Shedding, Splitting, Spilling is a six-week seminar is for artists who are currently exploring new ideas, mediums, concepts, contexts, and forms of research that move in a different direction from their existing practice. A photographer writing a novel, a filmmaker painting, a musician wishing to lean into sculpture—artists changing trajectories and reimagining what they thought was possible in their practice.

This direction may feel tentative and uncertain, but this seminar is a place to gather around that uncertainty and think through making. To make a place for a practice that has outgrown its prescribed boundaries and meanings—what an exciting and scary place to be!

We are often encouraged to develop a style, to become recognizable within an institution or market that values easy categorization. We are discouraged from diverging from our set paths, from displeasing collectors, audiences, or institutions that profit from our work and voice, packaging us into a seamless envelope without flaws. Risk-taking is discouraged, yet it sits at the core of a sustainable creative life.

Even when it feels generative and thrilling, it can be difficult to follow our curiosities all the way through because they do not look or sound like anything we have made before. Sometimes an idea finds a medium that holds it perfectly, and sometimes the medium itself becomes a restriction.

The readings in this class—poems, essays, books, and research papers—are curated into a genre-bending list that defies easy classification and categorization. We will read poetry that flows into science-fiction, prose that reaches toward the metaphysical, a color that becomes a love letter, dreams that form the backbone of cultural reality, language that is sonic before it is legible, and works where past, present, and future collapse into memory.

Participants will be invited to respond to these readings through creative prompts in whatever medium, form, or direction feels necessary.

We will meet for two hours each week to discuss the readings and our artistic responses to them. Participants may choose to make individual works throughout the seminar or allow the readings to accumulate into a single body of work. The final class will take the form of an online exhibition where participants can share all or some of what they have made.

For additional questions, contact: cherylmukherji@gmail.com