CLASS NOT A CLASS

This is not a class. It is an art­work. Even when it appears to have all the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a class (e.g. stu­dents, a teacher, a meet­ing time, a syl­labus, assign­ments, a class­room space, grades, course cred­it, teach­ing and learn­ing, etc.) it will nev­er be a class. Much like René Magritte’s famous The Treach­ery of Images—where the view­ers per­cep­tion of a pipe is imme­di­ate­ly rerout­ed to the obvi­ous­ness of its being a mere pic­ture of pipe—so will the par­tic­i­pants of this class-not-a-class con­sis­tent­ly oscil­late between the appear­ance of a class and the pli­able mate­ri­al­i­ty of being in a class, at a spe­cif­ic time in his­to­ry, in a loca­tion, focused on a spe­cif­ic top­ic, along­side a once-in-a-life­time set of indi­vid­u­als. What this means is that this “class” is mere­ly a set of mate­ri­als and we—the participants—now need to decide what to do with that material.

Blog address: https://classnotaclass.wordpress.com/

Jorge Lucero is an artist who cur­rent­ly serves on the fac­ul­ty of the  School of Art + Design’s Art Edu­ca­tion pro­gram at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois, Urbana-Cham­paign. Through the per­mis­sions of con­cep­tu­al art he now sees the poten­tial of being in the academy.

Lucero received his Mas­ter degree and PhD from The Penn­syl­va­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty and his under­grad­u­ate degree from The School of the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go. Pri­or to mov­ing into high­er edu­ca­tion Lucero hap­pi­ly taught art and art his­to­ry in a Chica­go Pub­lic School.

As part of his long-term work to test the mate­r­i­al and con­cep­tu­al pli­a­bil­i­ty of “school”, Lucero serves as the co-edi­tor of the schol­ar­ly jour­nal Visu­al Arts Research. Pre­vi­ous­ly Lucero served as the Instruc­tion­al Resources Edi­tor for the jour­nal Art Edu­ca­tion (2012–14). He cur­rent­ly sits on var­i­ous review boards includ­ing the Jour­nal of Social The­o­ry in Art Edu­ca­tion (JSTAE) and the Jour­nal of Cul­tur­al Research in Art Edu­ca­tion (jCRAE).  Lucero has been a long-time assis­tant edi­tor for the Jour­nal of Cur­ricu­lum and Ped­a­gogy pub­lished by Tay­lor & Fran­cis. He active­ly curates that jour­nal’s cov­er art.

Lucero has exhib­it­ed, pub­lished, and per­formed wide­ly. Exhi­bi­tions that Lucero has par­tic­i­pat­ed in have been writ­ten about and cov­ered in Art­Fo­rum; Sculp­ture; New­C­i­ty; the Chica­go Tri­bune; the Sun-Times; Gaper’s Block; DNAin­fo, WTTW’s Chica­go Tonight; WGLT.org; and the PBS Dig­i­tal Stu­dio.