Art & Education presents a new School Watch report by Matt Sussman on Curatorial Research Bureau of California College of the Arts and the new Classroom program “Social Relations > Property Relations: A Speculative Curriculum,” curated by Anthony Romero.
Within the Institution, Without Walls: Curatorial Research Bureau
By Matt Sussman
“Providing a theoretical background, as well as an overview of the practical skills required by curatorial work, is the balancing act faced by any professionalizing program in the field. In addition to foundational coursework on the history and practice of exhibition making, Curatorial Research Bureau students, like Curatorial Studies candidates before them, will collaboratively develop, organize, and install a capstone exhibition at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the end of their second year. Curatorial Studies program chair James Voorhies hopes that future classes will have the opportunity to design the thesis show in partnership with other participating institutions, referring to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Wattis as this year’s ‘core samples.’ Similarly, both Beard and Linden see the potential for CRB to allow students to pursue their interests beyond the exhibition form into, say, public programming or educational initiatives, which could be complimentary components of a gallery show. Conceptually, CRB can be understood as an attempt to provide greater transparency, pulling back the curtain on master’s-level curatorial education and putting the work involved in achieving that balance between the theory and practice of exhibition-making on full view.” [read more]
School Watch presents distilled perspectives on degree programs in the arts, with interviews, critical texts and editorial exposés on MFAs, Masters, Doctorates and certificate programs in fine arts, art history, curatorial, cultural and film studies, and other related areas of specialty.
Social Relations > Property Relations: A Speculative Curriculum
Curated by Anthony Romero
“It is important to remind ourselves that systems like capitalism and neoliberalism have been so quickly naturalized because they remain functional within the afterlife of European settler colonialism. Much of the work of the settler-colonial state is built on the idea of preparation: making ready lands, resources, and peoples for extraction, profiteering, confinement, exclusion, erasure, and eventually death. These preparations occur in multiple directions at the same time. It’s not only about the colony and its environment, but about making ready the colonizers, the empires, the bureaucrats, legislators, and legal enforcers. If we imagine it as a machine, we must see a kind of self-correcting artificial intelligence: it learns from itself and its environments to make predictive choices about how to operate at the highest level of efficacy in the future. All of this is to say that while the term ‘property relations’ necessitates a discussion of capitalism, it is also woven into a complicated knot of overlapping and interconnected ideas, including colonialism, education, and incarceration, to name only some.”
Featuring lectures and performances from Eve Tuck, Justin Leroy, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Randy Martin, Aruna D’Souza, and Dan S. Wang. [read more]
Classroom features thematically organized lectures and conversations chosen by artists and thinkers on issues relevant to their practice and contemporary artistic discourse.