Today I did my first Arte Agora lessons at Morgan Sayer’s art class st the SAE Institute Chicago.
Two weeks before the session, introduce the concept of Arte Agora to the students.
Define the term using the first portion of the book, provide a PDF of book, assign reading, and have a general discussion that focuses on the parameters of the definition so as to focus their collection efforts.
Next, assign time for the students to go out into the area around the school (if suitable) or some other area of the city to find and remove pieces of Arte Agora from the public way.
On the day of instruction, have the students bring their items and conduct a discussion.
Explain the Venn diagram of Arte Agora.
Try to fashion the discussion around the interests of the students and /or the curriculum of the class. For example, when engaging students at SAE Institute, a creative media school, I focused on the connections between outsider art and music:
- Howard Finster Little Creatures album
- The artistic and musical journey of Wesley Willis
- Debbie Harry, rap, and spoken word of the early 90s (which was killed by rap)
- The mechanics of removal– Stinkfish example– multiple layers of paper is your friend
- Large-format muralists/ spray can art is not Arte Agora
- Control is worthless– the story of the buffing of Hebru Brantley
- Pizzaintherain and the gallery world and the lessons of format
- Documentation as art
- Journals as documentation, art, and clarity
- History of postal stickers and slaps
- Methods for archiving– Itoya et al
- Gig posters as quintessential commercial-oriented Arte Agora
- Steve W/ Screwball Press is the master
- Lajuana Lampkins, modern master
- Stealing items that artists abandoned and how they feel about that (AQUES as example)
- Talk about my Soundcloud and possible creative directions from here
Here’s a photo I took on my bike ride back from the lesson.
