SFAI Summer Symposium: “I Object! Self-Organization and Political Agency as Aesthetic Practice”

Keynote lecture: Tania Bruguera
Solo keynote performance: Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

In 2017, the SFAI Summer Symposium offers—mandates really—a space to engage more deeply with current political events and the possibilities for artistic creativity as resistance and solution. This is clear and evident in the ongoing practice of our keynote speaker, Tania Bruguera whose interventions, collaborations, and activist artworks seek to transform and redistribute power in its many guises. The questions that Bruguera poses will shape our conversations and, as such, the SFAI Summer Symposium will function as a satellite to her summer-long Escuela de Arte Útil which is part of her survey exhibition Tania Bruguera: Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder at Yerba Center for the Arts.

More specifically, symposium speakers will consider [re]current illegal actions and uncertain futures, generated by elected governments, through a variety of artistic practices centered on the possibility of political agency through the creation of sites for the creation civil disobedience in the post-State age. How can creative strategies of self-organization, resistance, and institutional re-purposing offer sustainable social solutions and a way forward? Ultimately, the SFAI Symposium as a gathering of peoples and a generator of alternative structures located on a Sanctuary Campus, will argue for why the arts and humanities—themselves imperiled—are more essential to social justice and equality than ever.

This event is free and open to the public.

Participants: Tania Bruguera, Leslie Dreyer, Guillermo Gómez-Peña., Jennifer A. González, Taraneh Hemami, Marc Mayer, Christian Nagler, San Francisco Poster Syndicate, Ellen Sebastian Chang, Bonnie Ora Sherk, WochenKlausur

Schedule
9am: Coffee
9:30am: Welcome + keynote lecture by Tania Bruguera
11am–1pm: Town Hall Meeting: Interventions and Institutions Redefined
1–2pm: Lunch, Local Activist Organization Fair, open mic, and poster printing with SF Poster Syndicate in preparation or the Western Regional Advocacy Project conference and political actions surrounding homelessness.
2–4pm: Town Hall Meeting: Activating, Collaborating, Advocating
4:15–5:30pm: Reception + artist walk-through of Katrín Sigurdardóttir: Metamorphic,  Walter and McBean Galleries
5:30pm: Solo keynote performance by Guillermo Gómez-Peña. (Cameo by Balitronica aka The Phantom Mariachi)

Sponsors
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) & Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)

About the San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), founded in 1871, is one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious institutions in the practice and study of contemporary art. As a diverse community of working artists and scholars, SFAI provides students with a rigorous education in the arts and preparation for a life in the arts through an immersive studio environment, an integrated liberal arts and art history curriculum, and critical engagement with the world. Committed to educating artists who will shape the future of art, culture, and society, SFAI fosters creativity and original thinking in an open, experimental, and interdisciplinary context.

SFAI offers BFA, BA, MFA, and MA degrees, a dual MA/MFA degree, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate, and a range of exhibitions, public programs, and public education courses. SFAI enrolls approximately 680 students in degree programs. Notable past faculty and alumni include Lance Acord, Ansel Adams, Kathryn Bigelow, Enrique Chagoya, Angela Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Kos, George Kuchar, Annie Leibovitz, Barry McGee, Manuel Neri, Catherine Opie, Peter Pau, Laura Poitras, Clyfford Still, and Kehinde Wiley.