OurGoods

Potluck, this Saturday.

There were amazing people at Trade School. Please don’t disappear! We want to know you and you should all meet each other. So, we’re having a potluck from 6-9 on Saturday at our temporary space: The Fragmental Museum, 107 Suffolk Street, room 415. Please RSVP at tradeschool.ourgoods.org

What's next? We'll tell you soon.

Until then, here’s a list of PLACES to get educated, experimentally:

The Public School - run from a space in Borough Hall (nomadic classes)

Brooklyn Brainery - run out of Gowanus Studio Space ($25)

Brooklyn Skill Share - run out of Gowanus Studio Space

Etsy Craft Night -  run out of a space in Dumbo (Mondays 4-8pm)

NYC Resistor - run out of a space near BAM (electronics based)

#Class - run out of a gallery space in Chelsea (talking about art$)

BHQFU - run out of a space in Tribeca (run by artists)

School of the Future - run out of a park in Bushwick (this summer)

Mildred’s Lane - run out of an artist’s house in Beach Lake, PA (this summer)

Anhoek School- nomadic (sites shift from Greenpoint to Texas)

Here’s a list of WEBSITES to use if you’d like to learn from home:

Tutvid - tutorials

TED talks, iTunesU, MIT - lectures, courses

Miette - bedtime stories

Librivox - free audiobooks

Introduction to Web Design

Louise Ma walked students through fundamental principles behind web design with a series of real-life examples.

You can download the class notes and class takeaway PDF’s.

Art Work Discussion

Despite the snow storm, Trade School was full for a discussion about art, labor, and economics. Chris Kennedy presented an overview of the Art Work newspaper (download the presentation below) and Cassie Thornton led a group articulation of terms: trade, barter, exchange, quid pro quo, gift, donation, mutual credit, credit league, time bank, non-profit, market, community, commons, public good, trust, currency, funders, supporters, value, economy, cultural producers, creative workforce, creative class, artist, designer, organizer, leader, founder, volunteer, participant.

We all vocalized concerns about our personal economy, the economy of art and art education, and ended with a list of resources and hopes that motivate us:

Hopes: more artists will work with local communities, go to community board meetings, be more generous with peers, work across genres, collaborate or apprentice with youth and the elderly, and/or share access to equipment and information.

Project Management Resources: clocking hours- Harvest , invoices- invoicemachine.com , freelancers union ,”things” for mac,

Access: Get an artist’s membership at MoMA for $25 if you show 3 announcements from shows you’ve been in, Volunteer at museums to get a discount or museum pass, most museum book collections are open to the public (you may need to make an appointment), and say you’re a small business at the Apple Store and receive 10, 1 hour tutorials with a ‘genius’ for $100 (usually only good if you buy a new computer).

Information: Transarts.nl for residencies, TED talks, tutvid.org (tutorials),

Health care: the worker cooperative called Third Root for holistic health, barter with health workers in the Rock Dove Collective, and bartering art classes for health services at Woodhull Hospital in Bushwick (here’s the form).

Here’s the list of groups/projects Chris went over from the Art Work newspaper: The Art Workers Coalition of the 1960s, OurGoods.org, Lize Mogel’s cartography, The Artist Union of the 1930s with the WPA, the artist-run Back Story Cafe in Chicago, Incubate’s mico grant system called Sunday Soup (a pre-cursor to FEAST), The Baltimore Development Co-op’s farming projects, The Institute for Applied Aesthetics research stations, The Community Arts Network’s research portal, Just Seeds large printing collective, Impractical Labor’s union, The Creative Class critique, W.A.G.E’s demands for artist payment, The Center for Urban Pedagogy’s visualization and educaiton tactics, The Teaching Artist’s Union, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest issue #7 on money.

Kickstarter

Perry Chen came over to talk about Kickstarter, the website he co-founded to help people raise money for creative projects.

Here’s some notes I took:

1. Know your audience. You are driving people to your Kickstarter campaign, so have a sense of who they are. When asking for money and giving incentives for donations, think about what you feel comfortable giving and receiving and what kind of rewards you value. For example, offer music theory if you’re a musician. It’s low cost to you but high value to your supporters. Or, within the film community, giving a supporter producing credits has a lot of value.

2. Tell a good story. Kickstarter is all about empathy. People give to you because they care about you and/or love you work, not because they want a return on their investment or a tax free donation. Kickstarter doesn’t allow investment venture capital, even if you want it, because Kickstarter is about patronage. Videos can really help people get a sense of who you are. Look through the successful projects to get ideas.

3. Be realistic with $. Don’t ask for $200,000 if no one has ever heard of you. Most people will donate about $25 and it would take 8,000 people to make that money. Also, be sure you can afford to give the rewards you say you will! Think about the cost (time and $) of producing and delivering the items.

4. You can do it! You can use kickstarter to gauge demand for your ideas, just be prepared to spend some time putting together your project and spreading the word. Starting a Kickstarter project is a creative project on its own!  You can wait until you think you have enough support, or be bold and dive in and work it.

PLAY

Julia and Andrew of Makerhappener led a workshop on play, using blindfolds to heighten each person’s sense of smell, taste, and sound. Someone said “We all identify as creative people, but we rarely play.” It’s true, we need to risk making fools of ourselves. Let’s be ridiculous together! As Sharon Hayes said earlier this year, “let’s get embarrassed!”

Sunday: Social Entrepreneurs, Irrational Decisions, History of Taste, First Tastes

The last Business for Artists class: Social Entrepreneurship.

Sarah Lohman gave us a taste history of the past 200 years. Want more taste of history? she’s making pancakes with historic recipes on March 7th (for free).

Athena Kokoronis and Mary Wallking Blackburn talked about first tastes and stealth health zines.

Saturday: Draw, Crochet, Daydream, Collect

After the portrait drawing round robin (see separate post below), Huong Ngo taught crochet, Maude Standish led daydreamers, and Ye Qin Zhu conducted a collecting workshop.

Crochet with Huong Ngo and Kristine Taylor.

Resources from Huong:

And since knitting was my first ultimate sport: http://www.knitty.com
The Website for the Institute for Figuring, lots of good links on computation, hyperbolic planes, and crocheted reefs!http://www.theiff.org/reef/index.html
Nice video tutorials on crocheting:http://learntocrochet.lionbrand.com/
Crochet Guild of America:http://www.crochet.org/They also have lessons for children, which I thought was nice since we learned from the daydreaming class that knitting & crocheting helps one daydream, imagine, and generally be a better thinker:http://www.crochet.org/teach/toc.html

Daydreaming exercises led by Maude Standish.

Collecting workshop with Ye Quin Zhu.

Collecting, with recreations of Lygia Clark’s work led by Celeste Pfau.

Caviar Demystified

Elizabeth Jones fascinated students with a slide show presentation of the origins and process of harvesting the coveted caviar. The class indulged in various types of caviar while learning about the impact of fish farming and pollution on how we consume seafood.

From Elizabeth:

I wanted to teach at Trade School because caviar does not have to be elitist - and one can learn a lot about the perils of our oceans through the story of the sturgeon. I also really like the idea of having classes about single food items. I think caviar is something that brings certain images to mind for different people - I suppose I am interested in what these are (though we didn’t really explore this in the class). The underlying desire for me if to get people to continue a dialogue around food - not just around great restaurants and vintages of wine - but how food is linked to larger historical and political decisions - the rise of postmodernist art movements and issues of gender and queerness. Now, there’s a much larger conversation about climate and food is linked to this discussion as well - only recently has NY incorporated these issues within. Nutrition studies has further fueled the western societies eating issues - and we live in a city that is saturated with restaurants - that can separate us from our identities and fuel the consumerism that NYers end of embracing. I feel as though Food is for some, the only way individuals have personal connections - it often gets people away from their computers and off the internet…..
I think Trade School is beautiful - from a design perspective, from the curation and execution. It should live on as a platform for individuals who can’t afford school to have a place to be inspired and then potentially teach too. Or think critically about what they can talk about - It successfully inspires human engagement and education.

- OurGoods - It’s a venue that inspires creativity. The discussion around the state of our economy, our reliance on oil, on social security, health care - it’s a place where you are forced to think about alternative ways to satiate - it’s something we should do more often, that we shy away from… I think people often are not apt to follow through sometimes on promises - and this might often be a general feeling and so it evokes ideas around personal trust and our human authenticity - how giving are we when there is expectation or a service involved? What intrinsic value do these services provide and how do we measure them - and what are the various levels of need vs. want are we evaluating. It can be an uncomfortable space for the brain - but it the uncomfortable experiences (or what might be perceived as uncomfortable) that often teach us the most. There are issues of ownership, personalization and general emotion that bartering and the Trade School experience can bring about - it brings awareness over our desires to engage as a community member. I feel as though OurGoods might thrive with a continued space like Trade School - to extend a physical space where one can engage with the community.

It’s a stone soup of education, art, outreach, design, collaboration, interdisciplinary, interdependent, greens, reds, rainbows and radicals.

Portrait Drawing Round Robin

Teacher Peter Walsh led Trade School students in a vigorous round robin of portrait drawing. The class of ten people moved in a clockwise rotation every ten minutes so that by the end of the class, you had drawn the four other people at your table and also yourself. At the end of the class the students assembled two five by five grids of drawings of their classmates, by their classmates. We got to take home portraits of us as tokens of our participation.

The grid of portraits was truly an fascinating thing to behold because you can instantly observe what several people had picked up about a person. These commonalities reflect not only how a person appears to others, but also reflect the drawer’s own projections in his or her renderings in general. For instance, a student’s purple scarf appeared in all of the portraits of her. Another student’s portraits of others zoomed in very close on their faces, blowing them up dramatically on paper.

You can read more about Peter’s ongoing Portrait Round Robin on his site.