Ernesto Pujol
Ernesto Pujol is a queer eco-cultural worker in the post-democratic age of extinction. He socially choreographs durational performances as psychic portraits of peoples and places under threat. Pujol creates aesthetic, meditative, meditative experiences crafted with elements of walking and stillness, silence and minimal gestures.
In 2015, Pujol founded The Listening School as a series of pilgrim workshops exploring the psychic archeology of human creativity at the service of society, training participants in listening skills for seeking the creation of conscious culture. Since 2019, Pujol has collaborated with the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico to decolonize Caribbean ecology by designing native and edible, wild horticultural spaces that help re-animalize humans back to Nature.
Pujol has served as a consultant for National Endowment for the Arts, and has received awards from the Academy for Educational Development, The Joan Mitchel Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Art Matters.
Pujol is the author of Sited Body, Public Visions: silence, stillness & walking as performance practice (2012), and Walking Art Practice: Reflections on Social Paths (2018). His essays, interviews and profiles have been collected in Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, A Lived Practice, Fernweh: A Traveling Curators’ Project, The Spiritual in Art, among other publications.
Pujol has an MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He lives between San Juan, Philadelphia and New York, and is currently at work on a new book.
Overarching praxis statement:
Ernesto Pujol is a veteran, global, queer educator, a well known and very public, strong critic of American art training through many published essays, most recently through a critical chapter in the upcoming book: Post-Pandemic Pedagogy in Studio Art Teaching (Teachers College, Fall 2023).
Pujol believes that art education/formation/training should be sensitively tailored to each individual student. Pujol teaches with the belief that creatives should give up the anxiety of making "art" and instead train in as many disciplines as possible over a lifetime, in order to discover their ever-growing/flowing/changing equation of making that constitutes a truly contemporary eco-cultural practice.
"Humanity is at a crossroads as old economies and political systems fail and fall into crisis in the context of a global climate crisis that violently de-anthropologises the world. We are beginning to undergo a long and painful transitional stage, which includes a re-writing of the history of art as we once knew it, of what once constituted cultural achievement. Students should train as multi-disciplinary, prophetic facilitators of creative change, helping their local and regional audiences and societies envision a new cross-species global culture of consciousness."
Current art and/or research interest:
Sustaining a truly multi-disciplinary cultural practice over a queer lifetime has meant that my research interests have evolved and thus changed over decades. In the past, I was interested in researching silence and walking as visible expressions of deep listening in manifesting a transformative performative social practice. Currently, I am interested in literary fiction writing as a meditative tool for change because we have become an increasingly text-oriented society. But I am equally interested in horticulture practice as edible rewinding. In the future, we shall all be gardeners.
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