This coming March, I invite you to share our 6-week-long course, Social Artistry Through Co-Creation at SFU, to discover and give form to each others' lived experiences, while co-creating our roles as “keepers of the culture.” Sharing our accumulated wisdom through collaborative art will help re-balance our strained social fabric. Come meet like-minded people and let us make art together.
No prior art practice is needed. Just bring your open-minded curiosity. This small class involves group discussion.
Please register here at SFU’s Continuing Studies:
Location: SFU Vancouver Campus @515 West Hastings Street
Duration: 6 weeks (Mar 4 ~ Apr 8)
Dates: Fridays 12:30 p.m. – 2:20 p.m
Tuition: $180 (A $50 discount will be applied automatically for adults 55+)
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SOCIAL ARTISTRY THROUGH CO-CREATION
How can you bring your creativity to a cause you believe in? What can collaboration offer? In class, we’ll create a learning environment together that facilitates open expression and where we can represent our insights, uncovering new metaphors and symbols. We will reflect on our own knowledge, connecting it with scholarship from various fields, in order to engage with others in undertaking a project or facing a challenge. We will explore how reflection, our senses, sharing, and ritual can open ways of using art to address social issues within the larger community.
COURSE OUTLINE
Week 1: Relationality
Using the classroom as a community of practice and experimenting with storytelling, we will nurture an intimate environment for growing creative partnerships to handle the dive into the unknown, including relational paradigms such as the Japanese concept Ikigai.
Week 2: Challenges, art, and social change
Welcoming everything that comes to us, including adversity and calamity, is challenging. We will focus on the powerful role art can play in enabling us to face the challenges in our lives, communities, ecologies, histories, and cultures.
Week 3: Identity and art as inherently progressive
We will explore the special challenges of our sense of aging, including community contexts and needs, through storytelling and drawing self-portraits. We will examine the symbology around ancestry and heritage to enrich our perceptual and creative repertoires.
Week 4: Coming to our senses
The aesthetic experience involves the audience’s senses, emotions, and intellect. For this experience to occur, all of our senses must work together. We will explore how our senses inform our understanding of the world.
Week 5: Simple rituals as thought and action
We will investigate the value of simple rituals that enhance the process of identity development, redefinition, and self-transcendence. Learning and sharing that learning becomes especially important in late life and may be closely linked with identity.
Week 6: Integrating science and the arts in learning
We will gather around a table with paper, paint, scissors, and glue to think about a social issue and represent it through collarge. After creating collaborative collages, you will be asked to share your thought processes.
LEARNING MATERIALS
No textbook is required. We will provide all course materials online.