MELLON COLLABORATIVE FELLOWSHIP

An archive of over 30 previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowships will be accessible soon as part of our website overhaul.

Current

The Useless Tool

There are two questions at the center of this collaborative fellowship between writer Kyle Beachy, UChicago Professor (English and Theater & Performance Studies) Tina Post, and professional skateboarder Alexis Sablone: What might skateboarding offer to the pursuit of the humanities? What might the humanities offer skateboarding? Building off of each collaborator’s respective expertise in movement, performance, narrative, and architecture, The Useless Tool will function as a platform to focus on and experiment with such core components of skateboarding as ethics, style, failure, destruction, and repurposing.

What might skateboarding offer to the pursuit of the humanities? What might the humanities offer skateboarding? The trio behind The Useless Tool believes strongly that the embodied, perceptual, and dialogical practices of skateboarding, along with the networked values and relationships generalized as “skate culture,” hold potentially profound value to non-skate fields, including but not limited to pedagogy, community organizing, art making, and the performances / individuations of contemporary selfhood. Their shared curiosity to see what happens when skate components are pushed even further afield of their traditional context drives this fellowship. By utilizing their strengths in visual culture and the built environment, Kyle Beachy, Tina Post, and Alexis Sablone hope to be a conduit for the humanities to assert their use and value to skateboarding’s vibrant international subculture via a series of embodied experiments that will play out in the classroom and culminate in a collaborative performance. This fellowship builds off a 2022 symposium co-organized by Beachy, Post, and Sablone also called The Useless Tool. More information on the 2022 symposium can be found on on our Instagram while our new website is being completed.

Course

Performing Skateboard Poetics: Style, Motion, and Space (ENGL 20566/TAPS 20420) was co-taught by Kyle Beachy, Tina Post, and Alexis Sablone in the Spring of 2023. The course considered the social poetics of skateboard culture, with special attention to style, motion, and physical space. The course featured film screenings and panels on embodied style, narrative, time, and the built environment, along with skateboarding’s anti-scarcity and communal structures that both subvert and reframe capitalist competition. Students produced a short performance work as the culminating project of the class.

TINA POST

Tina Post is an Assistant Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. Her work is preoccupied with racial performativity, especially (though not exclusively) the ways that black Americans perform racial identity. What modes of embodiment assert belonging or dis-belonging, and how? When do racialized subjects confirm and when do they subvert the expectations of their identitarian positions, and to what end? How do other factors of embodiment (gender, dis/ability, hybridity, and so forth) color these performances? Post approaches such questions primarily through the lenses of affect and performance studies, using literature, visual culture, fine art, theater, and movement as examples and objects of study. Post’s 2023 book Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the 2023 ASAP Book Prize, given by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.

KYLE BEACHY

Kyle Beachy is the author of the novel The Slide (2009) and a book of nonfiction, The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches From a Skateboard Life (Grand Central, 2021). A longtime resident of Chicago and Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Roosevelt University, Beachy now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

ALEXIS SABLONE

Alexis Sablone is an artist, architect, and professional skateboarder. She has been skating in competitions since she was 12, and at age 34 finished fourth in Women’s Street Skateboarding at the Tokyo Olympics. Her current sponsors include Alltimers, Converse, Thunder, and Dial Tone. Sablone also creates works of animation, illustration, sculpture, and architecture, earning a master’s degree in architecture from M.I.T. In 2018, Sablone was commissioned to create a skateable, public sculpture in Malmö, Sweden. The New York Times, Thrasher, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post and many others have featured Sablone in recent issues. Her AS-1 Pro shoe was released by Converse in 2023.