The Unwritten Art Education
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What does an art education look like when there is no art school?
Project Proposal
I propose to develop The Unwritten Art School, an artistic research project investigating how artists learn, develop their visual language, and transmit knowledge outside formal art institutions. The project emerges from my own experience as a self-taught artist in Rwanda. Without formal training in an art school, I learned through observation, experimentation, practice, conversations, and engagement with other artists. Over time, I became not only an artist but also an educator, curator, and founder of spaces where others could learn and create.
In coming days, I want to examine this personal experience as a broader artistic and cultural question. I will research informal systems of artistic learning in Rwanda and other countries through conversations with artists, educators, students, cultural practitioners, and communities. I am interested in the knowledge that exists between generations, studios, streets, workshops, galleries, families, and artistic communities, and in what may be lost when these forms of knowledge remain undocumented.
The research will develop through interviews, drawing, painting, writing, archival experiments, observation, and participatory workshops. Rather than treating education as separate from artistic practice, I want to explore learning itself as a material and method for making art.
The divers environment would allow me to challenge the ways I have learned and taught art, while encountering artists and ideas from different cultural and disciplinary contexts. Countries would also provide an important setting for comparing how artistic knowledge is produced and shared across Rwanda and those countries.
The project will culminate in an evolving body of artworks and an experimental “unwritten curriculum” bringing together visual, oral, and archival material. Ultimately, I want to ask not only how artists learn, but whose knowledge becomes part of art history and whose remains unwritten.