Bricoleuses and trouble makers

This year I would like to think about feminist art history and art making, through real life  exhibition visits, and the reading of foundational texts together. I would like to look at the way female artists have redefined the relations between art and craft, art and therapy, periphery and center, and body and materiality, and how they have negotiated their subaltern status from the early days of modernism onwards. In the first semester we will see Virginia Overton at Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Sung Tieu at Kunsthalle Bern, Anni Albers at Zentrum Paul Klee, and Ligia Clark at Kunsthaus Zurich. In the second semester we will take a trip to Turin and visit Carol Rama’s studio and the Alice Neel survey exhibition at the Pinacota Agnelli. When possible, we will meet the artists and hear them present their work in their own words. In parallel, we will have group reading sessions at the school, and look at authors like Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Carla Lonzi, Ursula Le Guin or Silvia Federici, among others. The methodology for these sessions is inspired by the reading seminars I attended at the Whitney Independent study program, where an essay was assigned to students every week to read at home and discuss together, as well as by the online reading community organized by Ariana Reines under the name of the Invisible College, where the point is not academic or faithful interpretation, but rather how to draw energy and personal and political insight from a collective immersion in the text at hand.