During the month of April, 2016 Utopia Is No Place, Utopia Is Process will transform Usdan Gallery into a platform for critical feminist pedagogy. The project was inspired by Bennington’s experimental curricula and its history as a women’s college. In lieu of a traditional exhibition, resources such as a library, screening series, printing press, meeting space, and discussion groups will be available for autonomous and collective investigation. As a part of the project, this pop-up module will pair key feminist texts with concrete examples of feminist praxis. Students will learn about the basic principles of feminist organizing from texts by authors including bell hooks, Paul Preciado, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Martine Syms, Kathleen Hanna, and Astra Taylor. We will then unpack how these ideas shape projects such as Idle No More, #BlackLivesMatter, Deep Lab, chicana punk, cybertwee, Brujas, and Afrofuturism. Over the course of the six classes, class participants will collectively work towards the production of a digital publication, to live at www.utopiaisnoplace.net.

Jacqueline Mabey’s work is shaped both by ten years of post-secondary education in art history and cultural studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, McGill University, and The University of British Columbia, and her multifarious professional experience in commercial galleries and non-profit art organizations. Her practice is rooted in praxis: she endeavors to create texts and contexts that draw out the complexities and complicities of contemporaneity. Recent, forthcoming, and ongoing projects include: Art+Feminism, a campaign to improve coverage of women and the arts on Wikipedia; Utopia is No Place, Utopia Is Process, a platform for critical feminist pedagogy at Usdan Gallery, Bennington College; and Jennifer Chan, Adrienne Crossman and Lorna Mills: Carnival of Sorts at G Gallery, Toronto. She was included in Foreign Policy magazine’s list of 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2014 and called a “Badass Woman” by Buzzfeed. Mabey works independently under the honorific, failed projects.