Trust Art - Cassie Thornton - A new path through TIME AND SPACE

School of the Future

A public project led by Cassie Thornton

Project Proposal

The purpose of the School of the Future is to establish a school run by teaching artists using the problem solving techniques of art to approach… everything. There are two distinct but corresponding phases of this project. First, the teaching Artist Union, co-founded by Thornton, aims to build a community of teaching artists with the following mission:

"With this union, we aim to define the role of the teaching artist through developing a supportive community, celebrating and exhibiting the work produced in teaching situations, and advocating for the rights and needs of the teaching artist. We work in many different kinds of environments: for non profit arts organizations, schools, museums, and other agencies. Because we believe that art can invigorate, agitate, and reorient stale institutional habits, we want to develop a lasting structure to support the happiness and health of every manifestation of Teaching Artist."

Next, the artist will build a temporary, collapsible mobile school in Sergeant Dougherty Park in Bushwick. Local youth will be invited to attend free classes taught by members of the Teaching Artist Union in order to test out a new experimental curriculum in the community in real space and with real people over the course of one month.

About the Artist

Cassie Thornton views herself as a “street worker,” akin to a contemporary churchman or 19th century charity worker. Her work is a series of attempts to find a sense of belonging wherever she is. It has taken the form of setting up offices in neighborhoods throughout the world, from Flatbush to Finland, where she offers a professional service—consultant, fortune teller, diplomat, entrepreneur, aesthetician, surveyor—as an excuse for interacting with the residents.

Through the documentation of these various interactions, Thornton is building a database of experience and ephemera that informs the next business endeavor. She aims to work between a macroworld and a microcosm, as a diplomat between an infinite outside world and the minutia of the local.

Past projects have taken place at Saksala Art Radius in rural Finland, School of Fine Arts in the Yucatan, Subtle Technologies Conference at the University of Toronto, and Peekskill Project at Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art. Thornton has worked as an art educator since 2006, which most recently has included residencies the Center for Urban Pedagogy in Brooklyn, Brooklyn College Community Partnership, Ox-Bow, and Brooklyn Arts Council. She is currently co-founding the Teaching Artist Union.

Artist's Past Work

Infinite Housing Projects
Cassie made a series of 3-d models and prints on paper that combined the ideas and practices of moral architecture with holistic medicine in order to re-imagine Le Corbusier’s model utopian communities, whose vexed adoption by many governments render them notorious. As a gesture towards a new type of tonic culture, she used mythically healing root vegetables to print the facades of the public housing of this era. By using magical ingredients to build new versions of old buildings Cassie imagines that she is thwarting monumental forces of bad architecture. Read more here.

Tagging the Social Contract, 2007
How does our behavior change from one space to another? Cassie led twenty-five seniors at the Heritage High School in East Harlem in the final semester of their government class in investigating the meaning of the social contract and its translation into contemporary spaces in New York City. The team defined the Social Contract as a silent contract in which people sacrifice individual freedom for the betterment of a larger group. The team observed public and private spaces where invisible rules maintain a status quo. They went to an episcopal church, a Kennedy Fried Chicken, the mall, the last car on the 6 train, and a basketball court. After collecting evidence (photos, video, audio) of the spaces, each space was labeled or ‘tagged’ with a list of behaviors. The resulting website displays images of different locations tagged with the behaviors spotted there.

The Future Unincorporated, 2007
Future Unincorporated is a consulting company created by Cassie. The mission of The Future Unincorporated was to create an office where very important meetings can take place. To consult is to give and take advice. Cassie developed an interrogation system that created a reason for conversation with each individual client. The goal of the interrogation is to amass information about individuals in order to discover the perfect corporation inside every person. The Future Unincorporated understands the future starts in only 5 minutes, and it goes on forever. The company would like to ask you what you will be doing then. It believes the consultations will change the future just by talking about it. Read more here.

The Saddest Little Paintings
Every moment on the internet is a unique and finite experience. Not just because the world where your computer sits is constantly changing, but because the sites that you view are also constantly being redesigned. Sometimes I reflect on a day based on what I found online, and I know I can never quite reproduce that experience of discovery because the path I took to find it originally has changed, and the day after, the links are different. I began to paint websites as a way to remember important experiences, which often have roots in what I find online. See more paintings here.

Craptop
In the sunless winter of Finland, Cassie embarked on a quest for personal corporate acknowledgement and support,. After her laptop broke, she opened renegade Apple franchises in abandoned forest real-estate--capitalizing on the undewhelmed cultural landscapte of the Scandinavian forest. Cassie journey concluded with the grand opening of a commemorative five foot version of the technomiraculous 5th Avenue Apple store, and the unveiling of an earth-shattering technology that hopes to revolutionize all other Apple products. See it here.

Craptop

Primal Laptops by Williamsburg's Children, 2007

Stimulus - Left

Stimulus - Right1

Stimulus - Right2

Monday

May252009

A new path through TIME AND SPACE

The summer has presented some amazing opportunities to develop interactivity concepts and processes, in all sorts of contexts. It looks as though I will be representing Temporary Art Beauty Services at the Volta Fair in Basel this June. This disrupts the Trust Art schedule for the groundbreaking of the School of the Future. However, this project seems to be opening a lot of conceptual and physical doors that will lead back to the idea of developing new systems of education, which is the ultimately the goal of the School of the Future. I make public art, but I am exhibiting at an art fair. The art world is changing. Gallerists might not earn a profit on their investment in expensive art fair real estate, and so, a change in format is happening. Public art is being invited to fill the empty spaces presented by a worldwide recession. I'd like to think that I am participating in a revolution as I offer manic-cures, fine art tattoos, and T.A.B.S. products for barter or for tips. I am creating a cheap way for art fair viewers to consume some art, but I am also creating one on one interaction, and human contact where it has never been desired. This performance of art beauty education has never before crossed international borders, so I am very excited to see what type of reaction there is in Switzerland. Upon returning I will be heading to OxBow residency in Michigan with a group of collaborators as we experiment making building structures in the woods that provide shelter and that we can grow food in, lead foraging adventures, and learn how to live off that land. This project feeds directly into the architectural aspect of School of the Future, as we will be doing physical research about mobile site specific architecture. I will also be engaging in the process of finding and using resources in a very different context than in NYC. In a way, this is a type of education for me that seems necessary before I can pretend to understand and share the idea of realizing and creating unexpected bounty in new places. From Michigan, I will go back to a residency in Wisconsin, called Summerwork, where I hope to continue on a project I began two years ago with Andrew Dayton called Alternative Growth Research Institute. In this project we invite collaborators to come and create experiments and systems that will speed up the growth of genetically modified corn. In this project I believe that the instigation of magical theories around mundane stuff like corn becomes a skill that I will use forever and ever as I explore new ways of getting people excited about nothing and everything.

May 25, 2009 at 13:31 |

1 Comment

Reader Comments (1)

Wonderful post... Very informational and educational as usual!

Acai Optimum

March 15, 2010 |

Jay B.

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