The Stockyard Institute will initiate an interactive exhibition titled Pedagogical Factory, using the Hyde Park Art Center as a site to critically explore the intersection between art, education, and the city. Working with other artists, collaboratives, and groups, such as The Center for Urban Pedagogy (New York), rum46 (Denmark), Think Tank (Philadelphia), Artlink (UK), and AREA Chicago Art, Research, Education & Activism (Chicago), to name a few, the Stockyard Institute will transform the gallery space into a temporary factory that will design and implement an extensive series of programs and events throughout the two month project.
From this exciting, collaborative stage, Pedagogical Factory will interrogate the overlap between education, economics, art, and activism, creating a venue to explore alternatives to traditional notions of education and social art. The Hyde Park Art Center will act as a hub for this lively exhibition, which through a portable research center, mobile audio studio, radio broadcasts, free school supply exchange, radical library, lectures, performances, and programs will expand out to the extended public, embracing audience interaction and feedback. The “Factory Manual,” an updated art textbook for high schools, will be compiled throughout the exhibition, producing a manual that will become available to high schools in the fall 2008.
AREA Chicago and the Stockyard Institute will further collaborate for the “How We Learn” issue of AREA, which will publish a piece from the Pedagogical Factory and be released on the final day of the exhibition. By actively exploring proposals to art education, Pedagogical Factory not only offers visitors the beginning tools to question and modify educational systems, but also itself becomes a site for alternative, collaborative, and free-exchange learning.
The Stockyard Institute is a Chicago-based artist project led by Jim Duignan. Focusing on the intersection between education, art, activism, and the media, the Stockyard Institute collaborates with artists, writers, and various cultural workers to develop projects with youth and community residents, such as Designing a Gang-Proof Suit (2000), a design and sculpture project with youth of the Back of the Yards community of Southside Chicago, LOCO COOL Radio Project (2002), an experimental audio project developed and broadcast with youth, and the Austin Community History Book (2004). Projects have been exhibited and published in the US and internationally.
About Jim Duignan
Jim Duignan is a Chicago artist and Associate Professor in the College of Education at DePaul University where he founded the Arts Education Program. He started the Stockyard Institute in 1995 as an artist project and a small community institute in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of south Chicago. From the start, the Stockyard Institute was a community center working to collectively design and organize visual and pedagogical projects alongside youth, artists, teachers, community members, and the public, which speculate on art, education, aesthetics, and the city. The Stockyard Institute was influenced by an awareness of neighborhood histories and an under recognized group of community artists, architects, radical teachers, and local activists where a deep consideration of the social and civic forms of engagement were as critical to their practice as to their lives. He is the recipient of multiple awards for scholarship, merit, and service including the University Public Service Award, Artadia (2008) and has been the awarded grants from the Weitz Family Foundation, Purcell Family Foundation, PNC Bank Foundation and the Wrigley Company. Recent publications include, Building a Gang-Proof Suit: An Artistic and Pedagogical Framework, for the Chicago Social Practice History Series, (Eds.) Mary Jane Jacob and Kate Zeller, published University of Chicago Press (2015) and No Longer Interested for the Blade of Grass Foundation (2014).Major exhibitions include the Chicago Cultural Center (2016), Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland (2016), Interference Archive, Brooklyn, NYC (2015), Sullivan Galleries, Chicago (2014), Kochi-Muziris Biennial, India (2014) and the Hull House Museum (2013). The work of Jim Duignan has been reviewed in publications like The Atlantic (2015), Prestel Publications (2014), The Art Newspaper (2014), Chronicle of Higher Education (2011) and the Chicago Tribune (2011). He received a B.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was deeply influenced by two of his teachers, artists, Robert Nickle and Martin Puryear. Duignan received a MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in Studio Arts.
