teaching is never neutral. every classroom either reproduces the structures students inherit or opens space for something else. as a queer, non-binary, latinx, first-generation american raised in a mixed ethnic household, i know how many students arrive in rooms that were not built for them. my teaching rests on three commitments: access, care and shared governance. they hold across every context i teach in — undergraduate and mfa students at a private university, first-year and returning students at a community college and working artists at the independent school i direct — and in each room, we work out together what they look like in practice.
i teach drawing and painting expansively. students build skill through sustained attention to line, value, color, form, scale and time, and they learn perception, comparison and attending as the ground of observation. from there, drawing and painting become ways of thinking about surface, space and the body. my courses regularly take in performance, installation, sound and site, and i have also taught sculpture, including at the graduate level, along with three-dimensional design, mixed media, color theory, professional practice and art history. work that carries this thinking belongs in the room even when it does not look like drawing or painting. widening the definition is a claim about who gets to make art and whose ways of working the field recognizes.
access is my starting point, built into every course from the first day. the accommodation model asks students to prove a need the classroom should have been designed to meet, often when they are least resourced to carry it. my courses begin from openness and flexibility toward the full range of bodies, histories, economies and neurologies in the room. students know to reach out early, and we work it out together. formal channels remain available, and i help students use them.
shared governance shapes the studio. community agreements are living documents, written and revised with students. critique is taught. we look first. we describe what is there without judgment. the artist names what they were working toward and what they need, and the conversation stays within the work’s own terms. leadership in critique rotates. assessment works the same way: coursework is completion-based, students assess their own progress at midterm and at the end of term, and the final grade is reached in conversation. students learn to argue for their own needs and their own work.
care is the daily labor of teaching. it means noticing early when a student is struggling, connecting them with the right offices and staying with them through it. as a secondary advisor to mfa candidates, i meet each student in the studio every semester and support them through review boards, critiques, grant applications and portfolios. i mentor graduate teaching assistants as teachers and as artists. in every course i am transparent about the conditions of artistic labor — precarity, compensation and the invisible work that sustains the field — so students see how the art world works, whom it rewards and how to build a life in art on their own terms. community is something students build and sustain together.
this practice is rooted in self-organized education. my studio and my doctoral research move through each other, asking how artists organize their labor and sustain one another. the classroom is where those questions are tested with students.
teaching is care. teaching is refusal. teaching is ongoing, unfinished, necessary work.
teaching as practice: extended statement
course list
artist statement | statement of inquiry | curatorial statement | teaching philosophy | diversity statement
writing: on practice | writing archive
cv | biography | work