Malcolm: I’ll kick things off with a brief intro on why we are here today. We admire the history of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and its significance. Out of that, you created the New Art School Modality.
We thought it would be important to highlight the initiative and the work you’re doing, and how the foundation has positioned itself with a funding approach to allow for several grants over time and across multiple project iterations.
Sharon: Thank you, Malcolm, and thank you, Romi, for your time and for speaking with us. One of the things that the Terra Foundation is interested in—and it’s part of our mission—is to support the field in critically expanding the aperture of American art. And that requires us to do the work of American art differently. What we admire about the New Art School Modality is the ways you are presenting new pedagogical models. We often talk about the what of our work, but I think you’re really showing us the how of the work.
I’m hoping, Romi, that you can talk about the different ways that the New Art School Modality is doing the work of the art school. How do you think about NASM as an alternative model? How do you think about the ways it employs an intellectual and creative agenda drawn from Black cultural knowledge, specifically the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s? And maybe tell us more about what it’s reacting against and what future it’s proposing.
Romi: I want to start with your comment about how Terra has a mission to think about art and art history differently, because that’s a huge part of the New Art School Modality agenda.
There are three motivations. One of the key motivations comes from what you just mentioned: this notion, which I’ve been interested in for a long time, to produce a more dynamic, living and breathing, relationship to art historical knowledge.
To have a relationship to art historical knowledge that is not flat or static but is super dynamic. What do artists teach us? What do we learn from art making practices? That’s the piece of this that keeps me at it. You know, when I think about it and I wake up and I’m exhausted from all of the work, and ask why am I doing this? It is really that. That is something I’ve been chasing, I think, for a very long time. That’s the part for me that is probably as exciting as anything: Art history pursued in a different way—that exposes what we don’t know, what we got wrong, what we forgot to consider. This also means not just thinking about the art historical object as something that we can locate historically, study, or inventory or present or exhibit, — but paying attention to what we actually learn from it. I’ve learned a lot from art that might be dynamically deployed. For example, from art of the ’60s I’ve learned that we can structure how we learn to make art differently.
So that gets me to the second motivation, which is the Black Arts Movement. One of the art historical objects I was really interested in, and have been interested in for many years, is the Wall of Respect mural and artmaking from the 1960s in Chicago. This includes a group of artists who were affiliated in some way with the movement called the Black Arts Movement.
This project really comes from the research on this community of art makers. Research on their work and its ideological underpinnings serve as the intellectual foundation or underbelly of this work, absolutely. It’s the way I came to BAM School and the New Art School Modality projects, and it has everything to do with why it is in the form of a school. I’ll get to that in a minute.
This research on the Black Arts Movement made me realize that one of the things that was really interesting was that they often had something pedagogical embedded in their practices. It really was like looking at it long enough under a microscope and finding something. I found more evidence the other day that used the language of “demonstrations,” —but workshops, classes, institutes, all of these are prevalent within the context of their art practices. Sometimes they directly called them schools. What is key is that more often than not a pedagogical element or imperative was baked into their practices.
So again, I can evidence that with really notable artmaking projects. Whether that’s in the area of music in the AACM [the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians], or dance and choreography in the case of Darlene Blackburn, or theater in the case of Val Gray Ward and the Kuumba Theater Workshop, or the visual arts with OBAC or Third World Press, with the Institute of Positive Education—really, it’s a profound commonality.
Because I said I like to learn from and have a dynamic relation to the art historical object, I thought why don’t I, instead of writing a book about this or making an exhibit (which would be awesome and amazing as well), see if there’s a way to expose and demonstrate and continue (not just tell about and historicize) the significance of the pedagogical impulse. I wanted to honor that conceptual move and extend it into our current moment. So, that unique and important way of making art with a folded-in pedagogical piece, available to artists for free, is the inspiration for the New Art School Modality.
It was a generative and generous idea on the part of these artists. I thought: What if I were to not only examine this art history but also animate and enliven its pedagogical ethos in some way? Again, that is really the part that absolutely excites me, that keeps me going at it, because it follows from the research findings, –which reveal a genre of art shows us how to educate about art making.
Sharon: That’s so good, Romi, this way of thinking about the research and the models of pedagogy you’re talking about. The collaborative nature of it, its multivocal nature: This is not a model that has one faculty member talking to a group of students. You’ve created a cohort of faculty that models another way of learning and another way of research. Even the outcomes of the New Art School Modality look different. They’re broadsheets, films, art projects. Can you talk a bit more about these research methods and outcomes? What happens in those classrooms? And tell us more about the faculty, the all-star groups you bring together, which vary, because you have different themes for each New Art School Modality semester, each course. Could you reflect on that?
Romi: Happy to. So again, I’m following the research, the evidence. In making a school based on this, I wanted to pay attention to the methods of production utilized by this cohort and at this time. And one of those methods, very much, was collaboration. Most of the entities I mentioned are collaboratives in some way, or at least they’re not necessarily individuated artists working alone exclusively. These artists definitely had studio practices and were individuated in their way, but they also, as an extension of their practice, took part in collaborative projects. So, I didn’t want to offer courses that had a single authority on a given topic.
The faculty has been collective. It’s a collaborative faculty who for the most part have offered their posits on the given topics or issues, from their different vantage points and perspectives. That’s been really key. It would be a lot cheaper and a lot easier to hire one faculty person! But there’s a lot of noise in this, that’s really wonderful. Again, I would also say, Sharon, that this moves the needle a bit on how we think of the production of art historical knowledge. It takes the notion of a single authority to task by realizing a course that constantly disrupts ideas via other people’s contributions. There have been moments when it’s extremely dissonant. Though most times it’s just sort of calm, and we take everything in, and in our notes we recognize the different views. Both of those situations are valid and fine.
Another methodology that’s in play in the courses, as I think you mentioned, is in the “outcome projects,” which are really meant to be that thing that exists in lieu of credit. The courses are free. There’s no credit given. This is something else that I’m trying to revise or shift a bit. And so instead of credit, we can ask: Why not work hard over those ten weeks and pay attention to the material and what I over-call “posits” and make the work that you need to make, without an authority giving you a grade or even credit? Everybody jokes with me about my approach to posits. But I like posits. The faculty offer posits and then the students go away and make work (if they are inspired to) and then we have an opportunity that allows anyone who wants to—they opt in—to contribute work to the “outcome project.”
The FESTAC course was the first course. We ended up with an outcome project in the form of a film, which pulled together some of the ideas and work sketches from students and faculty, that film debuted at the Lagos Biennial in 2024.
Some of the outcome projects for the “Making New Monuments” course are in motion now, and there will be a symposium in January 2025 at the MCA [Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago], –which was our inaugural host institution. The outcome project for the “Arts Writing course,” is going to be in the form of a record album. It will include writing assignments that everyone in the course articulates for themselves and that might be useful to others. Its frame is “Know Your Assignment.” What we found in listening to the lessons is that the notion of “the assignment” is key. Even more, this notion goes back to some of the BAM practices of the 1960s. We have evidence, from previous courses that included faculty from AfriCOBRA, that the artists in AfriCOBRA gave themselves mini assignments to pursue as they made work.
Sharon: What you’re doing is you’re really modeling what you’re calling this dynamic relationship to art history. As for the FESTAC course, you actually engaged people who were part of FESTAC in 1977. Darlene Blackburn recreated the performance that she did in ’77 in Lagos and re-performed it in America. I wonder about that relationship to the actual: I mean, that’s history that you’re bringing into this course, you’re not just presenting a kind of mediated history. You’re bringing the actual participants in that history into—again, to use your own words—this dynamic relationship with art history. That’s incredibly powerful.
Romi: It can happen, Sharon, because one of the other pieces of this, for people who pay attention to or notice it, is the intergenerational piece.
You mentioned that the FESTAC course had faculty who participated. I really do try to pursue faculty with lots of expertise and experience. It’s important to say that, you know, this Little School That Could has really expert faculty, who are really amazing.
For the FESTAC course, almost all of the faculty had attended and/or participated in FESTAC, including dance and choreographer Darlene Blackburn. We went to Lagos with her, and she was able to reunite with someone who danced with her in ’77, who performed with her then. And basically, we produced an update of the FESTAC piece with that included young dancers from the University of Calabar. We haven’t launched the piece that was produced there, but it will show up at some point as an outcome project generated from the FESTAC course.
Sharon: Another thing that really distinguishes New Art School Modality, besides its intergenerational aspect, is its truly global cohort of students. It’s just incredible: you have people from São Paulo and Mexico City and Paris and Kansas City coming together for these courses. And then you’ve got a rigorously interdisciplinary group as well. You’ve got technologists, archivists, visual artists, filmmakers, and farmers. What does that sort of group create together? And how is that different than your normal or your traditional art school class?
Romi: It’s very different. I’ve been in the art school sector for over 25 years, so I know it well. And this feels really different, for some of those reasons.
I think another one of the key motivations—if I kind of anchor on that, Sharon—would be the innovation around the art school model. Maybe it’s motivation number three, that I failed to get to earlier. What I often find in the traditional art school model is that the ways that we try so hard to create a complex, interesting classroom community have not been so successful. It’s really the open access, being free that has interested artmakers and producers globally. The school is sometime a really intense setting in terms of people and where they come from.
In addition to the geographic range, they work in a range of forms, –something that relates to the practices of the ’60s when the wasn’t a constant separation of disciplines. So, since I take cues from that scene rather than what’s done in most art schools, it is the justification and grounds for not having all the painters in a room, not having all the poets in another room. There is a way for us to engage and pay attention to topics and histories and pursue them in our own ways, once in our own studios. And the global diversity is possible because of modern innovations. We have the technology. We can’t ignore it anymore. If we can have people come in from Brazil and Mauritius and Rwanda and Sweden and Paris, and Kansas, then let’s have them come in.
In some ways, they’re the most robust participants. I mean it’s two in the morning sometimes when we start for some in other parts of the world who join remotely. They’re there pretty consistently.
Sharon: That’s incredible. Romi, this is a Chicago history, too. How do you think about Chicago’s role in this model? I mean, obviously there’s the Black Arts Movement, but how do you think about the perches? For instance, one of your perches has been the MCA Chicago. Can you just reflect on the city in this project and its relationship to what you’re doing?
Romi: I love that question because Chicago is an important piece of this puzzle. It’s part of the NASM foundation. And BAMSM is foundational to NASM. I really care about structures, foundations, and methods so much, it’s just the way my brain works.
The art making and art history that comes from this particular city is crucial to the emergence of this new sort of art school.
If this becomes an offering that persists for some duration and is useful to a community of artists globally, allowing them to produce on their own and semi-collaboratively over the next couple of years—then that is all influenced by Chicago’s BAM art scene. It’s also influenced by the institution-making that emerges from that Chicago arts community. Another noteworthy piece here is that many of those artists founded institutions. And so, to found an art school, basically an institution, -with a different vision of what an institution is, –more nimble, soft, open, impermanent, is just incredibly important to me. Why? Because, again, it comes out of what we learn from those artists. The Chicago artists from this cohort taught us to make “institutions” when there aren’t institutions that are viable for, and available to, everyone.
I’ve really taken that to heart. I see this as the start of an institution that comes out of Chicago and that will always have a starting place in and connection to Chicago, but it’s meant to have tentacles reaching out into the world. In some ways, it’s an offering to the world that emerges from research into Chicago’s BAM artmaking sphere and ecosystem.
Sharon: And then the world gets to come to Chicago and understand that history and those models, which is really the beauty of it. One thing, Romi, that you’ve said about one of the objectives of the New Art School Modality, which I just love, is to make works visible that have not been formalized in the art history canon. And can you just reflect again on what that means to you? Hearing you talk, it’s evident that not just about works of art. It’s also about practitioners and artists as you think about them in the New Art School Modality.
Romi: Absolutely. Shining light on artists who are not part of the art historical canon is a facet of the NASM, –often inadvertently in the process of asking an eclectic community of artists to join us as Faculty. Just as artists from the Chicago BAM cohort had limited access to museums and galleries in the 60s and 70s, they were also less likely to secure teaching posts at art schools. So, NASM actively invites these makers into the art school faculty context. This means that several of the NASM Faculty are in their 70s or 80s. It’s meant to be reparative on myriad levels, including in this way. Non canonical art is often brought in view, and also the knowledge ways of makers who have not yet registered art historically.
Robert E. Paige for example as been a NASM faculty. I fact, the project that formed the beta testing of the BAM school and the New Art School Modality came from what was called Art Moves. Robert Paige was one of the art educators for that project. And really, this was because of conversations with him like the one we’re having. “People need to know your artwork. They don’t know it. Maybe you could roam around the city in the summer by bike and have meetings with people about your art history, (since no one else will teach it). You could have encounters with people and share with them about your work.” In fact, projects from the late 60’s and 70’s, such as Everyday Art, with Dr. Carol Adams, which took arts education into the parks and beaches, inspired the Art Moves strategy.
And, you know, Art Moves was ridiculously impermanent and frail as a program (consciously so), but I think it had impact when you blow it out five years later and think about how now Paige has exhibitions at the Smart Museum and Hyde Park Art Center and Cooper Hewitt and lots of amazing things are happening. This is somebody who was part of the BAM ecosystem of the ’60s and someone who has been on the faculty of BAM/NASM courses three or four times. So that’s one example of an artist whose work is as important methodologically as it is fulfilling aesthetically. NASM and the school setting expose both the work and the operating intelligence that drives it. Seeing the work and learning from him are equally important.
In addition to this, something I just realized, I think, with the third course, is that we’ve shifted the temporal span that’s normative within the context of art school. We’re thinking about space differently obviously, –we don’t have a dedicated building or location. Rather we move around a bit and soft partner with institutions. But the temporal dimension has shifted here, too. What I mean by this is that student work doesn’t appear immediately at the end of the course, in a final paper or art project, –but months later. There are members of the FESTAC pedagogical community, for example, showing work that emerged from that course a year later. Basically, there are opportunities for the course communities to continue to make work collaboratively– in the form of symposia and course related projects over the next two years. So, the outcomes are iterative, over a timespan beyond the time of the course. There is the opportunity for a group of people to stay in some form of connection, and work together, for an extended amount of time.
Sharon: I love that. It makes me think about this network you’re building, which actually will exist beyond, as you say, the time of the course. But there also aren’t even geographic boundaries here. It’s truly a global project.
One of the things I love when you’re talking about New Art School Modality, Romi, is that you are creating a new vocabulary with which to think about an art school. Posits, perches. What did you just say? But you’ve got other ways, I guess, other conceptual means. You’re bringing other concepts in, but you’re importantly giving them new words and new terms. So, is that intentional on your part? I mean, I just love how poetic it is, especially the perches. How do you think about language in this enterprise?
Romi: I’ve been thinking a lot about the place of critique, because I’ve been around art schools for a long time, and I know they are an important part of the design. It is really the dominant mode of assessment. I just recently figured out how I want to plot that into the NASM structure. It’s not going to be known as “critique,” –to your point. Rather, NASM has “Reaction and Revision Sessions.” These are opportunities for faculty to meet with students individually. We’re not doing those as groups because there’s some evidence (in a more global context) that shows group criticism, with others as witness, is unproductive. You know, in some contexts, to do that performatively or in public to people is not encouraged, –not unless you plan to competitively spar. And you know, because NASM considers a broad set of knowledge ways and those that emerge from various cultural contexts, amen and praise corners are as valid as forms of criticality as anything else. They certainly induce a great deal of production and innovation. Basically, Sharon, NASM asks what happens when we shift how all of this works?
Learn more about NASM, including courses and faculty, by visiting thenewartschoolmodality.com. NASM is supported in part by the foundation through our strategic initiatives program.
