School of Art

FA 1990 – School of Art Symposium

Where Do We Go From Here? Making Art in Challenging Times

Thursday and Friday, November 4–5, 2021
10:00 am–4:00 pm CDT
Online. Facilitated on Zoom.
Course Fee: $150

This two-day symposium will address issues in contemporary art practices in this time of COVID and quarantine. Panel discussions, workshops, and virtual tours will afford opportunities for dialogue around questions of pedagogy, creative practice in new contexts, and responding to working in a time of crisis. 

Students who have not yet taken a version of FA 1990 generally known as the First Year Field Trip, which was cancelled due to travel and COVID protocols, need to take this as part of their course requirements to graduate.

On this page:

ARTlab Exterior

Symposium Schedule

  • Day One: November 4th, 2021

    Artist Panel: 10:00–11:30 am CDT

    Panellists:

    • Scott Benesiinaabandan
    • Jodie Lyn-Kee-chow
    • Jessie Ray Short

     

    Material Workshops: 12:30–2:00 pm CDT / 2:30–4:00 pm CDT

    Choose from a selection of Graduate Student-run workshops. 

  • Day Two: November 5th, 2021

    Creative Panel: 10:00–11:30 am CDT

    Panellists:

    • Annie Beach
    • Merray Gerges
    • Candice Hopkins

     

    Walker Art Center Virtual Tours

    1:00–2:00 pm CDT

     

Artist Panel

November 4th, 2021, 10:00–11:30 am CDT

Moderated by Sarah Ciurysek, Associate Director, Graduate programs and research, School of Art

Panelists:

Scott Benesiinaabanda

Scott Benesiinaabandan

Scott Benesiinaabandan is an Anishinaabe from Obishkkokaang. Scott is an intermedia artist that currently works in experimental image making and sonic materials.Scott is currently resident in Montreal, where he has completed a MFA in photography..Scott’s current research interests are intersections of artificial-intelligence and Anishinaabemowin,Scott has completed international residencies at Parramatta Artist Studios in Australia, Context Gallery in Derry, North of Ireland, and University Lethbridge/Royal Institute of Technology iAIR residency, along with international collaborative projects in both the U.K and Ireland. Scott has completed residencies with Initiative for Indigenous Futures and AbTec in Montreal.

Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow

Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow

Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow (b. Manchester, Jamaica) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Queens, NY. She holds a BFA with honours from University of Florida and an MFA from Hunter College. Her work has been featured at Exit Art, Queens Museum, Boston Children’s Museum, Museum of the Moving Image, Rush Arts Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, Royal West Academy of England, and The National Gallery of Jamaica. Awards include New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2012), Rema Hort Mann Artist in Community Engagement (2017), Franklin Furnace Fund (2017-18), Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice (2018), and Queens Art Fund (2019).

Jessie Ray Short

Jessie Ray Short

Jessie Ray Short is an artist, filmmaker and independent curator of Métis, Ukrainian and German descent. Jessie Ray’s practice involves uncovering connections between a myriad of topics that interest her, including, but not limited to, space and time, Indigenous and settler histories, Métis visual culture, personal narratives, spiritual and scientific belief systems, parallel universes, electricity, aliens and non-human being(s).

Creative Panel

November 5th, 2021, 10:00–11:30 am CDT

Moderated by Jean Borbridge, Education Coordinator, School of Art Gallery University of Manitoba

Panelists:

Annie Beach

Annie Beach

Annie Beach is a visual artist, born and based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treaty One Territory. Beach is Cree/Saulteaux/Ukrainian, with relations from Peguis First Nation.

Annie is a recent graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree (Honours) from the University of Manitoba’s School of Art. Beach has curated, designed, and executed over a dozen mural projects throughout the city and works as art instructor with a variety of youth, community arts and cultural-based organizations, to engage and uplift others, to imagine a more vibrant, radiant, and tender world for the next seven generations. She is also one of three recipients of the 2019 Hnatyshyn Foundation Emerging Artist prize, and is currently exhibiting a new commission for the exhibition, Atautchikun | wȃhkôtamowin at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, SK.

Candice Hopkins

Candice Hopkins

Candice Hopkins is a curator and writer and a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and Senior Curator of the 2019 and 2021 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art. Hopkins was co-curator of major exhibitions including the Canadian Pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennial featuring the media art collective Isuma; the 2018 SITE Santa Fe biennial, Casa Tomada; documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany; Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art; and Close Encounters: The Next 500 Year. Her writing is published widely and her recent essays and presentations include, "The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History)" for MIT Press; “Outlawed Social Life," for South as a State of Mind; and "The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier," for the documenta 14 Reader.

Merray Gerges

Merray Gerges

Merray Gerges is a writer and editor based in New York City. She studied art history at NSCAD and journalism at King’s University in Halifax, where she co-founded and co-edited CRIT, a free biannual criticism publication. She held various editorial positions at Canadian Art from 2016 to 2019. From 2019-2020, she was the inaugural editorial fellow at C Magazine, where she produced three print issues addressing facets of systemic change. Her writing has appeared in MOMUS, Hyperallergic, the Gardiner Museum blog, Esker Foundation, and others, and has tended to pay more attention to art’s contexts rather than its contents. She is currently working on a new body of long-form essays as an MFA candidate in narrative nonfiction at NYU’s journalism school. She is available for writing commissions, lectures, workshops, interviews, editing, coaching, class lectures, panels, and juries.

Graduate-Run Workshops

Thursday, November 4th, 2021
12:30 - 2:00 pm CDT.
2:30 - 4:00 pm CDT.
Facilitated on Zoom.
Registered FA 1990 students sign-up for one workshop. Link sent prior to event.

Basic Video Editing in Adobe Premiere Pro

Graduate Student: Pani Bolbolabadi
Adobe Premiere is becoming the industry standard, and this class will give you a preliminary introduction to some very basic video editing before taking video editing in courses such as Digital Essentials offered in the 1st year foundation program.

Overall this 90 minute workshop will introduce participants to organizing and editing a very short project in Adobe Premiere Pro within a creative environment and *collective learning environment.

Conversations from the Abyss

Graduate Student: Timothy Brown
Influenced by the isolation created due to the Covid pandemic, Conversations from the Abyss explores the idea of reaching out from those spaces and communicating through the practice of drawing and writing. Through these communicative acts we create shared connections, which then affect us in meaningful ways. In Conversations from the Abyss, we will begin by developing inked drawings (figurative or abstract) as a reaction to our time spent in isolation. From these drawings, we will create a short written response (it can be formal, it can be poetry, it can be anything in-between). As we present our responses, each of us will begin to re-interpret those readings by adding more visual information to our own drawings. With each reading we will alter our work further. By the last reading, our initial drawings will have been altered dramatically, creating a visual language built on the connections we have made with each other.

Cyanotype Photographic Printing

Graduate Students: Niki Saghari and Sonny Cai
Cyanotype is a unique and easy manual process used to create print patterns, used by artists, botanists, and architects for almost 200 years. Through a photosensitive solution that dyes surface blue when in direct contact with light, it reveals original prints, with good definition and an intense, unique shade of blue.

In this workshop, you’ll learn all the steps required to create your cyanotype prints. Discover how to apply your prints onto different surfaces such as paper, fabric, etc. with the use of plants, flowers, and even objects.

Messy Molding

Graduate Students: Ashkan Nejadebrahimi and Hamideh Behgar
Messy Molding is the name of molding and casting workshop which is designed specifically for this symposium. Molding and casting are two essential art techniques that have been utilized throughout art history, particularly in the creation of sculptures. Making a mold allows you to copy or reproduce your desired product in a variety of materials.
This workshop provides a basic overview of molding and casting techniques for making a hand mold out of Alginate (for molding) and plaster (for casting).

Textile Collage and Stitch

Graduate Students: PJ Anderson and Tracy Charette Fehr
Fibre/textile art is one of the oldest forms of art making. Working with cloth, textiles, thread, wool, beads and other materials has been, typically associated with the so-called “feminine”: or “decorative” crafts. This attitude, which undervalues both craft and textile work, is changing as contemporary artists of many stripes are incorporating textile, stitching and other forms of needlework into interpretive works.

This workshop will introduce participants to basic elements of textile/stitch, collage design, painting on fabric and simple application of materials. No experience in sewing or needlework is needed. Come for the fun of playing with thread and for new ideas in art-making.

Words Are Important and the Creative Process

Graduate Students: Reid Flock and Jimmie Kilpatrick
Through a series of interactive activities, this workshop will aim to promote creative processing through interpretive transitions.
The sequence of interactive activities include, but are not limited to, sound art, dance, drawing, sculpture, and creative writing.
This course aims to enable participants to drop inhibitions and empower the creative psyche and build upon creative freedom.

NOTE: Some workshops have additional material kit fees. See the registration page for details.

Curatorial Tour

Friday, November 5th, 2021
1:00 - 2:00 pm CDT.
Facilitated on Zoom.

The Walker Art Center

The Walker Art Center

Engage with art from the Walker’s galleries and Minneapolis Sculpture Garden! Led by professional Educators, this virtual tour will use the Zoom screen-sharing to show high-resolution images and videos of preselected works of art from the Walker’s collection as they guide students through observation and interpretation exercises and discuss the context behind each piece. Additional Walker staff will be present to field questions in the chat throughout the tour, and there will be a few minutes at the end to reflect and discuss as a group.