Image MFA Mentor Education MFA, University of California, Los Angeles BA, Amherst College Email Address jbrooksturner@gmail.com Website brooksturner.com Drawing/Painting, Engaged & Public Arts/Social Practice, Film/Video, Interdisciplinary, Sculpture/Installation In-person, Hybrid mentor (in-person and online) Biography He/himI am an artist, writer, and educator. My projects begin in research, engaging history, community, and locality to tell stories that restructure the past into pedagogy from which we can learn how to build new futures. My scholastic interests are in aesthetics as politics, the intersection of art and research, didactic and pedagogical art, local labor history, and Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. My methods include archival research, writing, collage, drawing, book and paper making, video, sculpture, and installation. I grew up in Minneapolis, received a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from UCLA in sculpture. I returned to Minneapolis in 2017, where I live with my partner, Tamara, and our two kids, Ayla and Rory. Teaching PhilosophyLearning is as much about community as it is about curriculum. Mentorship offers a point of connection between me, you, and the worlds we inhabit. You define your curriculum; I offer a space of collaborative exploration and a method of inquiry where questions produce more questions. We stumble through materialities rich with their own histories and mythologies; I help excavate meaning along the way.