The “Classroom” program at Printed Matter's 2026 LA Art Book Fair (LAABF), which was held at ArtCenter College of Design in early May, featured a panel discussion moderated by Noah Simblist, the editor of Living to Learn: Art & Education for the Common Good. Co-published earlier this year by Inventory Press and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Living to Learn collects essays, interviews, and other writings from over seventy artists, curators, and scholars—all concerning arts education and the many shapes it has taken since the start of the new millennium.
For the panel at LAABF, Simblist invited three LA-based Living to Learn contributors to elaborate on their contributions to the book and their respective relationships to arts education. Dominic Asmall Willsdon, a former executive director of the ICA at VCU and curator at SFMOMA and Tate Modern, recalled when museums placed “educational programming on par with exhibition curating”; Rodrigo Valenzuela, an artist and head of the Photography Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, ruminated on the traps of tuition and middle management at public universities; the artist and writer Alexandro Segade, a member of the theatrical group My Barbarian and an associate professor at UC San Diego, looked back his work with the the Post-Living Ante-Action Theater and crafting an "inspirational critique" while working within various institutions. The following dialogue has been adapted from their original conversation.
Noah Simblist: I’m really happy to be joined by Alexandro Segade, Dominic Willsdon, and Rodrigo Valenzuela today. Dominic, your contributions to Living to Learn: Art & Education for the Common Good are manifold. Alongside your essay, in which you summarized your own path through the intersections between art and education, you’ve participated in roundtables about museums and education. You worked as a curator of public events at Tate Modern, thinking about education
One thing that you often insisted upon in your own reflections and these roundtable conversations was your belief in institutions—at a time when institutions are often under threat by both the left and the right for very different reasons. You were saying that, in some ways, you believe in their ability to galvanize the public. Could you say a little bit more about that?
Dominic Asmall Willsdon: Noah, it’s great to be here with you. Remembering the origins of, and the first conversations about, the great book that you’ve published here—it’s wonderful to be part of it.
To your question about my belief in institutions, my relation to institutions—a lot of this is biographical contingency. A lot of what
So, we were all curators. Anyone who did programming for Tate Modern in those early years had “curator” in their title. There was a sense that all of this—both art and education—is cultural practice of one kind or another. In the United Kingdom, as with many other parts of Europe, public-sector institutions are the central platform for a lot of what happens in contemporary art, in a way that isn
That maybe is less the case in the UK now, and perhaps hasn't been the case in the United States for a long time. Looking through Living to Learn in recent days, the points of entry that I had into these discussions all involved the public sector and the institution. One had to do with biennials, and what kind of public platform that a biennial can be. I’m in documentary film now—I run the International Documentary Association. The ways in which film festivals operate similarly to biennials has been interesting to me.
As you reference in the book, back when this project was in its infancy, Sarah Rifkey [former senior curator, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University] used to say to us that every artwork is a school. You used to push back on that. But I now think that every documentary film might be a school. So, I’m in a new chapter of all the things that we discussed here.
Noah Simblist: Thank you for that, Dominic. Rodrigo, for Living to Learn, you participated in a conversation that gathered several educators who are grappling with the idea of being an artist. You are an artist, but you also teach at an institution. One of the things that came up in that discussion is how the institutionality of the university can sometimes push up against the more utopian ambitions of teaching. You also discussed what kinds of students are gathering to be a part of MFA programs and how to potentially shift the makeup of these cohorts. But you acknowledge that in order to shift these cohorts, one has to raise money to accommodate students who come from community colleges or state schools as opposed to more elite private schools.
In the roundtable
Rodrigo Valenzuela: Yes, it
Then I give this amazing artist, who is probably first-generation, or has a part-time job or kids, the opportunity to attend UCLA. How do I make sure that I don’t do some sort of bait-and-switch, where I promise them some financial support the first year and then there are no scholarship options for the second year? Or I present an opportunity that’s so unique that they decide to go into debt? You have to always negotiate with that condition. We have some fellowships—I have gotten really good at writing those fellowships so my students can get a full ride, but it’s not standard. I cannot promise. I have to write those applications myself and put a lot of effort into them, especially as someone for whom English is not my first language.
Then you have to fundraise for those students. It can be complicated because the artists that you hire to help with fundraising are more often part of, or in touch with, a class that maybe doesn’t understand or empathize with these students
So they’ve been showing with, say, Regen Projects since the nineties, and they’ve been socializing with the collector class. I don’t do that—but not because I don’t want to. I just don't have the language for that.
My priority right now is breaking it down to the grad students that, like, you can have free tuition, or you can protest the money that the free tuition comes from. But it
Alexandro Segade: I mean, we actually have a very small graduate cohort compared to you. I went to UCLA for grad school, so the things you’re describing are very familiar. But one of the reasons I chose UCLA was its affordability. Compared to Columbia especially—it made no sense to go into that much debt to get a degree in performance art. At the same time, a public institution and staying in California was preferable to me. At UCSD we have seven students per cohort and we’re going to have to change from a three-year program to a two-year program because of budget cuts.
Simblist: Alexandro, I want to take this opportunity to ask how you compare your experience with the alternative education project My Barbarian to your other institutional roles.
Segade: Thank you for asking that. I’m speaking on behalf of two other artists, Jade Gordon and Malik Gaines, who are the other members of My Barbarian. In 2008, we started a pedagogical performance project that came out of our more queer cabaret theater project, which had started in 2000. The three of us decided, having operated in the art world for a little bit, that we actually needed to learn a little bit about the art world to understand the context.
When people used the word
We called it the Post-Living Ante-Action Theater. It had five principles. We were looking at things like Eugenio Barba’s A Dictionary of Theater Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, the Living Theatre, [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder
But that was the birth of My Barbarian. I will say that it’s a very different thing to be able to learn that way, because we really weren’t teaching people things. We were working with the communities to make something together. We were really the ones who were learning. I don
I mean, these things were kind of jokes, you know, but at the same time, they were practice. To this day, we think very much about what inspirational critique could mean. We are part of the institution once we accept their invitation. How do you shift things from that inside position? It’s not exactly inside—you're a guest—but is there a way to use the critique to inspire some kind of possibility?
I still basically believe these things, but I have been teaching at an institution since then. After getting an MFA I went right into teaching—I taught at Bard College, I taught at Cooper Union, I taught at Parsons and Hunter for a long time, as a kind of itinerant teacher moving from one to the other. Now I’m tenured faculty at UC San Diego and trying to keep something afloat that—let’s just say it has a lot of headwinds and very choppy waters.
Simblist: Maybe we’ll circle back to those choppy waters in a little bit. But you brought up a couple things that Dominic addresses in the book, particularly this moment of educational spaces becoming fertile ground for the kinds of work you’re talking about with My Barbarian.
Willsdon: Yeah, you were right. It was that exact moment, around 2008 or 2009, when I was at SFMOMA. When I think back to it now, I wonder: why were those the conditions? I think they were ushered in by a couple of things. One was that museum leadership really started to feel that attendance could be driven by events. There was an eventization of the museum. And museums had to be constantly changing, always making news, as opposed to a generation earlier when a museum was primarily paintings in the room, they’re always in the room, go and see the paintings. Some of us who moved into education and that live culture space took the rise of the event as an opportunity, curatorially.
We weren’t ultimately delivering the audiences that those museums thought they were going to get from events, but there was a window of opportunity that was quite friendly to live practice, generally. To get more under the hood: in my department at SFMOMA, we were in control of our own budgets. The curatorial decisions didn’t run through the main artistic programming. It was almost like we were affiliated with the main artistic direction of the museum rather than being within it. There have been different times in museum history where that has created opportunity. Education departments have been, at various times, a crucial home for experimental film before they were integrated into museums’ artistic programs.
Simblist: On the one hand, what I hear you saying is that this moment leaned into the idea of the museum as an event space. But on the other hand, these programs didn’t seem to receive the same investment of capital that, for example, objects in a gallery might, and consequently wouldn
Willsdon: Well, it’s outside of that economy, certainly. If you've got funding, it
Segade: I could share an anecdote that touches on that. The New Museum is where the Post-Living Ante-Action Theater project started. Then, over an eight-year period, we traveled to many different places before coming back to the New Museum in 2016 to do an exhibition that was a kind of installation and performance program. We invited former participants from around the world, so it was a different curator at the New Museum each time. Eungie Joo started the project, and then Johanna Burton was the final curator we worked with. We were really excited, you know—we had a museum show in New York. The Pipilotti Rist exhibition occupied the rest of the museum. There was this moment where I was on in the elevator with some other people. I knew one of them—they worked at the museum. And one of the others said,
Valenzuela: All the things that you guys are talking are also problems in schools, but I think this also has to do with this kind of managerial or middleman class, right? That kind of drop-shipping of education. For example, if we have tenure, we don’t have a boss, right? There isn
There is no school that does not yield power to management, and they often have no relationship to grassroots pedagogical experiments. I’m involved with Skowhegan and with Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. Places like Secession in Vienna—there are fewer and fewer that are artist-run or artist-based. I think donations by more successful artists really sustain that place almost as a utopia. And there is one kind of annoying day in the summer when all the donors go to see what people are doing. But the board is made up of five artists and, like, five donors or contributors, right?
This makes the input that everyone has pretty balanced. I think that the main problem, not only in education, is the rise of the managerial class in all kinds of decision-making. It
Willsdon: I think that is more the case in universities—in actual educational institutions than in museums. I used to work at Virginia Commonwealth University, and I see the split. You see the two cultures of faculty and administrators and, that’s a rift through the whole organization. My sense of museums and art spaces is that people are more divided by different artistic visions and even different senses of what the tradition of art is.
Valenzuela: It’s like it is a myth of collusion, right? A lot of time, people think that there's shadowy collusion occurring, but people don’t really need to collude when they know what is good for them, right? There is no mystery why museums are only putting on solo shows of work by successful artists. Why aren
Simblist: I think that this idea that you’re raising, Rodrigo, is tied to questions that pertain not just to universities or museums, but to how life works, right? This is something that comes up again and again through different voices in the book. It’s not just a utopian idea of democracy and education—the success or failure of our democracy depends on the ways in which museums and universities, these public institutions, function.
Segade: The fifth principle of the Post-Living Ante-Action Theater was a mandate to participate. One thing we considered was that the project was being made in collaboration with the people who were part of the workshop. There was never going to be a final work. Everything was going to be a workshop, and the final workshop was presented to a public. The idea of a mandate to participate was never that collaboration is, in and of itself, good or bad necessarily, but that there are different ways to think about it. Collaborating with an institution meant that maybe we would collaborate with the board of directors in a particular moment, or maybe resist them from within. But we can think about this on the micro level or on the macro level: what’s happening in the room or what’s happening in that society.
Having worked in the Middle East, in parts of Europe, and in Mexico, we saw that whatever conflict was happening outside of the room was also being reenacted inside the room. In many ways, that was what the work was about. And I just want to add an addendum to my earlier anecdote about that elevator—I did say,
