In collaboration with an exhibiting SoEx artist or project

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Teaching Artist: Claire Rabkin

This spring, Southern Exposure’s Contemporary Classrooms workshops highlight the work of artist Robby Herbst and his project New New Games, asking, “Who defines the games we as a society play?”

Integrated into teachers’ classrooms and curricula, these FREE workshops immerse students in Herbst’s remixes of participatory games from the 1970s era humanist New Games Movement. Facilitated by SoEx Teaching Artist Claire Rabkin, these self-reflective activities ask students to start examining their own ideas of labor and leisure. We also highly encourage participants to attend the New New Games event to be held in June 2016.

Workshop Learning Objectives:
Students will engage in play while developing critical perspectives on social or personal systems that they encounter every day. Activities are constructed around the inquiry, observation, and discussion of common systems and familiar culture. Each class will play one of the games developed for the New New Games project and learn about the historical and practical significance of playfulness in social commentary. Participants will craft their own game instructions, aimed at disrupting quotidian systems, and bringing collaboration, laugher, movement, and criticism to student’s understanding of art. 

About Artist Robby Herbst and New New Games:
Robby Herbst’s work engages contemporary and historic experiments in socio-political aesthetics through publishing, social sculpture, organizing, writing, and visual art.  Mainly concerned with technology, capitalism, and human interactions, Herbst applies his creative process to social activism.  

Herbst’s new project, New New Games, immerses participants in deceptively simple but powerful group collaborations that examine race, status, economics, and culture. New New Games is inspired by the 1970s San Francisco movement that annually gathered thousands of people to play games that accessed human instincts of competition and aggression, but reframed in a safe, cooperative and creative environment. Herbst is using this model of gathering people to play games updated to reflect current social issues and to satirize contemporary culture.

About Teaching Artist Claire Rabkin:
Claire Rabkin is a visual and performance artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work originates from the elemental forms of the human figure and collective forms. Her careful studies of line and shape bridge various media, including collage, textile, and and painting. Shape in the body is also a theme of her performance art, which collaborates with dancers, children, actors and non-actors, to inquire about space and belonging. As an art educator, Claire works to bring inquiry-based interdisciplinary art to classrooms in San Francisco and the East Bay.

Additional Resources:
cargocollective.com/robbyherbst
clairerabkin.tumblr.com