“I always knew that I wanted to teach – it’s part of my self-identification as an artist. As much as I thought about making work, I thought the dialogue with other artists about the history and future of art was so important. It does attract some derision – it’s almost like people think you teach because you’re not able to make it as a real artist – but it invites so much productive questioning. You’re constantly reinforcing your knowledge and beliefs by being held to account for them by students. Instead of giving students a manifesto, I’m much more interested in giving them a bibliography, annotated with plural options – things that might open their vision to what’s possible. There are people who are naturally talented but not every student is going to be an artist. Either way, it’s so important to learn how to think critically, to think about how images and objects have cultural meaning – no matter what the students go on to do.”
Sara Greenberger Rafferty believes there is beauty in the working. In Testing, her recent show at Rachel Uffner gallery, New York, the multimedia artist turned a stream of digital photographs – the fragmentary notes we store on smartphones and via screenshots – into abstracted images, frozen in kiln-baked glass. Alluding to early 19th-century printing processes, these objects render permanent the transient stream of visuals we continuously encounter. “I like the idea that something in process could also be public and finished – that it could be seeking an answer and still be strong,” she says. It’s this same openness she champions as director of the photography MFA at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and that has won her a solo show at MoMA PS1, as well as placements at celebrated institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, and inclusion in the Whitney Biennial.
WORDS SOPHIE BEW