Workshops

WORKSHOPS AND TALKS’ DESCRIPTIONS AND THEIR PRESENTERS
Please Note:

• On the Agenda-at-a-Glance Schedule, Workshop and Roundtable titles may have been changed for brevity and/or clarity as to what the discussions will cover.
• All Workshops and Roundtable discussions are 1-hour long (unless noted). They, therefore, end 45 minutes before the panels in the same time frame do.
• All Workshops and Roundtable discussions are free.
• Unless noted there is no participation limit.
• Limited Participation Workshops are noted. These require advance registration and are available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

DAY 1, NOVEMBER 4
MID-DAY

Workshop: The Art of Being Irresistible: Marketing Yourself to Attract Sponsor Dollars
Presenter: A.J. Steinberg, CFRE Founder of Queen Bee Fundraising
An artist needs to focus on their art, not the constant pursuit of dollars. Unfortunately, it is common for artists across the spectrum to be caught in a tug-of-war between art and survival, an ever-constant worry about where their next funding will come from. The good news is that now, more than ever, artists are constructing their own brand identities and creating sponsorship opportunities for both their art and themselves. These sponsorship dollars can mean the financial security and freedom for an artist to focus on their work. In this session sponsorship and engagement strategist A.J. Steinberg, CFRE will walk you through the steps to creating your own eye-catching brand and how to market that to prospective sponsors. Included in the presentation are an overview of the business of sponsorships and what sponsors are looking for. Also, you will be presented with a roadmap to creating a marketable brand and marketing materials without losing your integrity as an artist. This session will be repeated on Sunday at 1:00 pm. The Friday session will be geared more towards artists; the Sunday towards organizations. But if you miss the Friday one, the one on Sunday will cover much of the same information.

Workshop: Fiscal Sponsorship: How to Find It
Presenter: Alicia Ehni, Artist & Program Officer, New York Foundation for the Arts and Madeleine Cutrona, Artist, Senior Program Officer, New York Foundation for the Arts
Learn how fiscal sponsorship works and how artists are using it to build opportunities in support of other artists and their communities.

Workshop: Applying for Grants – Where to Start, What to Expect, and How to Optimize your Application
Presenter: Dan Blask, Program Officer, Artist Fellowships, Mass Cultural Council
Everything you need to know when applying for grants.

Workshop: Pre-Fluxus
Presenter: Doris Sommer, Harvard Professor, Author and Founder and Director, Cultural Agents
Artists are educators. We raise questions and speculate about possible answers. If you want to make your talents and skills count for social development from the ground up, consider a chilling statistic about the failure of conventional education: children who cannot read and write by 3rd grade are on the pipeline that leads to prison, early pregnancy, drug addiction and mental illness. If we do nothing about this, we are complicit with a system that victimizes underserved people, mostly minorities, trans children, and poor whites. But artists can make learning effective, by reviving curiosity and engaging children in the adventure of interpreting school material through creative arts. Difficulty turns into challenges. That’s one of the powers you can unleash. Like the Fluxus of the early 20th Century, Pre-Texts Fluxus invites artists in all media to create irresistible pathways to discovery.

DAY 1, NOVEMBER 4
LATE AFTERNOON

Workshop: Simple Strategies to Quickly Add LEDS and other Simple Circuitry to Your Artworks
Presenter: George Bossarte, Engineer
From years of working with a wide variety of artists, Bossarte has devised some simple circuitry designs that he can teach any artist to use to add light motors and other effects to their artworks. Participation Limited to 20.

Talk and Screening: Breakfast over the Bridge – A Film Experiment
Presenters: Mattia Mura, Documentary and Visual Artist and Karol Frühauf, MSc in Electrical Engineering, Co-Founder of INFOGEM AG and Director of Bridge Guard Art / Science Residence Centre,” Štúrovo, Slovaki
A film and report on how the aim of the Bridge Guard residency was embodied in an experiment that arranged first time encounters between people on both sides of Danube. The Bridge Guard Residency aims to foster the building of virtual bridges between people along the border between Slovakia and Hungary, hoping to protect the real Maria Valeria bridge, already destroyed twice in history. Since 2004, more than 50 artists from all continents have contributed to this mission. As the 50th Bridge Guard, Mattia Mura produced a film built on a performative social experiment, telling the history of the bridge through a series of talks between people from both sides of Danube – people who did not know each other before. Over breakfast on the bridge, the couples found out what they have in common. The breakfast, thus, served as a catalyst for social interaction and as a result, deeper understanding between the participants, which we would like to present as a case study for exploring the limits of communication, interactions among different cultures, and confrontation through adversity to feed an open, conscious mind.

DAY 2, NOVEMBER 5
MORNING

10 – 11:00 am
Monument Public Address System AR
Presenter: Meredith Drum
Location: TBA, Rain Date: Same location from 1:00 – 2:00 pm on Sunday
Monument Public Address System AR is an augmented reality documentary project centered around a collection of audio interviews about the past, present, and future of confederate monuments. The project’s goal is to engender critical and thoughtful experiences in public spaces. Participants open the AR app on their mobile device to discover 3D virtual objects and animations superimposed on the world around them. With user interaction, short sections of the audio interviews are triggered and play. As they listen, participants can explore the virtual in relation to the physical space. Ideally the app will be used next to existing or removed monuments, yet in order to make it as accessible as possible, it can be employed anywhere. The interviews are with a range of individuals: activists, scholars, students, planners, artists. Some have discussed feelings of exclusion when they see confederate imagery. Others have analyzed the symbolic violence of the monuments in relation to ongoing racist systems. And others describe potential liberatory sculptural works as replacements. As a cis-gendered middle-class white woman from the US southeast, I recognize that my perspective regarding the racist history carried by these monuments is limited. I have initiated the project as a way of discovering my own blind-spots and participating in critical discussions about confederate history.

Workshop: QTPOC Liberatory Aesthetics at Work
Presenter: Tonasia Jones
Aesthetics are the ways we find and claim each other. Aesthetics are our adornment and the ways we make do and make beautiful. Aesthetics are our dreams and future visions, our hope and possibility. QTBIPOC aesthetics are the embodiment of liberated futures – in bodies that aren’t represented in the mainstream aesthetic. QTBIPOC aesthetics propose new possibilities and birth whole new worlds. Birthed in collaboration with Sage Crump and Cherry Rangal, QTPOC Liberatory Aesthetics is an offering to the arts industry. Focusing on the themes of Wholeness, Emotional Risk, and Tenderness, Unrealities, Space & Segregation, Medicinal and Healing, Lineage and Time Travel: The Beautiful Collision, Edge + Queering and Ambidextrous, and (Be)longing, this workshop will explore the ways we can embody aesthetics through different programs, practices, and conversations.

DAY 2, NOVEMBER 5
MID-DAY
Noon – 1:00 pm

Workshop: TransArtists: How to Find the Right Residency for You
Presenter: Bojana Panevska, Senior Advisor, TransArtists, The Netherlands
This workshop will lead you through TransArtists’ resources, the world’s largest source of information on artist-in-residencies to help artists find the residencies that best suit their needs.

Workshop: How to Ask for Money, Navigating Grant and Fellowship Applications
Presenter: Hannah Schmidt, Research Development Manager, University of Tennessee- Knoxville
This workshop is geared toward artists who are interested in applying for external funding to support their practice and want to mitigate the bewilderment that often accompanies the process. Asking for money to support one’s practice can be confusing, if not downright painful. This workshop is geared toward artists who are interested in applying for external funding and want to mitigate the bewilderment that often comes with the process. Participants will learn the do’s and don’ts of drafting applications, how to use every aspect of an application to strengthen one’s proposal, and receive tips for finding funding opportunities. Artists of all levels of experience with funding applications are welcome and are encouraged to bring sample applications in for feedback and questions.

Workshop: Techniques to Improve Participation and Experience of Persons with Diverse Abilities
Presenter: Shiroq Al-Megren, Researcher Affiliate, Ideation Lab, MechE, MIT
Full participation in cultural events requires the ability of audience members and spectators to successfully accomplish activities that span multiple different physical and digital environments. Traditional accessibility standards focus on ensuring compliance and compatibility of assistive technologies or accommodations within a given physical or digital environment (building codes or web accessibility standards). The presenters will share a framework for systematically defining and analyzing various possible start-to-finish workflows that would allow full participation of individuals with diverse abilities in cultural events; and to measure and identify the experiences during that multi-environment workflow, which if not implemented usually causes overwhelming frustration, often leading to the abandonment of the cultural activity in question. The presenters will share specific stories with templates for analyzing each component of the process, then give users a chance to get creative and sketch a process map that is aligned with their particular cultural offering. Joining Dr. Al-Mergren will be Dr. Kyle Keane (Computational Scientist, and Disability Advocate) and Caroline Freeman (advocate for educational opportunities and experiences of Hard-of-Hearing and Deaf students).

DAY 2, NOVEMBER 5
EARLY AFTERNOON

Workshop: Modes of Listening: Material Structures
Participation Limited to 15.
Presenter: Marianna Dixon Williams, Artist and Assistant Professor of New Media, Augusta University
In my workshop I will demonstrate how to build handmade electronic instruments that can connect to digital interfaces, allowing us to extend how we ‘see’ our everyday environments. New media opens up space for play and speculation within the studio, allowing us to consider what ‘could be’ in ways we have never been able to do before. I use sound design in my studio practice to explore questions of sensing and to map what would otherwise be invisible within our everyday environments. This 90-minute workshop will require a presentation space, and is geared for scholars with an interest in modes of listening, learning how to build audio receivers, and electronic materiality. We will spend the first 45 minutes building receivers using piezo discs and alligator clips, and will then briefly use these devices to explore the conference area. Participants will discuss approaches for translating the sound data that they collect into their studios and research. In closing I will share background on the open source and interdisciplinary conversations that tie traditional tools to contemporary technologies and how many of these ideas can apply to disciplines within art and design in surprisingly simple ways.
Note this workshop will run from 1:30 – 3:00 pm.

Workshop: Everything Digital: How to Create Online Publications, Websites, E-zines, Immersive Exhibitions Spaces and More / The Future Of An Artistic Practice Is Data Driven!
Presenter: Peter Lemmens, Artist and Data-Specialist
The workshop will help artists get ready for a very near future where almost all transactions will be digital: from archiving, storage, presentation, communication and sales to restoration and authentication. This presentation will focus on the role of online art management tools as the professional backbone of an art practice: from logistics to artistic. These tools will enable each artist/user to reformat their artistic oeuvre into different kinds of output models, from publications and exhibition lists, online viewing rooms, up-to-date websites and e-zines to curating immersive exhibition spaces and museums. Simultaneously, these tools are artistic when they capture the scope, movements and substance of an artistic oeuvre. They offer a creative insight in the work itself. Recent developments are focusing on the integration of AI and blockchain technology into these management tools, in order to make them even more performant. For many, the benefit of a professional art management tool is often the first serious step towards making their artistic praxis sustainable on an economical as well as artistic level.

DAY 3, NOVEMBER 6
MORNING

Talk and Screening: Look-Listen-Local with Afghans, Haitians and US New Immigrants
Presenter: Michael Sheridan, Founder, Community Supported Film and Sheridan Works, Boston
Looking and listening from the local perspective should be an imperative in our divided and ill-informed world. Our news and non-fiction media-makers should have learned the lesson from the rise of Trump and authoritarianism that we need to learn about struggles and challenges from the perspective of those living them. Most of what we hear about people outside our circles is from the perspective and concern of people inside our circles. This causes those who wish to be well informed, and their leaders, to be caught-by-surprise, to be misguided, and to flounder with ineffective responses. Community Supported Film puts the listening and looking devices in the hands of the affected, the misunderstood and the misrepresented and mentors their making of short documentary films. Come and experience the results of looking and listening locally – from the perspective of Afghans, Haitians and new immigrants and refugees to the US – and learn about the process and challenges.

Workshop: How Digital Technologies are Transforming the Art World and Our Lives
Presenter: Purnima Mitra, Artist
This workshop will use sexual violence as a case study to show how photos of such incidents can be transformed into 3D reconstructions to provide audiences with direct experiences of past incidents.

DAY 3, NOVEMBER 6
MID-DAY

Workshop: Facing the Generational Cliff – The Importance of Becoming Relevant with Younger Generations
Presenter: A.J. Steinberg, CFRE Founder of Queen Bee Fundraising
The Greatest Generation has long been the backbone of support for arts-related nonprofit institutions such as symphonies and museums. However, over the past two decades, we have watched these donors age and edge toward extinction. Despite this inevitable impending shift, organizations have done very little to recalibrate their communications and offerings to attract and inspire younger donors. The time for action, however, is upon us now. No longer can organizations afford to delay changes in their organizational culture as the next generations of major donors are actively searching for nonprofits with whom they can align their ideals, volunteerism, and donation dollars. This workshop walks you through steps for assessing your organization’s current generational spread and outlines creative strategies that can be implemented to connect with Millennials and beyond. Also, we will discuss tactics that can be used to introduce changes to a board that feels threatened by the inevitability of generational change.

Workshop General Safety Training for Artists
Presenter: Julie Trébault, Director, Artists at Risk Connection (ARC), a project of PEN America
Artists around the world often face grave threats in retaliation for weaving political messages into their creative work and activism, including censorship, imprisonment, harassment, and even death. When an artist first faces risk, there are not a lot of roadmaps: the experience can be incredibly isolating and disorienting. In order to tackle this knowledge gap, ARC published a first-of-its kind “Safety Guide for Artists” in 2021 to explore topics such as defining and understanding risk, preparing for threats, fortifying digital safety, documenting persecution, finding assistance, and recovering from trauma. This workshop will provide concrete strategies and best practices to help artists mitigate risk. Drawing on ARC’s expertise in the field and our experiences working with more than 400 at-risk artists over the last several years, we will cover topics including cybersecurity threats and best practices; tactics used by governmental and non-governmental actors to attack artists; resources available to artists under threat and ways for organizations to provide support; methods of identifying risks to yourself; strategies for developing a safety net and plan; and actions to take against perpetrators and censorship.

Workshop: Chickpeas, Chili, Chocolate: A Menu for Cultural Diplomacy
Participation Limited to 24.
Presenters: Azra Akšamija, Associate Professor and Director, MIT Program in Art, Culture, Technology; and Gudrun Wallenböck, Founder and Artistic Director of hinterland galerie, Hinterland Design, and Co-Founder, Sitios, Vienna, Austria
This transdisciplinary and transcultural workshop/roundtable discussion is curated around a dinner menu– including chickpeas, chili, and chocolate–focused on the ethics of working in the field of cultural diplomacy. In a world traversed by zones of contact in which lifestyle choices have become targets for reactionary forms of identity paranoia, wearing a headscarf or a beard can be perceived as a threat. This transdisciplinary workshop asks how the cultural sector can provide a meaningful and impactful response to the global surge of xenophobia, nationalism, and fascism. It will highlight lessons learned from art projects, exhibitions, and residencies aimed at deconstructing cultural biases and facilitating a productive transcultural exchange towards mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence. As the cultural diplomacy efforts are carried out by a network of practitioners and stakeholders of various capacities, intentions, and motivations, anyone operating in this complex field is bound to make compromises. The line between artistic activism and social work, representation and misrepresentation, genuine curiosity and cultural appropriation, is easily crossed in this complex realm. This transdisciplinary workshop invites artists, gallerists, museum workers, governmental and financial “enablers” to share their experiences of engaging subject positions defined by “otherness” and marginality, with an objective to reveal shared positions, concerns, and dilemmas over ethics and aesthetics of cultural diplomacy. The workshop will take place as a dinner conversation, curated around a culturally packed 3-course menu: chickpea hummus, chili stew, and chocolate dessert.

DAY 3, NOVEMBER 6
EARLY AFTERNOON
1 – 2:00 pm

Workshop: DIY Choreographic Solutions for the COVID Era
Note: The target audience for this workshop is artists working from home.
Presenter: Kaitlyn Bass, Associate Director of SQx Dance Company
In response to a changing dance performance and creation landscape, we will share our digital creation and presentation tools we have implemented from home since we enacted our pandemic plan.

Monument Public Address System AR
Presenter: Meredith Drum
Location: TBA, Rain Date ONLY (see Day 2 Schedule): Same location from 1:00 – 2:00 pm on Sunday