CONTRA
CURRICULAR

Reimagining ‘schooling’ as a creative practice has long been embedded in the learning infrastructure of our Black liberation movements over time.

In the 1960s, across the tide of racial injustice, segregation, classism and anti-Blackness, Black communities across the world sought to create alternative schools that resisted the structural violence of the status quo. Instead, they created spaces that connected to self-determination and affirmations of culture, alongside the unlearning, surviving and healing from the pervasive, life-ending nature of white supremacy.

From the Supplementary Schools convened by West Indian families necessitated by inherent racism and disability discrimination within the mainstream British education system, to the Freedom Schools of Mississippi, coordinated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) “expanding the idea…that Black people could shape and control at least some of the things that affected their lives”, to the Black Panther Party’s Liberation Schools whose curriculum sought to “guide young people in their search for revolutionary truths and principles”, there’s a rich history of organising that points to school as a site of radical reimagination.

Noticeably, these schools were founded, not attempting to preach “right answers” solutionism, as is the traditional liberal approach to schooling, nor creating a school-to-workforce pipeline, nor attempting to assert one way of being or knowing, as in the colonial paradigm. Affirming the experiences, visions, abundance and possibilities of Black life, in particular the lives of young people was central to growing a politicised analysis of the world around them.

This is the lineage that MAIA’s work has grown from, understanding the everyday as a site of radical invitation, strategic reimagination and systems transformation led by those most impacted. MAIA’s vision is a world towards liberation, in which artists are resourced and mobilised to reimagine its possibilities. We engage culture as an imagination and organising strategy, working to build infrastructure that grows the personal, structural and sustained capacities in support of Black life and its interdependencies.

In 2020, we acquired a townhouse in our home city of Birmingham and created a site of imagination called YARD, as a prototype of the kind of radical hospitality we were seeking in our civic infrastructures. As the COVID-19 pandemic placed a spotlight on compounding crises concentrated at neighbourhood scale, ‘Free YARD’ became a core programme, simultaneously addressing crisis experienced by those slipping through the various gaps of available state support, while preserving the necessary and strategic dream space of our community.

Starting from various points of need amidst multi-systemic violence, without centring a deficit logic, Free YARD is MAIA's way of sharing and exchanging in the abundance of resources the YARD community houses; a way of offering porous invitations into mobilising for liberation practice; a way of being in continuous rehearsal of the worlds we're growing.

For MAIA’s Art School, one of the spaces within our Free YARD rhythm, we welcome fellow travellers, dreamers, thinkers, designers, artists and builders into a residency. Art School is a porous invitation to our community to immerse in learning, play, connection, celebration and exploration, engaging with culture as a strategy for liberation. Together, we pose a journey of creative practice that supports the imagination, resourcing and building needed for sustained place-based movement infrastructure. We surface the systems that are working to debase our communities and explore tools and practices that enable life-affirming infrastructure, through culture-making, embodied knowledge, lived experience and other ontologies.