The Living Culture Initiative Seminar (with Ann Hamilton)
The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
2005-2021
Seminar enrollment audition, winter 2007
My teaching for the Department of Art at OSU included an annual graduate seminar shared with Ann Hamilton. While our specific pedagogical methods and intentions sometimes changed radically, the topics we considered within each Living Culture Initiative Seminar typically included:
Why look at art and why talk about it?
How is the university a place for thinking?
How is making a form of thinking?
How can thinking give pause for reflection?
How might we move from reflection (self absorption) into conversation, or,
How do we make our thinking visible and sociable?
Our seminar’s Visitors Series generated interdisciplinary conversations and projects across the university as well as throughout Columbus and the surrounding region.
Seminar tee-shirt, spring 2009
Art Emergency Response Unit seminar action for Department of Music concert, spring 2009
Poster for seminar action with Department of Music, fall 2013
Mark Tribe lecture with guitar accompaniment at Wexner Center for the Arts, spring 2011
Matthew Coolidge post-lecture conversation at HamMer Studio, winter 2010
Seminar student guerrilla action, spring 2009
Related reading Ann Hamilton & Michael Mercil with Amanda Gluibizzi. Brooklyn Rail: New Social Environment. #46, 2020 Make A T-Shirt And It Will Happen, James Voorhies with Michael Mercil in The New Administration of a Fine Arts Education, Bureau for Open Culture and Columbus College of Art and Design, 2011 What Kind of Animals are Those? (interview by David Staley). Voices of Excellence. College of Arts and Sciences, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 2022