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. The curious can consult an excerpt from the book, right here.
Bio
As a curator, writer and educator, Noah Simblist works on the ways in which contemporary artists address history, sovereignty, and the tensions between political forces and self determination. He edited Living to Learn: Art + Education for the Common Good (Inventory Press and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2026), supported by the Teiger Foundation; and edited the book Tania Bruguera: The Francis Effect (Deep Vellum, 2022). Curatorial projects include Commonwealth at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (2020); Conjunctions and Disjunctions at Black Ground in Cali, Colombia (2022); Aissa Deebi: Exile is Hard Work at Birzeit University Museum in Palestine (2017); and Cracks in the Edifice: The Fairground as Constellation, a project co-organized with Suzy Halajian and supported by the Graham Foundation, which will be presented in Beirut, São Paulo, and Los Angeles in 2027-28. He is associate professor of art at VCU.