Re·Abandoned Practices Institute
Chicago 2021
August 2 - 20

This 3-week summer intensive course constructs itself as a weave of practices of performance, writing, installation, and documentation, with projects in varying degrees of individual and collaborative engagement. Summer 2021 will be delivered as a 'modified in person' course from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Reduced tuition rate for non-credit participants available.

The course will operate between remote shared platforms and technologies for the sake of public safety. The instructors will deconstruct those platforms in order to imagine and actualize the creative possibilities within them. Teachers and visiting scholars will lecture on related subjects.


Re·Abandoned Practices will research and enact practices that have been disregarded in the wake of progress, relegated to the archives of history. The course does not propose that we share a mutual past, but rather that we might mutually discover a shared strategy of thinking about varied pasts, a strategy of reimagining and reenacting the different abandoned practices that at some time in some place defined the ordinary.

In this opportune moment, this course will ask a new set of questions. Do we accept that we must abandon the practices that we have rediscovered as provisional, to return to an unsustainable, unethical normal? Must we sacrifice reduced air travel, pedestrian streets, and the resurrected drive-in movie?

We have seen the public return of the plague doctor mask, and the private democratization of access. We witness the annihilation of scale in the frame of the screen, the microscopic virus appearing equal beside the planetary nebula. What constitutes practice now, individual and collective? What does isolation subtract from creativity, and what does it add? What renewed practices become endangered?

Available for credit and non-credit enrollment.

Instructors:
Matthew Goulish: Writing
Lin Hixson: Performance
Mark Jeffery: Performance

Visiting Lecturers:
Anthony Romero, artist, writer, and organizer.
Andrea Rexilius, poet, author, and Program Director for the Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing at Regis University.

Visiting Curator:
Cortney Lederer, CNL Projects, ART-IN-PLACE with Terrain Exhibitions.
Full Bios listed below

Registration 2021:
SAIC student Registration begins 23rd March 2020
Non SAIC Registration begins 29th March 2020

Tuition:
SAIC for credit tuition:
Undergraduate - $5,220 ($1,740 per credit x 3 credit hours)
Graduate - $5,394 ($1,798 per credit hour x 3 credit hours)
Non-credit tuition for 3.00 units:  $3,236. Continuing Studies course number: ARTRES 501-001 #1304

Credits:
3 credits STUDIO (4000-level): Course number PERF 4005-001 #1238

Non-SAIC students: Abandoned Practices Institute is also available for non-credit registration to participants outside of SAIC.
Student-At-Large registration form, to register complete the form and email to SAIC Records and Registration at saic.registrar@saic.edu.

2021 Visiting Lectures
Anthony Romero is a Boston-based artist, writer, and organizer committed to documenting and supporting artists and communities of color. Recent projects and performances have been featured at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), the Blue Star Contemporary (San Antonio), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston) and the Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Biennial (Calgary, Canada). Publications include The Social Practice That Is Race, coauthored with Dan S. Wang, and the exhibition catalogue Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements, of which he was the editor. He is a 2019-2020 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and is currently an Artist-in-Residence with the City of Boston.

Andrea Rexilius is the author of the poetry collections: Sister Urn (Sidebrow Books, Spring 2019), New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine Editions, 2012), and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), as well as the chapbooks, Afterworld (above/ground press, 2020), Sèance (Coconut Books, 2014), and To Be Human (Horseless Press, 2010). She earned a B.A. in English from Sonoma State University (2002), an M.F.A. in Poetry from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), and a Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Denver (2010). Andrea is Program Director for the Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing at Regis University. She also teaches in the Poetry Collective at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.

Cortney Lederer is an arts consultant, project manager and educator. From 2011-14 she served as the Director of Exhibitions and Residencies at the Chicago Artists Coalition (CAC), where she designed and managed its two residency programs: BOLT Residency and HATCH Projects. As of June 2014, Cortney launched CNL Projects (CNL) to provide project-based consulting to organizations with a specialization in curating, project management, program design and development. Cortney launched the initiative PROMPT, an artist dinner series intended to create space to build community, share stories, resources and skills. CNL recently partnered with Terrain Exhibitions to launch, ART-IN-PLACE inviting artists to exhibit an original work of art outside their home or from a window visible to the public between May 20- June 20, 2020. This collective action provides artists and community members in Chicagoland neighborhoods (and beyond) with a sense of hope and connectivity through the experience of public art during an unprecedented moment of isolation. Cortney is faculty in the Arts Administration and Policy department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.