Susan Jahoda
Susan Jahoda is an artist, educator, and organizer whose work includes video, photography, text, performance, installation and research based collaborative projects. Works have been produced for venues in London, Paris, Basel, New York, Seoul, and Moscow. Currently, Jahoda is a core member of BFAMFAPhD, and a co-founder of NYC To Be Determined and The Pedagogy Group, collectives of socially engaged artists and educators based in New York City.
Jahoda has organized exhibitions and screenings including Documents from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, Interference Archive, Brooklyn, (2014-15), Susan Kleckner and Documents from the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, (2013), The Martha Rosler Library, and Beyond the Instance of an Ending, (2009), Setting in Motion (2006), and Global Priority (2002), This is My body: this is My Blood, (1992), Herter Art Gallery, UMass, Amherst. She has published short stories and essays including "Spring Flowers," in Class and its Others, University of Minnesota Press, (2000) and “Theatres of Madness,” in Deviant Bodies, Indiana University Press, (1995). In 1993, Jahoda joined the collective and journal, Rethinking Marxism, where she continued to serve as arts editor until 2014.
Her projects have received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Trust for Mutual Understanding, NYC. Jahoda is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and resides in New York City.
Jahoda has organized exhibitions and screenings including Documents from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, Interference Archive, Brooklyn, (2014-15), Susan Kleckner and Documents from the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, (2013), The Martha Rosler Library, and Beyond the Instance of an Ending, (2009), Setting in Motion (2006), and Global Priority (2002), This is My body: this is My Blood, (1992), Herter Art Gallery, UMass, Amherst. She has published short stories and essays including "Spring Flowers," in Class and its Others, University of Minnesota Press, (2000) and “Theatres of Madness,” in Deviant Bodies, Indiana University Press, (1995). In 1993, Jahoda joined the collective and journal, Rethinking Marxism, where she continued to serve as arts editor until 2014.
Her projects have received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Trust for Mutual Understanding, NYC. Jahoda is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and resides in New York City.
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Papers by Susan Jahoda
Ways of Being is a book, a deck of cards, and an open-access website that aims to provide a guide for artists and arts educators to: (1) understand the social lives of artworks, using systems thinking and life-cycle analysis; (2) assess the social conditions in which artworks and artists live, using social-ecological models; and (3) integrate collaborative practices that emphasize social-emotional intelligence into visual-arts pedagogy.
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/ways-of-being
Propositions:
1. Through our labor practices (i.e. who works for whom, who gets
compensated, and by whom) we, as artists, produce and reproduce social relationships.
2. By talking and writing about the labor practices involved in making any artwork, we narrate production “work stories” that make actually existing social relationships and art worlds visible and open to contestation.
3. The labor practices behind any art project can become integral to the meaning of the work — as important as the materials used, the title, the duration, or the dimensions.
4. The myth of autonomy in the arts is so strong that seeing labor in art and understanding artists as workers appears to collapse the category of Art itself.
5. An art of supply chains may be a move from autonomy and art as not-work toward distributed authorship and solidarity art economies.
This is a transcript of the first five minutes of a presentation delivered by Caroline Woolard on behalf of BFAMFAPhD at the College Art Association's annual conference. The text was written by BFAMFAPhD core members Caroline Woolard and Susan Jahoda and edited by core member Blair Murphy.
and materials acquired through their individual research and practices such as syllabi, classroom exercises, and readings. Over time we have become a peer support network. Such cooperative efforts to develop and use a shared body of knowledge
are understood as a first step toward countering some of the current limitations of art pedagogy, often hampered by competition and restricted by its focus on individual
achievement. Part of our process is to look closely at conventional art training, as well as how socially engaged pedagogy is situated within the “new university,” in order to consider what models, subjectivities, and values are being produced by this work.
Key Words: Art, Collectivity, Commons, Community Engagement, Pedagogy
Why can’t artists stay put? Because short term leases end and rents go up. Why doesn’t Loft Law keep neighborhoods affordable? Because Loft Law buildings don’t have limited-equity agreements, so units are sold on the open market, driving real estate prices up for everyone. Why don’t politicians seem to care about artists? Because we are politically invisible. Why don’t affordable housing organizers see artists as a powerful group? Because we haven’t demonstrated our ability to organize and contribute. How might we stay? How might we make housing a human right?
Using the largest household survey in the nation, the most significant insight of Artists Report Back is to identify a gap between arts graduates and working artists. While creative economy reports tout the economic impact of the arts and art schools assure potential students that they will pay back student loans with jobs in the arts, this report reveals that only 10 percent of arts graduates are working artists, and that 40 percent of working artists do not have a bachelors degree in any field. Though arts graduates may acquire additional opportunities and skills from attending art school, arts graduates are likely to graduate with significant student loan debt, which makes working as an artist difficult, if not impossible. The authors acknowledge that some arts graduates are satisfied with work in other fields, but recommend that the fantasy of arts graduates’ future earnings in the arts should be discredited.
The report ends with recommendations for imagining and enacting economies of equity and cooperation in the arts, in order to address the needs and struggles of working artists and arts graduates. Artists Report Back asks that artists, administrators, and teachers acknowledge the current financial and political economies in arts education: those of rising costs and student debt. Still believing in the power of arts education, the authors point prospective art students toward low-cost and tuition-free arts programs and defend the liberal arts as integral to higher education nationally.
Teaching Documents by Susan Jahoda
Books by Susan Jahoda
*BFAMFAPhD is a collective that formed in 2012 to make art, 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. BFAMFAPhD core members are: Susan Jahoda, Emilio Martínez Poppe, Agnes Szanyi, Emily Tareila, Vicky Virgin, and Caroline Woolard.
We wrote this book for those of you who want a holistic art education that includes how to be both more fully present with yourself and with others. The term holistic means that the parts of any given system are intimately interconnected; that they are understandable only in relation to the whole system. How can you talk about making a new project without talking about labor conditions? How can you talk about labor conditions without talking about payment? It’s time to address your artistic labor, your budgets your storage units, your gifts, and your well-being.
Ways of Being is a book, a deck of cards, and an open-access website that aims to provide a guide for artists and arts educators to: (1) understand the social lives of artworks, using systems thinking and life-cycle analysis; (2) assess the social conditions in which artworks and artists live, using social-ecological models; and (3) integrate collaborative practices that emphasize social-emotional intelligence into visual-arts pedagogy.
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/ways-of-being
Propositions:
1. Through our labor practices (i.e. who works for whom, who gets
compensated, and by whom) we, as artists, produce and reproduce social relationships.
2. By talking and writing about the labor practices involved in making any artwork, we narrate production “work stories” that make actually existing social relationships and art worlds visible and open to contestation.
3. The labor practices behind any art project can become integral to the meaning of the work — as important as the materials used, the title, the duration, or the dimensions.
4. The myth of autonomy in the arts is so strong that seeing labor in art and understanding artists as workers appears to collapse the category of Art itself.
5. An art of supply chains may be a move from autonomy and art as not-work toward distributed authorship and solidarity art economies.
This is a transcript of the first five minutes of a presentation delivered by Caroline Woolard on behalf of BFAMFAPhD at the College Art Association's annual conference. The text was written by BFAMFAPhD core members Caroline Woolard and Susan Jahoda and edited by core member Blair Murphy.
and materials acquired through their individual research and practices such as syllabi, classroom exercises, and readings. Over time we have become a peer support network. Such cooperative efforts to develop and use a shared body of knowledge
are understood as a first step toward countering some of the current limitations of art pedagogy, often hampered by competition and restricted by its focus on individual
achievement. Part of our process is to look closely at conventional art training, as well as how socially engaged pedagogy is situated within the “new university,” in order to consider what models, subjectivities, and values are being produced by this work.
Key Words: Art, Collectivity, Commons, Community Engagement, Pedagogy
Why can’t artists stay put? Because short term leases end and rents go up. Why doesn’t Loft Law keep neighborhoods affordable? Because Loft Law buildings don’t have limited-equity agreements, so units are sold on the open market, driving real estate prices up for everyone. Why don’t politicians seem to care about artists? Because we are politically invisible. Why don’t affordable housing organizers see artists as a powerful group? Because we haven’t demonstrated our ability to organize and contribute. How might we stay? How might we make housing a human right?
Using the largest household survey in the nation, the most significant insight of Artists Report Back is to identify a gap between arts graduates and working artists. While creative economy reports tout the economic impact of the arts and art schools assure potential students that they will pay back student loans with jobs in the arts, this report reveals that only 10 percent of arts graduates are working artists, and that 40 percent of working artists do not have a bachelors degree in any field. Though arts graduates may acquire additional opportunities and skills from attending art school, arts graduates are likely to graduate with significant student loan debt, which makes working as an artist difficult, if not impossible. The authors acknowledge that some arts graduates are satisfied with work in other fields, but recommend that the fantasy of arts graduates’ future earnings in the arts should be discredited.
The report ends with recommendations for imagining and enacting economies of equity and cooperation in the arts, in order to address the needs and struggles of working artists and arts graduates. Artists Report Back asks that artists, administrators, and teachers acknowledge the current financial and political economies in arts education: those of rising costs and student debt. Still believing in the power of arts education, the authors point prospective art students toward low-cost and tuition-free arts programs and defend the liberal arts as integral to higher education nationally.
*BFAMFAPhD is a collective that formed in 2012 to make art, 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. BFAMFAPhD core members are: Susan Jahoda, Emilio Martínez Poppe, Agnes Szanyi, Emily Tareila, Vicky Virgin, and Caroline Woolard.
We wrote this book for those of you who want a holistic art education that includes how to be both more fully present with yourself and with others. The term holistic means that the parts of any given system are intimately interconnected; that they are understandable only in relation to the whole system. How can you talk about making a new project without talking about labor conditions? How can you talk about labor conditions without talking about payment? It’s time to address your artistic labor, your budgets your storage units, your gifts, and your well-being.