Christopher Lee Kennedy

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United States °1983
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Christopher Lee Kennedy is a teaching artist and organizer who works collaboratively with schools, youth and artists to create site-specific projects that investigate queer identity, radical schooling and material culture. These projects generate publications, research, performances, and ongoing exchanges that celebrate the collective knowledge of a place and its forgotten histories. Understanding learning as an ongoing and creative experiment, Kennedy aims to make visible the social, ethical and political implications of modern schooling and art’s pedagogical intent. Recent projects include an intergenerational free school in North Brooklyn called School of the Future, an ongoing dance project using fungi as a material and metaphor for connectivity (StrataSpore), and the Queer Explorers Club, a publishing platform for queer youth, designers and artists.

 

Kennedy hails from the shores of Ocean County, New Jersey and has lived/worked for the past 4 years in Greensboro, NC where he served as the education curator for Elsewhere, a living museum and artist residency program set inside a former thrift store. While at Elsewhere he co-developed CoLab, a youth-led platform for digital storytelling and media experiments that explores southern experience and urban space. He has worked collaboratively on projects shown at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the Levine Museum of the New South, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art and Ackland Art Museum. Kennedy holds a B.S. in Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a M.A. in Education from NYU, and a PhD in Education Studies from the University of North Carolina. Kennedy is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Design Education at Pratt Institute.

research

research expositions

  • Mycological provisions (2016) author(s): Christopher Lee Kennedy published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    This exposition considers the use of mycology and chance operation as a method and material for arts-based research. The exposition details a series of mushroom hunting excursions designed to engage four artist-teachers in collaborative dialogue about their practice and identity. As participant and researcher converse, the hunts unfold as dérive-like encounters with a landscape interrupted through chance and embodied experience. The project draws from the work of artist and composer John Cage, who used fungi and mushroom hunting as one of many devices for exploring sound and its relationship to environment. Contextual research and documentation offer a glimpse into this process, while considering unstructured, kinetic, and uncertain ways of knowing in qualitative and arts-based research. The aim is to explore mycology as a post-formal lens for understanding the pedagogical and creative practices of the artist-teacher as a networked, fluid, and relational system.
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