(Photo: Haircuts By Children)

This project-based course engages The Children’s Museum of the Arts as a site for innovative contemporary production centered around children. The course will map the organization by co-producing a series of unique interviews for CMA’s website and will mine their collection as source material for new works which act as Retweets (RT) of this unique archive of children’s work.

As part of CMA’s fall exhibition “Tweet” Parsons’ students will use social media to develop projects which consider Twitter as a form for poetry, and #hashtags as a nesting structure for setting up new archives related to the work of children internationally and their influence on contemporary art. Progressive education models such as The Reggio Emilia Approach will be studied for their resonance as valid methodologies for conducting socially engaged, studio- based research.

Shane Aslan Selzer is an artist, writer and organizer whose practice develops micro communities where artists can expand on larger social issues such as generosity, exchange and failure. Selzer uses historical research to make per- sonal interventions into social and material archives. Her work has been exhibited at venues including The Suburban, Oak Park IL, Andrew Kreps Gallery, NY, and P.S.1 MoMA, The Poor Farm, WI, and The Bag Factory, South Africa. She is currently a fellow at A Blade of Grass, and is finishing a new book with Ted Purves, What We Want is Free: Critical Exchanges in Recent Art (SUNY Press 2014).

Courses are available for elective credit to all Parsons/TNS students