NEUROQUEERING THE DRAWING STUDIO
February 1st - 29th, 2024
Pratt Institute Dekalb Gallery
331 Dekalb Ave, Brooklyn, NY
An Exhibition and Flux Space for Supporting Diverse Minds in Art Practices and Pedagogies
Curated by Angela Conant
Presented by Pratt Fine Art BFA Drawing
Neuroqueering the Drawing Studio is an incubator for inclusive art pedagogy and studio practices, presuming that inclusivity is fundamental to mental health, and that drawing acts as a conduit from the brain to the external world. This program includes artworks, ideas, presentations and workshops by Pratt students, alumni, faculty, and invited guest artists, to share the studio methods and practices that support their unique minds.
Learning differences are supported in education by inclusive systems like Universal Design for Learning, Trauma/Healing Engaged Pedagogy and Culturally Sustainable Pedagogy. These systems promote multiple means for students to acquire knowledge, express ideas, and engage their interests, thereby decentering heteronormative thinking and learning. The exhibition springs from such pedagogical systems, and expands to incorporate “neuroqueering,” as coined by Nick Walker, which challenges neuro-normative conventions.
Beyond information intake and expression, accommodations for students with diverse needs can include adjustments to the learning space, and access to sensory stimulation, including texture, sound and light. For people with specific sensitivities to sensory input, drawing can focus visual and tactile stimulation, and help cope with overwhelming sensory situations, which at times, is the classroom itself.
Adaptive equitable pedagogical tools developed for young learners can be modified for artists to employ in the studio as we become our own teachers and caregivers. Neuroqueering the Drawing Studio is an intergenerational, neurodiverse and queer-affirming collaborative project that employs universal education design, along with mindfulness and therapeutic practices, into the artists’ studio, and throughout the lifelong, non-linear course of healing and thriving.
PRESS RELEASE
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PRESS RELEASE 〰️
EVENTS PROGRAMMING
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Please join us for the final day and event of NEUROQUEERING THE DRAWING STUDIO.
CLOSING EVENT and PERFORMANCE by NOEL HEROUX
Thursday, February 29th, 5:30pm - 8:30pm
and presenting our expanded REFERENCE COLLECTION curated by PRATT INSTITUTE LIBRARIES
Noel Heroux is a musician and artist whose reconstructed guitars, collaged with found images and objects, are on view as part of the exhibition and pedagogical project NEUROQUEERING THE DRAWING STUDIO. For his performance during the project’s closing event, Noel will play a live score, activating the guitars to create friendly noise, hidden melody and low ambience.
We will also be joined in collaboration with Pratt Libraries to expand our REFERENCE COLLECTION. Texts curated expressly for the exhibition by Pratt Libraries’ own June Bendich will be available to visitors for the duration of the event.
Noel Heroux is a musician living in New York City. Noel founded Hooray For Earth in 2004. In 2015 they signed with Sub Pop Records to create Mass Gothic. Noted collaborations include Zambri, Twin Shadow, Autre Ne Veut, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Modest Mouse, Willy Mason, Rachel Alina, Naoki Iwakawa. Noel enjoys everything with partner Jessica Zambri and baby Volta. He owns a grey cat called T'Gatoi.June Bendich, MLIS, is the Evening Circulation Assistant at Pratt’s Brooklyn Library. She has formerly been a writing tutor for the Writing Tutorial Center from 2018-2022, and was an undergraduate Circulation Assistant (for Pratt’s Brooklyn Library) from 2016-2020. She received her BFA in Art History from Pratt in 2020.
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EMBODIED DRAWING WORKSHOP with Creative Arts Therapist Hollis Witherspoon
Tuesday, February 27th 2:00pm-4:00pm
Pratt Institute Dekalb Gallery
331 Dekalb Ave, Brooklyn, NY (enter campus on the corner of Dekalb and Hall)
FREEHollis will guide us in three mindfulness exercises:
MOVEMENT, SCALE and PACE;
SENSING the FLUID BRAIN through internal rhythm; and
INTERNAL RESOURCING using BILATERAL STIMULATION,
through which you may encounter your muse🌿. Drawing as a form of processing will be incorporated into each exercise.
Please be prepared with:paper or a sketchbook
your preferred drawing medium
clothing that is comfortable for movement
an open mind 🧠
HOLLIS WITHERSPOON, MA, RDT, LCAT (she/her) is a Licensed Creative Arts Therapist, psychotherapist, and Registered Drama Therapist in Brooklyn, New York. She studied medical anthropology and theatre and dance at Princeton University, followed by the William Esper Meisner Acting Conservatory. She has a Masters degree in Drama Therapy from New York University, and has taught her unique curriculum at major institutions and provided individual and group therapy to clients from all walks of life, including military veterans, social workers, fine arts faculty, eating disorder treatment residents, school administrators, therapists, kids, teens, adults and couples. She is also a Visiting Assistant Professor in Digital Arts and Animation at Pratt. -
Please join us for an online Artist Talk with Anaïs Duplan: author; postcolonial literature professor at Bennington College; Trans and neuroqueer meditation teacher; and founding curator of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, a residency & incubator for BIPOC artists who explore race & technology.
Anaïs’ talk will focus on the idea of sustaining creative practice by incorporating mindfulness and intuitive work practices. He will speak on ways that a long term art practice might change over time, and how to respond to change authentically.
Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of the book I NEED MUSIC; Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture; Take This Stallion; and the chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. He is the recipient of the 2021 QUEER|ART|PRIZE for Recent Work, and a 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction. Duplan is a professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, and has taught poetry at The New School, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, and others. -
Drawing the Intuitive Voice will be an interactive experience combining drawing in response to live music.
DRAWING THE INTUITIVE VOICE
with Jessica Zambri
February 21st, 2:00pm - 4:00pm
Pratt Institute Dekalb Gallery
331 Dekalb Ave, Brooklyn, NY
Jessica Zambri’s Intuitive Voicing practice uses her own vocalization as a secure channel for participants to safely explore self awareness. A professional musician and Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness Practitioner, Jessica will offer a real-time soundtrack to the workspace, allowing participants to render explicit sensed experience in the present moment through drawing.
Jessica Zambri is a musician, mindfulness-based facilitator and the founder of Intuitive Voicing based in New York City. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Music Studies from Berklee College of Music, and began her music career in 2003. In 2005, she joined Quest Management (now Maverick), working as an artist manager for Björk, Paul McCartney and Arcade Fire. Jessica has contributed to twelve professionally released albums as a performer, songwriter and producer and as a featured artist in Zambri, Hooray For Earth, Solvey and Mass Gothic.
www.intuitivevoicing.com -
An Exhibition and Flux Space for Supporting Diverse Minds in Art Practices and Pedagogies, NEUROQUEERING THE DRAWING STUDIO is curated by Angela Conant and presented by Pratt Fine Art BFA Drawing.
Reception and Resource Exchange: February 12th, 5pm
Pratt Institute Dekalb Gallery
331 Dekalb Ave, Brooklyn, NYWORKS ON VIEW BY
Christina Barrera
Louise Bourgeois
Mira Brunner
Angela Conant
Noel Heroux
Christine Sun Kim
Pol Morton
Bruce Nauman
Ife Oluwamuyide
Caroline Woolard
Neuroqueering the Drawing Studio is an incubator for inclusive art pedagogy and studio practices, presuming that inclusivity is fundamental to mental health, and that drawing acts as a conduit from the brain to the external world. This program includes artworks as well as workshops, resources and ongoing, generative projects by Pratt students, alumni, faculty, and invited guest artists, to share the studio methods and practices that support their unique minds.
Visitors to the February 12th event are invited to contribute objects, texts and information to the show including:
INTERACTIVE SENSORY OBJECTS
Objects, videos, sounds and scents that interface with and soothe one or more senses for our accumulating Sensory Objects Table.
MENTAL HEALTH RESOURCES
Mental health help, resources and tools available through Pratt or elsewhere for our Resource Board.
RESEARCH TEXTS
Texts and references for inclusive learning, drawing practices, neurodiversity, and their intersection for our Non-Lending Research Library.
CLOSING EVENT and PERFORMANCE by NOEL HEROUX
and presenting our expanded REFERENCE COLLECTION curated by PRATT INSTITUTE LIBRARIES
FEB. 29TH 5:30PM
Pratt Institute Dekalb Gallery
331 Dekalb Ave, Brooklyn, NY
Please join us for the final day and event of NEUROQUEERING THE DRAWING STUDIO.
Noel Heroux is a musician and artist whose reconstructed guitars, collaged with found images and objects, are on view as part of the exhibition and pedagogical project NEUROQUEERING THE DRAWING STUDIO.
For his performance during the project’s closing event, Noel will play a live score, activating the guitars to create friendly noise, hidden melody and low ambience.
www.noelheroux.com
We will also be joined in collaboration with Pratt Libraries to expand our REFERENCE COLLECTION. Texts curated expressly for the exhibition by Pratt Libraries’ own June Bendich will be available to visitors for the duration of the event.
EMBODIED DRAWING WORKSHOP
with Hollis Witherspoon
FEB. 27TH 2:30PM
Hollis Witherspoon’s Embodied Drawing Workshop approaches drawing using the body as a source of primary knowledge, a tool for learning, and artistic process. Hollis will lead an exercise in “sensing the fluid brain”, using movement and bilateral stimulation (tapping) to calm the nervous system and regulate internal rhythms. Through drawing and imagining the head / brain, participants will use artmaking as a barometer for the body before and after engaging in therapeutic processes. REGISTER HERE
www.holliscreativetherapy.com
VISITING ARTIST TALK: ANAÏS DUPLAN
Online via Zoom
FEB. 25TH 2:00PM
Please join us for an online Artist Talk with Anaïs Duplan: author; postcolonial literature professor at Bennington College; Trans and neuroqueer meditation teacher; and founding curator of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, a residency & incubator for BIPOC artists who explore race & technology.
Anaïs’ talk will focus on the idea of sustaining creative practice by incorporating mindfulness and intuitive work practices. He will speak on ways that a long term art practice might change over time, and how to respond to change authentically.
DRAWING THE INTUITIVE VOICE
with Jessica Zambri
FEB. 21ST 11:00AM
Drawing the Intuitive Voice will be an interactive experience combining drawing in response to live music. Jessica Zambri’s Intuitive Voicing practice uses her own vocalization as a secure channel for participants to safely explore self awareness. A professional musician and Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness Practitioner, Jessica will offer a real-time soundtrack to the workspace, allowing participants to render explicit sensed experience in the present moment through drawing.
Jessica Zambri is a musician, mindfulness-based facilitator and the founder of Intuitive Voicing based in New York City. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Music Studies from Berklee College of Music, and began her music career in 2003. In 2005, she joined Quest Management (now Maverick), working as an artist manager for Björk, Paul McCartney and Arcade Fire. Jessica has contributed to twelve professionally released albums as a performer, songwriter and producer and as a featured artist in Zambri, Hooray For Earth, Solvey and Mass Gothic.
intuitivevoicing.com
ARTISTS’ RECEPTION AND RESOURCE EXCHANGE
FEB. 12TH 5:00PM
Pratt Institute Dekalb Gallery
331 Dekalb Ave, Brooklyn, NY
Please join us to celebrate and participate in NEUROQUEERING THE DRAWING STUDIO. Visitors to the February 12th event are invited to contribute objects, texts and information to the show including:
INTERACTIVE SENSORY OBJECTS
Objects, videos, sounds and scents that interface with and soothe one or more senses for our accumulating Sensory Objects Table.
MENTAL HEALTH RESOURCES
Mental health help, resources and tools available through Pratt or elsewhere for our Resource Board.
RESEARCH TEXTS
Texts and references for inclusive learning, drawing practices, neurodiversity, and their intersection for our Non-Lending Research Library.
OPEN CALL FOR SENSORY OBJECTS
An area of the gallery will be reserved for Sensory Objects, each of which will be handmade by Pratt students, and which will accumulate throughout the month.
You are invited to make an object in any form or media, that primarily interfaces with the viewer's sense of touch, vision, smell, hearing, taste, or a combination of two or more senses.
As the project addresses participants' diverse environmental and physical needs, these objects should function to soothe rather than harsh the senses. ENTER SUBMISSIONS HERE