Andrew Freiband
by Artists' Literacies Institute based on arts-based research map by Klara Auerbach
Andrew Freiband is an artist, filmmaker, educator, producer, and research-artist. His praxis sits among the many intersections of art, education, media, film, journalism, literature, social impact, international development, research, and strategic design.
For over 20 years he worked as: a producer of award-winning and nationally broadcast documentary films, a multimedia artist, writer, publisher, social researcher, and arts educator at institutions including RISD, Pratt, and SVA. After years of mobilizing artists to engage in their historical moment in ways beyond activism or advocacy, he founded the Artists’ Literacies Institute in 2018 to serve as a supplement to the education of citizen-artists. The ALI seeks to discover new, more meaningful roles for artists in their society and communities that go beyond communications.
His creative practice consists of field-building around artists-as-researchers. As the ‘Artists’ Literacies Institute’ he’s convened professional development courses for artists in systems thinking, worked as a strategic designer for fine artists with social change ambitions, consulted and convened on interdisciplinary research with Cornell University and the United Nations among others, and produced arts-based ‘civic interventions’ on a national and global scale, including The Democratic Field with NYU’s Verbatim Performance Lab, the Artists’ Grief Deck with the NYC Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, and the Turn it Around! climate education project with UNESCO and the Open Society Foundations.
Praxis Statement
My creative praxis concerns artistic citizenship in a world facing complex systemic crises. It is rooted in art-as-research, for the creation of new knowledges or knowledge outside of accepted Western empirical forms. I conduct individual or small group educational/advisory discussions with artists, to examine their practice and their unique ways of knowing ('artists' literacies'). I then practice as an agent to connect these research-artists with the systems they are concerned with, through existing organizations, institutions, or networks that previously may have not worked with artists effectively or at all. Finally, this relationship takes the shape of co-creator, collaborator, or producer, allowing the research-artist to engage meaningfully in these systems, and develop evaluation methodologies unique to each case to iterate and refine the artists' practice. In an ideal scenario, the artist is left empowered to sustain themselves through their presence, as opposed to their output (valuing the artists' way of knowing over the products of their labor), and consequently preferring to operate as a 'lab' rather than a 'studio.'
Research Interest
I'm currently working on artistic research as it relates to a.) the social-emotional disaster landscape of the pandemic, and artists' role in disaster relief (The Artists' Grief Deck, with Adriene Jenik) b.) the fractured relationship between human beings and their natural environment, as well as between human beings and their policymaking mechanisms (Turn it Around! Flashcards for Educational Futures, with Adriene Jenik) c.) the crisis in arts education (and higher education generally) brought about by forces of corporate capital, and the resulting cultural crisis that market-trained artists is bringing about, and d.) developing frameworks for interdisciplinary (and undisciplinary) research to enable better collaboration among scientists, artists, and other scholars who are constrained by overspecialization and academic siloing.