Video viewing stations from “SexEd: Chapter 1” exhibition at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space NY, NY February-March 2013. Photo by Eric Nadler.

Fine Arts faculty Norene Leddy and Liz Slagus are the inaugural recipients of the A Blade Of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art. This one-year fellowship pairs $20,000 in unrestricted project support with strategic assistance, assessment and project documentation, access to facilities, and other tailored resources. ABOG’s other inaugural fellows for 2014-2015 include Brett Cook, Pablo Helguera, Fran Ilich, Jan Mun, Laurie Jo Reynolds, and Jody Wood.

Liz and Norene have been collaborators since 2008 focusing on developing radical pedagogies that combine art, reproductive health, and participatory tools. Their ABOG Fellowship will support SexEd as it initiates an artist residency at the school-based health center and develops an arts-based sexual health curriculum at Washington Irving High School Campus in New York City.

This semester Norene and Liz are co-teaching Collab: SexEd at Parsons. Their students are leading three-session hands-on art + sex ed workshops with students throughout the Washington Irving High School Campus–working with high school students to create zines, games, drawings, buttons, posters, and other art-based projects that also cover topics like consent and healthy relationships. Last year Collab: SexEd students had the opportunity to screen their work publicly as part of “SexEd: Chapter 1″ an exhibition at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space on the Lower East Side.

Collab: SexEd will run again in spring 2015, as part of the new Social Practice minor at Parsons. Initiated by AMT faculty Shane Aslan Selzer, and developed with Lydia Matthews and Norene Leddy, the Social Practice minor provides a pathway for undergraduate students to pursue socially engaged projects that initiate exchange, envision new social relations, and provoke individual/collective actions. The required “gateway” course for the minor, “Social Practice Concepts and Contexts,” will be taught by Lydia Matthews in Spring 2015 as a ULEC, enabling multi-disciplinary students from various divisions to access the minor.