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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 is a sound production practicum with a focus on sampling and appropriation. Students will engage sound archives as a resource for creative sound design and music production. The seminar will consider contemporary strategies of sampling and appropriation in the context of popular culture, media preservation and intermedia design. Special attention will be given to public sound archives and library collections. Coursework includes reading responses, a mid-term, and a final project. Final projects can take form as a research based text or as a creative project that blends modes of creative production. Students are expected to actively and critically engage the social, political and cultural factors that inform their practice. Course readings explore the scholarly discourse on Interculturalism with focus on processes, structures, systems, and methodology in relation to the moral, ethical and aesthetic questions raised by working with cultural artifacts as material. The seminar encourages trans-disciplinary methodology and cross-media production. The seminar format includes lectures, student-led group discussions and individual student meetings. Online discussion groups will be created for each unit. Students are expected to participate in online discussions in response to unit readings, case studies and discussion prompts. Sound studio access, access to sound technology and tech support will be facilitated for students who wish to have access to campus resources.

Class Number

2139

Credits

3

Description

This graduate-level course immerses students in research methods and resources for use in their Visual and Critical Studies coursework and their theses. Guest speakers include librarians and curators. Students combine study of general research information with the pursuit of individual research projects directed by the instructor. [This is a required course for first-year students in the MA in VCS program.]

Class Number

1881

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

1883

Credits

3