Trust Art - Cassie Thornton - Community Seeking

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

Tuesday

Jul282009

Community Seeking

After finishing two weeks in a creative collective thinktank at Ox-Bow residency in Michigan, I have gone south to Indiana where part of my family lives. I am presently in Muncie Indiana where my uncle and grandma live on a communal farm and my mom works full time at Wal-Mart. I spend the mornings walking around the farm, meeting the other residents and animals, and reacquainting with my family. In the afternoon I go to Wal-Mart to see my mom (she works during most of my waking hours), to buy food (there aren't too many alternatives), and to study Wal-Mart. The southern branch of the Muncie Wal-Mart seems to have drawn me in for personal and intellectual reasons, causing me to be in attendance every day I am here. What I have realized about this place is its power over the town, and its potential for gathering people inside. I drive around wondering where the community center is, the main church, or the library. They all exist, but not one of them is for the broader Muncie community. The students from Ball State, the farmers, the ex-farmers, the business owners, the unemployed, the construction worker- they all have something to do at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is organic. Or rather some of their products are. Wal-Mart understands trends and people's thresholds for them. They don't go too far. The new logo was only a small transition from the old one. The new slogan: SAVE MONEY, LIVE BETTER is a subtle change from ALWAYS LOW PRICES, ALWAYS and it shows an awareness of the customer's shifting concerns. Wal-Mart is not stagnant, it is sensitive to its customers and it changes to keep them happy. I guess they have to. Can people buy in without buying in? Can they be taught to DIY without buying the kit? Anyway, I am starting to think that the school of the future will learn from Wal-Mart, the powerful machine that it is. Maybe SotF can compliment, fill in the voids created by, or quietly confront Wal-Mart. The School of the Future might mean recognizing where community is possible and infusing it with a challenging new set of expectations and activities for the community that has already formed in every American town.

July 28, 2009 at 17:55 |

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