Escuela de Arte Útil (School of Useful Art)
June 20–August 10, 2017
A partnership between CCA Social Practice & Public Forms and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
California College of the Arts
Social Practice & Public Forms
1111 8th Street
San Francisco, CA 94017
Course hours
Tuesday–Thursday: 4–8pm
Friday: optional drop-in hours, 2–6pm
Tania Bruguera’s socially engaged projects perform the ways in which the aesthetics of art can be applied to everyday life forms, focusing on the transformation of social affect into political effectiveness. For her survey exhibition of long-term projects Tania Bruguera: Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder, organized by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) and on view June 16 through October 29, 2017, California College of the Art (CCA) has partnered with YBCA to appoint Bruguera visiting professor in Fine Arts in order to realize an immersive participatory work in the form of a school titled Escuela de Arte Útil (School of Useful Art) open to Bay Area college students and the general public.
Escuela de Arte Útil continues Bruguera’s interest in, and use of, the form of a school to harness the potential of art to shift perspectives and initiate social, political, and cultural change. It is based on the model of her earlier long-term pedagogical project, the Cátedra Arte de Conducta—which took place in her home in Havana from 2003 through 2009—coupled with the aims of the more recent Arte Útil Archive (2013–ongoing), which translates as “useful art,” but goes further by suggesting art as a tool or device. Studying the shifting role of contemporary art, the class will consider factors of the practice of Arte Útil such as institutional self-criticism, active hyperrealism, a-legality, reforming capital, beneficial outcomes, sustainability, intersection with other disciplines, and modes of creative collaboration.
The timing of this large-scale endeavor at YBCA coincides with California College of the Arts re-launching of its graduate-level Social Practice & Public Forms curriculum as a stand-alone MA program. The overall scope of Professor Bruguera’s Escuela de Arte Útil, its engagement with community, institutional cooperation, social politics, and the re-envisioning of art as a shifting public perception, is closely aligned to the curricular and research directions of the new MA program and overlaps with CCA’s overall pursuit of engaged critical and creative dialogue with public life through art and design.
Bruguera has conceived a new curriculum for Escuela de Arte Útil that uses the concept of Arte Útil to address the challenges facing artists today. In addition to the collaboration between YBCA and CCA, the project gathers together key cultural and academic institutions in the Bay Area including San Francisco Art Institute, University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco State University, the Asociación de Arte Útil, and the YBCA Fellows program.
Escuela will be the central pedagogical and installation component of YBCA’s exhibition, where Bruguera will be in residence. Convening three days per week for eight weeks, the school will feature important cultural producers whose voices will be integral to the weekly seminars organized by Bruguera. The students enrolled at academic institutions will receive credit toward their undergraduate and graduate education degrees, and will also be named YBCA Fellows. In addition to tending the academic needs of enrolled students, the course-as-exhibition at YBCA is, as stated, open to the public, offering YBCA audiences access to a slew of engaged artists and cultural producers who will contribute in the project. The model intends to insert critically charged dialogue often taking place in the private sphere of academic seminars into the public realm. Course schedule and application instructions available here.
The Arte Útil Summit 2017: “Does Art Have Users?” will occur from September 28 to 30, 2017, and is organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Education and Public Practice department and the Asociación de Arte Útil. The program is part of SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Distinguished Lecture Series.
Escuela de Arte Útil, a commissioned art project for the exhibition Tania Bruguera: Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder, is organized by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in collaboration with California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco State University, the Asociación de Arte Útil, and the YBCA Fellows program.
