The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is currently accepting applications for the Summer College Workshop 2021. The Summer College Workshop is a remote program open to undergraduate and graduate students from any major or discipline. Over the course of ten weeks, students will engage with scholarship and art through reading, listening, sharing, and making. Students will hear from artists, museum professionals, and scholars as they build their research, critical thinking, and presentation skills, culminating in a final project that will be published in the Summer College Workshop e-book.
2021 Workshop Theme: The Document
From April 2 to September 27, 2021, Off the Record, organized by Associate Curator, Contemporary Art, Ashley James, will be mounted in the galleries of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Off the Record brings together thirteen contemporary artists to challenge the assumed authority and objectivity of documents. As a group, the artists redress, interrogate, revise, and query mainstream narratives to offer more complex stories about our past. The title of the exhibition is drawn from journalistic reportage, referring to accounts that live beyond mainstream chronicles. The exhibition suggests that documents (i.e. newspapers, government reports, personal correspondence) are not neutral.
Documents are mediated by specific voices—they tell specific stories. The Summer College Workshop 2021 will examine how artists, museum professionals, and scholars have created and interrogated existing documents to recover more comprehensive and inclusive narratives. The workshop will analyze practices of record keeping, truth telling, and ways of interpreting “facts.” Inspired by the exhibition, students will consider how artists have used documents to challenge constructions of mainstream narratives and to add new stories or acknowledge harm inflicted by old ones. Objectivity, materiality, representation, and authority are some of the topics that will be explored through texts, discussions, and guest lectures. This investigation will culminate in a final project of the student’s own creation that will be published in the Summer College Workshop e-book.
Students will receive mentorship from Guggenheim staff throughout each phase of the final project, including development, research, and presentation. Students will be expected to work independently and also collaboratively as a cohort during weekly meetings.
Timeframe
The Summer College Workshop will begin on Monday, June 7 and end on Friday, August 13, 2021. The program requires a commitment of seven hours per week for the full ten weeks: two hours for cohort meetings, one hour for small group meetings, and four hours for independent work.
The application deadline for the Summer 2021 College Workshop is Monday, April 19.
