Calls for Collaboration — Weisman Art Museum

Artists and academic researchers often address similar issues in their work, but by and large, they do it separately: the divides between sectors, institutions, and disciplines make substantial collaborations extremely challenging. Enormous potential remains unrealized: essential knowledge is not developed and crucial human needs remain unaddressed.

The Target Studio for Creative Collaboration is a platform that supports ambitious collaborations between artists and researchers at the University of Minnesota, making the University’s resources available to artists in the Twin Cities and the creative powers present in Minnesota available to academic researchers.

Collaboration is learning how to learn: how to combine creative powers of people working with disparate practices to close epistemological divides and to catalyze new, open approaches to learning that operate outside disciplines and hierarchies.

Collaboration is diversity: meaningful collaborations are possible only if we embrace the heterogeneity of practices and practitioners and radically diversify our approaches to human knowledge.

Collaboration is, primarily, a relationship: a delicate balance between careful listening and pursuing one’s own goals; between staying within conventions and being free; between developing a common language and safeguarding your own.

Collaboration is a performance: it necessitates a constant awareness of not being alone; it simultaneously embraces public exposure and personal vulnerability; it is creative improvisation as a response to developing circumstances.

Collaboration is an uncertain, ambiguous engagement with knowledge in which we expose ourselves to unknown practices with the hope to develop new insights into our own.

BORIS OICHERMAN, Cindy and Jay Ihlenfeld Curator for Creative Collaboration