Fungi: Making and Learning
Christopher Lee Kennedy
1 week course || DRAWING 623 001 || 1 credit hour

This class explores the use of mycology, performance art, and movement research to develop artworks in collaboration with a landscape. Through a series of immersive encounters with Ox-Bow’s 115 + acre campus, students will experiment with practices such as embodied science, chance operation, and the development of movement scores to create ecologically-inspired artworks. Students will experiment with a range of media including field recording, drawing and experimental choreography. Class materials and exercises will draw inspiration from the life and work of John Cage who was not only an experimental Fluxus artist, but also an avid mushroom hunter and co-founder of the New York Mycological Society. While an introduction to mushroom identification and foraging will be discussed, the class will also focus on how mushrooms can serve as a metaphor and material for multispecies collaboration and reflective art practices. Studio work and research will ultimately result in new movement-based works, drawings and field research.

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FACULTY

Christopher Lee Kennedy
Mycoramblings
microphone, field recorder, mushrooms
2016

Christopher Lee Kennedy is an educator and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. With a background in environmental engineering, Kennedy playfully re-imagines field science techniques and develops new forms of storytelling to create installations, sculptures, and publications that examine conventional notions of ‘Nature’ and the possibility of interspecies collaboration. Kennedy has shown work at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, the Ackland Art Museum and the Queens Museum. He is currently a part time Faculty in the Department of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design.