About
The New Art School Modality explores and brings to life new forms of teaching, learning, art production, and impact. The school is grounded in an ethos of collaboration, experimentation, and improvisation. Offering a revised version of the art school model, methods, and procedures, the New Art School Modality is conceived as a different take on, or an alternative approach to, art school education, one that has fewer guard rails and institutional protocols. There’s intentionally less hand-holding and the apparatus is reduced, all of this as a nod to prior historical moments when making art and being an artist were less reliant on costly infrastructures.
The school is decentralized, offering hybrid courses at various “perches” worldwide, blending online and in-person formats. Unlike other art schools, it is not place based or centric, allowing a global community to surface.
Origin Story
The New Art School Modality evolves from the Black Arts Movement School Modality, also founded by Romi Crawford, which registers the pedagogical tendencies regularly evidenced in the practices of black arts movement practitioners from the 1960s and 1970s.Key Interventions
- The course topics and themes are actively rooted in a revised set of values for arts education and learning (underrecognized art histories and forms; collective teaching; intergenerational and collaborative methods).
- The primary currency is not the course credit or degree. Instead, the school offers opportunities to take part in and produce outcome projects (being part of an exhibition, publication, civic project, etc.) that build unique professional experiences.
- One of the purposes of the New Art School Modality is to produce an affordable option for arts-related content. Primarily underwritten by philanthropic and institutional partners, the school is no or low cost to students.
- The school takes place at different partner/hub institutions (somewhat nomadic, fugitive, fluid).
- The school’s community is made up of students, scholars, artists, musicians, designers, business leaders, curators, artisans, and creatives from across sectors and across the globe.
- The school centers expertise, knowledge, and ways of learning about art that emerge from a range of cultural, artistic, and intellectual contexts.