Indoctrinating Trauma and Inequality: “On Education”
Installation view of On Education, March 20–August 17, 2025, Amant, Brooklyn, NY. Photo: New Document.
In On Education, sixty-eight works constructed by a cross-generational and cross-cultural selection of thirty-five artists at Amant meditate on the following:
Education is what shapes us, both within the family and outside of it.
Education is often traumatic.
Education is in crisis in the United States.
Education is a mental and physical space where the naïve meet the expectations of society, where family values often fight and are defeated by the imposed expectations and mechanisms of control.
Unsurprisingly, an exhibition looking at these facts within a temporal context is dense. Yet Amant curator Tobi Maier and his curatorial team felt the importance of redirecting often discourse-based discussion of education to grounding through specific objects in photography, painting, sculpture, sound, installation, archival materials, video, and spatial interventions. This selection provides us with tangible narratives, often situated as much in artworks as in the lives of the artists presenting them.
In his 1990s philosophic etude on the transformations of societies, Gilles Deleuze underlined how interior spaces such as family, schools, factories, and prisons are well-equipped with a delineated structure, homogenous from the outside yet atomized within. If these structures were in crisis when his article was written, this crisis would become almost existential today. Atomization leads to abuses and traumas, to the pressing need for reforms that do not extend beyond surfaces when they are superimposed by the rigid systems of control.[1] On Education looks at all the elements from here, punctuating the accents across the three gallery spaces.
Installation view of On Education, March 20–August 17, 2025, Amant, Brooklyn, NY. Photo: New Document.
The first gallery focuses on the transition of knowledge and, often, abuse from family into institutions and vice versa. Ephemeral and poignant, Michela Griffo’s paintings, a black-and-white photograph by Gordon Parks questioning propaganda, and Susan Traditional Woman Hudson’s quilt documenting indoctrinating violence against the Indigenous population all construct a conversation about what it means to give away part of your identity through any type of educational tradition, yet not to be certain what you are getting in return is yours to keep. Two exquisite clay sculptures by Brooklyn-based Amber Rane-Sibley foreground the woman as a central character in all these interior and exterior dramas.
Brad Kronz, I had all the tools even at a young age, 2014. Installation with three folding canteen tables, slide projector, mirrored pedestal, and adhesive wall mirror panels, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Gandt, New York.
The second gallery is centered around I had all the tools even at a young age (2014), Brad Kronz’s ghostly installation of three folded-up canteen tables. Kronz directly references the lunchroom—a place of drama in many school contexts, a reckoning for belonging to some in-groups, a battleground of othering. The theme of othering is carried, explored poignantly in a striking painting by Tetsuya Ishida: a child stands silently, watching a school of beta fish entering a school bus solemnly occupied by a carnivorous arowana fish. The arowana becomes a stand-in for a society’s expectation, for the predatory nature of late capitalism. Sable Elyse Smith’s blown-up pages of coloring books investigate the elements of the judicial system, where truth is protected by the courts. One of the most powerful works in the exhibition is presented within these premises in the form of Kasia Fudakowski’s two engraved brass plates titled Reasons to Reproduce and Reasons Not to Reproduce. Both sets of etched reasons are sarcastic but honest: You get a shot at breaking the cycle of inherited generational trauma, yet You will never be alone.
Tetsuya Ishida, untitled, 2003, acrylic & oil on canvas, 91 x 117cm. Private Collection.
The final gallery at Amant continues a nuanced response to this question of reproduction: Should we procreate, and if we do, can we raise undamaged human beings? One answer comes in the form of Cristine Brache’s poignant video work, Carmen (2023), which explores the damage imposed by the patriarchal family structure, violence, and inability to change the system from both the inside and the outside. The second answer is more hopeful, coming from alternative models of thinking, being, and educating as explored by Slovak artist Július Koller and his preoccupation with the sport as the mode of value reorientation, Dominique González-Foerster’s reference to the Montessori educational model, and ephemera from the now-closed, unaccredited art school, Bruce High Quality Foundation University, its focus on art education free of debt and rigidity.
On Education is a timely exhibition. Education of the nineteenth century operated based on the principles of the Enlightenment—on the beliefs that a student must be refined and controlled by the figure of the teacher. Through its massive catastrophes, the twentieth century shattered our belief in the figure of a teacher. So far, the digital iteration of education we face in the twenty-first century is flattening and disorienting. The artworks we see at Amant help us reevaluate these models and hopefully imagine new ones.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Part Two (Constructing), 1992. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
On Education is on view at Amant from March 20 through August 17.
[1] Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control. The Anarchist Library. (n.d.). https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-deleuze-postscript-on-the-societies-of-control.
