This week, I plan to have Sashiko Workshops & Sashiko Lecture at Bennington College in VT. It is my first time to offer the Sashiko Workshop & Sashiko Lecture in an academic setting as an invited guest lecturer. The Professor, J Stoner Blackwell, had invited me to such a honorable opportunity to share the Sashiko We have been practicing. They joined the Sashiko Workshop [Core & Essence] at Loop of the Loom in NYC. As someone who teach, it is the biggest reward that they contacted me to share their experience to their students & community after the initial workshop.
This visit will be consisted with 3 parts, (1) Sashiko Workshop to their students in Art Department (2) Sashiko Workshop to the local community (Open to the public with workshop fee), and then (3) Sashiko Lecture at Bennington College (Open to the publich For Free of Charge).
The Sashiko Workshop [Core & Essence] is very structured, and there aren’t much I can modify. In contract, as I received 2 hours for the lecture, I am planning a lecture that I can choose based on the reaction in the auditorium. I don’t really know who will be the audience… the students or artists from community… or even faculty…?
Bennington College has a quite beautiful mission. I share it below & I hope that I can meet their expectation.
In 1932, Bennington was founded on the belief that the education most worth having is the one you create for yourself. The College does not require students to fulfill a set of ready-made requirements; instead, it challenges them to discover their own intellectual identity and to design an education that will help turn them into the person they hope to become.
The College’s faculty plays a crucial role in this process of transformation. At Bennington, faculty members do what they teach, and students put their learning into practice. Students learn about literature from authors who write and publish it, in the same way that they learn choreography from dancers who create and perform their own work. Physicists and philosophers and playwrights teach at many other colleges, but typically, they ask their students to do very different work from the kind they do themselves. At Bennington, students don’t just learn about biology – or poetry, history, or anthropology – from their teachers; they also practice it along with them. Because both students and teachers actively engage in the work at hand, the relationship between them is richly collaborative, and students often participate in the research and creation of faculty work.
The New Possibility for “Sharing Sashiko”
The Sashiko Workshop & Sashiko Lecture at Bennington College is sponsored by Painting and Drawing at Bennington College, The Robert Frost Stone House Museum with additional funding from Usdan Gallery. This is my first time to work under someone’s funding/grant. Thanks to the generous support from these funding, we could reduce the workshop price substantially.
I strongly believe that the pricing for my Sashiko Workshop [Core & Essence] is reasonable. The host (Studio/Organization) needs to make their ends meet, and I need to feed myself, too. To make it sustainable. it has been the right pricing for both host & guest (students). The waiting list I often get for the workshop explain that the pricing is not outrageous. However, at the same time, I understand that it costs some money. I want to share the Sashiko we practice with as many people as possible – and as the result, I joined the Domestika to make the Introduction to Japanese Sashiko.
I have never tried to get Grant… for some reasons, I thought I wouldn’t be able to do so. Well, I may need extra steps to prepare such as making our activities as Non-Profit, or going through a pile of paper works… regardless, the fact I could offer the workshop with grant is a big achievement (All thanks to Prof.J). I hope I can start another journey of pursuing this new possibility.
Photo (C) William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest
Sashiko Lecture at Bennington College will go to more “Public”
I have learned that it is perfectly fine to repeat the Same Message in sharing stories. In fact, I realize I “have to” repeat it to be listened, or even heard. So, I plan to offer the same lecture I do tomorrow online somwhere toward May or June, 2024. When it is ready, I will inform it here, Instagram, and probably GiveButter, too.
It is about “Sashiko Today”, and it will be the summarize of all the things I talk about in Sashiko Live Streamings. If you are interested in Sashiko, please come to Youtube on Thursday night at 9 pm EST (Not this week) to see what I keep saying about Sashiko!
