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Kamau A. Patton

Associate Professor

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Personal Statement

Kamau Amu Patton is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work examines history and culture through engagement with archives, documents, stories, and sites. Patton’s projects are dialogic and take form as expanded field conversations. 

Patton received his MFA from Stanford University in 2007 and received a degree in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. His work was shown in 2012 as part of Pacific Standard Time and in 2013 as part of the Machine Project Field guide to LA Architecture. Patton has completed projects in soundscape studies through support provided by the State University of New York at Buffalo, the Mellon Elemental Arts Initiative, and the Tang Teaching Museum. He presented research in 2016 at the ABF house in Stockholm, Sweden, as a part of The Shape of Co- to- Come symposium and exhibition. Patton participated in a series of performances as part of Projects 107: Lone Wolf Recital Corps at the Museum of Modern Art in August 2017. In September 2017, he installed an iteration of his ongoing project, Tel, at the Tang Museum. In 2019, Patton’s public art commission with the Bowman Montessori School in Palo Alto, CA, was open to the public. Patton is a 2020 Creative Capital Grant Awardee. In 2020 Patton was an artist in residence at Coaxial Arts Foundation in Los Angeles and he was a 2020 Archive Artist in Residence at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Utilizing recordings from the Sun Ra / El Saturn Collection, Patton created "The Past & Other Dreams", a double cassette produced by the artist in collaboration with the Creative Audio Archive at ESS. A box set LP of Patton’s arrangements of Terry Adkins’s Lone Wolf Recital Corps Recitals, Second Mind | Alto Age, was released in partnership with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2021. In 2022, Patton performed new sound compositions at Roulette Intermedium and Basilica Arts in Hudson New York. In October of 2022, Patton presented a solo exhibition at the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery at San Jose State University. In June of 2023, Patton presented a new inter-media performance, "Dromeostasis" as part of the Signals exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Current Interests

Patton presented research in 2016 at the ABF house in Stockholm, Sweden as a part of The Shape of Co- to Come, a proposal, a symposium, an exhibition, a publication, a study circle, a research based site. Patton will participate in a series of multidisciplinary performances as part of Projects 107: Lone Wolf Recital Corps, at the Museum of Modern Art in August of 2017.

 

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course will focus on socially engaged art practices through which participants are encouraged to be directly involved in the creative process. The seminar will explore project planning, strategies of engagement, participatory methodologies and the development of resources designed to facilitate working in collaborative situations with social groups, communities and publics. Participatory art considers approaches to art making which engage publics in generative processes that allow participants to become co-authors as well as observers of the work. At its core, participatory art requires that the artist makes space for co-creation by removing themselves from the work or receding enough so as to become an equal partner and participant in the project. In this seminar we will explore ideas of authorship, authority, agency and interaction as themes central to generative collaborations between artist, audience and environment.

Class Number

2211

Credits

3

Description

The purpose of this course is to provide an informal critique situation where students from various disciplines meet once a week to present and discuss their work. The faculty leader facilitates the discussion, which is designed to help students articulate a critique of their own work as well as the work of other students.

Class Number

2008

Credits

3

Description

When considering the void we are immediately confronted with nothing, absence, vacuity, the invisible, the ineffable, with destruction and rejec­tion. As emptiness, as the absence of every­thing or as negation, the void is the opposite of life. However, the experience of the void is not emptiness: it is not about nothing, nor is it about absence. The void is a whole, yet a whole which has no noticeable reality and exists as emergent, potential or conceptual. This seminar will focus on the ideologically driven construction of space. The course will explore spaces as concepts and alternately concepts as generative spaces to occupy, as entities which establish an environment for thought and action. Site, as space performed through shared social and psychic schemata, as actual space, as sacred space and as virtual space. We will consider earth formed sites, human approaches to environmental design, computational media, information as landscape in cyberspace, case study homes and closed world site proposals. In this seminar, the construction of the commons, how we exist within it and questions relating to conceptualizing public space are of central concern. Readings and course material encourage trans disciplinary methodologies and cross-media production. Final projects can take form either as research based texts or as a substantial creative project that blends academic and creative production.

Class Number

2026

Credits

3

Description

This course is a graduate studio critique for both MAVCS students and MFA students. The course is structured as a hybrid seminar/critique, with weekly readings, discussions, and studio critique sessions. The course also includes writing assignments as an integrated element of contemporary studio practice. This course may count as studio credits for MFA students.

Class Number

2226

Credits

3

Description

How, where and why do we gather? In what ways is the impulse to gather informed by histories of exclusion? This seminar is a survey of the myriad ways that communities come together to thrive in times of crisis, assemble in times of celebration, come together around shared concerns and form structures with the capacity to take in and hold energy from scattered places and sources. Is the impulse to gather an innate tendency for humans? What informs our social need for connection, community, and shared experiences? And, how do we manifest this impulse in various forms like social gatherings, rituals, celebrations, or even simply seeking out the company of others? This course will consider forms of hospitality and hosting as well as the politics and protocols of gathering as a form of resistance. In this seminar we will explore methods of facilitating small and large group encounters with a focus on participant experience. We will examine how the structure of a gathering informs the identities, roles, desires and biases that individuals import into the group, as well as the emergence of conscious and unconscious group dynamics. This course will focus on community as form, social context as integral to human interaction and the participatory aspects of experience.

Class Number

2213

Credits

3