While collaboration is celebrated in many contexts, the actual work of intellectual and creative collaboration is rarely discussed or modeled. The Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics fills this gap by creating a space for scholars and artists to think, work and create collaboratively, allowing students to learn what collaborative processes look like from the inside and develop invaluable skills for their own creative and scholarly practice. It convenes multidisciplinary and multi-modal configurations of artists, scholars, writers, curators, performers, and practitioners interested in exploring the radical possibilities and transformative potential of reinventing aesthetics through innovative approaches to making and thinking about art.
The Princeton Collaboratorium is a co-curricular space driven by innovative research, ideas, and imagination. Unlike earlier invocations of the term in the context of scientific inquiry, empirical or quantitative research and data do not serve as its driver. Conceived as a studio space modeled on the artist’s studio, the project is designed as a platform for incubating collaborative thinking and making that merges history, theory and creative practice.
Housed in the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Department of Art & Archaeology, the Princeton Collaboratorium facilitates student, faculty and community convenings, creative initiatives and interventions, and group studios that use collaboration as the primary structure of their inquiries and take original and inventive approaches to aesthetics as their guiding principle. The Princeton Collaboratorium hosts public dialogues and seminars that explore what might constitute a radical aesthetics and what such a redefinition of this concept might yield for research, teaching, and learning at Princeton and beyond.
Faculty Convener
Photo by Dorothy Hong
Tina Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Campt is a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and the founding convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. Her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in Black communities in Europe and southern Africa, and the role of vernacular photography in historical interpretation. Campt has published five books including: A Black Gaze (MIT Press, 2021); Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017); Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012); and Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University of Michigan Press, 2004). Her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis Steidl, 2020), received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation. Read Campt’s full faculty profile
