26 January - 15 February 2022
The IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute is proud to present (New) Blueprints for Counter Education
Featuring new work by Artur Silva, Lasana Kazembe, and Jason M. Kelly, the exhibition uses virtual reality, poster art, film, and music to consider our current moment—and the ways that the visual arts, philosophy, poetry, performance, and history equip us both to understand and to respond to the challenges that we face.
(New) Blueprints for Counter Education responds to the the original Blueprint for Counter Education published by CalArts faculty members Maurice Stein and Larry Miller in 1970, which is on display in the galleries. The exhibition also features La Hora de los Hornos, the 1968 Argentine film directed by Grupo Cine Liberación members Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, which is displayed along with their influential manifesto, “Towards a Third Cinema” (1969).
While you’re visiting, we encourage you to type up your thoughts, your favorite quotes, or even your own manifesto on our typewriter. We will scan your contributions and project them as part of the installation. And, on your way out, pick up your own free copies of the posters featured in (New) Blueprints for Counter Education.
In 1970, Maurice Stein and Larry Miller published Blueprint for Counter Education. With design work by Marshall Henrichs, it consisted of a cardboard slip case containing three posters and a book, which they called the “Shooting Script.”
Developed while they were at Brandeis University in 1968, Blueprint for Counter Education was an experiment in radical pedagogy — one that emphasized interdisciplinary and collaborative learning. The design of the posters encouraged users to pursue non-linear learning paths, making new connections and additions as their understanding grew. The overall emphasis of the project was to challenge the top-down pedagogies of the universities and to respond to the socio-political and cultural landscape in which they found themselves.
(New) Blueprints for Counter Education responds to the participatory spirit of the original by asking IU faculty members to develop new posters, multimedia projects, and curricula that complement and expand Stein and Miller’s project.
The objects in this exhibition are the result of this work. While Stein and Miller used the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Marshall McLuhan to orient their project, the new blueprints are thematic in focus: anticolonialism, racial justice, gender, and environmentalism expand the original and explore how critical theory has developed over the past fifty years.
By design, (New) Blueprints for Counter Education does not propose a single, unified approach. Instead, it offers multiple ways to read the past, participate in the present, and approach the future.
Video documentation of (New) Blueprints for Counter Education 23 January - 15 February 2022.
Updates
2023-2-11
At the close of the initial (New) Blueprints exhibition in February 2022, the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute installed many of the materials in its galleries. In Fall 2022, Jason M. Kelly built a graduate course around the themes of (New) Blueprints for Counter Education. As part of the coursework, students designed their own posters, which responded to and extended the ideas and themes of both Blueprints for Counter Education and (New) Blueprints for Counter Education. The course and the assignment are available here.2023-2-11
The materials developed for (New) Blueprints for Counter Education are currently being edited and redeveloped for two upcoming installations. This has been accompanied by the creation of a curatorial guide.
Special thanks to Kelly Kerr, Joseph Mella, Greg Hull, Lauren McCartt, Corey Jefferson, Jerrod Smith, Sonja Lehman, Sunshine Ray, Ben Clark, Shonda Gladden, and Emily Leiserson with their support organizing this exhibition.