School of the Future

 School of the Future is a participatory installation that explores what we value in an education. Visitors find themselves in a space with a school desk at one end surrounded by thousands of inflatable, red balls. A notebook on the desk asks, “What do you wish you learned in school?” A classroom reinterpreted without books, pupils, or students, the installation was informed by the first public school in Alabama, abandoned and under discussion two blocks from the gallery,

Thousands of responses were documented over the ten-month exhibition and revealed a range of both practical and emotional wisdom: how to be yourself, the value of travel, to not be afraid of bugs and gross things, Spanish, how to budget, patience and kindness, how to have fun without technology again, to never let anyone tell you that you wouldn’t be good at something you are passionate about, to take nothing for granted, how to love and make good choices, different cultures, how to change a flat tire, the compassionate life, how to handle stress and existential crisis. The project reimagines methods for initiating discussions of the role of public education. Originally exhibited at the Centre for the Living Arts, the installation was also exhibited at the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, Greece in 2016.