Practices of Study: Social Architectures of Insurgent Learning

Abstract

This dissertation aims to expand histories of study, looking at moments throughout the twentieth century in the United States in which artists, writers, and educators have built social architectures for gathering and learning outside of traditional institutions. Study is a generous and generative practice of sharing, which is always collective, ongoing, and in revision. The chapters in this dissertation assemble archival traces of study, aiming to think alongside and celebrate rich practices of insurgent learning aimed at abolishing existing institutions and prefiguring other worlds. The first chapter begins in 1930s Harlem, where Augusta Savage and Gwendolyn Bennett spent decades convening spaces for artmaking, conversation, and learning, offering a vision for monumentality rooted in collectivity. The second chapter moves to San Francisco, where, from 1942-1957, the Communist Party-affiliated California Labor School became a community hub for workers to prefigure and practice a world beyond racism and capitalism. The third chapter turns to Ericka Huggins and rituals of study at the Black Panthers’ Oakland Community School in the 1970s, looking at handmade poetry books, yearbooks, oral histories, and ephemera to consider study as part of the Panthers’ revolutionary praxis. And the last chapter thinks alongside the junk art practices of Noah Purifoy, who spent a lifetime creating collaborative work and theorizing about the possibilities of junk art, helping create the show 66 Signs of Neon from the debris of the 1965 Watts Uprising and later building an entire world of assemblages in Joshua Tree. Taken together, this dissertation aims to contribute to a visual and textual archive of study. Bringing to the surface rich and varied histories of fugitive learning, it argues that small-scale practices of study exist in and around all movements for social change, forming an underground architecture of abolitionist worldmaking.