Nothing is “from scratch”.

Nothing goes “away”.

Art and design schools and programs in the US (at the high school, college, and graduate levels) attract students looking to problem-solve and envision new systems and possibilities—dreamers looking to visualize and materialize alternatives. Contemporary art making and cultural production is as critical as it is creative, as engaged in the business of witnessing what is wrong with what is, as it is proposing possibilities for how things could be. This said, much pedagogy within art and design fields—fine arts, architecture, urban planning, 2D and 3D design—is rooted in pedagogy that is narrow and authoritarian and does not provide latitude to truly problem-solve because it does not enable students to critically engage with—or even see—problems. For example, many students in art and design programs are gravely concerned with climate and ecological justice, yet are encouraged into creative practices that rely on ecological and social devastation, in the form of harmful material extraction and waste, and compromising labor relations. Pushing students into disciplines and mediums is justified by “tradition”, leaving little space for a critical assessment of the problems of those traditions and ignoring pressing realities that call for more careful and sustainable material practices.

My proposal for democratic school programming engages a specific topic within arts and design learning: materials. What I posit in the present chapter is an approach to learning about materials that makes space for perspectives commonly ignored (those of workers engaging with land), intentionally focuses on equity and social and ecological justice, and sets students up to confront the most pressing challenges of our time: climate change and ecological instability (caused by extraction, global transport, and consumption-driven earth-damaging and labor-exploiting practices). The programming that I offer orients art and design learners to have a greater awareness of the concerning practices that define their industries on the level of labor and land vis-a-vis materials, as well as efforts for alternative, restorative approaches. This programming relies on collaboration, interdisciplinary thinking, and critical engagement and will be oriented toward establishing new ethical frameworks in creative practice, toward a greater “common good”. This programming is designed to serve existing schools and design programs in higher education and could also serve high school students and schools with focuses on the visual arts.

My own personal background as a multi-material artist and arts educator in higher (and previously, elementary) education, and background in land-and-sea work (farming and marine aquaculture: oyster growing), as well as my exposure to waste industries (via my involvement with RAIR Philly, an arts organization and residency based in an active recycling centerFootnote 1)—and the child of parents who worked in the textiles industry in the waning days of domestic manufacturing—has lend me particular insight into the nexus of the arts, materials, land, labor, waste, and education. This complex of experiences propels me toward envisioning possibilities for more circular, resourceful, and respectful approaches to creative practice and pedagogy. These ideas draw from ample precedents and practitioners whose visions of art-making and arts learning stand up as ethical arcs toward which we must endeavor to bend ourselves and our institutions.

What?

MATTERS is a site-focused arts education program that connects artists to materials and materials to land and labor. Its programmatic objective is to lay the groundwork for a creative practice rooted in ecological and social awareness, repair, and care.

Programming focuses on partnerships with existing schools—art and design programs at institutions of higher and secondary education—and sites of industry and creative materials production. For that reason, the format of the offerings correspond with the cycles and structures of the partnering schools. MATTERS classes, workshops, and varied-format learning experiences act as a bridge between students in the arts, design, and creative fields, the materials that define their fields of practice, and the sites, sources, and labor and creators of those materials.

MATTERS emerges in response to ecological and social urgency under untenable and inequitable systems of extraction, and it seeks to empower artists and designers to solve problems and create with care. Attending to deficits in prevailing Western art and design pedagogy around acknowledging waste and consumption, programming prioritizes approaches that favor reuse, adaptive strategies, and regenerative design. Coursework is both conceptual and practical and includes experiential learning as well as contextual and site-based engagement.

How?

Students and instructors will work together to build a picture of how materials are sourced, processed, and essentially created today; how earthen matter becomes material through processes of extraction, refinement, shipping, and other labors. Once students have an overview of the systems and mechanisms at play around contemporary materials, they will identify specific materials crucial to their fields. They will study those materials in depth: from the source of the material itself, to the processes and labor involved in the creation and manufacturing of the material, to the methods and sites of the materials’ byproducts and disposal. Students will engage with concepts such as waste-lead design, discard studies, upcycling, regenerative land relations, and look to TEK (traditional ecological knowledge) and decolonial praxis. They will engage with hands-on making that gives a sense of materiality beyond academic study, site visits and close engagement with place, reading and research, discussion, presentation, and creation of synthesizing “deliverables” suited to each student and topic. Discovery of, and awareness around, “problems”, is not the end point; rather, these truths will lead to the exploration of alternative structures, systems, and ways of working with material and envisioning material itself.

Much of this discovery, observation, interrogation, and visioning of alternatives will take place outside of the classroom: in the origin sites of various materials (e.g. a sand mining area of South New Jersey where silica extraction takes place for the production of glass and concrete), waste sites, and historic and active artisanal and industrial spaces (e.g. Historic Rittenhousetown—North America’s first paper mill, located in Germantown, Philadelphia). Students will be tasked with on-site exercises rooted in observation, documentation, and slow looking, fostering a deep sense of connection with place.Footnote 2

In a pilot round in the spring of 2023, MATTERS will be offered to students at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. The class is open to graduates and undergraduates from fine arts, design, architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and the wider university. The course will hold a traditional 14-week format and partner with visual artists and a waste industry expert. The course description is as follows:

MATTERS: Connecting Arts + Design to Materials, and Materials to Labor + Land

How does matter transform into material, and back again? What hidden labor, sites, social and ecological costs and processes that go into the production of a “blank” canvas and other “raw” materials? And why—for artists, designers, architects, preservationists, creative educators, builders, and anyone working with materials—do these questions matter?

This course connects arts and design learners to considerations, sites, and cycles around production and disposal of the defining materials of their creative fields (ex. paper, wood, glass, pigment, “the internet”), laying groundwork for creative practice rooted in social and ecological awareness, repair and care. A hybrid research seminar, field exploration, and studio investigation, the structure of this course alternates between reading/response/research, field trips and guest visitors (including a partnership affiliation with RAIR PhillyFootnote 3), and time for responsive “making” and material experimentation/synthesis.

In this course, students will collaboratively define key terms and concerns around material sustainability, discard studies, land and labor relations vis-a-vis creative work. Students will experience local sites of material extraction, production and disposal (through approx 5 field trips taking place during class time). Students will formulate individual or group questions around a specific material, leading to a final independent project, and class exhibition. This course will engage students in forming a material ethics to guide future creative work.

A sample unit from MATTERS programming, from its first pilot round in Philadelphia, gives a more vivid sense of the approach and pedagogy:

MATTERS SAMPLE UNIT:

Paper: from Tree to Trash

INTRO:

Paper is a basic unit of art and arts education. It is the “blank” substrate upon which creations begin. We think of paper as an analog technology, disposable, recyclable—a renewable resource, and a casual resource. In this unit, we will examine the history of paper, the past and present sites and means of its production, and the methods of its disposal and re-use.

GROUNDING CONSIDERATIONS/GUIDING TEXTS:

“50% of all paper ends up as garbage (in fact, paper accounts for fully half the discards in US landfills).”—Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow

“Material stories are origin stories.”—Kathryn Yussoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

“Implosions” concept—Donna Haraway

Paper history—Mark Kurlansky, Paper

MATTERS SAMPLE SCHEDULE:

SCHEDULE:

Lessons are centered around visits to four sites:

Site Visit 1: Historic Rittenhouse Town

Historic Rittenhouse Town, sometimes referred to as Rittenhouse Historic District, encompasses the remains of an early industrial community which was the site of the first paper mill in British North America. The mill was built in 1690 by William Rittenhouse and his son Nicholas on the north bank of Paper Mill Run (Monoshone Creek) near (and now within) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Site Visit 2: Revolution Recovery + D’Orrazzio Paper Waste Centers

Revolution Recovery, dumpster rentals and recycling service

John D’Orrazio and Sons, paper waste facility

Site Visit 3: Artist/Papermaker Studio Visit

Site Visit 4: Industrial Papermaking

Why?

The triad of Western aesthetic theory—subject, form, and content—is missing its fourth leg: material. In most non-Western and even pre-capitalist Western artistic traditions, material was central to the making and meaning of art. And yet, contemporary art and design teaching glosses over these land and labor practices and connections, directing learners to the nearest Dick Blick (a popular “art supply” store in the US) instead of showing foundational sources and systems, people and places, that make materials happen and art and design possible. As theorist Donna Haraway articulates, “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with” (Haraway, D. 2016).

We know that architecture could not exist without stone and clay quarries, painting without pigmented dirt, textiles without plant and animal fibers, windows without sand and fire, and even the humble pencil without trees and coal. We know that millions of humans were and are involved in material extraction and production, and yet their labors—and exploitations—go mostly unmentioned in the historic, and even present-day discourse, around art and design. And we know that many cultures still prize their land and matter knowledges and do not separate them from art. What would it mean to bring these realities into view within contemporary art pedagogy?

In a survey across creative sectors that I conducted as part of my graduate research at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, arts practitioners, students, teachers, and other cultural producers expressed an understanding of the connections between art materials and:

  • decolonization and restoring relationship

  • land politics and ethics

  • issues of sustainability, waste, and reuse

  • financial viability

  • access, labor, and health

These same survey-takers noted an absence of resources around learning about these intersections and made a plea to learn more.

My proposal for democratic educational programming is a response to this plea, which I have heard echoed in my students and colleagues throughout my 15-year career as an artist, land-based practitioner, and art teacher in higher, elementary, and adult education. The proposed educational initiative attends to these facets of lack in our current arts pedagogy, centering a pedagogy of connection between practitioner, material, labor, and place that can be flexibly integrated into current frameworks of arts teaching and learning. It is a democratic project in that it makes information accessible that is otherwise obscured and thereby allows students—future practitioners—to make informed choices and necessary adjustments to their fields. It is a program that believes in the capacity for individual and collective problem-solving and the capacity of art and design to attend to and reverse the devastations of colonialism, consumption, extraction, labor exploitation, and more. Orienting matter at the heart of arts learning, and teaching can support creative practitioners to become the visionaries, ethical compasses, and connective tissue that this ailing world so desperately needs.

Who?

It may be helpful to think more specifically about who would benefit from this programming. To do so, I have created some sample student profiles below, based on students I have worked with in the past. (Pronouns for the students are he, she, and they.)

A college freshman steps into a drawing class and beholds unfamiliar tools and contraptions: wooden easels, Masonite drawing boards, low benches, clamp lights. They pick up a syllabus and rifle through the pages, landing on the Materials List—a litany of intriguing items: tortillons, kneaded erasers, vine charcoal, bristol board, all to be purchased at the local art supply store.

A high schooler in an architecture class creates a maquette of a pavilion out of balsa wood, designed with the intention to be used as a forum for hosting discussions about climate change. She is asked to source the materials necessary to realize this design. She researches wood species and learns about deforestation in Brazil.

A ceramics instructor teaches about the durability of fired clay: the way that it can withstand forces of time better than any material, including metal, except for plastic. She explains how clay—ceramic—has helped us to learn the stories of past civilizations. When she teaches students to throw, the students are eager to fire all of their creations—no matter how wonky. The teacher wishes she knew more about where the clay came from, so that students could make more informed choices about what they wish to fire and what to let melt back into usable earth.

An aspiring fashion designer makes clothing from upcycled garments from thrift stores, using natural dyes like onion skin and marigold. A friend takes him to a store where there is a whole section of neon fabrics. He wonders how they make the fabric so bright.

A drawing major switches to web design because his parents say it will be more lucrative and because he loves to travel and not be encumbered by materials, and he imagines that working digitally is more ecologically friendly. He notices an article about underwater cables used to power the internet and wonders why none of his teachers ever talk about what the internet is actually made of.

Democratic Learning

In a world increasingly imperiled by authoritarianism and restrictions on independent thinking and critical inquiry, it is necessary to push for opportunities for new democratic learning spaces and also to re-envision existing educational spaces toward democratic learning ideals. Higher education in the US, in particular, is deeply afflicted by the stronghold of bureaucracy and monetary incentives that reproduce oppressive, exclusive, individualistic, and exploitative conditions.

The programming that I envision is deliberately lacking in its own autonomous structure, that is to say, it is not a school or even a definitive program. It is a flexible and responsive cluster of programming defined around a clear ethos or—in the words of educational theorist Steve Seidel—an animating core (Seidel, S. 2013). It works with existing schools, attending to their deficits in traditional art and design learning, encouraging students to re-envision it from the inside out, and setting a precedent and offering models for teachers within those school communities. While current instantiations of MATTERS work within existing academic structures, future iterations—once relationships are established—might find different forms to act better as interdisciplinary bridges and to meet more students. The structure of MATTERS aims to be mycelial (or as aforementioned scholar Haraway says, “tentacular”)—and also symbiotic, riding on the back of existing structures to imbue them with necessary nutrients while making use of those structures to access students who are rigorous and curious.

This programming is itself the product of democratic expression and results directly from students’ shows of dissatisfaction and limitation, and their demands to dig deeper and look at material conditions from the ground up, to make new meaning together rather than inherit old half-truths. It also responds to their wishes to move beyond the bounds of their institutions and to connect with communities, land, place, and one another. I express gratitude to every student I have worked with at the various schools where I have taught as a lecturer and critic and to the high schools and community education programs where I have worked as a teaching artist. Students are teachers, and they are responsible for summoning this framework to actualize the tools, conditions, and communal mindset to respond to the unpredictable conditions that lay ahead.