BmoreArt

“UMBC allowed me to come here when all of this was a knot of emotion,” Jackson shared with me in an interview. “What was really keeping me up at night, this knot in my chest, was the long-term implications of an absence of shared history for visual artists who rely upon the humanities to pass it on. If we don’t give it away, we don’t get to keep it. We get to keep it because we give it away.” This shared history has been negatively impacted or even purposefully eradicated by continual disinvestments in the arts and humanities in schools and at local, state, and federal levels.

Pedagogy Study Hall provides public access to many of these histories. Gallery visitors can read legislation that affected arts, humanities, and education in a hand-drawn timeline that will accrue data points over the run of the exhibition. They can learn about local histories through video interviews with Baltimore-based cultural leaders. Individuals are also invited to shape history as active participants by engaging in reading discussions, arts workshops, and other educational offerings in community with others.

I experienced this multi-dimensional collective learning first hand during a program on October 10, which was focused on the book Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America by Michael Brenson. This book focuses on the National Endowment for the Arts’s 30-year fellowship program for visual artists and the public attitudes and political climate that shaped its rise and eventual demise.

The event brought together Jackson, Evans, Brenson, museum educator Annie Storr, and participants in a program that was both an in-person event and a webinar, part discussion and part read-aloud of the book as several audience members followed along with their own copies. I left the event with a greater understanding of one way that the federal government invested and then disinvested in artists. I also walked away with an admiration for an approach to pedagogy that resonates with my own teaching practice—one that is multi-modal for different types of learners, inclusive of viewpoints from participants as much as invited speakers, and grounded in learning together in real time.

Following the program, Evans explained the benefits of learning collectively. “There’s something to be said for being able to ask other people questions and being able to have thought partners, a soundboard, perhaps have your thoughts and questions reflected by others. I think that’s a piece that’s very important. Because I definitely think the way we conduct life here can be isolating and it can be lonely.” said Evans. The collective learning that takes place through Pedagogy Study Hall is rooted in Jackson and Evans’ definition of pedagogy “not only as the practice of teaching, but also as the systems of decision-making and environments that make learning possible,” as stated on the CADVC website.

For Jackson and Evans, the environments they grew up in gave rise to their academic and artistic inquiries and to their eventual collaborations. They each credit their respective elementary schools as important drivers in pursuing their educational interests. They also describe the significance of living in Los Angeles in their 20s, when their social circles overlapped. They spent this exploratory time of their lives driving to friends’ houses, bookstores, a historic pastrami stand, and coffee shops across the sprawling city. Cars became spaces for connectivity and conversation. Evans adds, “We found that we were interested in education in different ways, we were interested in art in different ways, and just trying to figure out the world together, having a whole bunch of questions.”

Jackson says it was a party in LA that first solidified their connection. Although Jackson had gone to this party with several friends, at one point she found herself sitting in a courtyard, separated from her crew. She noticed an individual who appeared to be funk pioneer George Clinton and she bemoaned the fact that none of her friends were nearby to confirm if it was true. At that moment, Evans, who was not yet a close friend of Jackson’s, walked into the courtyard. Jackson was grateful to see a familiar face. She held Evans’ face in her hands and instinctively said, “Sunshine. Bright, bright sunshine.” This encounter would spark a decades-long friendship. Later Evans invited Jackson to teach art at the elementary school where she was working, noting her magnificent facilitation skills while engaging students who had reputations for being troublemakers but really just needed the creative and kinesthetic outlets that Evans and Jackson provided.

“I think we all deserve and we all need the visual arts and humanities,” Jackson stated. “There’s some of us who won’t live without it. I identify as someone who would not be living without the interventions of access and rigorous study. And so when Nia and I stumbled into each other, it turned out we were both prepared for rigorousness.” These kinds of intersections—arts learning and lifelong learning, friendship and mutual admiration, shared exploration and rigorous study—are made available to the public through Pedagogy Study Hall.

Indeed, when I attended the opening artist talk for the project on October 9, I felt like I was being welcomed into a living room of erudite friends who put as much panache into dialogue about disinvestment and investment in the arts as they do singing “Happy Birthday.” (It was moderator Teri Henderson’s birthday). The gallery was filled with Jackson and Evans’s friends and collaborators, many of whom will be highlighted in upcoming public programs.

The ambitious slate of programs that take place over the 7-week run of the exhibition are as much a part of the Pedagogy Study Hall project as the physical spaces of the galleries. And like the project overall, the public programs are varied in format.

The Talk-Draw Session on October 11 was a panel discussion in which audience members responded in the form of drawings that will then be incorporated into the gallery. Upcoming programs include creative writing workshops, roundtable discussions, and public drawing sessions. Over time, topics that come up during these programs will feed the iterative timeline as important historical events are mentioned and then recorded on the gallery wall. Here Jackson adds another layer onto her mixed media artistic practice—the dimension of time.

The university campus offers a fertile environment for learning to expand and shift. During Jackson’s residency, she meandered down the hallways and found connections between the studio classrooms in UMBC’s Fine Arts Building and her past educational experiences.

Having been a visual arts learner in several schools and community-based spaces, Jackson has observed that fellow learners do not have a comprehensive understanding of the history of arts disciplines in relation to policies and laws. Without this shared understanding of the systems that impact arts access, Jackson notes, we become competitive. ”When we’re left only seeing each other and the institutions that we’re associated with as competitors, we are left weak. We are left disunited.” Through Pedagogy Study Hall, Jackson and Evans propose the opposite.

Accessibility to the arts is a right. Evans warns about institutions that maintain the inaccessibility that was established in their founding, a blatant prioritization of a privileged few. She predicts that such institutions that “continue to carry out different harms against different communities and that value really small percentages of populations and communities are inevitably gonna have a point at which that disconnect puts them in the position where, when things get tough—and they will—there isn’t a broad or wide community to advocate for them.”

Pedagogy Study Hall delves deep into serious and somber issues of public concern. However, when I walked out of CADVC following the opening, I was greeted by the familiar sounds of Boyz II Men’s 1992 hit “End of the Road” blaring into an open amphitheater. Jackson’s alter ego Tommy Tonight in the group D’TALENTZ (comprising artists Nikita Gale, Aryel René Jackson, and Ashley Teamer) was being projected onto the wall of the building. The video shows the group lip-syncing to the tune in drag akin to 1990s boy bands, crooning in the library and other spaces on a school campus. While D’TALENTZ takes inspiration from Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Talents, the video projected that night conveyed feelings of camaraderie and exuberance, the kind of liberatory feeling that arises when friends’ radical creative expression runs rampant in institutions of higher learning.

Now that the exhibition opening is in the past, I asked Jackson, a self-described lifelong learner, what questions she is now asking. She shared the following: “What does it look like for us not to be waiting to gain entry into an exclusive space that might very well be on its last legs? What does it mean for us to make the studio spaces and the reading rooms and the libraries and to affirm their value ourselves?” Jackson stated, “Reflecting only on the history of how these things have happened is part of the exercise. It’s only part of what’s needed. What is needed after that is the fortitude to organize with each other cooperatively to make the spaces that we need.”

Pedagogy Study Hall is on view from October 9–November 22 at CADVC at UMBC. For more information and a schedule of upcoming programs, click here.

Upcomming Programming:

Thursday, October 16: Panel on Public Arts and Humanities, convened by Christopher Brooks
Featuring Carla Du Pree, Navasha Daya, and Nether, with Tomashi Jackson
6PM–8PM

Thursday, October 23: Language as Personal and Communal Expression: An Interactive Zine Workshop sponsored by UMBC Global Asias
Featuring activist-educator Shengxiao “Sole” Yu and scholar-activist Joyhanna Jung Yoo
2PM–4PM

Friday, October 24: Public Drawing Session with Alx Velozo
2PM–4PM

Wednesday, October 29: Dresher x CADVC: Arts & Humanities Funding Cuts in Baltimore
Moderator: Amy Froide, Dresher Center for the Humanities; Panelists: Lindsey Baker, CEO, Maryland Humanities; Terri Freeman, President, Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture; Marc Ruppel, Director, Creative Achievement and Research Administration Team
12PM–1:30PM

Thursday, October 30: “The Spellcaster’s Manual” Poetry Workshop with Ainsley Burrows and Laurielle Noel
5PM–7:30PM

Friday, October 31: Dresher x CADVC: “Baltimore’s Chicory, the War on Poverty, and the Work of a Poem”
Featuring Keegan C. Finberg, with Tomashi Jackson on Zoom
11AM–12PM

Thursday, November 20: Community Advocates in conversation with Nia K. Evans of the Boston Ujima Project
Featuring Dr. Meleny Thomas, South Baltimore Community Land Trust, and Lawrence Grandpre, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle
6PM-8PM

Saturday, November 22: Closing Day Talk/Draw
Participants: Eric Mack, Tomashi Jackson, Nia Evans
DJ: M’Balou Camara
1PM–4PM