“It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results,” wrote Sigmund Freud in 1937, taking stock near the end of his life of the field he almost singlehandedly invented. He continued: “The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.”1 “On Education,” the second group show at the nonprofit contemporary art center Amant in Brooklyn, on view from March to August of this year, reflected on the current state of the first of these impossible professions. As befits any engagement with the subject-formation of children, Freud’s own impossible profession colored the whole affair, which filled all three of the gallery spaces that make up Amant’s twenty-one-thousand-square-foot East Williamsburg campus.
Organized by Amant’s chief curator, Tobi Maier, along with its associate curators, Patricia Margarita Hernández and Ian Wallace, “On Education” coincided with unprecedented crises in the US school system, from infant care all the way up to postgraduate studies. When I met Maier at the foundation’s café-slash-bookstore, he pointed out that the exhibition opened on the same day that President Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the US Department of Education. In New York, full-time childcare for a two-year-old child costs an average of $23,000 a year;2 in 2024, Stuyvesant High School, a public institution widely regarded as one of the city’s finest, offered only eight of its 781 seats to prospective students who identified as Black;3 in April, Columbia University crumbled under pressure from the Trump Administration, putting its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “review”;4 the CUNY Graduate Center pays a stipend of about $30,000 to students who must live in one of the world’s most expensive cities, and who face abysmal job prospects at the end of their doctorate programs.5
But what if education, as Freud stated all those years ago, has always been doomed to never satisfy? What if trauma is unavoidable? What felt radical about “On Education” was how it attended to the very real historical, economic, and social factors that contribute to teaching and learning’s many obstacles, while also making space for the idea that education itself might be an impossible project. “Unless living in complete isolation,” admits the coauthored introduction to the catalogue, “one is implicated in teaching by nature of cohabitation with other people.”6 Relationality is inherently fraught, in other words. The traumatic effects of education—as sickeningly summed up by Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy’s 1987 filmed performance of the father-son dynamic in Family Tyranny/Cultural Soup, which takes pride of place in the exhibition’s first room, stationed atop a red carpet that was designed to look like blood emanating from a felled, fuzzy monster sculpture by Stefan Tcherepnin—cannot be reduced to the less-than-ideal conditions in which it always takes place.
This premise elucidated Maier, Hernández, and Wallace’s choice to avoid making any explicit attempts to educate the viewer, or to set up new educational systems that promise better outcomes. Working in the wake of Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012) and its excoriation of participatory art, the curators largely eschewed practices they deemed “a mashup of relational aesthetics, institutional critique, and mutual aid.”7 Instead, they focused on contemporary artists concerned with making things, be it videos or fuzzy monsters. There were no wall labels of any kind, though the exhibition guide did include a map and lengthy texts on each artist—an apparent argument for separating extra-artistic discourse from the work it attempts to explain. “The exhibition asks viewers to pause, reflect, and engage with the object not as a didactic tool,” the catalogue explains, “but as a site of attention and meditation.”8 This focus on attention also tracks with Bishop’s follow-up to Artificial Hells, the book Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art Today (2024), which the curators cited as influential on their thinking on the importance of recentering the object.
When I visited the show, I was immediately thrust into such a state of meditation. Walking mistakenly into the courtyard in front of the third exhibition space, rather than into the opening gallery, the artwork I encountered was a recording of the Hanne Darboven scholar Elisabeth Sohst performing Darboven’s Opus 25 A: “Ludwig Van Beethoven” (1987), a score-based reinterpretation of the German classicist’s chamber composition. Darboven transforms Beethoven’s piece into a meditation on progress and time. Its cascading, spectral organ notes seemed to come from everywhere at once—out of Amant’s glass walls as much as the rocks in its courtyard. I later learned that Marcus Pal, student of the late Swedish musician Catherine Christer Hennix, and the thankfully still-alive American minimalist composer La Monte Young were responsible for the perfectly executed spatialized audio. Darboven’s four-to-five minute études seemed perfect fodder for piano practice, granted one is instructed by some other legendary experimental musician.
The gallery inside 306 Maujer Street contained a similarly absorbing installation. The works on display were united in their pointed use of objects to evoke the legacies of several modes of alternate education. In the room’s central vitrine, ephemera from the Bruce High Quality Foundation University’s 2011 tour of the US, Teach 4 Amerika, attested to how the collective applied their particular brand of irony to the promotion of a sincere desire to, in their words, “inspire and enable local art students to define the future of their own educational experience.”9 According to the exhibition booklet, former schoolteacher and conceptual art legend Jef Geys made Gelijkheid, Brüderlichkeit, Liberté (1986), a door embedded in a wall that led nowhere, to provoke consideration of how liberal pieties like “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” inscribed in cursive on the work at eye level, belie very real barriers to entry in democratic society. Two projects by Philip Wiegard engaged that other ostensibly democratic milieu, the internet. The impressively crafted polymer clay mosaics that comprise his Sunset Suites (2022) are the result of an invitation from the artist to viewers of his YouTube tutorials to create their own work for inclusion in an exhibition. Wiegard worked with a group of local schoolchildren to create the wallpaper that provided the backdrop for these mosaics. Of all the works in “On Education,” Wiegard’s came the closest to the kind of participatory art that the curators critique in the exhibition catalogue, but they were notably rooted in the transmission of tangible craft practices rather than half-hearted mutual aid. Rather than being compensated with goodwill and unfulfilled promises, the children Wiegard employed were paid for their labor in cold hard cash.
As I passed through one of Ghislaine Leung’s Gates (2019)—commercially manufactured child safety gates installed at every open threshold throughout the institution, frustrating visitors by inhibiting entry, much like Geys’s false portal—I drew closer to the exhibition’s psychoanalytic underbelly. Mike Kelley’s works Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #25 (Devil: Master of Ceremonies) (2004–06) and #28 (Nativity Play) (2004), which feature yearbook images of children in angel and devil costumes, respectively, hung in a darkened hall. Kelley, whose oeuvre was described by art historian John C. Welchman as full of “social mutations of desire and repression,” was emerging as the patron saint of “On Education”.10 Nearby, a ceramic dunce cap by Christine Brache felt Kelleyian in its mute power to summon a whole host of unpleasant memories. The room’s central installation was a selection of sgp’s found chair sculptures arrayed on spotlit plinths, a display choice that drew attention to their structural defects—broken arms, unstable legs. Sourced from a school near sgp’s studio in Brooklyn, the sculptures were ready-made metaphors for the precarity of the student experience. In concert with these sculptures, a half-moon of tiny chairs invited visitors to sit down and become infantilized as they watched a trio of films by Emanuel Almborg, Brache, and Ilene Segalove. Brache’s Carmen (2023) studies the socioeconomic conditions that color the relationship between a mother and daughter in 2003 Miami, and provides a vivid glimpse into parentified childhood. Segalove’s The Riot Tapes (1984) is, like the Kelleys in the room, a reconstruction, in this case of the artist’s own experiences in the University of California system during the New Left uprisings of the late 1960s. Almborg’s Baby Group (2024–) documents experiments tracking intra-infant socialization to suggest that, as the curators wrote, “the basis of complex social interactions, and perhaps civilization itself, is present in the earliest stages of development.”11 A total reeducation, then, would require going all the way back to the beginning.
Working backwards—that is, regressing—through “On Education,” I made my way across the street to 315 Maujer. A small photograph by social reformer Jacob Riis, taken in 1902, captured a crowded immigrant classroom on the Lower East Side, a hyper-local reference. This section of the exhibition also included works by New York–based artists Brad Kronz, Sable Elyse Smith, and Marc Kokopeli. Kronz and Kokopeli’s contributions, like sjp’s chairs, fixated on the built environment of closely monitored spaces. The former’s I had all the tools even at a young age (2024) featured cafeteria tables folded in a darkened room, as if closed up for the night; the latter’s installation of his mother’s photographs of the artist, his sister, and some of their friends as children were hung at toddler height, requiring the viewer to bend down—that is, regress. Smith’s Coloring Book consisted of blown-up pages from the type of activity books often given to children when they visit prisons—books filled with subtle conditioning about how a good little boy or girl should act. Elsewhere in the space, Kasia Fudakowski’s Reasons to Reproduce, Reasons not to Reproduce (2023), twin plaques listing exactly what their title explains, clarified that the millennial crisis of whether to have children extends from New York to Germany, where Fudakowski lives and where childcare options seem far less dire. Both lists ended with the sobering fact that, regardless of which option you choose, “you will never be alone.”
Ending at the beginning, I finally arrived in the first gallery, where Stefan Tcherepnin’s aforementioned goofy creatures met far more sinister monsters—most viscerally in Susan Traditional Woman Hudson’s Thank You My Grandmas and My Grandpas (2020), Amber Rane Sibley’s ceramic sculptures, and a suite of paintings by Michaela Griffo. Indeed, this entire gallery played on ambiguities between the innocent and the deeply disturbed. Installed on more of Wiegard’s collaboratively produced wallpaper alongside works from Laurie Simmons’s Deep Photos series, in which the artist recombines old her dollhouse props into new wall sculptures, Hudson’s impeccably appliquéd quilt depicted two rows of people holding plaques that attested to both their suffering and their success under colonial rule. The work’s medium related directly to abuse that Indigenous people have suffered at the hands of settlers: while studying in colonial schools, Hudson and other members of the Kin Yaa’áanii Clan of the Navajo Nation were forced, under threat of violence, to learn the needlework skills so stunningly on display.
Griffo’s paintings, which use the visual language of cartoons and academic pencil drawing, seemed light and airy, particularly where the painted surface gave way to graphite on white expanses. This pallet contrasted with the subject matter of the works—familial abuse and alcoholism, in addition to traumas relayed by acquaintances of the artist. Rane Sibley’s two sculptures of women—one ripping out her insides, the other showing a body wrecked by age and care work—were more explicit about their traumatic content. In the center of the gallery, a monster sculpture dragged a caricatured school bus on wheels, as if bearing the weight of future generation on its back. All the while, Ghislaine Leung’s Monitors (2022) watched visitors to the gallery with a video camera and broadcasted the live feed to a screen hung elsewhere. In her catalogue essay, design historian Michelle Millar Fisher elucidates how the radio-transmitter technology that baby monitors use originated in World War II–era military innovations.12
The final work I encountered, which was meant to be a visitor’s introduction to the exhibition, functioned just as well as a summation of the show’s themes. Like many of the works discussed above, Carissa Rodriguez’s Untitled (storage cubbies) (2024/2025) took the form of a piece of progressive educational infrastructure. Her very design-y, custom-built shelves and benches were installed in Amant’s foyer for use by exhibition-goers. They reminded me of the hooks and cubbies used by the Waldorf preschool that I attended. A little bit of background information deepens the work’s significance: last year, Rodriguez, who currently has a two-year-old, won a $25,000 grant from Artists & Mothers that was specifically earmarked for childcare. Alongside the cubbies, Rodriguez also took control of Amant’s institutional LED sign to display a running list of words that were currently in her two-year-old’s vocabulary, adding new ones as his dictionary expanded. Language acquisition, that mysterious process that has fascinated generations of psychoanalysts and linguists, is never complete. Language’s fundamental inability to express what we truly mean—meaning’s constant deferral—forecloses true communication between people, however “well-educated” and at whatever age. With “On Education,” Amant chose to linger in these communicative gaps rather than insist that they could be neatly bridged. The exhibition exposed the problems of our education system without nominating art as the means to solve them. In so doing, it suggested that while education is impossible, it must continue.
Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937–39): Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, and Other Works, ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1964), 248.
“Why Are We Fighting for Two’s Too?,” New Yorkers United for Child Care →.
Troy Closson, “Elite New York High School Admits 8 Black Students in a Class of 781,” New York Times, July 31, 2025 →.
Meghnad Biazzo and Sacha Bose, “Inside Columbia’s Betrayal of Its Middle Eastern Studies Department,” The Intercept, April 16, 2025 →.
“A Quick Guide to Doctoral Funding at the CUNY Graduate Center,” CUNY Graduate Center →.
Patricia M. Hernández, Tobi Maier, and Ian Wallace, “Introduction,” in On Education (New York: Amant, 2025), 13.
Hernández, Maier, and Wallace, “Introduction,” 11.
Hernández, Maier, and Wallace, “Introduction,” 19.
Michael Wilson, “After School Special: Michael Wilson at Bruce High Quality Foundation’s Teach 4 Amerika Rally,” Artforum, March 31, 2011 →.
John C. Welchman, “1000 Words: Mike Kelley,” Artforum 44, no 2 (October 2005): 233–35.
“Exhibition Brochure,” in On Education, 144.
Michelle Millar Fisher, “‘Mother’s Helpers’: Surveillance and Softness in Artworks about Care Work,” in On Education, 36.
