I'm Amina Ross, an artist and educator, and centerstudy is my “school,” a place for shared learning, and a creative project in its own right. It is an umbrella for the many ways I work and learn across mediums, avenues, channels, and containers: workshops, critique, writing, sound, ritual, and the objects that carry practice home. I think of it as a tentacular practice, after Donna Haraway: many arms reaching outward, all part of one living body.
centerstudy is a practice space for artists, writers, and anyone whose work is creative at its core. That includes therapists, educators, organizers, and healers: people who make meaning with others, not only with materials. It brings the body's knowledge and intuition into the places we are often asked to leave the body behind: the artist statement, the grant application, the critique, the blank page.
So much of this moment asks us to rush. centerstudy revels in process instead. Here, learning and curiosity are valuable in their own right, and the process of creation is the heart of the creative act, not just the road to it.
The work is rooted in the body and fueled by collective exploration of ideas that are imperfect and unfinished, because that is where the gems are. We gather to practice, to think out loud, to stay with what is still forming, and to learn from one another along the way. Whatever form the work takes (a statement, a draft, a sketch, a sound), we meet it from the body first.
centerstudy moves at the pace of attention and values close reading: of the work, of one another, and of what the body already knows. Groups stay small and time is protected. Each room is held as a liberated zone (a phrase borrowed from Sins Invalid and the disability justice movement): a place to practice living in the world we are choosing to build, as free, as kind, and as rigorous as we want to be.
centerstudy is a Black, queer, and trans-led project. That politic is not a theme added on top; it moves through everything here, from what we choose to study to how we gather.