What the heck is BICA School?
Emily Reynolds and Nando Alvarez, cofounders of The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art and Cornelia Magazine, interviewed by Paul Knopf based on a list of questions approved by the group that makes up BICA School at 30 Essex Street on the 23rd of July 2022.
BICA School Orientation. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.
Paul (P): I thought that it would be very interesting to do a more thorough investigation into the essence of BICA School, its genesis, and its future in the context of Buffalo, Western New York, and the United States in general. To start things off, could you introduce yourselves and the roles you’re mainly speaking from today?
Emily (E): I’m Emily Reynolds — a co-founder of BICA and speaking today as one of its directors. I’ve also worked as a curator and in marketing for arts organizations.
Nando (N): I’m Nando Alvarez-Perez — the other co-founder of BICA, an artist, and teacher.
P: To complete this self-contextualization, I’m Paul Knopf — a self-chosen jester, critical German tourist, and BICA School student. And yes, I’m also an artist with a strong architectural background, which means I like to think about living together with and through material and space.
It’s important to point out that BICA School is at the beginning of a process of exploring its possibilities and nothing is set in stone — at least, that’s how I see it. Everything here is speculative; nothing is by any means definitive or finalized. And I think this is in itself vital; hopefully we never think of BICA School as entirely solved.
It seems to me that you both have a kind of in-between position as organizers of and participants in BICA School. Do you agree with that? How would you describe your roles in BICA School, and how do you imagine your involvement with the school moving forward?
N: I think that's well put. There's definitely a weird mix to the roles we’re in right now. In thinking about BICA School for the past two and a half years, I always feared that, as organizers, we’d in some ways always be outside of it; that our input would have some taste of the top-down. But, I don’t want to feel like an outsider; I'm hoping to be as much a participant in this experiment as an organizer of it.
E: Right now, I’m thinking of myself as both — a participant and an administrator. There are all these administrative needs, and I’m happy to take these on. Nevertheless, I’m trying to navigate the difficulties of not falling into a top-down position.
Hannah Xaver at BICA School orientation. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.
P: Both of you have experiences with traditional, accredited art programs. How did your time there influence the founding of BICA School?
N: We started at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in their last good years, but definitely witnessed the start of their downfall. What we got out of SFAI is a network of friends, peers, colleagues, and comrades — mutual support for making a life in the arts. Originally, this was a response to a school administration working against us most of the time. It was always such a struggle to access needed resources. This conflict was definitely generative, but obviously extremely toxic and nothing that I’m eager to reproduce.
E: I was in the Exhibition and Museum Studies program, which seemed like the school’s minimal effort cash cow. They recycled the school’s existing programs into a new “department,” and we shared the professors from the MFA program. When we would demand to participate in critique classes or ask to curate student work — reasonable requests — we got stonewalled. So, we just collectively said “eff you” and created our own opportunities. This lesson was the most valuable thing I took out of grad school. Of course, I also learned lots of theory. But I think this is what it’s like to be an artist: to be somebody who continues to have ideas, wants to engage with them, and likes to see what happens with them in the world. We took the amazing non-hierarchical, cooperative aspects of our experience at SFAI, stripped it of its organizational and financial burdens because we’re not aiming for an accredited institution, and developed our own concept of a free art school: BICA School.
P: To some extent, past experience has also taught me that one can learn as much through the support of your peers as from professors. The idea of learning through a fixed teacher-student dichotomy is flawed. Learning should never be a one-way street but always reciprocal, demanding an active and critical presence on the part of all. And the world is more than competitive enough. So the school can and should offer a space of mutual care that teaches not only survival strategies for the so-called “real” world but also the criticality, self-confidence, and agility needed to confront the sheer realness of our reality. In your description of BICA School online, you also mention the “crisis of arts education nationally” — can you talk a little bit more about this crisis and how it relates to BICA School’s founding?
N: The main financial promise of a terminal degree like an MFA is that you can teach at the college or university level. We graduated in a class of sixty people. Is the job market creating new positions for all these graduates year after year? Obviously not. There are not enough colleges in the country to absorb this ever-increasing number of graduates, and so there is no clear way for most artists to make a living in this field. We have to figure out how to give artists the ability to form their own communities without making them pay $60,000 per year.
“We want to see if art can be part of a broader practice of making opportunities and communities happen, of being truly coterminous with reality instead of just being institutionalized by it.”
Paul Knopf, Around the Fire, 2022. Digital drawing. Courtesy of the artist.
E: I have a lot of student loans. I thought my work for non-profits would qualify me for public service loan forgiveness, but when I applied, they said my non-profits didn’t count. Continuing to perpetuate this mess of a system just saddles artists with huge amounts of debt, forcing them back into an exploitative labor system that prevents them from being full-time artists. The question is — and I don’t want to be cynical here — does our system want us to be artists or does it want us to work in tech or any other job that offers some measure of social control?
P: Art education approaches pedagogy differently from other fields: it is more open-minded, less streamlined. However, I think the ideal of the individual artist is still very much present as a kind of trickle-down effect from a specific, one could say capitalist, part of the art world. However, artist collectives and communities have always existed and resisted this idea, shifting the focus away from the artwork, per se, and toward the circumstances of its making and its relation to its context. Instead of presenting a finished, sellable product, the art is in the mutual process between artists and co-artists/participants, the experience of working it out. What are other important aspects of art, or in general, why is art important at all?
N: A lot of our thinking about this has come from a background of loving artists and their work while at the same time acknowledging that art is obviously very prone to commodification. That’s not new. There are certain prominent art schools in the United States that train students to become inured to the problems of the art world and define success in terms of the market. That’s fine, and certainly important work is being done reimagining who’s in art’s canon, but even at its most progressive, this mode of thinking tends to reproduce the most retrograde aspects of the art world and its institutions — like the notion of the individual genius, as you mention. We want to see if art can be part of a broader practice of making opportunities and communities happen, of being truly coterminous with reality instead of just being institutionalized by it.
P: You mean like a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art merging art and life to provide alternatives to this capitalist view?
Critique at BICA School. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.
“The name is just a vehicle to help us to build whatever we want underneath.”
E: Yes. Historically speaking, art has always had a specific vantage point on what’s happening in the world — in society and the production of culture — and how artists are involved in all this. A lot of these artistic perspectives gathered at the edges of mainstream society, watching what was happening, critiquing it, fitting in or not. Observing these dynamics is crucial to understanding the past and the present, but the mainstream art world often tries to reproduce a kind of hollowed-out art history, a parade of genius divorced from questions of political economy. It is just assumed that art is avant-garde and artists are always at the bleeding edge of culture, at the bleeding edge of new markets, even though their work often begins far downstream of these economic processes. It’s always hard for me to articulate clearly why artists are important. But with BICA School, we just put out an invite and all of a sudden artists are in a room building something out of scraps of nothing. And artists are very good at finding value in disregarded things, finding resources where there aren't any.
P: If there are no professors, can there be students? And then, who are we as students?
N: We think about it more like having a conversation about art, about being an artist in general, about conversations happening in contemporary discourse. Agree or disagree with what’s out there, you can always learn from it. We want to work together with the participants in determining the topics of these conversations, working together to form our own knowledge.
E: I called somebody a student yesterday, and Nando bristled and said to call them “users” or “participants.” But I used to work at a museum where I had to ask people if they were students to get the reduced-rate tickets, and all the old guys would be like: “I'm a student of life.” So cheesy, but always true. We are all students if we can think of ourselves that way and stay open to learning.
P: Names are powerful and naming things confers a power. The word “school” carries a lot of baggage, most of it not necessarily positive. Why BICA School? How do you interpret the word “school” in this context?
E: It’s like having the word “Institute” in our name — more than a little tongue-in-cheek and meant to be played with. In Buffalo we have been able to explore these different meanings, but then the rest of the world also knows what’s implied by “institute” and its history. So it was a strategic decision that comes in handy when we apply for grants, and it gives us a little extra ability to catch someone’s attention. It just enables us to be like: “This is an education program, check.” The name is just a vehicle to help us to build whatever we want underneath.
P: Can you talk a little bit more about how BICA School is funded at the moment?
E: So far it's an investment of our and everyone else’s free time. We have a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for exhibitions, teaching stipends for exhibiting artists and others, and organizing events. We're working on grants now that would provide more of that as well as more physical space for critiques. Long term, we’d like to provide all participants a studio and a show at the end.
P: If BICA School is a community, then everyone should have equal access to funds but also take on responsibility for their acquisition. That would create more transparency and buy-in because as a participant you could harvest the fruits of your own labor. Will it always be you who is acquiring and distributing these funds?
Paul Knopf, Line of Lines, 2022. Digital drawing. Courtesy of the artist.
E: All of our work for BICA, Cornelia, and BICA School has been unpaid so far, and we don’t yet have the money to pay someone to write grants. Anyone who wants to learn how to do that is welcome to join, but we also don’t want people to work for free. That’s definitely a point we have to figure out.
N: Grants timelines are so tight; next year’s deadlines are always lurking around the corner. The more grants we write the more it becomes clear that the timeline of grant writing and how you need to pitch projects has very little to do with the real developmental processes of an organization. Once you start to align yourself with these timelines then you need to come up with ideas at a certain pace and to match the needs of the funders. All of a sudden, the grant ecosystem starts to make the reality of the institution instead of the other way around. I'm hoping that we can short-circuit that loop and start sharing budgets, working through them together, and talking about what we want to do with them as a group.
E: I’ve also been thinking about how we can describe what we’re doing to people in other places. There should be more free art schools. And the knowledge we gain here can be shared to help others.
P: The MFA program at the University at Buffalo (UB) is technically free: most students receive a scholarship. But they also have to teach in exchange. BICA School is actually free and offers a different experience of art education than an MFA. What are similarities and differences between them in your opinion?
N: Besides the fact that BICA School is not an accredited program, and we hope it never will be, the major difference is in user experience: BICA School is meant to be a program that you can do while not quitting the rest of your life. It is tailored toward the system in which we actually live, where you have to figure out how to manage your time and energy between art-making and a day job. Still, it would be wonderful to be able to fund all the people coming to BICA School or be able to give them a job at BICA — there’s plenty to do!
E: We also want to build it into a place where we recognize each other's work and labor. It is not about competition but about supporting and caring for each other and sharing whatever resources we have. The reading group is one step in this direction: Anyone can propose an idea, and we just give it a try.
P: Do you see BICA School as a kind of critique of these programs or just as an alternative?
E: When we came to Buffalo the cultural landscape was not very accommodating towards your millennial, zoomer type artist. That is one of the motivating factors for the work we do and for BICA School. A lot of the older art spaces weren’t exclusionary by design but by inertia, their audiences having aged with them, and very few were building new audiences. We both have been very engaged audience members but are obviously demographic outliers.
N: If you take a look at this complex here at 30 Essex Street, we’re unlikely to ever be able to offer the resources of a university: we don’t have a chemistry lab or an amazing foundry. So this is an alternative path for people who are in Buffalo and are looking for ways to tie into local conversations with their work. We want to address both people from Buffalo but also graduates from art programs nationwide by creating a space that shows you don’t have to go to (and go broke in) New York City or Los Angeles to be a real artist.
E: We’re also not a traditional institution with all of their complicated structures, bureaucracy, legal departments, and so forth; we don’t have any rules about what we can or can’t do except for the ones we give ourselves. Moving forward, hopefully we can become a more horizontal, flexible space for people to be able to do the things they want to do. We’ve also had several people asking if they can be part of BICA School while in the MFA at UB. Sure, please come — I think you're getting two very different things.
P: I assume that we agree that the structure of any school, group, space, or the like is political in the widest sense, as a fundamental question of living together. Do you think that this has to be openly addressed? I would say it has to. But maybe the question is more if you see BICA School a political experiment? Or are the political aspects just inherent to it and not the main focus?
N: To me it is a kind of political experiment, but I also recognize that historically similar experiments have tended toward failure.
E: Not everyone who is at BICA School has to participate in working on the structure of BICA School, but it is important. We also first had to see who would show up and what the vibes would be like. But I think the group is very open toward and interested in this kind of social experiment. And when there is a problem — raise your hand!
N: Another thing that we’re trying to figure out with BICA School and with Cornelia is if they are going to be actual community resources, who is going to take them over? Because it should not just be us. How do you set something up for the hand-off and ensure it won’t just crash and burn in its transition to a more public resource?
E: I think it needs time to see how and where people will fit in. You can’t force somebody to participate, although we asked everybody to commit to a year because we wanted some sense of security. We had thirty people sign up, and there has been a group of twenty-one attending every meeting. Some are more into the reading groups, some more into critique. That’s fine; not everything is for everyone, but we can try to be a platform for those who are interested and continue making on-ramps for them to be as involved as they want to be. Our hope is that a baseline of participation will lead to a baseline of responsibility and accountability.
P: This interview will serve as a good baseline to take the conversation back into the group. So, again, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with us today! To close the circle, or better, turn it into a spiral, I guess we can say that BICA School is already a vibrant framework and very interesting amalgam.
Paul Knopf (b.1997) is a German artist currently studying International Media Architecture Master Studies at the University at Buffalo and the Bauhaus-University Weimar, Germany where he also studies Fine Arts. He uses installations and sculptures to create spaces that explore the relations between networks, narratives, and their joint ecologies.
