Based in Dakar, Senegal, RAW Académie is a residential program for the research and study of artistic and curatorial practice and thought that is rooted in the question: “How do we learn from each other?” For the ninth session of its Académie, RAW will relocate its staff and organization to Philadelphia in an experiment in institutional exchange, alternative pedagogy, and hospitality. The session, Infrastructure, is directed by artist, curator, activist, and filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant.

Over the course of seven weeks, Linda Goode Bryant will work to reimagine the possibilities for an alternative arts infrastructure with an interdisciplinary roster of visiting faculty—including Gudskul, Arthur Jafa, Louis Massiah, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Bryant Wells, and Sarah Workneh— and a group of international fellows—Rehema Chachage, Ibrahim Cissé, Dale Lawrence, Baptiste Manet, Moad Musbahi, Matthias Mushinski, Dani Kyengo O’Neill, Ana Garzón Sabogal, Aziz Sohail, Sanaz Sohrabi, and Chantal Vorobei Thieves. The session’s investigations will be explored over time in the ICA galleries and will be shared through a series of public-facing events and actions. Visitors will be invited to follow along, engage in dialogue, and share their own needs, desires and ideas for how to create new models for the arts.

Linda Goode Bryant writes:

“For centuries, the infrastructure that props up today’s global production and market for art has been based on a business model that adheres to the fundamental principles and values of material gain and worth. Despite changes in the ways cultures and art have evolved during that same period, this infrastructure has essentially remained the same. What if a different type of infrastructure were to be envisioned?

Using the public art museum as both a point of connection and departure from art’s current infrastructure, and situated at ICA, Session 9 fellows will engage with and begin to answer these questions as they envision and conceive of an infrastructure that supports and expands the level and degree to which artists pursue a perpetual need to create and create anew. A structure that diversifies the ways and means for making artists more self-sufficient in meeting their living and creative needs, drawing on knowledge born from the artists and their works themselves. An infrastructure that can exist as creative hubs within local communities and that expands ongoing access and direct engagement with art as a natural, daily part of life.”

The institutional collaboration with RAW grew out of the ICA initiative I is for Institute (2016-present), which examines the perceptions and parameters of contemporary arts organizations as a way to create a space for dialogue about how we might reimagine them. To date the project has unfolded through a series of exhibition exchanges, a podcast, and over 50 conversations with curators and directors reflecting on their work within their specific institutional and local contexts. The conversations are archived online at iisforinstitute.icaphila.org.

Support
ICA gratefully acknowledges support from the Katherine (CW’69) and Keith L. Sachs (W’67) Guest Curator Program. RAW Académie at ICA: Infrastructure, directed by Linda Goode Bryant is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by Toby Devan Lewis. Programming support is provided by the Sachs Contemporary Art Fund and the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation. Additional support has been provided by Linda & Jeffrey Chodorow, Stacey & Benjamin Frost, Marjorie & Michael Levine, Toby Devan Lewis, Christina Weiss Lurie, B.Z. and Michael Schwartz, Lori & John Reinsberg, Dorothy & Stephen Weber, and Susan J. Weiler.

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