Knowledge at the Table

Facilitating artist Tom Kin, left, talks with artists Jacob Barron, center, and Mack-o as they work on art at The Dresner Foundation Soul Studio in West Bloomfield, MI, USA.

The phrase self-taught often gets attached to artists working within progressive and supported studios. It’s meant as a compliment - a way of signaling independence and originality. But it misses something essential.

The reality is that no one comes into a studio without knowledge. Artists bring with them years of lived experience, habits of attention, and ways of engaging with the world. Some of this knowledge is obvious - a particular skill with line or color, a preference for certain materials. Some of it is quieter, emerging slowly through repeated interactions with paper, clay, or fabric.

Facilitating artists, too, arrive with knowledge: technical familiarity, an understanding of materials, experience in supporting others, and a sensitivity to how creative environments can open new possibilities.

What happens in the supported studio isn’t a matter of one side “teaching” and the other “being taught.” Nor is it simply self-teaching. Instead, it’s an unfolding - a generative exchange where each set of knowledge meets the other.

Consider a few examples:

• An artist insists on using the same brush, day after day, even as the bristles wear down. A facilitator might first see limitation, but with attention realizes that the artist is exploring how deterioration itself changes the mark. The facilitator learns to supply similar brushes in varying states, expanding the artist’s vocabulary while respecting their initial knowledge.

  
  
  
  

• Another artist fills page after page with a single repeated shape. Instead of discouraging repetition, the facilitator might place different kinds of paper on the table - thick, thin, textured - so the shape takes on new life. In doing so, the facilitator responds to the artist’s deep knowledge of rhythm and persistence, while nudging it toward new discoveries.

  
  
  
  

• A third artist resists traditional art materials altogether, preferring the feel of cardboard scraps or fabric remnants. A facilitator doesn’t correct this, but instead helps organize those materials into a system the artist can return to again and again, acknowledging that their tactile preferences are as valid a starting point as any conventional medium.

  
  
  
  

These are not examples of one person teaching and another learning in a rigid, academic sense. They are examples of knowledge meeting knowledge - of facilitators responding not with correction, but with recognition and extension.

Calling this work self-taught flattens that complexity. It implies isolation, when in truth the studio is built on relationship and reciprocity. The knowledge that develops there is neither handed down from above nor pulled up from within in solitude. It emerges at the table, shared and shaped between people, materials, and space.

Progressive studios thrive not because they mimic the academic classroom, but because they cultivate a different kind of pedagogy: one that honors both the knowledge already present and the knowledge that can unfold together.