First annual Art + Research Center Summer Intensive

Enrollment is now open for two-weeks of free graduate-level seminars exploring the intersection of climate change and cultural production.

This July, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) convenes the first annual Art + Research Center (A+RC) Summer Intensive, which aims to address how urgent climate change issues and anthropogenic effects influence contemporary cultural production. The 2017 semester runs July 10 through 21, and continues ICA Miami’s rigorous education and public programming during the transition from its temporary location in the Moore Building to its new permanent home in the Miami Design District, opening December 1, 2017.

Developed by ICA Miami’s Curator of Programs, Gean Moreno, the Art + Research Center is the first museum-based research department in South Florida focused on theoretical inquiry. A+RC’s field-advancing curricula includes application-based graduate-level seminars and workshops, as well as free lectures and programs offered to the general public with a focus on fostering the next generation of socially-minded cultural producers in Miami and beyond. 

The Art + Research Center 2017 Summer Intensive encompasses four seminars on topics ranging from Miami’s current and near-term conditions, to the Everglades waterways, to abstract questions around what it means to produce art on a planet that is rapidly changing, and how these issues urgently relate to current cultural production. Visiting faculty include theorists and cultural producers from around the country and Miami, including Miccosukee activist Reverend Houston Cypress, visual studies pioneer and activist Nicholas Mirzoeff, theorist Claire Colebrook, and urban geographer Stephanie Wakefield.

The deadline to apply is July 1, 2017. Admission is free, however space is limited. ICA members, college students, and national and international artists and cultural producers are encouraged to apply. All seminars will take place at ICA Miami, located at 4040 NE 2nd Ave, Suite 200, Miami. Applications are available now at icamiami.org/arc.

Visiting faculty & schedule

Reverend Houston Cypress
Seminar: July 10–12, 10am–12pm, 2–4pm
Reverend Houston Cypress is a poet, artist, environmental activist and ordained minister. Through his organization, Love the Everglades Movement, Cypress has become a major force within Miccosukee society as an advocate for cultural preservation, environmental protection, business development and sovereignty. Cypress also acts as a cultural ambassador, leading the way for meaningful exchange and connection between his society of clans and the outside world.

Stephanie Wakefield
Seminar: July 13–14, 10am–12pm, 2–4pm
Stephanie Wakefield is an urban geographer and Assistant Professor in Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College at The New School. She has written and organized extensively around the political and philosophical questions of the Anthropocene, exploring it as a threshold moment of both great potential and catastrophe. She is finalizing a book on the being, time and politics of oysters, “living infrastructures” of urban resilience in post-Sandy New York. Her new research explores urban “experimentation” as a mode of dwelling in the Anthropocene and emancipatory possibilities offered by the concept of the “back loop.”

Claire Colebrook
Seminar: July 17–20, 10am–12pm
Claire Colebrook is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. She has published books and articles on contemporary European philosophy, queer theory, visual culture, poetry, literary history gender studies and literary theory. Her most recent book is Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols, co-authored with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller.

Nicholas Mirzoeff
Seminar: July 18–21, 2–5pm
Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics and global/digital visual culture. His most recent book, How To See The World, was published by Pelican in the UK (2015) and by Basic Books in the US (2016). Mirzoeff is considered one of the founders of the academic discipline of visual culture in books like An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999/2009) and (as editor) The Visual Culture Reader (1998/2002/2012). His new project, The Appearance of Black Lives Matter has recently been published as a free e-book by NAME Publications, Miami.