Tania Bruguera won the 2013 Meadows Prize and received a $25,000 stipend and four week residency in Dallas. (Courtesy of galleristny.com)

Meadows Prize winner, Tania Bruguera will teach a special workshop for students in April.

“The Use of Art” workshop will be held on Monday, April 8 through Friday, April 19.

The purpose is to discuss the ways in which art can be of social or political use, the challenges that arise from being evaluated aesthetically and politically and the art world in relation to the social and political sphere.

A maximum of 12 Meadows students will be able to attend.

Students from the art, art history, theater, dance, music, film, political science and social science are eligible to participate.

Graduate students and undergraduates with permission are welcome to apply.

In the workshop, students and Bruguera will review resources to develop communication tools appropriate for use in the contemporary public sphere.

Additionally, the course will involve analysis of case studies for “arte util,” or useful art and develop related projects.

Bruguera often defines her own practice through the terms “arte util” and “arte de conducta,” which means conduct or behavior art.

Students will also examine texts by Claire Bishop, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Shannon Jackson, Stephen Wright and Grant Kester.

Among the addressed themes from these texts are social practice, the relationship between reality and fiction in art, the relationship between art and performance, the utility of art, public art and site specificity and the relationship between art and activism.

Over the course of the two-week workshop, students will present and develop one personal project.

The workshop will be completed with student participation in the production of a new public art commission for SMU in Sept. 2013.

Tania Bruguera won the 2013 Meadows Prize for her work as a political and performing artist.

Her work researches ways in which art can be applied to everyday political life.

She accomplished this through her creation of a public forum to debate ideas shown in a state of contradiction and by transforming the condition of “viewer” into “citizenry.”

Bruguera has previously lectured at The New School in New York, the School of Art Institute of Chicago, the Royal College of Art in London and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

To register for the workshop, contact Professor Noah Simblist at [email protected] by March 18.