Transmission for Transformation.

In 2025, Skowhegan was invited to collaborate and organize the fall symposium “Transmission for Transformation: On Artistic Pedagogies and Democracy” with Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW and Culturescapes 2025 Sahara.

The two-day event was moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer with Ruth Estévez (Skowhegan Co-Director) and Kateryna Botanova. Participants included celebrated artists from Skowhegan’s long history: Daniel Bozhkov, Paul Pfeiffer, and Carmen Winant, and exceptional figures from educational initiatives across Saharan Africa and its diasporas, alongside the teaching community of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW: Jurriaan Cooiman, Edwige Dro, Wafa Gabsi, Selom Koffi Kudjie, Sadie Plant, Lea Porsager, and Filipa Ramos.

True transformation rarely occurs in isolation. Nor does art. As Edward Said once noted, paraphrasing T. S. Eliot: “No artist of any art has his complete meaning alone.” Thus for Institute Art Gender Nature’s fall symposium at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, in Switzerland, we are partnering with two cultural institutions devoted to artistic education in its abundant guises and geographies. Skowhegan was founded in 1946 in the United States by a group of artists, and its alternative art school in Maine remains devoted and governed by artists; Culturescapes, a transdisciplinary Swiss arts festival dedicated to intercultural exchange, is engaged in a four-year program devoted to the Saharan region, its cultural practices, diverse epistemologies, and political histories and futures. Together with them—namely Ruth Estévez, co-director of Skowhegan, and Kateryna Botanova, co-curator of Culturescapes—Institute Art Gender Nature will dedicate its autumn symposium to the artistic transmissions and transformations that happen both inside and outside the institution.

Art schools—whether public and within a state academic system, like HGK Basel FHNW, or privately organized, like Skowhegan and Culturescapes—are structured around ideas of community and its culture, both ongoing and newly created every term. In an era when the social is placed under such expert political pressure, and when community building is often antithetical to the very systems in which we live and work, how might we teach collective practices as much as the transfer of knowledge and artistic techniques, so as to ensure that the students leave our institutions with this set of democratic skills and priorities, both as an ethos and a practice? Too, how might we bring language and practice in alignment within our academic environments, so that one does not supersede the other? In the academies, as in contemporary culture at large, there is often a real pressure to perfect a certain language—political, artistic, technical—while the very practices that such languages speak seem to disappear. How can teaching install the importance of their alliance, making room for ambiguity, uncertainty, and opacity, so that the projection of false authority of knowledge production is instead replaced with the complications of practice and learning in real time?

That said, the conceptual utility of artistic systems habitually dictates how we should discuss and present art. The instrumental reason emphasizes the effectiveness of images and words based on what one believes an audience to expect. Similarly, the art market dictates artistic formulas, as biennials and museums increasingly align with a capitalist system that favors funds over ideas. What is the role, then, of poetic imagination in terms of self-reflective and communal practices and sensibilities? Is it possible to develop alternative forms of art production that transcend the market and the competitive mechanisms that are imposed on art academies and spaces? Are there any remaining places—real and true—for artists to rehearse their imaginations?

Text by Quinn Latimer, Ruth Estévez and Chus Martínez.