Pioneer Works Announces the First Alternative Art School Fair

Pioneer Works is very pleased to announce the first Alternative Art School Fair featuring a showcase of 50 experimental art schools from around the world that map a growing landscape of innovative educational models.

Pioneer Works and AASF organizers Catherine Despont (Co-Director of Education at Pioneer Works); Alexandre Gurita (Director of IHEAP and Biennale de Paris), and Dylan Gauthier (Sunview Luncheonette, Co-Founder of Mare Liberum), will bring this global phenomenon to greater public awareness through interactive booths and a diverse roster of public programming that examines the role of arts education in the evolution of contemporary society. In keeping with the spirit of these schools, each school has the liberty to design and organize their booths as they see fit.

In recent years, the arts have seen an unprecedented increase in cross-disciplinary practices. Artists across the globe are engaging in the social sciences, questioning institutional structures, and challenging outdated divisions in academic disciplines. In conjunction with this growing movement, there has been a surge of unconventional educational initiatives that are becoming significant forces in the effort to reimagine pedagogical experimentation and drive cultural evolution. These diverse educational initiatives operate with a wide range of methodologies, missions, and theoretical approaches that see the artist as a defining figure in the development of new methodologies for hybridized disciplines. Even when relatively small in scale, these exploratory schools provide vital models of cultural critique and broaden the prevailing expectations of classroom environments and means of dissemination.