IEI Past Themes

2024: Flourishing
Faculty Members: Rina Kundu Little (Texas Tech University), Liz Rex (UWM)Additional Instructors: Anna Grosch (Lynden) Claudia Orjuela (Lynden), and Candance Doerr-Stevens (UWM), Sara Bolster (MPS)
Participating artists: Melanie Yazzie, Asmaa Walton, Elnaz Javani, Open Kitchen (Rudy Medina and Alyx Christensen), and Jenny Urbanek
Artists-in-Residence: Danielle Burrows and Ceci Tejeda
Art Educators-in-Residence: Katie Hobday, Ali Berry, and Hattie Grimm

The 2024 Innovative Educators Institute and reconvening meetings have been planned with artist Melanie Yazzie, Lynden’s project with Call & Response artist-in-residence Asmaa Walton and its Home artist-in-residence Elzani Javani. Melanie Yazzie is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and works in a wide range of media that includes printmaking. Her references Indigenous communities and native post-colonial dilemmas. Realizing that arts education in the United States was not only failing Black communities today but the conservation of Black histories, Detroit native Asmaa Walton seeks to create documentation of a legacy and an educational resource with the Black Art Library, a collection of books and other art history ephemera on Black visual art. Elnaz Javani is an Iranian artist and an assistant professor at Colorado State University. Her practice revolves around the fragmentation of identity and place where she captures moments of transformation, fueled by memories and stories. All will contribute to the investigation of flourishing as a theme in relation to art, land and care.

The literal meaning of the verb ‘to flourish’ is ‘to live within an optimal range of human functioning, one that connotes goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience. Art’s creative and affective potential allows for flourishing because it promotes reflection, acquisition, immersion, socialization and expression. We will explore: What does it mean to flourish? How can art and other disciplines promote flourishing? How does care enable flourishing? What assumptions undergird definitions of flourishing? Whose flourishing are they designed to support? Are prevailing conceptions of flourishing well-suited to the task of confronting the most urgent problems of the day? Or, alternatively, how might they risk leading us astray?

Flourishing evokes a holistic sense of things going well and activities that move us forward. It calls for the creation of an environment of rights, equality, dignity, and respect in which each person has the social supports and opportunities necessary to develop many capabilities and to realize many pathways of development, identity and meaning. It is an active process of striving to live in keeping with values, commitments and visions for the future as individuals and in the context of one's family and the communities and environments to which one belongs. Flourishing is not simply a psychological state, but an active pursuit informed by cultural expectations and social relationships. It is influenced by the social, political, environmental and economic structures that shape lives. Art plays a role in the social actions needed to lead lives that have value for self and others.

Leading approaches define flourishing largely in terms of individual psychological characteristics. Absent from many of these approaches is substantive attention to the broader structures that shape and constrain individual and collective flourishing. Exploring the meanings and histories that flourishing holds and in relation to art and care can be a powerful way to refresh our perspective on the most serious issues of our time. What is the connection between individual and social flourishing? For individuals to flourish, they must be situated in societies and spaces of care that promote their flourishing and require acts that are embodied, embedded, enacted and extended.

Care recognizes needs, necessitates responsibility, and provides support. But care is also a selective mode of attention. It circumscribes and cherishes some things, lives or phenomena as its objects. In the process, it excludes others. Care requires a mode of relationality that does not objectify otherness. It is not about accommodating otherness but understanding it as transformative. Such an ethics of care guides in acting care-fully in the human and more-than-human world and highlights the costs of carelessness. It underscores the costs of not paying attention, not listening and not responding with integrity and respect. “Caring with” moves beyond the model of “caring for” to recognize relations of trust, solidarity and reciprocity. Ideally entailed in relations, care is co-constituted by care giver and receiver --a practice in which care givers work with (rather than simply for) care receivers in the performance of care. “Caring with” can be recognized on the interpersonal scale but it has significance as a practice of communal solidarity. An ethics of care is thus a hands-on, ongoing process of re-creation of possible relations for flourishing and therefore one that requires openings about what those possibilities involve. The investigations of art and land help to create such possibilities for flourishing. In other words, tending to one another and the wider infrastructures and environments that shape our world through investigations of art and care may enable us to flourish.

2023: Material Memory
Faculty members: Rina Kundu Little, Liz Rex
Additional Instructors: Anna Grosch, Claudia Orjuela
Participating artists: Eneida Sanches, Cris Siqueira, Jenny Urbanek, Open Kitchen (Rudy Medina + Alyx Christensen), and Arianne King Comer
Art Educators in Residence: Katie Hobday, Ali Berry, Hattie Grimm

The 2023 Innovative Educators Institute and reconvening meetings were planned in conjunction with Lynden’s project with Call & Response artist-in-residence Eneida Sanches. An artist from Bahia, Brazil, Sanches worked as an architect until 1990 before returning to the visual arts. Her work is inspired by the African diaspora: its rituals, protective garments, and shared cultural histories and memories. More about her concurrent exhibition, MATERIAL TRANCE, here: https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/exhibitions/eneida-sanches-material-trance

We will explore material memory as a theme in relation to art and other interdisciplinary subjects. Focusing on art in material terms, we need to shift attention away from art’s solely representational function and zoom in on art’s creative and affective potential. This requires us to approach art as sensation: a form of encounter, a trigger to combine, connect, and remember. It is this sensation, or encounter, that makes thought possible.

Similarly, there are two kinds of memory, one grounded in recognizable narratives and structures and the other situated beyond the representational realm. When memory operates through encounter it can be provisional, malleable, and contingent. In this framework, art is a more-than-representational interweaving of culture and nature, sensation and signification, matter and how it matters, the material and the semiotic.

2022: Cultivating Ecologies of Care
Faculty members: Rina Kundu Little, Liz Rex
Additional Instructors: Anna Grosch, Claudia Orjuela
Participating artists: Daniel Minter, Reggie Wilson, Arianne King Comer, Open Kitchen (Rudy Medina and Alyx Christensen), LaNia Sproles, Molly Hassler
Art Educator in Residence: Katie Hobday

The 2022 Innovative Educators Institute (IEI) and reconvening meetings will continue our exploration of the theme of “cultivation,” planned in conjunction with Lynden’s two-year Call & Response project with artist Daniel Minter, In the Healing Language of Trees: A Natural Act of Transformation Restructured for Curing Many Ills. Last year, the IEI focused on cultivation's positive transformative qualities in relation to art and nature, specifically creating gestures for imagined futures through drawing, carving, printing, storytelling, and curricula. Art cultivates by creating new worlds where materials are used to bring to life previously unseen realities and alternative social, cultural, and spatial formations. We also used the social and material practices of art, harvesting of plants, and foodways to investigate how to organize, nurture, build, and re-imagine our surroundings differently in relation to humans and nonhumans.

This year’s IEI investigates how to cultivate ecologies of care through encounter. Affective encounters are a crucial part of our knowledge production because they highlight the feelings of the other and for the other. It is a communal process of becoming that involves witnessing, testifying, sharing, and exchanging. What relationships do we want with others and why? We will begin by working with choreographer Reggie Wilson, and will then continue to carve, but this time on three-dimensional wooden beads that will adorn Minter’s ash tree sculpture, transforming the space of the Lynden through acts of cultivation that relate to forging a relationship with nature and invoking axé. The Yoruban concept of axé describes the power, the authority, or the vital force found in all living and non-living things, or the coming to pass of an utterance that affirms out loud that which resonates in our hearts and makes what we speak happen. Those that come before us and after us generate and perpetuate this life force and connection to others. Bodies and things are not separate but relational; they act together to exclude, invite, and regulate particular forms of participation.

Furthermore, we will work with Rudy Medina and Alyx Christensen of the collective Open Kitchen to learn about their project at Lynden’s Cultural Garden. This will engage us in critical conversations on food, home, society, and culture--local and at-large--while cultivating knowledge through a shared space of mutual exchange that tends to and amends our relationship to land and place. Lastly, we will be introduced to HEALING COATS, a project initiated by Ariane King Comer. The “healing coats” were produced by community members and Call & Response artists and bring together cultural and personal symbols of healing. They answer to what relationships we want to establish with the artist, the artisan, the maker, and the community in Milwaukee and beyond using the questions: If you were the messenger of healing, what would you want to do or say? What does it mean to learn about healing from each other?

2021: Cultivation I
Faculty members: Rina Kundu Little, Liz Rex
Additional Instructors: Anna Grosch, Claudia Orjuela
Participating artists: Daniel Minter, Reggie Wilson, Kyoung Ae Cho, Emma Daisy Gertel, Ck Ledesma, Scott Alves Barton, Kellen Abston, Kim Khaira, Angela Kingsawan, Molly Hassler, LaNia Sproles
Art Educators in Residence: Katie Hobday, Sue Pezanoski Browne
The 2021 and 2022 Innovative Educators Institute (IEI) and reconvening meetings will be focused on the theme of cultivation and planned in conjunction with Lynden’s two-year Call and Response Program (CRP) project with artist Daniel Minter, called In the Healing Language of Trees: A Natural Act of Transformation Restructured for Curing Many Ills. The word “cultivation” may conjure up such synonyms as farming, sowing, growing, planting, fostering, developing, supporting, encouraging, and nurturing, among many others. Cultivation is tied to growth and change but also to refinement and civilization, which have excluded people and devasted the land. The IEI and reconvening meetings will explore cultivation's positive transformative qualities in relation to art. Art cultivates by creating new worlds where materials are used to bring to life previously unseen realities and alternative social, cultural, and spatial formations. This IEI uses the social and material practices of art to investigate how to organize, nurture, build, and re-imagine our surroundings differently and in relation to humans and nonhumans. How can art cultivate? How does it transform the world and produce conditions that would support it? Daniel Minter will involve participants in wood carvings to invoke “axé,” the spiritual force that resides in all living things. Furthermore, Minter will ask us to re-imagine art as utilitarian, a resource for individual and collective struggles, and a shared space that enables nurturing and healing. We will join him in practices of worlding which is the ability engender responsibility for futures co-created through making, storying, writing, and researching. He will be joined by Call & Response artists Arianne King Comer, Reggie Wilson, and others. As Minter reminds us, “by sharing space, you make it larger.”

2020: Uprooted
Faculty member: Rina Kundu Little
Participating artists: Kellen Abston, Phoenix Brown, Molly Hassler, Kim Khaira, Jenna Knapp, Sarah Gail Luther, Latrelle Rostant, LaNia Sproles, Ariana Vaeth, and Reggie Wilson.
Art Educators in Residence: Katie Hobday, Sue Pezanoski Browne
The 2020 Innovative Educators Institute focuses on the theme of “uprooted.” We will begin with a consideration of the social and political issues surrounding migration, borders, natural environments, and the importance of transforming local communities through creative production. Uprooted indicates the devastation of forced displacement, and the discord experienced while searching for new homes and opportunities. Art provides unique access to the world of the displaced in which people have stories to tell. Their stories awaken in us the ability to imagine things differently through exchange and dialogue. They allow us to wonder, to encounter, and to build relations of understanding by connecting and learning from one another while constructing ways to make and remake ourselves. Wonder exists in body and mind, “emanating from a particular object, image, or fragment of text,” and crafting the challenge, “What next?” It facilitates interconnected relations and a sense of place as “encounters that hold in them useful anti-colonial practices and narratives.” The theme provides us with an opportunity to grapple with complexities in relation to people and places.

Since the onset of the pandemic and the emergence of national protests against police brutality, systemic racism, and racial terror-- particularly in relation to Black lives-- the theme has also taken on additional meanings in relation to the teaching and learning in classrooms as well as rebuilding respect, equity, and care in communities. What experiences do we want to construct for students? How can we contribute through teaching, advocacy, and community building? Covid-19 reveals that teachers are demonstrating bravery and resilience in the face of harsh realities, initiating new forms of online teaching and learning, and generating a sense of community through continued interactions with children.

How might we reflect and express empathy and solidarity with Black members of our communities? What actions must be taken to address inequities? How can we materially and imaginatively situate historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination? Answers to such questions require us to create and sustain relationships, look beyond borders, and get involved. We will discuss cultural artifacts that value and document the actions experiences, struggles, and achievements of those who have found their way to new places and spaces where they work to contribute meaningfully within their communities. Such activity connects us with a web of movements and actions that construct modes of emplacement.

2019: Re+stor+ation
Faculty member: Rina Kundu Little
Participating artists: Rosemary Ollison, LaNia Sproles, and others to be announced.
The 2019 Innovative Educators Institute focuses on the theme of restoration. "Repairing," “rebuilding," “reconstructing,” and “returning” are processes associated with restoration; they allow us to reconnect to self, re-imagine others, and rediscover our relationship to the land. The summer lab will use an experiential, interdisciplinary approach to learning while developing skills, confidence, and understanding of the value of place. It will build cooperative learning strategies that involve members of a place in the process of education; enable listening and learning from the community and the land; and facilitate restoration through art-making and myth-making. Rosemary Ollison will be one of the featured artists for the workshop. She is a self-taught artist who creates drawings, sculptures, quilts, jewelry, and environments by repurposing collected materials. Her art often works at a catalyst for well-being with restorative possibilities.

2018: Entanglement
Faculty member: Rina Kundu
Participating artists: Reggie Wilson, Arianne King Comer, Portia Cobb, LaNia Sproles
Entanglement provides a metaphor for a non-hierarchical, reciprocal approach to thought, creativity, and expression—and a dynamic understanding of place as a web of movements, actions, and materials. Entanglements call us into connection, shaping us as we intra-act with people, flora, fauna, objects, structures, and culture. Our learning about entanglement will be grounded in Lynden’s local phenomena, artifacts, and environment in relation to our own experiences, memories, and histories. Using movement, making, and writing, we will explore the fluid and flexible processes of the experiential, the affective, the haptic, and the performative that construct and connect us to place.

2017: Narrating Space: Wandering, Encountering, Dwelling, Resonating
Faculty member: Rina Kundu
Participating artists: Fo Wilson, Reggie Wilson, Colin Matthes, Rose Curley

2016: Emplacement
Faculty member: Rina Kundu
Participating artists: Fo Wilson, Tyanna Buie, Colin Matthes

2015: Movement and Migration
Faculty members: Laura Trafí-Prats/Rina Kundu
Participating artists: Reggie Wilson, Santiago Cucullu, Nirmal Raja

2014: Living Matter
Faculty member: Prof. Laura Trafí-Prats
Participating artists: Linda Wervey Vitamvas, Kevin Giese, Emilie Clark

2013: Attentive Living: Art, Nature and Place
Faculty member: Prof. Laura Trafí-Prats
Participating artists: Roy Staab, Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg