Making

I never considered that the classes I taught at TradeSchool, see chapter 3, would lead to a job in an accredited BFA program, but they did. Teaching at TradeSchool was always an experiment, and I was only 24. I was the primary person who hosted classes during the first run of TradeSchool, helping teachers set up and welcoming students into the space for 35 days in a row. Every now and then, I would teach a class on grant writing (since I had raised over $300,000 with Jen Abrams over the years, for OurGoods.org) and also a class on so-called “alternative” economies (what I would later learn to be solidarity economies). In 2010, TradeSchool.coop was written up in The New Yorker and in The New York Times, and the classes started getting so full that we had to turn people away. We had wide a range of people in our classes: millenials who thought it was cool, activists who believed in solidarity economies, retirees who wanted to keep teaching, high school students, unemployed artists, well-known artists with art market success, and lots of people who were present for the sake of self-directed learning. Because of this range of students, I thought nothing of the faculty members from The New School who were in my classes.

But in 2010, one of my TradeSchool students, Pascale Gatzen, who was also a faculty member at The New School, and who had met me at an experimental school called Mildred’s Lane, invited me to teach a class at The New School. With only a BFA, I never imagined that I would be invited to be an adjunct teacher at the college-level. That summer I got really depressed and felt like all my students would know that I was an imposter. I was so nervous to enter a “real” classroom with BFA students paying over $40,000 a year in tuition. I asked everyone I knew how to teach a fifteen-week BFA course, and a curator named Erin Marie Sickler put me in touch with Susan Jahoda. I was relieved when, a year later, Susan started the New York City-based Pedagogy Group with Maureen Connor, and I could meet with other faculty members, adjunct and tenured, to talk about how to teach.

It was the year of Occupy Wall Street when I started teaching my first class for BFA students at The New School. That fall, the new president at Cooper Union, President Bharucha, also started talking openly about charging tuition at Cooper.

I never imagined that I would be invited to be an adjunct teacher at the college-level. That summer I got really depressed and felt like all my students would know that I was an imposter. I was so nervous to enter a “real” classroom with BFA students paying over $40,000 a year in tuition.

This would be a radical shift, the first time in the institution’s 154-year history when any student would have to pay for their education at Cooper. I knew it was time to move from my work on self-organized learning with TradeSchool.coop and into arts advocacy for cultural equity and for free education. In addition to joining the Art & Labor working group and the Alternative Banking working group at Occupy, and demonstrating against charging tuition at Cooper, I began to shift away from my work with OurGoods and TradeSchool. In 2012–2013, I held open meetings through- out New York City with a call to found a collective called BFAMFAPhD which would exist to investigate the relation- ship between student debt and precarity in the arts, and to advocate for cultural equity and free tuition on a national scale. By 2014, Susan Jahoda was fully involved, and we led Artists Report Back, which used rigorous statistical methods and data visualization to advocate for cultural equity in arts education.

“So the question is not the scandal of the individual, necessarily, but how can individuals create institutions that they want to be part of. Where they see the power of the institution as collectively generated, rather than a random chance occurrence they need to participate in.”

— Caroline Woolard, 2014

To form BFAMFAPhD, I held a series of open meetings in 2012–2013 in New York City where I invited a range of people to a facilitated conversation. At first, I sent emails to people that said things like this:

Subject: volunteering on a project about creative graduates? | BFA MFA PhD

Dear Steve (and Louise?),

I'm coordinating a group of artists, designers, and sociologists that's doing a project that attempts to make visible, and organize, creative graduates in this country. We started with a quick site: http://bfamfaphd.comand we are working this December and January to make a more robust visualization of graduates.

My friend Jeff Warren (of http://publiclab.org/) is pulling a bunch of data from IPEDS, and I'm wondering if you can help sort it, compile it, make sure it's accurate, and even present it visually to the public. I can explain more on the phone, if you have time/interest. Here's where the data is stored right now:https://github.com/jywarren/bfamfaphd/

Let me know!

Caroline

PS: here's more info ... Summary of the project:

How many artists are in this country, and what might we do together? Informally called "BFA MFA PHD," this project visualizes the number of students graduating with creative degrees, elicits proposals for collective work, and generates dialog and conversation. A lecture series and exhibition of visualizations will open on February 2, 2014, in Caroline Woolard and Lika Volkova's studio at the Queens Museum.

According to the census, there are more artists than police officers, lawyers, or doctors in this country. Reporting on the census in 2008,The New York Timesnoticed that "if all artists in America's workforce banded together, their ranks would be double the size of the United States Army." In fact, we may be three times the size of the army, as the census only tracks people who identify their primary occupation as "artist." BFA MFA PHD looks at students graduating with BFAs, MFAs, and PhDs, noticing that the growth curve is extreme, and that there are now a million new graduates in this nation every ten years.

Who's working on the project so far: Jackie Armstrong: manually pulled data from IPEDs site / Agnes Szanyi: sociologist, correlated data for population growth / Jeff Warren: writing code to pull data from IPEDS? we hope! / Annelie Berner: data viz (we could use more folks) / Ben Lerchin: website / Christin Ripley: printmaker, may make prints of data viz / Lika Volkova and Caroline Woolard: installation

And later on, when more people were working together in a clear way, I sent emails to remind people of our progress, like this:

Subject: info and materials for BFAMFAPhD today: 12-6 p.m. at 63 5th Ave at 13th Street (6th Floor # 620)

Dear all,

I am so excited to gather together today! If you can, please bring a laptop, an ID (the guard needs to see it), and some food/drinks to share with 6-8 people. We will meet at the New School's University Center at 63 5th Ave at 13th Street (6th Floor # 620). It's the new, shiny building on the corner of 13th and 5th Ave.

We will be able to do very focused work today, as there are 6–8 of us fully confirmed, enough to work together and still all be heard. We will get to know each other better, talk through our progress so far, and work together on projects that we care about. These seem to be: Solidarity Research: what groups and organizations should we learn from, support, and work with? and Mapping: based on existing tenants organizations and solidarity economy initiatives, what are ideal neighborhoods for community land trusts and learning together?

Ann, Pasqualina, and I have created an agenda, and will be reviewing it from 11-12, in case you want to arrive early!

Looking forward to it,

Caroline

WORKING GROUPS WE ARE INTERESTED IN: Mapping: Based on existing tenants organizations and solidarity economy initiatives, what are ideal neighborhoods for community land trusts?

Library and Reading Group (sorting PDFs and links sent, learning together)

Documentation: video and/or audio recordings about WHY we are gathering

All of the above dataviz + exploring financial-social models for community land trusts

Data Visualization / Drawing: race/ethnicity distribution (bring a laptop, if you can)

Solidarity Research: What groups and organizations should we learn from, support, and work with?

Library/reading; mapping; solidarity research; public calendar; documentation (I also do not have a laptop)

Solidarity Research: What groups and organizations should we learn from, support, and work with?

Library and Reading Group (sorting PDFs and links sent, learning together)