently being tried in schools in England, Italy, China, India and the USA. Sugata Mitra’s work inspired the book “Slumdog Millionaire” that went on to become the Oscar winning film of 2009.

When Children Teach Themselves: Self-Organizing Systems in Primary Education

Starting with the “Hole in the Wall” experiments of 1999, Sugata Mitra’s talk will address the idea that when children are given the appropriate resources (computers and internet) they can achieve many objectives of schooling on their own.

ARTURO O’FARRILL, pianist, composer, conductor, and educator, is founder and director of the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance, a not for profit organization dedicated to the performance, preservation, and education of Afro Latin jazz. Leading his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, Arturo O’Farrill received a GRAMMY award for Best Latin Jazz Album in 2009, for Song for Chico, as well as awards from the Jazz Journalists Association, the Alliance of New York State Arts Organizations, and a Distinguished Alumnus Award from Brooklyn College. As a composer, Arturo O’Farrill has received commissions from Jazz at Lincoln Center, Meet the Composer, The Philadelphia Music Project, and the Big Apple Circus. arturoofarrill.com

Arturo O’Farrill’s presentation will focus on the idea: Structured improvisation or spontaneous design? Great artists from all art forms have sought to capture the uncapturable—the transitory life essence that disappears as soon as you experience it. The greatest symphonies, soaring architecture, and all great works of art are but snapshots of an improvisation that is yet unfolding.

JUDITH SCHAECHTER received a BFA in Glass from RISD, and has lived and worked in Philadelphia since 1983. She teaches at the New York Academy of Art and The University of the Arts, and has also taught at Pilchuck, Penland, Toyama Institute of Glass, Japan, RISD, and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Crafts, a Louis Comfort Tiffany award, Joan Mitchell Award, two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts awards, The Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and a Leeway Foundation grant. Her work has been in numerous exhibitions, including the 2002 Whitney Biennial and 2011 Venice Biennale, and is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Corning Museum of Glass, New York; and Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. judithschaechter.com

Surviving Your Creativity

Creativity is mysterious, miraculous, and utterly crucial to an artists’ practice. Guided by questions such as, “How does one become inspired? How does one choose the one idea to pursue amongst many ideas? How does inspiration get processed and or developed into tangible, material substance and what happens to it along the way?”, I researched the subject and divided creativity into the following: Inspiration, Perspiration (developing ideas into pieces), Practice (work habits, motivation), Audience, and Beliefs. We will cover all of these topics, with a focus on what is most non-verbal and ephemeral.

JACOB TONSKI is a pragmatic optimist whose work explores dynamic balance through kinetic metaphors. He received an MFA from the Design Media Arts department at University of California at Los Angeles, studied computer science at Brown University, and worked as a Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios. Jacob Tonski is an Assistant Professor of Art and Interactive Media at Miami University, Ohio. His work has been shown in Germany, Greece, Portugal, China, The Netherlands, online, and throughout the US. jacobtonski.com

Pluperfect

Post industrialism dreams new modes of production. Machines now endeavor to make unique objects in series, just as their masters have for centuries. These perfect machines think they can make anything. Let’s try to find out if they can produce the imperfect. Let’s test their limits. Starting with the Workmanship of Risk as a point of departure, this workshop will look at our conceptions of perfect and imperfect and measure the mark of a computer-controlled laser cutter against the mark of the hand.