Destroy All Monsters: Strategies for a Sustainable and Dynamic Studio Practice

How do you stay afloat? How do you keep it joyful, alive, and worth showing up for — consistently, over a long time?

This is a high-frequency, highly interactive course built around studio strategies for artists who want to deepen and sustain their practice. The focus is on building something regular, dynamic, and enriching — a practice where learning never stops and stagnation doesn't get a foothold. That means confronting the harder questions too: how to push yourself without burning out, how to stay porous to the world around you but also know when to shut it down, how to snap out of it when you've gone too closed, too indulgent, or too comfortable.

The course draws on self-knowledge, goal-setting, and a willingness to plunge into unfamiliar media, methods, and sources — from art history to pop culture, film, poetry, and music. Readings, context, and dialogue are central. So is the kind of constant study that builds muscle memory and keeps the eye sharp.

Two significant interventions will bring outside voices into the room. The abstract painter Anke Weyer will come to discuss her work, trajectory, and how she has navigated the obstacles faced both in and outside the studio, as well as offer short, informal feedback on your work. She will get into the studio nitty-gritty as much as the grander themes in her practice. Her decades of resilient, wild, process-based abstraction — rooted in oil paint, large-scale work, and drawing, and running consistently high on uncertainty and risk — may be of real value to any artist looking to push their work further. The poet Jacob Bromberg will discuss his writing and the ways he has used language in the visual realm — performatively, interactively, in space. Having worked across the spectrum from image to poem, Jacob will offer a poetry prompt for you to respond to through your visual work.

The course also includes group and individual critiques, drawing sessions, poetry and film prompts, and discussions and presentations on art history and seminal works of art criticism. Both guest visits are designed as informal, personalized exchanges among all members of the pod.

The final shape of the course will be partly determined by you: in our first meeting, we identify your needs, and the emphasis follows from there.

The title borrows from the 1974 artist collective and is meant in the same spirit: assert the agency of your practice. At a moment when, as the collective put it, "a sense of gloom, disaster, and apocalypse, mixed with doses of anarchy, comedy, and absurdity" seems to define the air we breathe — the studio remains a place of radical possibility.

Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Astrid Dick is a painter working and living in Paris. Dick has been a recipient of the Milton and Sally Michel Avery Visual Arts Fellowship at Yaddo and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, among others, and shown her work through solo and group shows in Europe, the US and Argentina, such as the Grand Palais in Paris and the Manoir de la Ville de Martigny, Switzerland. Most recently, she had shows at Moments Artistiques in Paris, MDavid & Co. Gallery, ArtCake, and Below Grand Gallery in New York, Johnson Lowe Gallery in Atlanta, and her work was reviewed in CULTURED, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. Her art writing has appeared in ArtPress, the Brooklyn Rail, and Two Coats of Paints, among others. She holds a PhD in Economics from MIT. She has taught undergraduate and graduate university courses at INSEAD in France, where she was tenure-track faculty, as well as at New York University and Columbia University.

Anke Weyer (b. 1974, Karlsruhe, Germany) lives and works in Brooklyn and upstate New York. She attended the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany from 1995-2000 where she studied with Danish artist Per Kirkeby and spent an exchange semester at the Cooper Union, New York. Her work has been exhibited at Kunsthalle Lingen, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville; Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueño, Oaxaca; CANADA, New York; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles and Brussels; Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp; Harper’s, East Hampton; Office Baroque, Brussels; MEIERBACH, Düsseldorf; David Klein, Detroit; Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles; Lucie Fontaine, Milan; Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles; David Achenbach Projects, Wuppertal; Páramo Galería, Guadalajara; Galerie Ceysson & Bénetière, Windhof; Makebish Gallery, New York; AUTOCENTER, Berlin; Joilie Laide, Philadelphia; Leo Koenig, New York and Andes; Esso Gallery, Andes; After the Gold Rush, Brooklyn; Galleri Loyal, Stockholm; Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles; Galería Comercial, San Juan; Counter Gallery, London; Champion Fine Art, Brooklyn; and Pekao Gallery, Toronto.

Jacob Bromberg is a Paris-based multi-media poet and translator. His work spans poetry, text-based installations, video, and collaborative art projects, often exploring the relationship between language, image, and systems of meaning. His writing and artistic work have appeared in major international venues and publications including The Paris Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Le Monde, and exhibitions at institutions such as the Louvre and Palais de Tokyo. Bromberg is also known for interdisciplinary collaborations—most notably with artist Camille Henrot on Grosse Fatigue, which won the Silver Lion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. In addition to his creative work, he is an accomplished translator, having translated writers such as Julia Kristeva, Georges Perec, and Etel Adnan into English. He has served as a contributing editor at The White Review and was the inaugural Poet-in-Transit at The Brooklyn Rail.