One Thing Can Be Many if We Let It

Sofa Issues Spring 2025

Clara Harlow with Jorge Lucero

“I’m trying increasingly, and have been trying for about three decades, to take those activities that are frequently considered underbelly activities and turn those into the primary activities. Turn those into the works.”
Jorge Lucero

I found Jorge Lucero’s pedagogical work at a time when I needed permission myself. I’d been preparing to teach my first undergrad course on conceptual art and looking for ways to make it accessible and meaningful for my students, while also keeping it engaging and manageable for myself as a working artist and graduate student. In my course research, I was delighted to come across Illinois-based artist and educator Jorge Lucero. I was instantly struck by his expansive approach to teaching as a form of conceptual art in and of itself that reimagines the classroom as potential art material, research site, and experiment for both student and teacher.

In a moment when folks are eager to draw boundaries around life and work, Jorge wonders what might happen if we emphatically embrace the opposite. Through Jorge’s envisage of his daily roles of professor, administrator, colleague, and parent as an opportunity to embody his art practice, he offers an invitation into what else might be possible when we don’t change what we’re doing, but rather how we’re relating to it. On the last day of school, I sat down with Jorge to parse through the potentialities of art, education, and work, and was left with something far more resonant than any singular answer could provide.

Clara Harlow: I want to know a little bit more about the way you’re approaching the intersection of art, life, and teaching. What has that been looking like for you lately?

Jorge Lucero: It’s a more precise version of something that I have spent many years trying to articulate and carry out in a way that feels true to how I understand myself as an artist and increasingly, as an artist who has a lot of other activities that don’t immediately read or register as studio practices. So it’s about trying to figure out how these practices exist as hybrids, but also how the variations in all the different kinds of practices give permissions to each other for new ways to enact those things.

So, for example, I now hold an administrative position here at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and when that was offered to me, I was reluctant at first because I didn’t want anything to take away from my artistic practice, which is what has been driving me professionally for the last 25 years. But then again, I never wanted to be a professor, because I thought that was going to get in the way of being an artist, and I never wanted to be a high school teacher before that, because I thought that was going to get in the way of being an artist.

But what has been revealed in taking on all of those different types of tasks is their materiality. There’s a ton of permissions that these forms exchange with each other, and I’ve become increasingly attuned to how they speak into each other. And I give myself the latitude, which I try to pass along to my students and even to my colleagues, to be able to take methodologies, approaches, and discourses from each other. So I do think that there are a lot of things that being an administrator opens up for being a creative practitioner, and vice versa. It seems like a counterintuitive pairing or formula, but it has proven to be complementary practices.

Clara: Yeah, reading your work was making me think a lot about my own history with work both inside/outside of the art and design world in New York, and always trying to find that balance between the two. Do I need more time or more money right now? Do I want to work in proximity to the art world where my actual role isn’t going to be associated with being an artist, or do I want to work outside of that, and have free time to be working on my own practice? I feel like I’m always moving around between those axis.

Jorge: I think the reason that we make a difference between those types of activities is because we have different levels of tolerance for their arduousness. So let’s take a ceramicist, for example, who has to do the arduous work of either calibrating glazes or reclaiming clay, or fixing works that crack in the kiln or something. There’s a lot of labor and finickiness, and maybe what we could call banal activity that is a part of those studio practices. While the enjoyment of those activities may fall on a spectrum, they certainly don’t question their necessity as part of the sequence that allows for them to make the kinds of inquiries that they want to with those mediums.

Yet when it comes to finding that work-life balance, we tend to categorize things like filling out paperwork or working a “day job” or teaching as something else, as if those weren’t the equivalents of pugging clay or trial and error testing of glazes. It’s not like I teach or have managerial tasks in support of some other practice that I call my art practice. It’s that I’m trying increasingly, and have been trying for about three decades, to take those activities that are frequently considered underbelly activities and turn those into the primary activities. Turn those into the works.

Now, in order to do that I have to obviously reconceptualize my idea of what art is, but also how the work is put into the world. Because, you know, so much of the work that I do as a creative practitioner within the institution is never put on display, and, in fact, is incredibly difficult to document because of its expansiveness. So there are a couple of mind shifts that need to occur in order for me to get there, but that’s been the activity all these years.

Clara: What are some of those mind shifts for you?

Jorge: Well I’ll start with documentation for one. Even when it comes to social practice, there’s the expectation that even a blurry or bad photograph, or a partial recounting of the events on some level serves as the currency that emerges from the practice, event, or activity. But what I’ve been thinking about is what happens when the prioritization of documentation takes a backseat, or even proves to be impossible? What occurs then? So then you have an art practice that I would call an art practice of invisibility, meaning not that there isn’t something there, but that it’s very difficult to perceive. And it’s particularly difficult to perceive within the limitations of one lifetime. So there’s this kind of immateriality to it, or a kind of length, largeness, or impossibility to the materiality that invites us to be at peace about not being able to see it.

I get really curious about the extremes of that, about the projects that are so small that you can’t get them down on paper. You can’t photograph them, or you can’t talk about them. And then I also get really interested in the ones that are so big that they’re equally very difficult to capture. Even if you do something that has a large footprint like, for example, the Social Practice program there at Portland State, that has an incredible footprint that’s probably going to outlast, or probably has already outlasted its founders and many of its contributors. But even then, it’s gonna have a lifespan. Eventually people will come around and will either defund it, dismantle it, or there just won’t be any interest in it anymore. And then it will have lived its life. But it’s just too big to capture it all in even one very nicely designed website.

Clara: I’m curious how you talk about this sense of scale with your students? How do you share with them what you’re doing and the ways in which you’re playing with the expectations around what learning is and how it can happen. Do you find that it’s more of a showing and less of a telling?

Jorge: Actually, it’s funny that you pit showing versus telling because I actually think it’s more of a telling than a showing. And what I mean by that is I think people know that these things are true, we just don’t have the language to describe some of those things. So I do a couple of things, actually.

One being that there’s a difference between education and schooling. They all sort of intuitively know what schooling is, because they’re doing it and it’s being done to them. But they haven’t all thought about what their education is. However, when you can present to them something like their Instagram scrolling or hanging out with their friends as an educational activity, then things start to shift in their brain a little bit. Because when you’re scrolling on Instagram for 2 hours, you feel guilty about it afterwards, you feel like you wasted all that time. But didn’t you also engage with the world in some way? Didn’t you also learn a bunch of things?

And in order for that to make sense to them, I have to pull it back from the activity having been productive, right? So the instinct is, it’s not useful, or it’s not a good thing that I did because it’s not productive, but not all education has to be productive. That’s a schooling paradigm, but it’s not necessarily an education paradigm. Sometimes we go for a walk, and our body registers the temperature, the pace, the passage of time, the nostalgia of it all, the beauty of nature, all of these things which on many levels you could say are “unproductive,” yet at the same time we don’t downplay that as something useful or not useful, but simply as an enriching experience.

And I’m not saying that everything that we do has to be enriching, but that I try to bring my students to a place where they can be more attuned to the things that they perhaps dismiss, or have been told to dismiss, and that actually opens up a whole other field of experience that helps them to rethink what their education could be. Once they stop thinking about school as the only place you get an education, and they start thinking that you can get an education at any moment that you’re awake, or even that you’re asleep, then all of a sudden there’s a kind of curiosity that is enlivened in the students.

And then you can really talk about so many things that happen in art, and so many things that could happen in art that still haven’t happened that are on these edges that I’m talking about, like the edge of visibility, the edge of documentation, the edge of artist currency, the edge of thinking and experience. And then you’re really tapping into the idea that living life is a kind of material.

Clara: Yeah, that has been very top of mind lately for me in thinking about how I approach my process in making work that’s relational and often anti-capitalist in nature, and then coming up against my own conditioned and self-imposed expectations in the process of making that work. I’ve been holding this tension between wanting to make things and spaces where productivity culture is being challenged or questioned, then finding myself also having to do a lot of internal work alongside that in unlearning the ways that I can reinforce this productivity value system in my process. Even in my learning, my real impulse to be like, “Oh, okay great, this is a thing that keeps coming up, now I’m gonna continue to research it and see it from all these different sides.” But I’m trying to learn when it’s sometimes just about being in the experience and trusting all the different ways that we can access learning and knowledge, that it doesn’t need to be a certain way for it to work.

Jorge: Sure, the only other thing that I would say in addition to that is that it doesn’t have to be either/or because we’re really elastic. We have a lot of capacity for imagination and for multimodality. So there’s also a lot of room to say, I’m a person who gets things done, and a person who enjoys and can be enriched by the process.

I try to get the students to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. I do want them to think about being more conscious of the fact that they might be contributing to projects and work that are way beyond them that will outlive them, that may not be recognized until way after they’re gone, or may not be recognized at all ever. But at the same time continuing to keep in consideration the ability, pleasure, and sense that we get when we close a circuit, either on a daily basis or moment to moment basis, whatever that circuit is. Whether it’s the conclusion of a 15 week class or the making of a singular meal, or the completion of a 4 year project, I believe we can have both.

Clara: Yeah, you mentioned you taught your last class of the school year today and I’m curious how you reconcile this idea of students’ learning and contribution to something that’s way larger in scope than they might realize at the time while also working within these real temporal constraints of the class length. How did you close the circuit for your course today?

Jorge: This is going to be really corny, but I try to hold true to the idea of commencement, which usually schools do at the end of the year, but the term actually means beginning. So today, I had my last class called Art, Design and Society. After 15 weeks of giving lectures to 160 first year students about things like ecology, Utopia, invisibility, and absurdity, I ended with a lecture about permissions. That lecture is an attempt to give a singular tool that I’ve been kind of modeling throughout the entire semester. And the tool is, how do you look at the work or the creative gestures around you and take what you need from them in order to compose your own toolbox in your own imagination that you can go forward with?

Conceptualist Permissions for Teacher Posture. Photo courtesy of Lucero.

I give some examples of a project that I did where I tried to examine as many of the posture permissions that I’ve gotten from artists over the last 30 years in my life. So I end the class by offering this project as a tool for how the students can go forward in the construction of their own education. And my hope is that it’s a kind of examining tool, a kind of microscope, that they could use to encounter all sorts of creative practice, not just art, design, or scholarship, but that they can use that tool to engage in the next 3 years of their undergraduate experience, and hopefully in all of their creative practices thereafter.

Clara: I’ve been thinking about that project a lot recently in my own life and practice, and I made a little list myself of all the different members of my MFA Program in this moment and the things that they’ve taught me.

Jorge: That’s great!

Clara: And my family, too. That practice was really meaningful to me because it almost felt like a kind of gratitude practice, grounding back into the idea that we all have something to teach, and we all have something to learn from each other. And even in moments of conflict or miscommunication that naturally arise in relationships, remembering that there’s no right way. There’s no expert here. We’re all kind of figuring it out together and what if we instead choose to see the material around us and each other as a kind of gift? It’s hard to phrase without sounding corny, but thinking of it as a practice that wonders how else we might see each other in this moment.

Jorge: I mean, it’s not. I know it sounds corny, but maybe the only reason it sounds corny is because it’s elementary in a certain way, you know? Like the way that I think about it is not very different from Show and Tell, a gift that I was given when I was very young, which was to have this opportunity to have the floor. And so here I am, 6 years old bringing in my treasured Star Wars action figures and I’m given the chance not only to show them, but to speak on them as if I have some expertise about them. Which of course I did, because I’m the one who plays with them, I’m the one who treasures them, I’m the one who knows where they come from, right? And I’m not saying that that wasn’t a shared sensibility with other kids in the room at that given moment, but the gift of being given the opportunity to hold the floor was like being told something that you like matters.

Maybe the learning objectives of participating in Show and Tell were to encourage me to come out of my shell or learn how to tell a story or something like that. But the hidden curriculum of that was being empowered to say the thing that I am drawn to is important. I think that the permissions project is just one step more sophisticated version of that same activity.

It’s connected a little bit to the word “like” and the way students who are new to an art critique setting are oftentimes told they need to give more sophisticated responses beyond expressing that they “like” something. And I understand why teachers do that because we think there’s a more robust way to talk about what we’re experiencing. But I also think we don’t give enough credit to the expression “I like.”

The etymology of the word “like,” which is also where we get our word alike, has to do with an echo, an echoed body or a mirrored body. And it basically means something that is similar to you, so when we say “I like this,” or even when we give a like on Instagram or Twitter, we’re kind of saying, here’s an echo of me. And that for me has become a really important thing to highlight in the way that I, as an artist, move through the world, but also in the way that my students move through the world because I don’t want them to discount that feeling that they have as if it’s not a smart feeling. I think it is a smart feeling. It’s an incredibly intellectual response to phenomenon in the world, right? I like this song. I like the green in this painting. I like the risk that you took here. I like you. This kind of thing where we express similitude to something else, I think, is an underrated, but very potent way to be in the world.

Clara: Well, I like that. I like that a lot, in fact.

Jorge Lucero (he/him) is an artist from Chicago who currently serves as Professor of Art Education in the School of Art & Design and also as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

As part of his decades-long work to test the creative and conceptual pliability of “school as material” Lucero participates in and around the academy in every manner possible. He has exhibited, performed, published, administered, and taught through his work all over the U.S. and abroad. Lucero is an alum of Penn State University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to working in higher education, he served as a high school art teacher at the Chicago Public School Northside College Prep.

Clara Harlow (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator interested in the question of how we can make today different than yesterday. Her work operates as an invitation into themes of celebration, exchange, and alternative ways of measuring time and value. Through parties, workshops, and interactive objects, Clara is invested in how we can turn the dilemmas of the everyday into an opportunity for experimental problem solving and collective delight. Her practice aims to create responsive public containers for unexpected joy and connection, but if she can just get you to forget about your To Do list for a little while, that’s pretty good too.