Art & Education presents a new School Watch report on La Práctica and the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative and the new Classroom program “Up Close: Moving People, Changing Climate,” curated by Céline Condorelli.
Support Structures: La Práctica and the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative
By Marina Reyes Franco
“Beta-Local’s La Práctica, the most inventive of Puerto Rico’s art education programs, has developed through variations and internal revisions since its founding in 2009 in San Juan by artists Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and José “Tony” Cruz and curator Michy Marxuach. Its first groups of fellows established an experimental, elastic pedagogical structure at a particularly vulnerable moment for Puerto Rico, with the beginning of the global financial collapse, the third year of a local recession, and the implementation of austerity measures that crippled Puerto Rico’s economy and triggered island-wide student strikes. Under these conditions, it was difficult to imagine a dignified cultural life on the island, but Beta-Local’s daring approach to cultural production, ability to mutate, and collaborative leadership have become hallmarks of the organization in the nine years since. This past August, as the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria approached, the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, which is partly inspired by La Práctica and other local projects, was launched in partnership with Northwestern University. Though different in many ways, both programs seek to provide resources and intellectual stimulation to artists and other cultural producers eager to continue creating in and thinking from Puerto Rico.” [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.
Up Close: Moving People, Changing Climate
Curated by Céline Condorelli
“Recently I found myself in a place torn between climate change and migration, lacking in knowledge, looking for a bibliography, seeking out what might speak to my questions. That was hard to find. There is no lack of materials on climate change and global warming nor of literature on all types on migration and refugees. There is less on the conflation between the two, and I find most of the material unnecessarily abstract and fluffy, or hyper-pragmatic, catastrophic, and situation-specific. I am pulled between two equally distancing possibilities, looking for voices that bring these two issues closer together and to me, that work against distance and empathize across time and space. Where to go between Donna Haraway and disaster activism in Northern Greece?
I feel out of my depth in these subjects, having given them not much more than general interest and concern in the past. I am by no means on anyone’s list of whom to contact if they were setting up a project on related issues and think: Which artists have been looking at…? Therefore this contribution, as well as some recent projects of mine on the subject, are part of a larger desire to educate myself.” [read more]
Featuring films and lectures from Jorge Furtado, T.J. Demos, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Pavel, Avery F. Gordon, Artavazd Pelechyan, Inhabitants, Kari Norgaard, and Angela Anderson and Angela Melitopoulos.
Classroom features thematically organized lectures and conversations chosen by artists and thinkers on issues relevant to their practice and contemporary artistic discourse.
