Art Education: Education Art: A brief history of schools founded by artists
by Kenny Schachter with Seth Cameron
Géza, 306 Maujer
“To be a teacher is my greatest work of art.”
–Joseph Beuys quoted in Beuys Kompass: A lexicon of the conversations of Joseph Beuys, Monika Angerbauer, 1998.
“…if one takes a step backwards and sees Josef Albers work as a teacher and institution-builder, he can begin to look more like a conceptual artist. There is an Albers whose true medium is not paint but school.”
–Ellen Levy, A book about Ray 2024.
In conjunction with Amant’s exhibition On Education, this lecture by Kenny Schachter, with a response by Seth Cameron, will discuss how artists have historically taken education to another level by initiating alternative institutions. In doing so, these artists proactively contributed to instilling a broader, more experiential, and more experimental foundation of knowledge for future students to draw from.
Highlighting enterprises such as John Ruskin’s School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford (1871), the Bruce High Quality Foundation University (2009–2017)—of which Cameron was a founder—and Tracey Emin’s Artist Residency (TEAR) in Margate (2023), the discussion will explore artists’ particular (and unique) manner of explication of techniques, as well as the technologies and strategies they have used to gain a foothold in the notoriously treacherous and unwelcoming ecosystem that is the art world.
Amant programs are always free. RSVPs are strongly encouraged. Seating is first come, first served, with some standing room available. Doors for Art Education: Education Art will open at 6:15pm on Wednesday, May 21 in Géza located at 306 Maujer.
Seth Cameron: painter, filmmaker, essayist; formerly: children’s museum director, university president, anonymous radical collectivist, SAT tutor, bookstore clerk, Little Caesar’s Pizza assistant manager, United Methodist; occasionally: professor, pianist, playwright, graphic designer, cat orchestra conductor; originally Appalachian, committedly deconstructionist, persistently intertextual, intermittently confessional; always both kinds: abstract and straight up. In 2017 Cameron disbanded The Bruce High Quality Foundation and shuttered its eponymous school, BHQFU. This fall he will mount a multi-site solo exhibition with Entrance Gallery in New York. He lives and works in New York and Connecticut.
Kenny Schachter is an artist, writer and lecturer. Schachter has written for MIT Press (on Paul Thek) and a book with Vito Acconci for Springer-Verlag and co-authored a handbook on digital art, published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2023; and, has a regular column on Artnet and contributes to various international publications, including The Art Newspaper, New York Magazine and The Times Magazine (UK). In 2023/24, Schachter had a mid-career survey at the Francisco Carolinum Museum in Linz, Austria, accompanied by a publication and a retrospective at Joel Mesler’s Rental Gallery, NYC in 2018—represented by Nagel Draxler Gallery in Germany and Jupiter Gallery in NYC.