[artinfo] What is an Art School?

[Art&Education]

"What is an Art School?"
is an online publishing series
presented by the Walker Art Center
investigating the past, present, and future of art education.

https://walkerart.org/magazine/series/what-is-an-art-school

While dramatic changes have occurred in art 
practice over the last century, with only a few 
exceptions have these shifts effected arts 
pedagogy. "What is an Art School?" looks at these 
exceptions. Released on a trimesterly schedule, 
it uses a global lens to highlight art schools 
and practitioners ranging from Japan's Bigakkÿ to 
Cuba's Instituto Superior de Arte and beyond. The 
series will also foreground other educational 
practices that hold possibilities for art 
education today, such as the Anarchist Modern 
School movement in Spain and Chatauqua in the 
U.S. Mining educational models in the past and 
present, the project crabwalks through time to 
find potential pathways for the future.

The first issue to be released throughout this 
summer is on early Soviet-era educational 
experiments, focusing on the art school 
Vkhutemas. Forged in the revolutionary fervent of 
post-Civil War Russia, Vkhutemas aimed to 
reimagine the world with a new art education 
model at its core. Little known now, the school 
is often compared to the Bauhaus and contained 
some of the major figures of the Soviet 
avant-garde in its faculty: Vladimir Tatlin, 
Lyuobov Popova, Aleksander Rodchenko, among 
others. The issue provides an overview of 
Vkhutemas, analysis of the teaching methods of 
perhaps its greatest architectural pedagogue, 
Nikolay Ladovsky, and the first-ever English 
translations of two of the handful of surviving 
primary documents from the oft-forgotten school. 
Included in the initial launch is a primer on 
Soviet educational vehicles: trains, cars, and 
boats that were mobilized across the vast Soviet 
Union to present agitational propaganda to the 
masses. Also included is an interview with Sam 
Thorne, whose soon-to-be released book School: 
Conversations on Art and Self-Organized Education 
surveys the field of contemporary radical art 
schools across the world.

Walker Art Center
725 Vineland Place
Minneapolis, MN 55403
United States
<http://www.walkerart.org/magazine/series/what-is-an-art-school/>www.walkerart.org