BA in Individualized Studies Program
My creative life is a dramatic migratory piece—one that wanders and drifts in shape and form through my consciousness, existing concretely and as a shifting fixation. While I have been buoyed by myriad imprints, the arrival of my own works demanded that I become at once my own witness and interrogator. In other words, the creation of art and scholarship, visual conceptualism/digital media, photography, the literary and the performative—among the many sites on which I make excavations—necessitates that we reveal our fetishes, our obsessions, our strengths and weaknesses. Otherwise, we learn to fear…We learn to rationalize fear…Rationalize…life. My expressions instead are committed to eliminating fear.
As a student, I also returned to higher education as an adult learner following a career in Broadway Theater/Arts Management. My affirming belief is that the act of seeking knowledge for its own merit and in improving one’s personal condition is a noble venture and should be supported vigorously.
As an educator, published writer and practicing visual artist, my objectives are engaged with multiple urgencies: first, to guide students to a place in which they grant themselves permission and possibility as learners and second, to generate questions through investigations that consider personal sovereignty. While examining the power and responsibility of writing, my methodologies encourage students to read/see/hear across disciplines and social “geographies” as I imagine them—with a particular emphasis on “mapping” the ethical and moral dilemmas that drive human nature.
I would like to caucus for Hester Prynne, Charlie Brown, or Miss Celie for President.
Through my experience with both traditional-age and adult learners, I have discovered how the constraints and complexities of life enables highly motivated, self-directed students. While each of these populations has different needs, what they share in common are the range of personal and developmental responsibilities that must be balanced against the learning process. To coalesce the fragmented parts of self, to become one’s own laboratory and specimen; of negotiating what philosopher Adrian Piper frames through the Kantian lens as an “externalized selfhood”—is a calling.
Working in the tradition of artist as scholar in my practice, my ideas about life are informed by the applications of critical analysis, social responsibility and media, (in popular culture especially) race, gender and sexual identity. Similarly, my passions are centered in theoretical undergarments; of what the idea is really wearing; examinations of the embedded sacred in the daily actions and practices of life as artist, educator, and global citizenry are of particular interest. More recently, projects in Asia and Germany have fused an intense relationship with artists/philosophers such as Piper, Jessye Norman, Immanuel Kant and Isamu Noguchi while grappling with origins of creative response.
MFA-Interdisciplinary Arts, Goddard College; M.A. Gallatin Individualized Program, New York University with concentrations in Performance Studies/Theory & Dramatic Writing; International Study/Comparative Literature, Oxford University. In the past, I was also a director of advising for design students at the Parsons School on topics and projects as vast as eco-sustainability/environment and race, Graphics, Fashion and Photography. Currently I teach Writing in the Faculty Arts & Science/General Studies Program at New York University.
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Pamela S. Booker, MA, MFA