The human animal is born playful, curious, and creative. Through socialization we reach a condition of creative docility, typified by self-surveillance, inhibition, and shame surrounding creative acts. Creativity, the interplay between attention and free activity, has been celebrated as a central human behavior. But it is increasingly shaped by professionalization, elite capture, and commodification. The result is creative blockage, burnout, and estrangement from our creative desires. How is our understanding of “creativity” socially produced, disciplined, and governed? How might it be reclaimed?

This four-week workshop series is an unlearning laboratory for creative activity, drawing on theorists of culture such as Johan Huizinga, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault. Students will examine creativity not as an individual trait, but an innate capacity that has been socially organized and historically conditioned—and that can be re-conditioned.

Part open studio, part collective inquiry, we prioritize exploration, suspending external measures of legitimacy. Through lectures, hands-on exercises, and group discussions, we will challenge inherited assumptions about artistic identity and value, especially those shaped by institutional, cultural, and colonial histories.

With increased attention to the social forces shaping what is recognized as “creative”, we will re-anchor creativity in play, perception, and impulse, as a site of social and political connection.