2011 conference : plenary panel
The Creativity of an Open Question
Rikki Asher
Jacquelynn Baas
Mary Jane Jacob
As we delve into our own explorations of
Expressing Dharma: Creativity in the Present Moment, we are fortunate to have a plenary panel of three women who have worked deeply in the arena of this year's theme.
Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob ran a five-year consortium entitled
Awake: Art, Buddhism and the Dimensions of Consciousness.
Awake was a national research consortium created to investigate the shared aspects of the creative, meditating, and perceiving mind, and the relationship of Buddhist philosophy to contemporary artmaking. This extensive and in-depth process generated three books and some fifty artist residencies, exhibitions and educational programs.
Rikki Asher draws on her thirty-plus years of Buddhist and artistic practices in her work teaching art education, as well as in her work with inner city teenagers and various adult and senior adult groups.
A few excerpts from the rich terrain of their work:
What both the creation and the perception of art share
with Buddhist meditation practice is that art allows us
to forget ourselves and thus realize ourselves.
Understanding ourselves as interconnected beings that
experience time and space, rather than being subject to
them, takes a radical shift of perspective.
-- Jacquelynn Baas
How do you keep that intangible moment that is very scary - and which any of our primal instincts would tell us to put closure on ... this creative chaos - how do we not put closure on it, how do we learn and practice and build up our ability to prolong creative chaos, to get past the first answer to a deeper answer - past the first answer to something else - even if it takes us back to the first impulse but in another way.
-- Mary Jane Jacob
We visually discover the heart of seeing and begin to understand the interconnection between the seer and the object. ... Student teachers began to make a transition in their experience and thinking. Whereas before they might have asked, 'What am I learning about sculpture?', they were now asking 'What am I learning about sculpture, myself and others?
-- Rikki Asher
Our three insightful panelists will discuss the process of open questioning and the interconnectedness of the creative mind, the meditating mind and the perceiving mind. Conference participants will have an opportunity to participate by posing their own questions to the panel.
Rikki Asher was introduced to concepts and theories of Ch'an (Zen) meditation methods and yoga practice by the late Chan Master Sheng Yen in 1976. It was through Master Sheng Yen that she realized the benefits of meditation in daily life. She is a graduate of Lehman College, City University of New York (CUNY) with a Master's in Fine Arts (MFA) in painting, and a Doctorate in Art Education (Ed.D.) from Columbia University and combines her background in art and education with meditation. Mindfulness and yoga techniques find their way into her CUNY Queens College classes for art education training, in work with inner-city teenagers, and various adult and senior adult groups. As a certified yoga and meditation instructor, she has taught yoga and meditation in synagogues, local Y's, yoga centers, community centers, the Omega Institute and the Dharma Drum Meditation center since 1999. She has led one and three day retreats since 2004.
Jacquelynn Baas, Ph.D
Photo credit: Ben Blackwell Jacquelynn Baas (Ph.D. University of Michigan) is Emeritus Director of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and an independent scholar. Previously, Baas served as Chief Curator and then Director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and as Assistant Director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art. In 1999, Baas founded, with Mary Jane Jacob, the arts consortium, Awake: Art, Buddhism, and the Dimensions of Consciousness, which generated two books and some fifty artist residencies, exhibitions, and educational programs over the course of its five-year existence. She has organized some thirty exhibitions including, most recently, “Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life,” scheduled to open at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, in April and then travel to the Gray Art Gallery, NYU, in Fall 2011, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, in Winter/Spring 2012. Her recent book-length publications include: Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today (University of California Press, 2005), Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (University of California Press, 2004), and Learning Mind: Experience into Art (California 2009). She has studied Zen and Tantric Buddhism as well as Daoism and practices both meditation and qigong.
Mary Jane Jacob is a curator who holds the position of Professor and Executive Director of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As chief curator of the Museums of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Los Angeles, she staged some of the first U.S. shows of American and European artists. Then, shifting her workplace from the museum to the street, she critically engaged the discourse around public space, by organizing landmark site-specific and community-based programs. Recently her co-edited anthologies have become key references in the field, beginning with
Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (University of California Press, 2004) in which she furthered her research into the nature of art, the artist, and the audience, followed by
Learning Mind: Experience into Art (University of California Press, 2009), and
The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists (University of Chicago Press, 2010). Forthcoming is
Modern Mind (University of Chicago Press, 2012). At the 2010 College Art Association Conference, Jacob was awarded the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lifetime Award for Achievement in the Field of Public Art from Public Art Dialogue.
More on Mary Jane Jacob
Selected Work by Panelists
article by Rikki Asher
edit by Mary Jane Jacob and Jacquelynn Baas
