Curriculum: Contemporary Art Goes to School
Online Book Launch
NCAD is hosting the online launch of Curriculum: Contemporary Art Goes to School, a new book edited by Dublin-based curator and writer Jennie Guy and published by Intellect Books.
Thursday Oct 29, 2020 17:30-18.30
To book a place please click here
This one-hour event will feature presentations from Jennie Guy, Nathan O’Donnell, Sjoerd Westbroek, Clare Butcher and will be chaired by Sarah Pierce (NCAD). Speaker biographies appear below.
Curriculum explores the intersection of contemporary artistic practice and school education in the 21st century.
At the heart of Curriculum is Art School, an independent curatorial framework founded by Jennie Guy in 2014. Operating throughout Ireland, Art School establishes interfaces between contemporary art and schools as sites of education, inviting students and artists to work collaboratively to question how the conventions of learning – as typically encountered in schools – might be extended or reimagined.
It takes place as a series of workshops, residencies, exhibitions and new writing that explore how contemporary artists can intervene within systems of education in order to inspire and expand might also help to fracture and revise.
Curriculum features contributions by: Clare Butcher, Gerard Byrne (Foreword), Juan Canela, Helen Carey, Daniela Cascella, Fiona Gannon, Jennie Guy, Andrew Hunt, Hannah Jickling & Helen Reed, Alissa Kleist, Rowan Lear, Peter Maybury, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Nathan O'Donnell, Sofia Olascoaga & Priscila Fernandes, Matt Packer and Sjoerd Westbroek.
The book explores Art School projects by artists: Sven Anderson, John Beattie, Sarah Browne, Karl Burke, Rhona Byrne, Ella de Búrca, Vanessa Donoso Lopez, Priscila Fernandes, Hannah Fitz, Jane Fogarty, Kevin Gaffney, Adam Gibney, Fiona Hallinan, Elaine Leader, Maria McKinney, Mark O’Kelly, Sarah Pierce and Naomi Sex.
Curriculum will be available to purchase online at a discounted rate during the event.
Participants
Jennie Guy is a curator, artist, writer and educator based in Dublin, Ireland. She is the founder and director of Art School, an experimental framework that explores strategies for placing artists within sites of education. She is the editor of Curriculum: Contemporary Art Goes to School, a new volume that explores the intersection of contemporary art practice and school education.. In 2018, Guy developed I Sing the Body Electric, an education programme presented by EVA International. In 2016 she co-launched Artists’ Exercises, an online platform for distributing artists’ educational strategies featuring contributions from artists all over the world. Alongside her work with art and education, Guy curates and consults on public art commissions in Ireland. Recent commissions curated by Guy include Ruth Lyons’ Iontaise/Iontas (2020), Adam Gibney’s Your Seedling Language (2019) and David Beattie’s Reflectors (2019). Guy presented the exhibitions Field Recording (2018) and It’s Very New School (2017) as curator-in-residence at Rua Red Arts Centre. In conjunction with her independent practice, Guy is manager of programme and operations at Fire Station Artists’ Studios. Her writing has appeared in Paper Visual Art, TransActions, Circa, and The Visual Artists’ News Sheet. Guy’s artworks often manifest as portraits, including films, performances, installations and texts, such as Before the Flood (2015), How to See Clearly from a Distance (2014), Reading Ensemble III (2012), Life is Beautiful (2012), Selected Crônicas (2011) and Melancholy Park (2010).
Sarah Pierce is an artist based in Dublin. Since 2003 she has used the term The Metropolitan Complex to describe her project, characterised by forms of gathering in historical examples and those she initiates. Pierce works with installation, performance, archives, talks and papers, often opening these up to the personal and the incidental in ways that challenge received histories and forms of making. Her sources include civil rights movements and student culture, the historical legacies of figures such as El Lissitzky, August Rodin, and Eva Hesse, and theories of community and love founded in Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille. Pierce’s work has shown widely in the EU, US and Canada with major exhibitions including Positions #2 at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and We are the Center at CCS Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson (both 2016), The Artist and the State at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2015), Push and Pull at Tate Modern and MuMOK Vienna (2010), and Nought to Sixty at the ICA London (2009). Pierce is a Lecturer in the School of Visual Culture at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin where she co-leads the Masters program Art in the Contemporary World.
Clare Butcher is a curator and educator from Zimbabwe who cooks and collaborates as part of her practice. She is Curator of Public Programming and Learning for the Toronto Biennial of Art, before which she coordinated programmes such as unsettling Rietveld Sandberg in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and aneducation for documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. Clare has worked with museums, academies and communities in Europe and Southern Africa, and holds an MFA from the School of Missing Studies, an MA in Curating the Archive from the University of Cape Town and has participated in the De Appel Curatorial Program. Some collective and individual endeavours include Men Are Easier to Manage Than Rivers (2015); The Principles of Packing... on two travelling exhibitions (2012) and If A Tree... on the Second Johannesburg Biennale (2012)
Nathan O’Donnell is a writer, researcher and one of the coeditors of the Irish journal of contemporary art criticism, Paper Visual Art. He has had work published in the Dublin Review, gorse, the Irish Times, the Manchester Review, Apollo and 3:AM, among others. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. He has received bursary support from the Arts Council of Ireland as well as artists’ commissions from IMMA, South Dublin County Council and Dublin City Council, and his first solo exhibition—focused upon student protest and ideas of discipline and indiscipline—took place at the Illuminations Gallery, Maynooth University, in March 2020. His first book, on Wyndham Lewis’ art criticism, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2020, and he will edit the scholarly edition of the British avantgarde journal BLAST for the Oxford University Press’ Critical Edition of Lewis’ Collected Works. He lectures at Trinity College and on the MA Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD.
Sjoerd Westbroek is an artist living and working in Rotterdam, with a practice that involves drawing, teaching, studying and collaborating. He holds a BA in Fine Art in Education from ArtEZ Arnhem, a BA in Philosophy from Erasmus University Rotterdam and an MA in Fine Arts from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Having exhibited both nationally and internationally, he was granted a research position at the Jan van Eyck Academy, a post-academic residency programme based in Maastricht, in 2013/2014. He often works with other artists, for instance as a founding member of artist initiative ADA, Area for Debate and Art; as a member of Barry (with Edward Clydesdale Thomson and Frans-Willem Korsten); and as a board member of Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn. Westbroek teaches at the Fine Art and Design Teacher Training programme of Willem de Kooning Academy and the Master Education in Arts programme at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.
