100 Assignments From Nayland Blake

Editor’s Word: The next textual content has been excerpted with permission and tailored from My Studio Is a Dungeon Is the Studio: Writings and Interviews, 1983–2024 by Nayland Blake, edited by Jarrett Earnest, printed by Duke College Press on November 4, and obtainable on-line and in bookstores (Copyright Duke College Press, 2025).

I’ve taught for 30 years in schools, residencies, and intercourse events. I’ve come to view educating as a necessity, a means of placing again into the world the tradition and concepts the world has poured into me. The bedrock of educating artwork is the task. And the premise for my very own work as an artist is having the ability to give myself assignments. The fitting task on the proper time can reply a necessity we ­haven’t been capable of articulate to ourselves. The assignments we want inform the story of how we view the work and the world, even when they inform it slant. I give my college students assignments that ­got to me immediately in class in addition to others that I’ve gleaned from the writings of artists and thinkers in vari­ous fields. Discovering a superb task offers a thrill. I give them to ­folks for vari­ous causes — to construct a par­tic­u­lar ability or to maybe lead somebody to a dif­fer­ent sense of how they might take a look at what they do. A few of ­these I’ve honed over years of lessons in vari­ous disciplines; some are for nobody however myself. After I doubt what I do or am unable to get myself to work, the one ­factor that has acquired me out is a self-­administered task. They’ve been my method for creating myself. Good assignments usually are not straightforward to give you, however one princi­ple that has helped me comes out of restoration: Take the motion, and let go of the consequence. Many instances folks try to make use of assignments to power ­folks to return to a conclusion, to predetermine the end result. Good assignments awaken us to the breadth of potentialities obtainable to us moderately than slim ­issues down to 1 chance. They’re the scaffolding we construct to the touch the sudden and wild inside ourselves. They’re how we stretch. ­There isn’t any proper or unsuitable reply. ­There may be solely the following ­factor to do.

Whereas ­these assignments ­won’t flip somebody ­else into me, they ­will present the practitioner with a path to the deviations inside themselves.

1. Reconstruct, with out picture­graphs, a childhood toy, together with what it felt, smelled, and tasted like.
2. Design a sculpture to be taken internally.
3. Make a crown. Give it away.
4. Buy a difficulty of {a magazine} that you’ve by no means opened earlier than.
   Deal with it as the one surviving artifact of a vanished civilization.
   Use it to reconstruct the attitudes and values of that civilization.
   Create your individual artifact as a part of that civilization.
5. Draw the sensation of somebody —­ a relative —­ mendacity on high of you and snarling when you strug­gle to rise up.
6. Mix two items of your clothes right into a garment that neither was designed for.
7. Discover a collaborator. Have them contact you fifty instances over a interval of two hours.
8. Draw the earlier US presidents from reminiscence. Draw the following 10 out of your creativeness.
9. Make a chunk utilizing solely supplies you have got obtained by barter, with out forex.
10. Make a guardian packet: a bundle to be worn ­beneath your clothes to maintain you protected. It should have 10 ele­ments. Put on it for every week.
11. Holding your arms out out of your sides, ­measure the space out of your left to your proper hand. Make one thing that’s that size, plus two toes.
12. Make every day drawings that can’t include phrases.
13. Construct your divination deck. Embody the exercise of including a brand new card in your birthday.
14. Design your dream physique: What number of limbs does it have? What number of holes? What’s it lined with? Scales? Fur? The place is it most delicate? What half is it proudest of? What sort of mattress is most snug for it?
15. Describe your dream physique to an viewers and ask them the query of how they’d take care of it. Make drawings of their responses.
16. Construct a sculpture that produces the ­pleasure of being ignored.
17. Make a hopeful piece.
18. Strive once more in case your piece is about how hope by no means works out.
19. Carve a block of wooden and say goodbye to each piece you’re taking from it.
20. Say goodbye to your self till the phrase loses all that means. Then sing it.
21. Describe the subjecthood your upbringing has granted you and ask the place you might be dissatisfied with it.
22. Draw the sensation of when your genitals really feel unsuitable for a way you need to masturbate.
23. Make a chunk that lies to you about your heritage.
24. Write a 500-­phrase rationalization for a chunk you ­won’t ever make.
25. Solid your elbows, knees, crotch. Use the ensuing fragments to make one smiling face, one frightened face, and one asleep face.
26. Masturbate and be aware the precise qualities of the picture or state of affairs that ideas you into orgasm.
27. Each time you’re taking a photograph­ graph, shift six inches to the aspect and take one other.
28. Paint a ­household meals onto the aspect of a constructing.
29. As soon as every week, make 10 drawings, every one by 4 inches. Depart these drawings as bookmarks in nooks on the cabinets in secondhand shops.
30. Take a vinyl rec­ ord and drill a gap 9/32 inches in dia­meter one inch from its heart. Utilizing this as the brand new spindle gap, play the report and rec­ord it, utilizing the recording as the premise for brand new musical compositions.
31. Observe drawing toes and fingers.
32. Inform the story of your ­household, as soon as as a triumph and as soon as as a tragedy. In each tellings, solely whisper.
33. Choose a favourite ­album. Make one piece for every tune.
34. Sit close to a wall and hint your shadow. No, the opposite one.
35. Learn to program a recreation for the unique Sport Boy.
36. Make a chunk, and dangle it in your house. ­After one 12 months, revise it. Repeat the ­course of for the following 4 years.
37. Buy a potato. Take 50 picture­graphs of it, attempting to make every as dif­fer­ent from the earlier ones as pos­si­ble.
38. Make a sculpture that confines you ­till you might be comforted.
39. With a chisel, rigorously nick the laminate from a dresser you have got discovered that was discarded. Gouge the particle board that’s revealed till your complete floor seems fuzzy.
40. Wash ­till a form is modified.
41. Repair a prob­lem from a earlier piece in a brand new piece.
42. Inform lies. Benefit from the style of them.
43. Stroll ­till the concepts come.
44. Draw the sensation of ­folks turning away from you in embarrassment whenever you ask for assist.
45. Record your failings; make a chunk for ­each merchandise on the record.
46. In a public library, discover a favourite e-book. Depend 10 books to the left after which use that e-book as the premise for 4 new items.
47. Utilizing scrap material, make a flag for the nation you ­will set up after you permit this one.
48. Design two traps.
49. Create a pedestal for a well-known sculpture.
50. Make a banner for every of your mates.
51. Set up cabinets on the road. See what finally ends up on them.
52. Make a ­efficiency for only one particular person. Present it solely to them. Don’t doc or make some other rec­ord of it.
53. Have somebody sew ribbons to your pores and skin.
54. Design a vacation and the parade that celebrates it.
55. Day-after-day: a portray fabricated from 10 strokes. Its floor will be any dimension or materials; strokes will be any size.
56. Make a drawing concerning the assertion “I’m inside myself.”
57. Take the strategy of a sundae as the premise for a sculpture.
58. Design a monument to a different artist.
59. Construct the elements for a chunk that ­will likely be fi­nally assembled 10 years sooner or later.
60. Make be aware of ­each joke your ­household tells about itself. Rewrite them as songs.
61. Draw on your self with bruises.
62. Draw the sensation of ­these round you.
63. Bear in mind the potato you took 50 picture­graphs of? Eat it and write an outline of the way it tastes on a shirt.
64. Put on that shirt and ask 50 different ­folks to take a photograph­graph of you in it.
65. Paint a ­recipe — no phrases.
66. In 10 picture­graphs, present how a par­ticu­lar particular person does their job. Solely do that with their consent.
67. Write two lists of fifty gadgets every: “In my work I at all times ______________” and “In my work I by no means ______________.” For every of the following 10 weeks, decide 5 of your “nevers” and do them.
68. Design a barrier. A sonic one.
69. Take Hamlet. Pre­despatched the narrative of the play in 10 discovered photographs. Edit the play to 100 strains.
70. Observe drawing with toes and fingers.
71. Discover a portray made earlier than 1600; re-­create one object depicted in it in three dimensions.
72. Stash items the place they ­won’t be discovered ­till a minimum of 10 years after your demise.
73. Discover a black bag. Minimize a gap in it. Put a white bunny within the bag.
74. For a day maintain each door open for a minimum of six folks earlier than you undergo it.
75. Create a drawing throughout a metropolis by tracing your steps. Scribble. ­Each 10 blocks, observe one thing and draw it.
76. Sculpt a self-portrait the place ­each a part of your physique that you just really feel is weak is rendered at twice its regular dimension.
77. Draw what you miss.
78. Script a ­efficiency of your cowardice.
79. Make 10 work on the theme “I forgive you.” Ship them to 10 folks picked at random.
80. Narrate the apocalypse as love at first sight.
81. Destroy all of the documentation you have got of a previous piece.
82. Make a chunk that each­one ­will name “intimidating.” Make a chunk that each­one ­will name “beneficiant.” Present them collectively and attempt to guess which is which. Ponder the extent to which ­these phrases are the identical.
83. Arrange a set level for different ­folks to donate issues that ­will cowl over a chunk that you’ve made.
84. Draw the stacks of books in your house, bringing out the way in which that they characterize a weight that confounds some other small little bit of progress in your life. Draw the impossibility of shifting them and the ache impressed by that realization.
85. Outline your race after which betray it.
86. Make guardian packets (see task 10) for 5 of your closest buddies.
87. Design a chunk that ­will present a thanks for the one who cleans an exhibition area. Make it.
88. At a paint store, discover the colour that’s the fury you are feeling when on a trip along with your accomplice understanding that you just ­will break up with them as soon as you come residence. Buy sufficient of the colour to color your bed room. ­Each morning pour some on the ground and stroll via it.
89. Cowl up a tattoo.
90. No beards with out clothes; no clothes with out beards.
91. In any room, ­measure an area three toes in from the partitions. Transfer any earlier contents of the room into this new boundary. Spend three days inside this new assortment of objects. On the second day, request that collaborators make work to rec­ord your scenario from the periphery. On the fourth day, clear your self and the contents of the condensed room. On the fifth day, substitute the contents of the room with the work.
92. Write fan mail.
93. Create a ­T-shirt; then type the band to go together with it.
94. Collect an inventory from buddies of 10 phrases they affiliate with non-public. Put on ­these phrases publicly.
95. Go to an exhibition. Word the title of every piece. Go residence and draw every bit from reminiscence and your record of names.
96. Take your initials. Draw a self-­portrait utilizing the letterforms as the one mark you may make.
97. As soon as every week, create one object to furnish your Utopia.
98. Devise task 99.
100. Do what you have got left undone.