About the Workshop

This workshop will focus on how to understand the way our bodies relate to the world through touch, through image, and through material instincts. It will use the history of collage, assemblage and decollage as a way of imagining new configurations of the self. We will explore method and meaning in art making, the role of experimentation and failure, and the translation of experience into artwork. We will learn about historic and contemporary artists that explore the body through its own unravel. Students will gather, build, excavate, and translate, exploring how these gestures can help us create new paths. We will lean into our leaky boundaries and through the monstrous, look beyond what is and into what can be.

About the Instructor

Ilana Savdie (b. 1986, Miami, FL; raised between Miami and Colombia) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose large-scale, visceral paintings explore themes of performance, excess, survival, and transgression. Through fragmented and contorted forms, intoxicating color and uncanny textures, Savdie’s paintings reflect on psychological and societal responses to collective crisis, probing the tension between individual agency and systemic power. Solo exhibitions include ‘Radical Contractions’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and ‘Glottal Stop’ at White Cube New York. Savdie was a recipient of the 2025 Creative Capital Award. Prominent museum collections include Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, The Jewish Museum in New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.