Blueprint for Counter Education

Inaugurated during the volatile and transformative late 1960s, the unconventional publication Blueprint for Counter Education introduced the tools for a radical pedagogical model. A project of Brandeis Sociology Professor and Chair Maurice Stein and his student, Larry Miller, this “classroom in a box” encouraged students to shape an educational environment from their own lived experiences. Blueprint’s open-ended charts mapped a world of ideas, from the avant-garde to the postmodern, in a form that presaged the internet, allowing readers to chart multiple courses of thinking and discovery that anticipated the prevalence of search engines, social media, and the quick connection of the hyperlink.

Permanent collection artists on view:
Anni Albers, Charles Henry Alston, Jean Arp, Jasper Johns, Nam June Paik, Eduardo Paolozzi, Irene Rice Pereira, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Bridget Riley, Yves Tanguy

Organized by Caitlin Julia Rubin, Assistant Curator.

This exhibition is presented as part of a citywide partnership of arts and educational institutions organized to recognize the outsized role greater Boston played in the history and development of technology. The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston initiated this partnership to link concurrent exhibitions and programs related to the themes of the ICA exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today.

Blueprint for Counter Education is made possible through support from the Lois Foster Fund and the generous contribution of Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.