Artifacts and Actions: Navigating Studio Practice and Performance

This session invites proposals from artists who teach in traditional studio disciplines such as printmaking, painting, ceramics, or sculpture, and whose practices also include performance. Many of these artists work across the spectrum of object-creation and experience-making, producing physical works while also engaging in live, time-based, or embodied actions. Yet performance is often perceived as supplemental or secondary to more materially grounded forms of making.

We seek presentations that reflect on the conceptual and practical relationships between studio work and performance—whether they are intimately connected or entirely distinct. How do these modes of making coexist within an artist’s identity and pedagogy? How does performance enter the classroom, consciously or unconsciously, through critique, demonstration, or presence? Is teaching itself a kind of performance, and how do artists reconcile or embrace this in relation to their studio practice?

This panel aims to create dialogue among educators and artists who work at the intersection of objects and actions, artifacts and events. We welcome contributions that explore embodiment, temporality, labor, and the expressive challenges of navigating between tangible forms and performative gestures—particularly within institutional contexts that privilege one over the other.