I think someone at Transart mentioned Mildred’s Lane to me last year, but I only now stumbled upon it do discover it is a project/site organized by J Morgan Puett (whose fashion/architectural installations in Manhattan in the early 90’s I absolutely ADORED!) and Mark Dion.
While it has a much more elaborate (and academic) program (not to mention an incredible homesteading site and world-famous artist-founders) than my Berkshire Art Kitchen project (2008 – 2010), it is similar in that both projects are about creating new modes of being in the world. We share a worldview (and workstyle) that focuses on how art, life, home, work, and food are interconnected – and where family, friends, and the public are woven into the fabric of that workstyle experience.
Mildred’s Lane seems like a cool place to check out… Here’s a bit from their website, Mildred’s Lane :
Workstyles and the Ethics of Comportment
The core of the practice and the educational philosophy at Mildred’s Lane is an attempt to collectively create new modes of being in the world — this idea incorporates questions of our relation to the environment, systems of labor, forms of dwelling, clothing apparatuses, and inventive domesticating; all of which are form an ethics of comportment — and are embodied in workstyles. As a student at Mildred’s Lane, these issues will be negotiated daily through the rethinking of one’s collective involvements with food, shopping, making, styling, gaming, sleeping, reading, and thinking. Every research session will be an intensive reconsideration of workstyles — there will be visits to alternative farms, discussions around food and cooking, cleaning, and maintenance. The total space of the domestic will be part of the course of study — we will collectively work on experimenting with the full spectrum of our whole system of engagements.
““I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a quasi- protectionist attitude, to prevent ‘bad’information from invading and suffocating the ‘good’. Rather, we must simply multiply the paths and the possibilities of comings and goings.”
1000 Invisible Things 