When Anton Lee took over AHIS 4515—an art history course that interrogates NSCAD’s legacy and its role in the conceptual art movement in the late 1960s and 1970s—he thought he’d change everything about it. But then, “as a newcomer to the school,” Lee decided it would be an excellent way to learn some institutional knowledge himself.
“NSCAD is well-known for its practices and education from the 1960s to the 1980s, but somehow within NSCAD we don’t talk very much about it,” says Lee, who came to NSCAD in 2023 after years of teaching in Vancouver, Montreal, and Houston. “It’s assumed everybody knows, or else it’s something we have to move past. I was interested in using this course as an opportunity to create the discourse around the past and what actually happened at the time.”
Titled, Much Ado about the Last Art College, Lee’s intention for the course was not to simply celebrate this particular heyday in NSCAD’s history, but to use the class to “identify the shortcomings, omissions, and erasures in the school’s history from that period.”
Students were asked to select an activity (e.g., a work, an exhibit, a publication, or an event) from the era and reinterpret it through their own research-creation projects. The works were presented during the final class on December 4.
Rita M. Tanti reimagined dancer Yvonne Rainer’s publication Work 1961-73 (1974) by creating her own coptic-bound, collage-filled book focused on themes of feminism and madness. Kamryn Mollins, inspired by Kennedy’s lithograph My Fourth Grade Class (1972)—on which he wrote the names of every student he could remember—used photos of her friends’ eyes in a similar experiment, noting that in this digital age, “you don’t have to remember, but at the same time it’s more easily forgettable because you don’t have to think about it.” Not exactly inspired by Vito Acconci’s performance documentation Trademarks (1970–1971), Kira Denommee referenced Acconci’s gesture of self-mutilation by tattooing herself in eight places with white ink, which like his bite marks will fade in time.
“A lot of people at NSCAD have taken the opportunity to do some cool conceptual work,” says Denommee, “but I hope people take this course so [the medium] can become more prevalent. So much awesome creative work comes from it.”
Victoria Hannam was inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Work from Instructions, a set of ten lithographs created by NSCAD students in the NSCAD Lithography Workshop in 1971. Hannam recreated four of them herself following LeWitt’s instructions. Mikiki turned the class’ premise into an academic proposal for the institution itself, suggesting NSCAD create a Social Practice Department, to “champion another form of artmaking.” Manjot Kaur, in a riff on John Baldessari’s I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art—a phrase written thousands of times by NSCAD students on the walls of the Mezzanine Galleryin 1971—wrote the phrase in thick black marker on the walls of the classroom but in gurmukhi, the written language of Punjab, India. “There’s a word you can use to describe ‘creation,’ but there isn’t a word for ‘art,’” Kaur noted.
Geoffrey Webster created a video collage inspired by Adrian Piper’s performance series Funk Lessons, which premiered at NSCAD in 1983. The piece instructed viewers how to dance to funk music (resulting in often negative results), and how over time the spectrum of interest in Black dance culture has moved from disregard to engrossment. One of the first slides of his presentation read: “Afrocentric discussion at NSCAD is conditional but meagre.”
“Every time I enter a class, I’m usually the only Black student there. I’ve often been in this weird educational role because there are gaps to fill,” says Webster. “I haven’t minded being in that role, but without people talking about those roles, it won’t be talked about again until the next Black student walks into the room.”
This was in fact what prompted Lee to offer this class in its current form: to shift students’ perception of themselves from a transient population of the school to an important body of decision-making for its institutional identity.
“NSCAD is an ever-evolving community of learners, and each research-creation project is a proposal for its future direction based on a critical look at its past,” says Lee. Now, at the end of the semester, the final works attest to the success of that intention.
“It was the realization, regardless of the technique and medium, that we’re all doing conceptual art,” Lee continues. “After the late 60s, early 70s when the ideas became so important, from there on no matter what you were doing, you had to have a solid concept as a backbone. What we’re doing right now is studying on the shoulders of this institutional intervention into what art is about.”
