Starving Artist: Financial Care in a Capitalist World

with Falaks Vasa
June 4–19 | 11:00 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. ET | Exploratory

In this online performance-based studio course, we will explore the intersections of body, gesture, and screen as tools to unravel the trope of the starving artist and explore pathways toward both material and psychological abundance through a queer, anti-capitalist, interdisciplinary lens. Through readings, discussions, and workshops rooted in performance, institutional critique, and collective experimentation, students will investigate how artists stage, embody, and disrupt systems of value and exchange. Together, we’ll explore how queer approaches to care, redistribution, and collectivity can reimagine abundance beyond material wealth. We’ll look to artists such as Andy Warhol, Maurizio Cattelan, and Monét X Change as models for how we can reveal and subvert the institutional and financial structures that shape our lives. Assignments will translate these ideas into multidisciplinary studio projects rooted in performance. Students will complete two major works: a visual art project that maps financial realities and emotional economies, and a conceptual work of institutional critique informed by class discussions. By the end of the course, students will also produce a practical financial plan for their future and a portfolio of studio work that situates their practice in dialogue with the histories and strategies explored in class.

 SAIC students: This is a 3-credit course; use the course code PERFORMANCE 610 001.

Falaks Vasa (they/she; b. India) is an interdisciplinary artist with a set of practices that are continually moving in and out of definition and obscurity. Their work spans video, performance, fiber art, poetry, photography, 3D animation, stand-up comedy, and more. Vasa’s lived practice currently takes the shapes of artist, writer, and professor. As an artist, Vasa has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and ACRE and shown their work internationally. As a poet and author of speculative fiction, she has had work published by the Unnamed Zine Project. As a professor, she enacts her pedagogy as creative practice and has received the Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence from Brown University. Vasa currently teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design as Visiting Assistant Professor and at Rhode Island School of Design as Lecturer and Critic. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University.

Let’s Paint Online

with John Kilduff
June 4–19 | 2:30–5:00 p.m. ET | Exploratory

Join legendary painter and performance artist John Kilduff—best known for his exuberant live-streaming persona Mr. Let’s Paint—for a wild, high-energy dive into painting, performance, and process. In this experimental course, students will learn how to set up a home studio for both painting and streaming, transforming their creative spaces into dynamic sites of art and action. A highly interactive course, students will be expected to have their cameras on during class sessions as they participate in real-time painting challenges and group activities that emphasize spontaneity, humor, and endurance as pathways to creative freedom. Materials can include any combination of oils, acrylics, watercolors, spray paint, markers, musical instruments, canvas, paper, cardboard, blank t-shirts, or caps—students are encouraged to work across multiple media and make their studios as dynamic as the performances themselves.

Situating Kilduff’s practice within a lineage of performance-based and process-oriented painters, this course draws inspiration from artists such as Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneemann, and Bob Ross—figures who reimagined what it means to make and share art in public. Through this lens, students will examine how painting can exist as both a live act and a broadcast, dissolving the boundaries between artist, audience, and environment.

Assignments will include a full calendar of alternative painting exercises—painting while cooking, running on a treadmill, or singing. Students will also venture into their local landscapes to create rapid-fire paintings of shifting scenes and moving subjects. The course will culminate in a final performance built around a painting idea–celebrating the intersection of art-making, movement, and play. Students should plan to work with a computer or phone and free streaming software such as OBS (while Kilduff uses Wirecast, a paid option, free tools are encouraged).

SAIC students: This is a 3-credit course; use the course code PERFORMANCE 612 001.

John Kilduff aka Mr. Let’s Paint (he/him) is best known for the cable access TV show Let’s Paint TV, where he combines painting with performance. His first love in art was plein air painting, something he has done for over 40 years. Today, Kilduff goes back and forth between these two disciplines in the making of his art. He received a BFA in Fine Art from the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in 1987. Following graduation, he became interested in performance and took acting and improv classes at Los Angeles City College and the Groundlings. After doing some movie background work, he started doing cable access TV in 1995. His first show was titled The Jim Berry Show; in 2001, he started Let’s Paint TV. In 2008, Kilduff graduated with an MFA in Fine Art from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited and performed all over the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe.