Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Driven by capitalist ideologies of ownership, progress, individualism, and competition, contemporary society often perpetuates a belief that there isn’t enough to go around – not enough food, water, shelter, money, and time. Neoliberal capitalism has left individuals and communities with a sense of deficiency and disconnect rather than abundance and relationality. At the centre of many socially engaged artists’ practices resides a desire to disrupt this contemporary trend by engaging with themes associated with sustenance. In this paper, I explore diverse ways socially engaged artists have worked with sustenance in their practices. This includes how I have infused themes of food as sustenance, connecting to place as sustenance, and relationality as sustenance into my creative practice using artistic research. I explore how I translated these themes into the pedagogical and curricular approaches I employed in teaching an undergraduate course on community art education. This culminated in a lesson focused on sustenance as a theme in socially engaged art and community art education. Food and water, place- and land-based art education, and relational practices in contemporary art were central to the lesson. Engaging in a collective seed-bomb creation session, which ended in a prompt for students to gift these seed bombs to others, students worked with these themes in a hands-on way. Through analyzing this practical example, the study explores how sustenance can be employed as a powerful pedagogical orientation and artistic theme in educational settings, disrupting neoliberal capitalist ideologies.