Pratt Fine Arts Forum for Research & Community Engagement
Project Third (P3) is a Pratt Fine Arts forum for students, visiting artists, academics, and activists whose work is research-based, socially engaged, and politically involved. P3 seeks to promote substantial interdisciplinary collaborations between Pratt’s Fine Arts and other departments, as well as meaningful collaborations with communities outside Pratt Institute. Located at Dekalb Gallery on campus, P3’s multiple programs include artist residencies, exhibitions, workshops, seminars, performances, lectures, and student-led engagements.
P3’s mission is to offer Pratt Institute’s students and its larger communities access to visiting artists, academics, activists, and others whose practices are motivated by the desire to instigate social and cultural change.
Projects
CTHQ in collaboration with Pratt Institute’s, Fine Arts: Project Third
Coded Language: QueerWordPlay
with Peter Sigal, Noelle Deleon, and Rebecca Teich
“Did you understand what they just said?” Language is heard and resonates differently depending on who is communicating, with certain meanings masked in public space and deciphered only by those in the know. Queer communities have long used coded forms of communication to remain discreet in plain sight, express desire and affirm relationships. QueerWordPlay brings together scholar Peter Sigal, archivist and artist Noelle Deleon, and writer Rebecca Teich, to discuss modes of communication used in different queer communities, from the pre-hispanic Náhuatl Florentine Codex to the House and Ballroom scene.
Alongside the conversation, the poster QueerWordPlay, highlighting languages, dialects, slang and coded gestures used by queer communities across geographies, edited by artist Carlos Motta, a Creative Time R&D fellow, along with his collaborator Justin Linds, PhD, will be released.
The Research & Develop Fellowship works with five acclaimed socially engaged artists to support the development of each artist’s exciting project in the public realm. CTHQ is Creative Time’s gathering space for art and political engagement.
Pratt Institute’s, Fine Arts: Project Third sponsors Duke Professor Peter Sigal’s presentation on the Náhuatl Florentine Codex as part of its “Decolonial Art and Design Pedagogies,” an ongoing program that seeks to introduce decolonial approaches to art and art education based on Indigenous knowledges.
Thursday, January 30th, 2025
6-8pm
CTHQ
59 E 4th St, Floor 7, Buzzer #14
Strategic Defense Mechanisms with Demian DinéYazhi – FALL 2024
An exciting lecture with Demian DinéYazhi, hosted by Carlos Motta and Project Third took place at Pratt Fine Arts MFA Studios at Dock 72 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Demian DinéYazhi is an Indigenous Diné transdisciplinary artist born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábaahá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) and Todich’linii (Bitter Water) living in Portland, OR. DinéYazhi highlights the intersections of Radical Indigenous Queer Feminist ideology while challenging the white noise of contemporary art. Their work refuses colonial and professional etiquette while interrogating the irresponsible state of the Arts Industrial Complex. Their art practice enacts a transdisciplinary strategy through vibrant, radiating neon signs; letterpress posters reimagined from social media posts; self-published books printed collaboratively with BIPOC communities; or endurance performances and sonic collaborations that unsettle remnants of colonial assimilative conditioning that is stored in the body. Working in this manner honors ancestral traditions of Survivance, migration, and revolutionary histories tied to the resiliency of Indigenous, Trans, 2Spirit, and Queer communities. They have recently exhibited at Hessel Museum of Art, Honolulu Biennial, Biennale of Sydney, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Wexner Center for the Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, Henry Art Gallery, Pioneer Works, and CANADA, NY. They are the author of Ancestral Memory, An Infected Sunset, and We Left Them Nothing. DinéYazhi´ will also be exhibiting new work in this year’s Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing.
Decolonial Art & Design Pedagogies
Decolonial Art & Design Pedagogies, is a series of events that propose decolonial, alternative, and radical pedagogical models for education, starting with a focus on Indigenous pedagogies at the intersection with art education, social practice, and performance art. P3 features an array of programming focused on Indigenous epistemologies, pedagogies, research, community practice, and performance art via a series of lectures, an artist’s residence, conversations, workshops, performances, and student engagements. Decolonial Art & Design Pedagogies was conceived to demonstrate how the recognition and implementation of Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies may lead to promoting a culture of radical social and political inclusion for Indigenous peoples (and for society at large), a process of developing awareness around Indigenous sovereignty; and demonstrating how performance art and social practice, approached from a pedagogical perspective, may activate social engagement, address social injustice and inequity, and lead to processes of social change on the Pratt campus and beyond.
Decolonial Art & Design Pedagogies is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Fine Arts Department, Film/Video Department, Art and Design Education, Center for Teaching and Learning, Franklin Furnace Archive, Performance and Performance Studies, and Social Science, and Cultural Studies’s The Global South Center, amongst others.
2019 Shaun Leonardo
For his P3 residency in summer 2019, Leonardo partnered with students to conduct a Social Practice Laboratory. Viewable from the Dekalb Gallery, the lab offered an investigation into varied forms of creative public engagement through a series of student-driven projects, which explored the interpersonal potential of art in various social spaces, including community center, prison, classroom, and living room, while instigating the public vs. private nature of the practice.
In spring 2020, Leonardo extended the work into a collaboration between the Creative Arts Therapy Department, Fine Arts Printmaking area, and youth Peer Leaders of Assembly — an alternative sentencing, diversion program operating out of the Brooklyn non-profit Recess, for which the artist has acted as Lead Educator for the last 4 years. Conceived as a series of ‘sharing workshops’ between the two entities, the Pratt x Assembly exchange was born out of a philosophy of community building that begins with a belief in the restorative power of imagination as a binding force that moves people toward collective healing and action. The semester-long collaboration resulted in an exhibition and participatory workshop, centering the communicative possibilities of visual and embodied narrative.
Shaun Leonardo’s multidisciplinary work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. His performance practice, anchored by his work in Assembly — a diversion program for court-involved youth at the Brooklyn-based, non-profit Recess — is participatory and invested in a process of embodiment.
Click here to view the project.
BFAMFAPhD
Susan Jahoda, Emilio Martinez Poppe, and Caroline Woolard
BFAMFAPhDis a collective that employs visual and performing art, policy reports, and teaching tools to advocate for cultural equity in the United States. The work of the collective is to bring people together to analyze and reimagine relationships of power in the arts. The Residency Project: Making and Being took place during the Summer of 2018 where BFAMFAPhD hosted workshops with Pratt students and publicly shared the process of producing the publication Making and Being.
Click here to view project
