Families

Jason Urban and Leslie Mutchler conceived of MAKEwild as a participatory installation — an active site for creative inquiry, communication, and collaboration. The stations facilitate face-to-face making through open-ended project prompts and limited, curated materials that invite participants to explore what it means to make in serendipitous and wild ways.

What is wild? For most of us, the wild and the wilderness it occupies is a distant concept — a thing of legend and memory. We navigate a regulated world of rules and deadlines, and few aspects of our lives contain even a hint of the wild. But perhaps art is a place that remains wild? People need spaces to express themselves and experiment, places to share new ideas and embrace the unknown. Inspired by the exploratory quality of nature and art, MAKEwild is an artwork, an environment, and an activity that provides museumgoers time and space to discuss, reflect, and ultimately, make. An open studio space built for the Blanton Museum of Art, MAKEwild presents museumgoers of all ages with an opportunity to be a little wild through hands-on creation.

Read our blog post about MAKEwild, written by our 2023-2024 Graduate Teaching Fellow

JASON URBAN and LESLIE MUTCHLER (JULMstudios) have been working collaboratively since 2012; they live and work in Brooklyn, New York. As a collaborative duo, they exercise a coequal approach to art and life that focuses on research and problem-solving. With a relationship of physical to metaphysical in mind, their practice is increasingly about the natural world and the way digital technologies influence and distort our relationship to nature.

The pair has had solo exhibitions at Eastern Edge (St. Johns, Canada), Center for Book Arts (New York, NY), Monaco (St. Louis, MO), the Delaware Contemporary (Wilmington, DE), NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia, PA), The Print Center (Philadelphia, PA), Centre for Fine Print Research (Bristol, UK), Space Gallery (Portland, ME), Atelier Circulaire (Montreal, Canada), among others. They have been awarded numerous residencies including Edition/Basel in Basel, Switzerland, Cork Printmakers International Visiting Artist Residency in Cork, Ireland and Dieu Donne Workspace Residency in Brooklyn. From 2008 to 2018, the pair taught in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Both are currently affiliated with Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY where Mutchler is Chair of the Foundation Program and Urban teaches in the Communication Design program.

Instagram: @julmstudios

Website: http://julmstudios.com