Professor John Cayley
Tuesdays, 10:30 am - 12:50 pm, Fall 2019
Priority Deadline: April 30
Final Deadline: Sept 6
About the Course
This collaborative Arts Workshop, which may be taken for course credit, provides a forum for developing and discussing in-progress creative research and practice with the intention of preparing projects for public presentation during subsequent semesters. Presentations may include but are not limited to, exhibitions, performances, interactive installations and symposia.
Co-offered by the Brown Arts Initiative and Brown’s arts departments, the weekly workshop aims to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and critique among arts practitioners in varied academic/career stages and is limited to 12 participants: four faculty, four graduate students and four undergraduates.
Participants are not limited to members of arts departments. Anyone with an aesthetic practice – especially an experimental, collaborative and/or engaged art practice – and with a clearly formulated project idea or an actual work-in-progress is welcome to apply for consideration. The workshop also invites participants with projects that are critical and aesthetic research-as-practice or practice-oriented research (that is, critically devoted to arts practices; e.g., writing on art), chiefly characterized as having a theoretical or humanities-research inclination, but one that is also committed to creative engagement.
Each applicant is invited to propose a specific creative practice/research project to be developed during the course of the semester. In the semester(s) following the workshop, participants will have access to production assistance from the BAI for public presentations in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, as available.
The workshop requires an online application process, and successful applicants will be provided with instructor permission to enroll.
Required Coursework
Participants are required to attend all workshop sessions, present their work in class for feedback/critique and contribute to group discussions. As and when participants share readings, artwork that has influenced them and/or reference materials, the other members of the workshop are asked to study these materials and be prepared to respond to them in the workshop.
Participants are expected to develop their project proposals during the course of the workshop as an aspect of documentation – typically, this includes web-presentable descriptions, an archive-ready introduction to the work and material concerning the project's aims, techniques, claims for its artistic/aesthetic significance, didactics and (if necessary) instructions for users, limitations, plans/projections for future development, etc. At mid-term a justification and revision of the proposal is required and, at the end of the course, documentation of the project will be produced intended for the Brown Digital Repository and accessible to a Distributed Gallery (details TBD).
Participants share space, folders and files on a Brown-supported Google Drive and are encouraged to make every reasonable effort to share as much of their research, inspirations and actual work-in-progress with other members of the workshop using this shared resource.
Who Should Apply
Undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty working on practice- or research-based aesthetic projects with the intention of preparing them for a broad public audience. Students working on thesis and capstone projects will be prioritized.
Support Provided
The workshop aims to provide a supportive environment for participants to experiment with new concepts, collaborate with peers from throughout the University and prepare to engage with new audiences. Throughout the workshop, participants receive priority access to spaces and materials at the Granoff Center, as well as support for presenting final projects at the Granoff Center, as appropriate, during subsequent semesters.
Criteria for Selection
Participants will be selected with an eye towards curating an interdisciplinary cohort addressing similar themes within their work. Priority will be given to work that can be best supported by resources available through the BAI and the Granoff Center.
