Art of Survival

We will explore the art of continuing to exist despite accident or ordeal. What creative strategies make life livable within sickness, incapacity, and loss? How does survival (or its absence) alter time and space, producing its own aesthetic preoccupations and concerns? Our arts of survival focus on racial and sexual difference as determining factors in living and dying, while considering the labors of sustenance, the affects of suffering, the aesthetics of ruination, and the (im)possibility making the unbearable bearable. Students will develop a comprehensive view of interdisciplinary art practice (including performance, installation, sculpture, memoir, fiction, and poetry) while exploring their own arts of endurance, memorialization, and medicine.