A Curriculum for New and Emergent Practices

What is different about Mildred's Lane is that it functions entirely to reassemble the connections between working, living, and researching — centered around specific projects within a pedagogical strategy. This unusual program affords students the ability to participate in the production of large-scale research driven art projects within a truly transdisciplinary environment — a rare opportunity that is unavailable in any institution.

As the system at Mildred's Lane has developed, working with students has become a critical component. It is out of this work and realization — that project based art making requires a fundamental rethinking of the parameters of education — that a curriculum has been developed at Mildred's Lane. At the core of this new curriculum are two principles: (1) that for students, project based art making is best pursued in the context of actual site and (2) education should be principally involved in the development of modes of life — what we are calling workstyles.

This is an unusual site and a unique program which does not strive to duplicate other studio program models. Students do not get studio spaces — the site itself is the studio. The program is made up of a series of one-of-a-kind research, development and project building sessions during which students live and collaboratively work with internationally renowned artists who will direct the sessions to produce an ambitious new work. Thus each session will result in a single, concrete site-sensitive installation and/or body of research. During the session students will have the opportunity to be involved in all aspects of a project's development — and in addition, each session will produce documentation in the form of a publication, website, exhibition and/or other project forms which the students will collaboratively design, author, edit, curate and publish in collaboration with Mildred's Lane.

The core of the practice and educational philosophy at Mildred's Lane is an attempt to collectively create new modes of being in the world — this idea incorporates questions of our relation to the environment, systems of labor, forms of dwelling, all of which are an ethics of comportment — and are embodied in workstyles. As a student at Mildred's Lane these issues will be negotiated daily through the rethinking of one's collective involvements with food, shopping, making, styling, gaming, sleeping, reading, and thinking. This is a program and a place where a work-live-research environment is developed to foster a rigorous engagement with every aspect of life. In parallel to and co-evolving with every research session will be the intensive reconsideration of workstyles — there will be visits to alternative farms, discussions around food and cooking; cleaning, maintenance and the total space of the domestic will be part of the course of study — we will collectively work on the full space of our total system of engagements via doing, making, and researching.

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