Creative Response: Performance Matters

Course Description

This class considers the multiple ways we create artistic content. How do we creatively respond to this historical moment? Do you wish to create art inspired by lived experience and offer representation to your voice? How do we artistically engage with resilience and resistance to represent stories and histories not told? How do we find purpose and meaning in these crazy and challenging times within our practice and identity? We will examine cultural examples in history, exhibitions and hear from guest speakers to inspire our vision for a hopeful future. Imagination as celebration can be a space to transcend and resist. This is a dynamic, generative class where you will be able to engage in creative production. We are creating and making. You will have your choice of mediums - performance art, installation, hybrid media, film, photography, site-specific, poetic or text based, or experimental practice. Sound work, drama or movement is also welcomed. Creatives or curators that work in related areas are invited to expand their practice to explore new ground! This is a workshop atmosphere and the professor strives to have an educational space for trying things out and discovering together. We will go on field trips to investigate art practices that will look at identity, representation, new media gender, race and activism. At the time of this writing the professor is still planning our cultural adventures and field trips for Fall 2026. Last 2025 class we attended Homage to Queer Lineage Video. at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University and met with the gallery director and to The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art to see Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exploring Black Dandyism, when the museum was closed to the public for an invited viewing with staff. In both of these examples students created and researched presentations / creative production inspired by the exhibits. We will have guest artists, last year we had Noa Micaela Fields who describes themselves as a trans poet with hearing aids who visited our class and discussed their practice and most recent book of poetry. We will have a research session to learn about artist archives at the NYU special collection. At the archives we will study the Magic Box by Queer artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. How do we research and document the creative process? In Fall 2026 I have been invited to bring our class to see and respond to the exhibition by fluxus artist Alison Knowles at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU. Finley will update exhibitions, guests and field trips in the summer. We will observe, review and research ways to expand our practice and methods. Performing, embodiment, intersectional feminism, communicating the body: gender, race and identity. Recovery, restoration and healing is made possible. Appreciating in-progress, process, or How do we give and receive feedback?. How do we translate our practice to the page? Humor and absurdity is appreciated. Introverts and ambiguity welcome. I look forward to working with you. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to the professor via email - karen.finley@nyu.edu

Code

ASPP-UT 1028

Credits

4

Subject

Ctr for Art, Society & Pub Pol