ARTISTIC PRACTICE IS A WAY OF LEARNING - ART IS RESEARCH

WHAT ARE ARTISTS’ LITERACIES?

Artists’ Literacies is a framework for artists to identify their unique ways of knowing, and apply them to meaningful contexts, such as the pursuit of social justice, environmental sustainability, or humane intervention in large and complex systems.

Artists know things nobody else knows, and are able to learn in ways nobody else can learn.

What is often intuitive in a creative practice can be made cognitive through a process of critical dialogue, reflective feedback, and the structured study of various ways of knowing.

Markets and economies demand that artists be defined by the products and objects they produce. Artists’ literacies instead centers your process, and the knowledge you possess to create new value and opportunities for artists as world-shapers and culture producers.

Research conducted by artists is extremely effective at identifying the deepest structures underlying the most complex systems. This sort of knowledge is extremely valuable both to shape just and humane societies, and to reposition artists as among humanity’s most prominent producers of knowledge.

WHAT IS MISSING FROM OUR EDUCATION AS ARTISTS?

In art school or art classes, artists learn their craft and their tools. But they are not taught to look within their work for their unique sensitivities, their unique ways of learning and knowing.

Further, artists are taught how to survive economically by instrumentalizing and commodifying their products - but not how valuable their capacity to learn is, or how to apply their ways of knowing in order to make significant contributions to vast, complex cultures.

 The structure of artists’ literacies-based training is in three parts:

1. STUDY KNOWLEDGE

This includes synthesizing work from various fields of study from critical and affect theory to behavioral psychology and media theory to find common threads and overlaps that instruct an artist in new potential applications of things like intuition, hunches, instincts, and creative decision-making.

2. STUDY OUR OWN PROCESS

Studying one’s own work in a critical, dialogue-based environment, artists can come to see what they already know in a new frame, and begin to think about how this knowledge may be applicable beyond the forms they’ve taken up to that point.

3. LEARN HOW TO APPLY YOUR ARTISTS’ LITERACIES TO THE WORLD AROUND US

This is where artists engage in research with the world either around or within them, and how to strategically develop the interdisciplinary collaborations that can lead to transformative new discoveries.

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OUR GOALS

TO BUILD CULTURES ROOTED IN DIVERSE FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE THAT WILL YIELD A MORE EQUITABLE, JUST, AND DIGNIFIED FUTURE FOR HUMANITY. HOW WE CAN DO THIS:

1. TURN ARTISTS INTO THE NEXT WAVE OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCHERS, AND TRANSFORM THE WAY ORGANIZATIONS, RESEARCHERS AND PROBLEM-SOLVERS CONDUCT INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF THE WORLD AROUND US.

Organizations, institutions, stakeholders: if you do work in big, complex, and dynamic systems, then your ways of knowing - research, data, reporting - are probably missing something important.  Context, subjectivity, perception, feeling, sense, and even irrationality - all are key drivers of human decision making, but ones almost impossible to capture through sensor-based or quantitative research.

2. TEACH OTHERS TO WORK WITH AND VALUE THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF ARTISTS IN A NEW WAY - GIVE MEANING TO “IN RESIDENCE;” ENCOURAGE EMBEDDING, IMMERSION, AND ADJACENCY, TO FREE CONSTRAINED THINKING, AND BUILD BRIDGES BETWEEN THE ARTS AND ALL OTHER ASPECTS OF OUR OVERLY-QUANTITATIVE SOCIETY.

Artists - from filmmakers to photographers to painters to performers - traffic in forms of qualitative data that are severely under-utilized in the study of complexity.  This is partly because arts education doesn't help artists develop these knowledge types cognitively; and partly because we are socially conditioned to expect art to be a 'gift' of the talented, and not an accessible, fundamentally human way of understanding the world.  

3. COMPLEMENT ARTS EDUCATION

Build upon the craft and skill artists already possess by amplifying their unique ways of understanding the world, and giving them strategic guidance in how to apply their unique understanding in ways that affect the world now, and into the next generations.

4. EMPOWER ARTISTS TO DO MORE THAN COMMUNICATIONS

Artists and designers are almost always brought in to communicate.  Media, websites, graphics, fine arts exhibits - these are the primary ways that artists are brought in to institutions and organizational structures: by visualizing or making tangible extant knowledge.  

But in the course of making that film, developing that image, conceiving that layout, an artist does a ton of research and analysis - most of which is never shared. These intuitive processes of learning are actually rich with potentially important knowledge - the types of qualitative, subjective, even irrational “data” that artists routinely translate into the work that moves us as humans.

What if we could capture that knowledge by working with trained artist-researchers to better understand the complex systems we're a part of , and therefore develop more humane, dignified, and effective interventions and grow more just and equitable systems?

Already some organizations are partnering with literacies-trained artists to better understand their own systems, and create more intelligent bodies of qualitative data to inform their work:

WHO WE ARE

FOUNDER, CO-DIRECTOR

Andrew Freiband is a filmmaker, producer, researcher, writer, educator, and multimedia artist who founded ALI based on several years of original research and development into the unique capacities - and imposed restrictions - of artists in contemporary society.

He has 20 years of professional experience in the film, television, museum, and fine arts fields, having worked in productions everywhere from the top of the unfinished skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan to post-earthquake Haiti to the slums of Nairobi and beyond. He has worked with the US Agency for International Development to form media narratives around transformative humanitarian development, and with high levels of the Federal Government to make the case for new innovations in international development and new engagement models for artists and filmmakers in humanitarian work.

He has served on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts' Dept of Film and Television, and for 14 years on the faculty of the Department of Film, Animation, and Video at the Rhode Island School of Design; and has taught film, video, and art students in Haiti (CineInstitute), Malawi (Chancellor’s College), and Bangladesh (Dhaka University), among other places.

Andrew was co-producer and director of photography on the feature documentary I Learn America, about the life of 5 high-school age immigrants in the New York City school system.

He is the Executive Producer of Denali Tiller’s Tre Maison Dasan, winner of numerous Best Feature Documentary awards at festivals in the US and Europe, as well as a featured presentation for the 2019 season of PBS’ Independent Lens. As Impact and Engagement Producer, he coordinated a national campaign to put the film to work in meaningful contexts, connecting incarcerated parents with their families and communities, catalyzing awareness about the enormous rippling social impacts of mass incarceration in America, and leveraging the deep, systemic knowledge embedded in the film and filmmaking team to inform new policy, programs, and approaches to reshaping culture around criminal justice.

At the Artists Literacies Institute, he teaches artists to be researchers and artists simultaneously, believes there is untapped knowledge in trained intuitions, and is sure the world will be a more just and equitable place if artists and culture producers were held in the same regard as scientists and technologists.

ADVISORY BOARD

Andy Chen

Maureen Connor

Tarik Davis

Alexis Frasz

Chris Griswold