Conversation Series Sofa Issues Winter 2026
Me The Balloon And Her, The Rock.
What if instead of being invited in to name a problem, we create something we actually want and live with the consequences of how messy it is to build something that you believe in? – Caroline Woolard
I first was introduced to Making and Being by my classmate Clara Harlow who handed me this hefty, cream tome with blue text written by Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard. When I began to read it, I felt one of those aha! moments. Caroline and Susan spoke to the “how” we are together being just as important as the “what” we do and make together, and offered strategies and tools to create a classroom that lives into those values. As I began to prepare to teach a class on Art, Conflict, and Collaboration, Making and Being became my guide. I was very humbled and honored to speak with them about their work together and apart, their understanding of the dopamine-fueled present, and their plans for continued collaboration.
Lou Blumberg + Susan Jahoda + Caroline Woolard
Lou: I’d love to hear more about what you had in mind when you wrote Making and Being and what you feel like has changed in the six years since it’s been out.
Susan: You might be familiar with the project that we did prior to writing Making and Being, which was “Artists Report Back,” where we looked at the relationship between arts degrees, student debt and employment. Once we finished that project, we realized that we’d asked a lot of questions, but we actually hadn’t answered any of them ourselves.
If I can speak for both of us, I think that was the impetus, or the prompt, for us to do a deeper dive into what could potentially be approached differently in art school. What could we offer? How could we reconfigure pedagogy? How could we think about our spaces of learning themselves as being transformative and as we say, not a journey to somewhere else, but a way to model ways of being once you leave the institution?
Caroline: I think you could see “Artists Report Back” as research into the fundamental conditions that have shaped higher education in the arts and artists’ lives who go through higher education, from the 1980s until today. Namely how neoliberalism has impacted people’s relationship to higher education, and the rise in costs and what that does to the subjectivity of the artists.
Like Susan said, it was then, what do we do? And how can we shift some of the expectations and practices in order to, like she’s saying, model where we might go? In that longer arc that’s from the ‘80s or ‘90s until today, not much really has changed. If anything, the inequality has become more visible or palpable, especially from 2020 until today, not only with the acceleration of an atomized individualism where people are forced to be alone, but also with the George Floyd uprisings and the awareness of racism and anti-blackness and injustice. More and more artists are welcomed into a political analysis of their context, artists who might not otherwise question the status quo.
It’s only been made more clear: the difference between the power of the arts to allow people to express themselves and be in touch with feeling and sensation that is often exiled, versus the powers that be that encourage us to seek profit and individualism and domination.
And I think, lucky for us, we don’t seem crazy or like this strange outlier. It’s at the forefront of debate today.
Susan: I can speak to what locally, within the context of my institution, has changed, recognizing of course that institutional change is extremely slow. I’ve noticed through teaching the book—and I certainly do in my graduate courses—that there’s a recognition of all of the contradictions, but they can be and are beginning to be generative.
A lot of the practices in Making and Being have been adopted. For example, crit spaces have changed. Students have a lot more agency, because they use the critique protocol from the book. A lot of our students do collaborative work. They do community-based work. There’s an enormous amount of peer learning and community building within the groups. So on a local level, I feel a lot’s changed since 2019, since we’ve been teaching the book.
Caroline: Oh yeah. And maybe it’s important to say, we started working on the book and who even knows—
Susan: Five years prior to that, it took us five years to write it.
Caroline: So it’s actually been over a decade. And it’s true. I do think a younger generation that’s coming into school is also much more collaborative and interested in care and rest and is much more politicized.
Institutionally, some of these things are being embraced, and yet institutions will always be sick. So, we still engage in many alternative education projects. I just started this thing called pollinator.coop, which is all about peer learning. We will always need spaces outside of conventional institutions so that we can model—on all the levels—the kinds of governance and decision making and ownership that we value in the classroom.
Lou: My experience using it in the classroom has been really positive. I find the undergrads that I’m teaching are often faced for the first time with understanding themselves and their inner world on a somatic level, unless they’ve been into that before. I ask each of them to lead a warmup after I’ve modeled a few of the embodiment practices you detail in the book, and it’s interesting. Many of them choose to lead a drawing exercise and shy away from more meditative or introspective practices. I wonder what you make of that, and how we can get students to be a little bit more invested in that self-knowing and capacity building.
Susan: I think it varies from class to class. Sometimes you’ve got an incredibly receptive group and sometimes you have one or two people in the class who don’t want to participate. You have to acknowledge dissensus, right? And you have to manage that. I think it’s really to do with the groups that you’re working with and slowly building, starting with simple things.
Caroline and I often start with what we call the Aqueous Event. We have everybody sitting in a circle and, using spoons, we pass water around from one person to the next until we have gone around the whole circle. It’s very funny and often tense. And then we ask students afterwards, “Well, why do you think we engaged in this exercise?” This most often leads to a conversation about collaboration, about ways to support each other.
We often ask, what does this classroom want? As if the classroom itself is a sentient being. And then students will come up with all kinds of things, “Oh, music, yoga.” It takes some of the responsibility off them personally, and then you can build from there.
Caroline: It’s interesting actually. I just got a job at Montclair State University, redoing the Foundations courses using Making and Being, and I have been doing less and less of those embodied activities and also less sharing. This is interesting. I don’t think we’ve even talked about it, Susan.
I think there’s so much anxiety in students who did high school during COVID. Their moment of blossoming into themselves was interrupted—let’s imagine they’re trans, they’re queer, they have different political beliefs than their parents. So, because of that, I have actually made my classroom much less vulnerable.
I build with people individually and then they hand in things like the “Welcome New Student” worksheet or the asset mapping worksheet and tell me things about themselves. I will notice if there’s someone interested in performance or music or theater, and I invite those people to be doing more of the leading.
When they’re doing things together, they are group activities, like everyone trying to hold a pole and lower it together, trust falls, basic physical things that feel silly. Also because these are not performing artists, so, if they have any training, they have thought about themselves as vulnerable visually, not through their bodies. So, anyway, I don’t ask for that much vulnerability and I actually don’t expect it because of the moment that we’re in.
Some of my students will just leave the room if I make them talk to each other. I have to have adaptations for those people. They are not able to do that right now. So I give them an alternative assignment.
It is sad. I’m going to be totally honest. I think our ability to be social and to go unaccompanied, without a device, is so severe. People call it the next tobacco. There will be lawsuits. There’s reasons that children should not, and we should not, be on our devices at the level at which we are, because it creates anxiety.
I talk to my students about the things that naturally release dopamine instead of your device, things like live human contact, art making, long walks, meditation. These are slow releases of dopamine, and we have to learn them. It will not be an immediate high like you get from your little scroll. But the difference is that if you want to be an artist, you can get this with yourself and you’re not reliant on something else. And it’s very creative, a lot of the things that release dopamine are related to creativity.
So first it’s, let’s find the dopamine or the high of being quiet with yourself, and experiencing art that is not Disney. And then later we can go to the high of being with a human being. I feel like it’s going to take a whole year of Foundations, and then people may revert back.
Susan: I think what you’re saying though is about sensing and learning to meet people where they are. And that’s a pedagogy in itself: meeting people where they are, and then attending to their needs.
We teach different groups. I completely understand what you’re saying, Caroline, and I really admire that circuitous way around to get to the somatic. I’m mostly working with graduate students and juniors and seniors.
Lou: I’m really curious to hear more about the dopamine that we get from working with each other, and your strategies for collaboration amongst the two of you, having worked so long in collaboration. The class I’m teaching now focuses on conflict and collaboration and how to address disagreement and be honest with your opinions—I have a background in conflict mediation and I’m really curious about that piece of ourselves. I wonder how it’s been for you and your evolving collaboration over the years and the many different iterations that it’s taken.
Susan and Caroline: Where do we begin? laughs
Lou: Could you start with how you started working together?
Caroline: Do you want me to tell that story?
Susan: Yeah, you tell that story.
Caroline: It was around Occupy Wall Street time. I had just been given my first class as an adjunct at The New School. I think I was 26, had no MFA, and felt terrified. I had been running Trade School, a peer learning thing with my friends, but that felt like our own learning experience, not something that people should pay for. Erin Sickler put me in touch with Susan and was like, “Here’s somebody who’s similar to you. They think about political economy, they care about collaboration, they do social practice art, et cetera.” And then you, Susan, helped me with my syllabus. Then there was a lot of silence. And then I think you invited me to the Pedagogy Group that you were starting. Maybe you can take it from there.
Susan: Yeah, just slightly post Occupy, the collaborative Ultra-red, invited me to a retreat on collaboration and collectivity. I went as a representative of the journal Rethinking Marxism because I was the arts editor. It was during that meeting that another artist and I thought, “Wow, there is nowhere for teachers, especially adjunct professors, to meet, to share resources.”
So we started this group in New York City called the Pedagogy Group, and we met every Friday, sometimes for four hours. It was really amazing. It was invigorating. Caroline joined the group. And then, in our own side conversations, we realized that we wanted to start an additional project.
And then, Caroline, you came up with the idea for BFAMFAPhD. You put out a call for people to meet. The group started out large, and then became three or four people. That’s when we began to work on Artists Report Back, which then morphed into the Making and Being project.
But I think you’re asking a slightly different question, which is how we’ve worked together all of these years, and how, as our lives have changed, our relationship has changed.
After Making and Being, our relationship changed. You had a child, you moved to Berlin, and began working on some other projects, and so we shifted. Although all along, I think our personal, loving relationship has always been in place. Our relationship changed into a much more kind of domestic engagement.
We now live diagonally across the road from each other. We both moved to Kingston, New York together at exactly the same time. We lived in the same house together last year for a year, and certainly went through some complicated things with our partners, as our own families have expanded.
We have had to navigate what it means to bring other people into our relationship, and in what ways do they want or not want to participate on the level in which both Caroline and I love being and engaging with people. We’re both social beings in many ways and like to work in groups and collaborate, and our partners aren’t necessarily like that. Laughs
So in the expansion of our relationship we’ve had to navigate some other complexities, but we make time every week to be together. In fact, this right now is our time to be together, to talk, to experiment with our little art projects. We’re emerging, I think we’re in a state of becoming something else at this moment.
Caroline: I think intergenerational friendships are really helpful for a number of reasons, one being the zoomed out view you can have when you’ve lived more decades than the other person. We were at such different life stages, and I guess we still are, but we met in a moment where Susan referred to my stage as the ascendancy stage, which was very helpful.
That helped me see, this is not necessarily forever—I was trying to get an MFA, which I eventually did while having a tenure track job, while trying to apply for other tenure track jobs, while trying to have an art career as an individual artist, while trying to collaborate. And Susan was like, “Oh, that’s the ascendancy, you little whipper snapper.”
I think the last five years have been very tumultuous for me. I think, Susan, you’ve been supportive as I’m trying to learn in these different ways, and on some level I feel like you raised me up into being an educator, and then it was like, “Oh, we’re both educators, for real.” I’m here too.
And then I became a parent, which Susan already was, and she could help me see how this happens and be more like an auntie to my kid, and wildly move to Kingston. We’ll probably start a residency that’s for artist educators here, and we both live here.
But I think in terms of specific conflicts, we recognized very early on, I think, without naming it, that we have similar childhood traumas that make us very interested in collectivity and in trusting something beyond the family. It gives us a sensitivity to each other and to people that not everyone shares, as a survival mechanism that’s also a superpower.
We also have a kind of compulsive workaholism that works very well together. We will prioritize working over having fun together. We had a long history of, I’d say on some level, enabling each other, but also producing wonderful things. It’s always complex, our superpowers.
We also manifest our sense of safety very differently. I’d say for Susan, it’s around control and order. Susan’s also a Virgo. We often would talk about it that way. So all the folder systems: Susan. I’d say, “Just put it out there in the world!” And Susan would say, “No, make it perfect.”
My survival style is more chaos. I feel most alive in chaos. I would be the one doing public events and outreach and bold, crazy ideas. And Susan would be saying, “Let’s make sure it’s coming down to the ground.” We used to call me the balloon and her, the rock.
I remember we would have a conflict around how we wrote. I would just burst out with, “Here’s this,” and Susan would be carefully making a paragraph for hours. And I would come in and just redo. It was an erasure of labor and we would talk a lot about that.
We had a lot of practices that were about collective writing. We eventually actually sat and wrote together, and if anybody was reading anybody else’s writing or edits, we would read the whole thing before making any comments. Otherwise we would get so trapped and you wouldn’t even feel the person’s full idea.
It took a lot of time also. I don’t know how I would do that with a young child today, to be honest. Then fast forward to when we were more, you said domestic. I think we shifted from a professional relationship to a familial friendship. That’s something I can say I really need and want right now. Living together, it was almost a year and a half, and there were so many tensions around that fundamental experience of home and family that brings us together, but comes from a distrust of, could a home be safe?
But we never named all these things. We just went into it together and so many things exploded. Especially around money. We almost moved in together forever and fused our finances forever, so it got very extreme in terms of the stakes of the fantasy of being chosen family.
Then magically, I think because of our love for each other, we’ve been able to work through that, and like Susan’s saying, accept that actually our partners want very different things than we do. In truth, there are ways that my healing journey and Susan’s healing journey overlap, but fundamentally I am about an intensity of expansion that can be very difficult, I think, for you, Susan. And Susan is fundamentally about a slowness and order and a daily care, and they can work together very well, but not necessarily domestically. But we make time for each other, we love each other and probably will make another project with this residency.
Susan: One thing I can add—we used a practice called “Threeing” in the writing of the book and the collective work, BFAMFAPhD, where we recognized who was really good at what. We learned to yield to each other’s strengths and to acknowledge the person who had confidence and skills and capacity and allow that person to lead. Then others could shift into a supporting role rather than engaging competitively. Yielding, I think we are good at that together.
Caroline: Yeah, that’s true. I would call up Susan and say, “I want to take this call with the press. Can I be in Firstness?” And she’d be like, “Yes.” I think we figured out a lot of things and now we’re in a new era.
Lou: I’m always so curious about long-term collaborations and how they function together. I think some of the most powerful work can happen when you’re comfortable naming what’s hard and naming what’s difficult and being willing to move through that together.
As I was preparing for speaking with you, I was perusing the BFAMFAPhD website, and one of the values really stood out to me: “Looking for strategic opportunities to advance cultural equity in the arts and to build a community of rigor and care rather than reproducing a cynical, ironic, or antagonistic stance that can deny our capacity to create change in the world.” I felt like that had a lot of story or feeling behind it, potentially.
I wonder if you can speak to how we avoid that cynical, ironic, or antagonistic stance, especially in the growing polycrisis that we’re living in, where it can seem sometimes easier every day to either cast off art and go to the front lines or throw up your hands and become a nihilist. At least those are some of the poles that I feel. I wonder how that’s speaking to you now.
Caroline: I read about this idea of “cringe culture,” which I didn’t even know about, the idea that a younger generation than me would cringe at the idea of being earnest or vulnerable. I think that it is a protective measure that is important to honor when a person or a student does not want to know their desires or share them. And yet I don’t think you can make art without doing that.
I think that writing came from pushing against institutional critique, which assumes that naming problems leads to transforming them, when in fact what we see is that there’s actually an excitement from the institution (I used to think of it as a fantasy) of asking to be slapped.
What if instead of being invited in to name a problem, we create something we actually want and live with the consequences of how messy it is to build something that you believe in? For every artist that is going to say, “No, I resist this. I don’t want this,” let’s hope there can be artists who also say, “This is what we want and this is what we’re working toward and this is what we believe in,” and that is vulnerable.
Obviously this is a political issue as well, as we see the left doesn’t know what it wants. We’re starting hopefully to formulate what that agenda might be. But if we can’t say, “This is what we want the day after we win,” then we’re in deep trouble. It’s about prefiguring the worlds that we want and inviting artists to try and name their values and stand behind something.
Susan: I think that was reflected in a very purposeful, conscious writing in Making and Being where we added the negation section to each of the chapters as a kind of invitation. I think it’s a really difficult moment for so many of my art students, the terror of living in this moment and thinking about futures and the dismantling and instrumentalizing of higher education. I teach in a three-year program where we emphasize teaching, but there are fewer and fewer tenure track jobs, so students are sort of swimming against the tide. What does it mean to teach a professional practice course or a survival guide for artists, courses like that, when we don’t even know what the territory is, the land that we’re standing on? It often feels like painting the deck chairs on The Titanic.
I’m also realizing and recognizing that this moment requires different forms, but we don’t really know what those forms are yet. It’s a very complicated, difficult time. Even the question of what it means to be a bystander and when do you step in, and all of those things that are so difficult to navigate at this moment.
Caroline: I guess I’m always like, “No, we’re not painting the deck chairs on the Titanic.” We know what we’re doing and actually it has always been radical to care for the arts, and I really think that. This impulse to create and maybe do it collectively will always be there, and we’ll find different places to do it if higher education is not the place for that. It never was for many people.
Susan: And maybe that’s in a sense what we are doing, by thinking about this residency program. That’s where we are at, what we are thinking through, or finding our way through.
Caroline: I feel like the project of higher education is not over yet, and there will be some closures of art schools but I think we still have another few decades. I don’t think it’s as dire as it might seem.
I also think that more and more students want to be in art school, and that’s a testament to their own courage to stand up against whatever people might be telling them about their future, that even with this media landscape that says you’ll never get a job, people are like, “No, I still want to feel, I still want to express myself.”
Even in a place where, I forget the exact stats, but it’s something like a quarter of our waking life we spend on big social. It is terrifying, and people know the anxiety that this creates and also how boring the media diet is, what it does to the ideas and forms that you might produce. I have hope for endless generations of people who want to create and move toward being together.
And I also believe that in this era of artificial intelligence, we will be more and more valued for the slow dopamine, for the human-to-human intelligence, for the ways that we create connection with ourselves and each other and the material world that cannot be replaced by AI. I think in the long run, the value of presence and tactility will actually go up and we are in that field, luckily. I feel great. It’s okay. I try to tell that to my students.
Susan: Yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, statistically, our enrollment has increased in the last two years. We’ve had the biggest freshman class in the arts. I think last year more people in the humanities got jobs than in the sciences, specifically computer sciences. So, that turn that you’re referring to, I think, optimistically that it could be a right turn. It could be good.
Lou: I have one more earnest question that I love to ask people, to fight against the fear of cringe. I’m always curious what people’s relationship to hope is. You mentioned that you have it. Is it something that you feel that you need? And if so, what’s bringing it to you these days?
Caroline: Hm. What do you think, Susan?
Susan: I feel hope. I think it’s operative on different levels. I feel hope in my personal life and in my relationships, and I am optimistic about the project that Caroline and I are about to embark upon.
Hope re: the world. I don’t know how to really answer that. I think I have to overcome my own familial trauma. That’s a big obstacle. What I am terrified of, in historical terms, are the signs of authoritarianism and fascism, and my family lived through that and died through that. I’m very sensitive to that and it looks like that to me. So I’m navigating that.
Caroline: There’s something about “hope” that feels like the wrong word because to me it is about a mentality that’s future oriented, that’s about a better future.
I’d have to read and think more about the temporality of hope, but if there’s a word or if hope can mean action in the present, to affirm your connection with other people, beings that are human or non-human, and a practice of love and mutuality, then I think hope is a discipline that I practice daily as a way to be alive. It’s hard for me to imagine not working with Susan in community, collectively as a practice of a more inspired present.
And, yes, I am a person who from a very young age was like, “Fuck you. I’m a believer.” There’s a way. It doesn’t seem like it, but there’s a way, and we’re doing it right now: by trying to respond to people when they reach out, trying to care for each other in the ways that we can, modeling that something that seems impossible is possible and showing that.
Even if we don’t have words for things—my kid has two moms, and my name to him is “other mama.” We don’t have words for it. There are still practices that connect us to a lineage of power and liberation. It’s a cyclical practice, not just toward a better future, but toward the possibility that we are here, that we are alive, and that our ancestors, the lineages that we want to call upon, are with us, you know? There is a fantasy, that energy of pleasure and desire, couldn’t that be channeled in the art world or in the work that we make?
Susan: Thank you for saying all of those things and articulating them in the way that you did, and offering or giving permission to talk about the daily pleasures, the engagement with all living things and with each other and with food, and those practices which are so affirming and loving.
Lou: When I’ve asked people this question recently, it’s very often come down to our intimate relationships and the small ways that the seasons change and the garden continues to grow, providing a life force, even as the larger structures feel hopeless or hard to combat. Thanks for sharing.
Susan: And I think there’s also some guilt associated with articulating those things because you wonder what you should be doing and what your bystander status is. What moment do you step in, what are the actions that you should be taking? So it’s complicated.
But I think it’s important to say, to talk about the things that are affirming, the local, the personal.
Caroline: I’m so glad you reached out to us.
Lou: Thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Susan: Take care.
Caroline Woolard is a founding co-organizer of Art.coop and Head of Strategy at Pollinator.coop. She is the Area Head of Foundations in the Department of Art and Design at Montclair State University and the co-author of two major reports: Solidarity Not Charity (Grantmakers in the Arts, 2021) and Spirits and Logistics (Center for Cultural Innovation, 2022) and three books: Making and Being (Pioneer Works, 2019), a book for educators about interdisciplinary collaboration, co-authored with Susan Jahoda; Art, Engagement, Economy (onomatopee, 2020) a book about managing socially-engaged and public art projects; and TRADE SCHOOL: 2009-2019, a book about peer learning that Woolard catalyzed in thirty cities internationally over a decade. Woolard’s artwork has been featured twice on New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS.
Susan Jahoda is an artist, educator, curator and organizer whose work includes video, photography, text, performance, installation and research based collaborative projects. Her projects have been included in national and international exhibitions in London, Paris, Basel, New York, Seoul, and Moscow amongst others and have been supported by residencies at Triangle Arts Residency, Brooklyn and New Inc, the New Museum, NYC and by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts. She is the co-author of Making and Being: Embodiment, Collaboration and Circulation in the Visual Arts and has organized exhibitions and screenings including Documents from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, Interference Archive, Brooklyn. She is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She resides in Kingston, New York and New York City.
Lou Blumberg is an artist, facilitator, and educator with ties to San Francisco, New Orleans, and Portland. With a belief that a better world is possible, their deeply personal practice deals with conflict and its impact on our relationships and lives; surveillance and safety; and joy in despairing times. They are part of the MFA Art and Social Practice program at Portland State University and a co-organizer of Techies 4 Reproductive Justice.