The C.H.A.A.S.E. Commons: Gathering Places for a Curriculum of Imposters

My scholarship therefore requires of me an orientation toward generosity rather than accumulation: toward the careful circulation of knowledge in ways that sustain the relationships from which that knowledge emerges…knowledge carries responsibilities.

• Raven, Coyote & Robin (unpublished dissertation draft, Ohio State University, 2026)

Most of the questions posed in the letter are in fact a reframing of Trump administration positions. The question about free speech and open inquiry refers to “violent protesters,” of which there have been very few, but is silent on the much more consequential attacks on open inquiry in states including Texas and Florida. The question about subordinating scholarly pursuits to political and social goals actually means that scholarship should only be subordinated to the goals of the administration. The call to “put Americans, and American interests, first” and to reject “malign foreign actors” requires little explication and also seems inconsistent with the call for purely merit-based admissions, unless one assumes that only Americans possess the relevant merit.

“This award is a recognition that Ohio is leading the way,” said Lee J. Strang, Executive Director of the Chase Center. “Through the statewide civics consortium, our universities are working together to confront civic decline and provide a model for the rest of the country. With the Department of Education’s support, Ohio State and the Chase Center can accelerate programs that equip K-12 students, teachers, and communities to sustain the American experiment.”

“This grant demonstrates the Department of Education’s confidence in Ohio State’s mission to equip leaders and engaged citizens,” said Ravi Bellamkonda, executive vice president and provost at Ohio State. “With this support, the Chase Center will be able to better serve our students and communities across the state in line with our land-grant mission.”

Dear asinnajaq (if I may),

I am an art education professor at Ohio State University & I have been admiring your curatorial & artistic work for a while now. Most recently I saw your beautiful & powerful installation at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. Since I have taught classes about the Toronto Biennial of Art since the first edition, your work that has had the most enduring impact on me is with Isuma, ᖃᒡᒋᖅ (ᑲᑎᑦᑕᕐᕕᒃ) Qaggiq: Gathering Place. Teaching at a land-grab university in Ohio that consistently fails to register the significance of Indigenous land and place-based knowledge, I continue to return to this work because it made such an important intervention in the university setting. I included a reference to it in a long & somewhat dense article I wrote a few years back called ‘Not about U: Social Dissonance at a Land Grab University’ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fhu2.9. In it I wrote: “It is not my place (a place occupied by all too many settler academics) to articulate the how of the Inuit collective Isuma’s practice in creating a place to become active through, merely that what is created by Gathering Place is something both within and beyond the settler colonial institutions of the university and the museum. Like social dissonance as a concept that cannot be separated by how it is enacted in the world in the form of the concert Social Dissonance, as an artwork, Gathering Place demands us to acknowledge that the neutral university or white cube gallery does not exist, any more than Cage’s ideological anechoic chamber and ‘sounds themselves’ ” I am not sure if you know, but the new edition of the Toronto Biennial – Things Fall Apart – which just opened this weekend – has their main exhibition space in the same galleries where Gathering Place used to be – there are exciting works by Indigenous artists there, including Bonnie Devine, Kent Monkman & Rebecca Belmore, while at the other university gallery space, the work of Taqralik Partridge (who I have been corresponding with for a few years now). Anyway, the reason I’m reaching out is that I wanted to ask if you had any reflections on Gathering Place that you would be willing to share with me after all these years? I am giving a guest lecture in a class on Tuesday (Sept 29) where the students have read my article & I want to show some of the video conversation with Isuma that you had as part of the exhibition, but I also wanted to connect with you & share your reflections with the students. Obviously I understand if this isn’t possible given the short notice, but I at lease wanted to use this opportunity to connect with you & express my gratitude to you for your transforming work!

In admiration,

Richard Finlay Fletcher

Harding’s conviction that artists have the capacity to transform the everyday lived experience of society underpinned the development of Environmental Art at GSA. Harding shaped the philosophy of the new department on a maxim derived from the manifesto of the Artist Placement Group (APG), conceived by Barbara Steveni in 1965 and founded with John Latham a year later in London: “The context is half the work.” APG envisioned artists undertaking extended placements in industry or public institutions, eschewing the confines of anticipated roles in order to explore new forms of creative interaction between artists and host organizations. In effect, the APG sought to abandon conventional aesthetic forms and evolve new social formations. APG’s pragmatic, experimental, and interdisciplinary program provided the conceptual underpinnings for the course’s pedagogy, which Harding developed alongside colleagues such as artist Sam Ainsley: “We committed ourselves to a policy whereby visiting teachers to the course would not necessarily be artists but could be sociologists, philosophers, poets, novelists, architects and others to broaden our students’ understanding of the world in which we lived. Not only were we educating artists but also people to take their place in society. Ecology, politics, human geography, ethnicity, collaborative practices, among others, were, we believed, suitable topics for the education of artists. Criticism and questioning self-criticism are essential elements in the formation of all artists in all fields.”

The cool breath of evening slips off the wooded hills, displacing the heat of the day, and with it come the birds, as eager for the cool as I am. They arrive in a flock of calls that sound like laughter, and I have to laugh back with the same delight. They are all around me, Cedar Waxwings and Catbirds and a flash of Bluebird iridescence. I have never felt such a kinship to my namesake, Robin, as in this moment when we are both stuffing our mouths with berries and chortling with happiness. The bushes are laden with fat clusters of red, blue, and wine purple in every stage of ripeness—so many, you can pick them by the handful. I’m glad I have a pail and wonder if the birds will be able to fly with their bellies as full as mine. This abundance of berries feels like a pure gift from the land. I have not earned, paid for, nor labored for them. There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way. And yet here they are—along with the sun and the air and the birds and the rain, gathering in the towers of cumulonimbi. You could call them natural resources or ecosystem services, but the Robins and I know them as gifts. We both sing gratitude with our mouths full.

Richard Finlay Fletcher: [W]hat does a Shawnee place-based arts education look like for you?

Laura Da’: For me, a Shawnee place-based arts education manifests in the land traditions of the poem itself, its creator being a member and representative of the Shawnee tribe, and also as an ancestral connection to a removed people. In an institutional education setting where you’re on land that has the echo of a genocide, it tends to be a lot easier for non-Indigenous folks to reintroduce Indigeneity that is a bit divorced from the actual land history. If you bring in a Shawnee person where you’re in the landscape where I was, where my ancestors were directly removed from, and I know how and where and when and why, it creates challenges—what I think of as something that Western education unintentionally always duplicates—which is the concept of academic distance. Even when we look at art, there are forms of art education that suppress emotional reactions so that you can step back and retain a pseudo-objective lens. Yet it’s much harder to do that when someone is raising and embodying a profoundly unaddressed injustice that continues to happen right here and now. So, when I think of what reindigenizing could mean, it must be done from the collective multi-generational community, and in a compassionate way. In terms of arts education, this compassion in, for example, community parenting is critical to having folks by the time they’re in college be able to engage in a humanistic way with art that touches on the historical record. And then I think it addresses institutional biases, like misogyny, and how that is so baked into the arts and the way that we tend to create curriculum for the arts, because that wouldn’t reflect a particularly shiny worldview. So that’s why I think reindigenizing through centering Shawnee arts education in our dialogue and exhibition is significant, since it’s a hypothesis to bring Indigenous work back into Indigenous space because it brings up intellectual, but also human and collective engagement and communication that is less controllable than an institution tends to historically want. And that’s really exciting for students because it brings up questions and concepts about their pertinent lived experiences right now. You can look at this poem, which hinges on removal, interpersonal and political violence, but also think about this past being in direct engagement with the present.

• Laura Da’ and Richard Finlay Fletcher ‘So Lazarus Broke Ground’: Towards a Shawnee Place-Based Arts Education in Ohio’, forthcoming in Art Education.

I made this post for a guest presentation in my new OSU AAEP colleague Eunkyung Hwang’ class AE 7000.10: Concepts, Theories & Issues in Art Education, today (Tuesday September 29, 2026) at 4:30pm. Below are the topic and readings for the class in case you want to follow along. I thank Dr. Hwang for her invitation and the AAEP Grad Students for their engagement and willingness to follow me down this rabbit hole! I also thank asinnajaq for the ongoing gift of Gathering Place, David Harding, Ross Birrell and Sam Ainsley for ongoing grounding, Laura Da’ and Marco Fiedler (VIER5) for ongoing dialogue, and Raven, Coyote & Robin for insistent reminders of the responsibilities that knowledge carries.

Week 5: Identity & Power

How do identity and power shape art education and its institutions? How can art educators and researchers critically examine whose identities, knowledge, and experiences are centered or marginalized?

9/29 Tues

• Read “Fletcher, R. F. (2024). Not About U: Social Dissonance at a Land‐Grab University. Future Humanities, 2(3), 1–22.”
• Read “Rhoades, M., Davenport, M. G., Wolfgang, C. N., Cosier, K., & Sanders III, J. H. (2013). Big gay church: Sermons to and for an underserved population in art education settings. Studies in Art Education, 54(4), 349–363.”
• Read “Ballengee-Morris, C. (2010). They came, they claimed, they named, and we blame: Art education in negotiation and conflict. Studies in Art Education, 51(3), 275–287.