How thoughtful questions allow our creative work to grow, with artists Ajuan Mance and MariNaomi at the CIIS MFA Fall 2019 Intensive
Written by writer and current program coordinator, Olivia Speier.
What’s it like to be in a classroom of artists with diverse gender identities, ethnic backgrounds, and personal histories working in a range of mediums? What’s it really like for artists across disciplines to be in conversation? This is what I wondered when I jumped into the fall semester as Program Coordinator for CIIS’ MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing. We’re a low residency program; our students live locally and around the world — making the trip to SF twice a year for immersive six-day intensives. At the fall intensive I felt a little like one of the students: excited to meet new faces and eager to see what the week would entail. What I didn’t expect was to leave the intensive hungry to dive into my own creative projects with refreshed energy and insight. Together with faculty and visiting artists, we examined the questions underlying our work as well as creative approaches to push our practices to new heights.
Visiting artist Ajuan Mance introduced us to her project 1001 Black Men. Over the course of six years, Mance drew 1001 portraits of black men. The project arose from questions she had about the portrayal of black masculinity in black media. Why weren’t the black men she grew up knowing represented in the media? The elders, the nerds? Where were the black men she knew day-to-day living in Oakland? What about gender queer black men? Mance showed us how the process of questioning keeps her work thoughtful; her inquiry evolved over the course of the project as she continually came up against the limitations of how she sees the world and black men. She challenged herself to see the world differently — and she showed us how question-making and artmaking can reflect evolving consciousness.
Graphic artist and cartoonist MariNaomi also visited, sharing her work and creative process. Walking us through her rudimentary sketches to polished comics, Mari exemplified the significance of aesthetic choices such as font and diction, details that may go undetected by the viewer, that create the voice that drives and defines work. Mari uses frames to tell stories and challenged us to do the same in workshop. She prompted our students to tell a story they find themselves retelling, a story they know very well, in just five frames. This workshop provided space for our students to explore another method of storytelling, paying special attention to concision, detail, and the pacing of a complete moment, the beats that make up a story. It was fascinating to see the variations our students came up with by limiting the scope of their stories.
The creative experience is at once intimately personal as it is universal. That’s something we’re exploring here at CIIS. By unpacking different angles and approaches, we discover what is at the core of our work and the many ways to get there. We consider why and how we choose to tell stories — the framing, the perspective, the medium. What does it do for the work? What does it do for the questions driving us? We keep asking questions with evolving answers as our practices unfold.
Ajuan Mance and MariNaomi are featured in our new issue of Mission at Tenth, Volume 8. In print now. Join us for our launch party at CIIS on Friday, January 31, 2020.
