Mellon Collaborative Fellowship
Useless Tool
There are two questions at the center of this collaborative fellowship between Kyle Beachy, Tina Post, and 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.
Course
Performing Skateboard Poetics: Style, Motion, and Space
Spring 2023
ENGL 20566/TAPS 2042
Performing Skateboard Poetics considers the social poetics of skateboard culture, with special attention to style, motion, and physical space. The course will feature 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 will produce a short performance work as the culminating project of the class.
Fellows
KYLE BEACHY
Kyle Beachy is a novelist and essayist living in New Mexico. His memoir-in-essays, The Most Fun Thing (Grand Central, 2021), was named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR and Electric Lit. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harvard Review, The Point, Portable Gray, Southwest Review, Thrasher Magazine, and elsewhere. For many years he lived in Chicago and was an associate professor at Roosevelt University, helping run their MFA program. In addition to teaching, Beachy works as an editorial consultant. His first novel, The Slide (The Dial Press, 2009), was the Chicago Reader’s Readers’ Choice for Best Book By a Chicago Author in 2009.
TINA POST
Tina Post is an Associate 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. Her first book, Deadpan: The Aesthetic of Black Inexpression (NYU Press), was the winner of 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.
ALEXIS SABLONE
Alexis Sablone is an architect, designer and multidisciplinary artist, as well as a professional skateboarder and Olympian. They hold a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, and a Masters in Architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they were both the Ida C. Green Fellow and recipient of the Imre Halasz Thesis Prize. Much of their work brings together their two worlds of architecture and skateboarding through the design of hybridized playscapes and large scale interactive sculptures in an ongoing exploration and interrogation of public space. Skateboarding, if nothing else, has provided an interesting case study for designers, as skate spaces consistently show themselves to be creatively used, shared and beloved by a broad, diverse and growing community. This diverse usership—cutting across spectrums of skill level, age, race and gender—demonstrates the potential that public play spaces hold, not just for skateboarders, but beyond. In 2018, Sablone was commissioned to create a skateable, public sculpture in Malmö, Sweden, and has since completed similar projects in San Francisco and Montclair, NJ.