Abstract
Driven by capitalist ideologies of ownership, progress, individualism, and competition, contemporary society often perpetuates a belief that there isn’t enough to go around – not enough food, water, shelter, money, and time. Neoliberal capitalism has left individuals and communities with a sense of deficiency and disconnect rather than abundance and relationality. At the centre of many socially engaged artists’ practices resides a desire to disrupt this contemporary trend by engaging with themes associated with sustenance. In this paper, I explore diverse ways socially engaged artists have worked with sustenance in their practices. This includes how I have infused themes of food as sustenance, connecting to place as sustenance, and relationality as sustenance into my creative practice using artistic research. I explore how I translated these themes into the pedagogical and curricular approaches I employed in teaching an undergraduate course on community art education. This culminated in a lesson focused on sustenance as a theme in socially engaged art and community art education. Food and water, place- and land-based art education, and relational practices in contemporary art were central to the lesson. Engaging in a collective seed-bomb creation session, which ended in a prompt for students to gift these seed bombs to others, students worked with these themes in a hands-on way. Through analyzing this practical example, the study explores how sustenance can be employed as a powerful pedagogical orientation and artistic theme in educational settings, disrupting neoliberal capitalist ideologies.
Presenters
Natasha S. ReidAssistant Professor, Art Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—-Art for Sustenance
KEYWORDS
COMMUNITY ART EDUCATION, SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART, SUSTENANCE, PLACE-BASED EDUCATION
