Interdisciplinary Pedagogy: Place, Partnership, and Practicalities

In this conversation, Alison McNulty talks with Katerie Gladdys about the vast interdisciplinary territory she navigates in her work and pedagogy to “encourage others to look more closely at what constitutes . . . everyday existence.” Gladdys’s courses in studio art and technology view creative practice from the intersection of social and ecological inquiry, open spaces, and opportunities for her students to practice art that is based in diverse modes of research and nontraditional sites, and make creative use of resources and unexpected partnerships. McNulty and Gladdys also discuss the inspirations and questions guiding Gladdy’s research and pedagogy, the strategies she uses to craft and implement her courses safely, with reciprocity and flexibility to serve all students, and where she finds the support and resources to work with her students in these challenging modalities. Katerie Gladdys is a transdisciplinary artist who thinks about place, marginalized landscapes, sustainability, mapping, consumption, food, agriculture, and disability. She creates installations, interactive, sculpture, video, and relational performances. Her creative work has been exhibited in national and international juried venues, including in the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, and Croatia. She is an associate professor in Art and Technology in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida. Gladdys received her MFA in New Media from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BA in Art and Design from the University of Chicago.    Alison McNulty is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator based in the Hudson Valley, NY. She grounds artmaking in embodied poetics through explorations of ordinary material histories, precarious places, and ecological entanglements. Her work has been presented at museums, galleries, conferences, and unconventional spaces throughout the US, Europe, and Columbia. McNulty was recently awarded an Arts Mid-Hudson Individual Artist Commission, a Saltonstall Foundation Residency Fellowship, the Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award from Washington University in St. Louis, and the Empowered Artist Award from Arts Mid-Hudson. McNulty is an assistant professor at Parsons School of Design and the director of Ann Street Gallery, a nonprofit contemporary art space in Newburgh, NY. She earned a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA at the University of Florida.