Book launch and debate with editor Noah Simblist
Presentation begins at 6 pm, Oct 16. Soup and drinks to follow.
How have exhibition platforms created space for artists to generate learning environments? How have these practices changed assumptions about art institutions and artistic production? Can alternative organizations and traditional institutions learn from one another?
Living to Learn: Art & Education for the Common Good (ICA at VCU and Inventory Press, 2026) presents the work of artists, curators, collectives, and scholars who address contemporary art as a site of learning in the 21st century.
At a moment when formal art and education institutions in Chicago have faced public disinvestment, austerity measures, censorship, and police violence, how are small, artist-run organizations creating solidarity, building localized capacity, and attending to alternative possibilities for learning environments? Can we help create fresh relevance for banished or marginalized disciplines and themes? Can we push back against the current institutional order, opening the pathway to future reforms and inventions?
Join Noah Simblist, editor of Living to Learn, and Brian Holmes, contributing author, to talk about these and other issues.