For this Summer Session we’re thinking about going Back to School, musing on art education, pedagogy, and learning. From our sister publication Art Practical we bring you John Zarobell’s review of the San Francisco Legion of Honor’s 2011 Camille Pissarro exhibition. Zarobell finds that the show reveals a radical politic of Impressionism that is often overlooked in the works of some of the more famous artists. The author demonstrates the value of returning to historicized works, and articulates how thoughtful curation can uncover new meanings in older movements. This review was originally published on November 2, 2011. 

Camille Pissarro. Apple Harvest, 1888; oil on canvas; 24 x 29.13 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Dallas Museum of Art.

Take away the more iconic images of Impressionism, whether sylvan glades or water lily umbrellas, and you might find something entirely new under the teeming surfaces of colorful brushstrokes. Organized by inveterate Impressionism scholar Richard Brettell and coordinated here by James Ganz of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Pissarro’s People at the Legion of Honor reconsiders an essential figure of the Impressionist movement whose name is not as familiar as Monet’s or Renoir’s. Even the most astute students of art history may be surprised by this exhibition; at last we have an Impressionist’s vision of domestic life, agricultural work, and radical politics joined in a single presentation. Those who think that the best lessons on anarchism can be found at Occupy Wall Street are bound to discover that artists have been there long before.

Read the full review here.

For this Summer Session we’re going Back to School, and today we bring you Sasha Lee’s interview with Denise Gray of the MOCA Education Department. Here Gray talks about her work as an educator and her role in MOCA’s apprenticeship program, which is designed to encourage high-school students to engage with the local art community by attending talks, visiting exhibitions, and curating their own events. This interview was originally published on January 9, 2009.

Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Sean MacGillivray.

Sasha Lee: Can you talk a little bit about your position at the MOCA and the various projects you oversee, maybe your favorites?

Denise Gray: There’s one particularly that comes to mind, and that is the high-school apprenticeship program. The program has been around since the ’90s, it started out because we originally had a high-school program for students interested in having conversations about art with their peers. It ended up being successful and students wanted to continue the dialogue, so MOCA decided to formalize that program, resulting in the MOCA apprenticeship program. We conduct a pretty vigorous interview process–with anywhere from eighty applicants for twelve spots, usually. It’s highly competitive, consisting of students who have identified themselves as interested in pursuing a career in the arts, whether as a curator or as an artist or educator. The program is great because it’s very hands-on. We use downtown as a resource, so for example today we’re going to the art walk. We use the library at REDCAT and visit exhibitions and attend events related to art, so as to compare and contrast the different kinds of art that’s out there. Sometimes we’ll even have artists who are exhibiting at the MOCA or invite other artists to do special programs with MOCA apprentices.

The apprentices also host events. In 2009, we’re going to have our seventh annual teen night. It’s an amazing opportunity for the apprentices to take the lead and create events for their peers. Usually there’s a student art exhibition that they curate, they bring out live entertainment, along with other activities. It’s like this big art party for teens; we don’t turn away the adults but it’s definitely designed for teens–creating a real ownership for them over the event. Last year, related to the Takashi Murakami exhibition, we collaborated with TOKYOPOP [publishers and distributors of Manga] to hone in on the Japanese pop culture connection–we had a photo booth, young performers, etc. The event was called Eye Candy.

Last year they actually had a slumber party at MOCA! This group had bonded so much that they wanted to have a sleepover at the MOCA. They were hanging out at 2 a.m. in the gallery–and the challenge was intentional insomnia–so to stay awake, we hung out with security and explored behind the scenes of MOCA.

Read the full interview here.

This Summer Session’s topic is Back to School, and we’re thinking about pedagogy, learning, and education in the art world. Today from Art 21 we bring you a short video about Mike Kelley’s 2005 project Day Is Done. The work is based around Kelley’s concept of Educational Complex, or the invisible construction of cultural mythos through social institutions like school and domestic life. Here Kelley attempts to reveal the workings of Educational Complex by disrupting the normalized patterns of display through the juxtaposition of images and music. This video was originally uploaded on April 30, 2010.

Today we’re thinking about what “school” means as a way of codifying an art movement—that is, the politics, aesthetics, and ethos that are implied by attributing work to a particular school. In that vein, we present Anuradha Vikram’s review of SFAI’s 2013 exhibition Energy That Is All Around—Mission School, wherein Vikram analyzes the problematics of the Mission School attribution. This article was originally published on November 18, 2013.

Alicia McCarthy. Untitled, 1996; oil and latex on panel; 84 x 84 in. Collection of Jeff Morris, Oakland. Photo by Johnna Arnold/SFAI.

A panel at the San Francisco Art Institute on October 20 in conjunction with the Walter and McBean Galleries exhibition Energy That Is All Around – Mission School: Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, Ruby Neri, posed the question: “Mission School: Yes or No?” The general consensus, both on the panel and in the wider Bay Area arts community, was a qualified “Yes.” On the panel, Natasha Boas, who curated the SFAI show, described the intense resistance with which her question—“Was there ever really a Mission School?”—was met when she began her research on an essay of the same title that was included in the Berkeley Art Museum’s catalog for its 2012 solo exhibition by Barry McGee. Artists refused to address the concept, objected to the label, and were otherwise evasive, even when (perhaps especially when) they had personally benefited from association with the group.

In parallel discussions within the community and on Facebook, a common response to the question was, “Yes, but who cares?” Most people agree that the critical mass of artistic activity in San Francisco’s Mission District in the 1990s met the social and formal criteria for a “school” of artists: shared influences and connections that congealed into apparent stylistic and material affinities, and that informed later generations. Why, then, does the mention of this widely recognized and influential movement in recent art history provoke a polarized response from both the artists customarily included in the group and those who are not? Understanding the hostility to the Mission School label requires an appreciation of the many ways in which this Bay Area movement prefigured controversial developments in American contemporary art and urban space over the last twenty years.

Read the full article here.

This Summer Session we’re going Back to School and thinking about learning, pedagogy, and education. Today we’re featuring an excerpt from The Internet for Artists Handbook, an online resource designed to help creatives with professional development. With article categories like “How to Help Yourself,” “Generating Revenue,” and “The Future,” Creative Capital’s informative Wiki is sure to have practical advice for the autodidact. Below is an excerpt from the article “Personal Goal Setting,” with actionable tips for coming up with one’s own professional plans. This article was originally published October 10, 2012. 

via Creative Capital Professional Development Program.

Personal Goal Setting is an important part of shaping how you use the information contained in this Wiki! Goals are integral to helping you to formulate a plan of action and prioritize.

A strong and clearly-defined goal has these five qualities:

1. Goals are quantifiable, measurable, falsifiable. Goals can be measured and often include specific numbers and timelines. It’s good to also have a specific date in mind too. Keep in mind, once the date or timeline has passed, will you be able to falsify (prove the statement false) your goal as stated?

2. Goals use a declarative sentence. They are not a question or a fragment.

3. Goals are written down. Writing down a goal greatly increases your chance of achieving.

4. Goals don’t include the word “and”. This is not a to-do list or a laundry list. Long lists usually indicate that you have included several goals in one statement or that you have already started to list the steps necessary to achieve your goal.

5. Goals should stretch you. Goals should challenge you. When you conceive of a goal, see if you can state your biggest goal out loud to yourself in the mirror without laughing.

Read the full article here.

Our August Summer Session is all about different forms of education, pedagogy, and the nexus of art and school. Today we direct our readers to a crowdsourced how-to guide on preparing for grad school while poor. Originally started as a public Google Doc by Karra Shimabukuro, PhD, based on her own experiences, the guide became so popular and gained so many contributors that she eventually moved the document to its own Wiki. For many, graduate school can be an enormous financial burden, but it can also be a critically important part of an artistic practice—we here at Daily Serving hope that this guide can help make pursuing an MFA or PhD more accessible.

Art School Owl meme, via Tumblr.

From the homepage of the How to Prep for Grad School if You’re Poor Wiki, founder Karra Shimabukuro has this to say about the project:

I have blogged and tweeted a lot during my PhD experience about the ways my (self-identified) socio-economic and cultural status has affected me and my experience in a thousand different ways. From not understanding social norms, to not getting jokes or references, to feeling like I was constantly playing catch-up, these issues have impacted my PhD studies and my professionalization. So one day on Twitter (during #ScholarSunday) I commented about how this affected those of us who were poor, and started a Google Doc/conversation about what would happen if we started a primer for other students like us. What would this primer look like?

In just three days the document exploded (you can see the original document here). It consistently had 100 people in it, crashing Google Docs for most of the third day. It went up to over 62 pages. Despite using bookmarks and headings it was becoming unwieldy. Robbie Fordyce @r4dyc had the idea to transition the information to a wiki. So here we are. My hope is that this space will serve as a more stable and easily navigated resource for students (MAs, MFAs, and PhDs) who are attending grad school and are poor or working class.

Click here to go to the full guide.

Our Summer Session topic this month is Back to School, and today we bring you an excerpt from our Help Desk, Bean Gilsdorf’s arts-advice column that demystifies practices for artists, writers, curators, collectors, patrons, and the general public. In this installment, Gilsdorf answers questions specific to the MFA degree, giving readers practical advice on how to sort through the bullshit and find the best graduate-level arts program for themselves. This article was originally published February 6, 2012.

Bruce High Quality Foundation wants you to skip school and hang out at LACMA instead.

I am considering getting a MFA in sculpture/new media, but it is very difficult for me to get a complete sense of the different MFA programs both in the U.S. and abroad. Unfortunately my best resources have been asking friends and old teachers. From them I get a mix of old information, rumors, and myth. Can you tell me the top three MFA sculpture programs in the U.S. and the top three abroad? If not, can you tell me about some resources that can help me learn about these schools beyond their, nearly useless, websites?

To begin, let me tell you how glad I am that you’ve already figured out how useless a school’s website can be. From the unnavigable layouts to the endless paragraphs of self-aggrandizing prose, a school’s website can be really ineffective if you’re looking to understand the culture of the institution or the kinds of students who attend. I have firsthand experience with this dilemma myself: When I was applying to grad school, I did a lot of preliminary research online; but when I visited the schools in person, my experience on campus often contradicted my initial impressions. One website made me fall deeply in love, until I interviewed the school’s students and they all were so sad and burned out and disinterested. Another institution seemed very scholarly—important to me because I like art theory—but the second-year students who toured me around talked about how little time they spend reading and writing. You’re right to be suspicious of websites, and also prudent to ask your colleagues and old professors.  But mostly I’m glad you wrote in, because I’m going to share some hard-earned wisdom with you. Come lean a little closer to the screen because I’m going to tell you a secret about the top three art schools:

They don’t exist.

Read the full article here.