Factory fresh

SEATING IS BELIEVING A view of the installation during an event.

“Pedagogical Factory: Exploring Strategies for an Educated City,” at the Hyde Park Art Center, is more of an evolving project on the art of teaching than an exhibition. Organized by the Stockyard Institute, an artist project run by Jim Duignan, this interactive two-month-long event brings together more than a dozen artists and organizations whose practices intersect art, education, media and activism. Ideas are being manufactured here. And judging by the massive eight-by-ten-foot blackboard attached to the gallery wall, filled with points to be discussed throughout the course of the exhibition (such as “How we learn”), those are sure to be far-ranging.

Duignan, a professor of art education at DePaul University, founded the nonprofit Stockyard Institute to explore experimental approaches to teaching. The idea for Stockyard goes back to 1995, when Duignan took a job at San Miguel School in the Back of the Yards community. The missionary-run private school recruited its students from the dropout list produced by the neighborhood’s public schools. Duignan was hired to shape a curriculum that would be meaningful to the students. For that, he tapped many friends in the arts—poets, painters, sculptors, audio experts.

For “Pedagogical Factory,” Duignan threw the net out even wider, inviting collaboratives he had never met like Philadelphia’s Think Tank and Brooklyn-based art collective Just Seeds, along with Chicago’s very visible Redmoon Theater. Duignan also asked all the nearby youth centers and schools to participate. Chicago-based Temporary Services and Neighborhood Writing Alliance (publishers of the Journal of Ordinary Thought) were invited to bring their archives to be displayed on reading racks.Temporary Services produced numerous booklets like Free For All Exhibition Guide, a document of their one-day exhibit in an empty storefront that featured more than 10,000 free items.  AREA Chicago, a biannual newspaper on art education and activism, is organizing workshops.

Duignan says the show is a continuation of an idea that he explored with his friend, the late Michael Piazza. “We were sitting around wondering what our ideal art school would look like,” he says. It would look something like the “Pedagogical Factory.” From week to week, the space will change depending on what the various groups need to accomplish. The audio trailer, racks of reading materials, tables and chairs will shift around. The result of all of this input and collaboration will be a textbook “about contemporary artistic strategies” that will be sent to schools.

“Teachers have difficulty incorporating art into their classrooms,” Duignan says. “I just look at these high-school textbooks and I can’t believe it.” The surveys of art history are dull and incomplete: “They stop at Warhol,” he says. Other than a mention of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., there are few critical works discussed. Most kids in the classroom are agitated, he adds. “They can’t sit still, and asking them to memorize art-history time lines is irrelevant,” he says.

What would be more meaningful? Listen to the kids, Duignan advises, and they’ll probably tell you. One of Stockyard’s projects a few years ago, “Designing a Gang-Proof Suit,” came about when one of the students mentioned his fear of being shot accidently on the way to school. Working on the project was a way for students to discuss a real concern.

“Pedagogical Factory” runs through September 23. Free workshops take place on Wednesdays, 6–9pm and Saturdays, 11am–3pm. Visit www.stockyardinstitute.org for a complete list of events.