Want your work to make a difference? It all comes down to knowing what you’ve got, and how to work with it. You might already have everything you need…

Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard will begin this workshop by introducing you to the work of the collective BFAMFAPhD and the frameworks for their book “Making & Being: Embodiment, Collaboration and Circulation in the Visual Arts.” This will be followed by an attunement practice, Asset Mapping—an activity that supports members in identifying resources that already exist within their group—and a Q&A period. The workshop will end with a closing activity.

Susan Jahoda  is Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Jahoda is an artist, educator, and organizer whose work includes video, photography, text, performance, installation and research-based collaborative projects. Works have been produced for venues in London, Paris, Basel, New York, Seoul, and Moscow. Jahoda is a core member of BFAMFAPhD and the Pedagogy Group, collectives of socially engaged artists and educators based in New York City. 

Caroline Woolard  is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Hartford, CT and employs sculpture, immersive installation, and online networks to imagine and enact systems of mutual aid and collaboration. Her work has been featured twice on  New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS. Woolard is the 2018–20 inaugural Walentas Fellow at Moore College of Art and Design and her work has been commissioned by and exhibited in major national and international museums, including at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and Creative Time. Woolard is a core member of BFAMFAPhD. 

BFAMFAPhD  is a collective that formed in 2012 to make art, reports, and teaching tools to advocate for cultural equity in the United States. The work of the collective is to bring people together to analyze and reimagine relationships of power in the arts. More information is online at:  http://bfamfaphd.com 

Making & Being  offers a framework for teaching art that emphasizes contemplation, collaboration, and political economy. Authors Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard, two visual arts educators and members of the collective BFAMFAPhD, share ideas and teaching strategies that they have adapted to spaces of learning which range widely, from self-organized workshops for professional artists to Foundations BFA and MFA thesis classes. This hands-on guide includes activities, worksheets, and assignments and is a critical resource for artists and art educators today. Making and Being is a book, a series of videos, a deck of cards, and an interactive website with freely downloadable content.  http://makingandbeing.com

This workshop is hosted in conjunction with knowingdoing (exhibition dates TBA, pending provincial restrictions), curated by Alison Cooley. What lessons do we find in knowing and doing? What knowledges do movement, practice, play, embodiment, and the cycles, systems, histories, and economies of artistic work open us to? In this exhibition, works by Helah Cooper, Erika DeFreitas, and Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard of BFAMFAPhD exist between modes of practice, play, embodiment, sensing, and pedagogy, recoupling knowing and doing. Assembling projects that both predate and arise from the context of COVID-19—a force that restructures our modes of relation, encounter, activity, and gathering—the exhibition traverses diagrammatic, participatory, sculptural, and moving-image practices in order to refocus attention on the lessons carried in embodied practice.

This exhibition at The Bows is animated by online talks and workshops, including visiting artist lectures by Helah Cooper and Erika DeFreitas in AUArts studio art courses taught by Alana Bartol and Sarah Nordean, and an open public workshop by Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard on April 10, 2021.