Learn

From kindergarten to high school, college to seniors, from lifelong learners to everyone in between, Elsewhere is an immersive space to learn about collaboration between people and things. We offer tours, workshops, retreats, and internships in the three-story museum. We also bring our learning methods to your school, office, community, or city. Contact museum@goelsewhere.org to set your tour, workshop, retreat, internship, or long term learning partnership in motion.

Our learning philosophy is based on three key ideas:

  • Collaborative Fiction: The stories we tell in the world about the world make and remake the world. Everyone is a character in their own lives. Together, we create an unfolding plot.

  • Finite Resources, Infinite Possibilities: Elsewhere is a microcosm of the world. Just like the planet, there are finite resources that can be used over and over again if the future is kept in mind for the present. Things should remain in a condition to use and reuse infinitely. This requires care, attention, and thinking about things and others beyond you.

  • Action-Thinking: Too much learning is about concepts in space rather than concepts in place. Elsewhere is about experimenting, trying, testing, prototyping. We play hard, we think deeply, learn by doing. Collaborative making is a medium by which we navigate the world.

Workshops

We host workshops on collaboration and storytelling. These can be hosted using the environments of the library, the fabric workshop, the garden, the kitchen, and the toy world. Workshops are led by either our artist-staff or visiting artists. We often have special workshops on offer with our rotating fellows.
  

Creative Retreats

Creative Retreats are immersive magical adventures through Elsewhere’s unfolding world of things. They are open to students, collectives, community organizations and learning groups across disciplines and interests. Retreats offer creative, hands-on learning through living, doing, and exchanging that builds group connectivity, communication, and collaboration. Retreats offer encounters with contemporary, site-specific creative practice in Elsewhere. Students work independently or in teams, prototyping site-specific concepts and designing microprojects. During retreat participants develop projects that use the collection in non-permanent ways (photography, video, audio, writing, performance). Elsewhere works with each group to organize a project that meets the needs of the learning community while sharing collaborative models. Topics of past Creative Retreats include repair as contemporary practice, event-based curatorial production and performances, collaborative art processes and contemporary media production, improvisation, and sound production.

CoLabs

CoLABs are youth-led platforms for interactive media and civic action. CoLAB creates collaborative media experiments and alternative modes for digital storytelling that speaks to peers. See our many CoLabs below.

Queerlab

QueerLab is a youth-led media project and forum for LGBTQ-identifying youth in North Carolina and beyond. QueerLab launched I Don’t Do Boxes, a youth magazine collecting stories and artworks from around the region exploring queer southern experience. The publication is available online and is distributed to local schools and spaces around the Triad featuring advice, news, essays, youth commentary, lesson plans and ideas for organizing and sustaining Gay-Straight Alliances (GSA) at local schools. READ I DON’T DO BOXES. Click here to find out more.

Foodlab

The first session of FoodLab took place in Spring 2015 as an after-school program in partnership with Jackson Middle School and Communities in Schools. The goal of FoodLab was to share Elsewhere’s philosophy of playfulness and education outside of Elsewhere’s walls. Students explored culinary arts, food heritage, and healthy eating habits. They created unique recipes and took pride in sharing their diverse dishes with teachers and fellow classmates in youth-led collaborative demonstrations at the end of each cooking class. Click here to find out more.

SoundLab

SoundLab is the second installment of CoLAB, a youth-led platform for digital storytelling and collaborative media experiments at Elsewhere, a museum in downtown Greensboro, NC. The project brought together artist group Invisible and youth from Weaver Academy and Guilford College to build a mobile visual artwork and instrument made from obsolete technology. SoundLAB was co-led by Mark Dixon and Bart Trotman (Invisible), and Elsewhere, with support from the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources. READ THE SOUNDLAB PUBLICATION. Click here to learn more.

Dancelab

A youth-led movement-research investigation bringing together students at Dudley High School and artist Athena Kokoronis to create a site-specific dance for downtown Greensboro. A series of interactive workshops led by Athena and dance teacher Angela Robinson will explore Elsewhere’s living museum and Greensboro as sites for storytelling and experimental dance. The project culminated with an interactive performance called The Listening Story of No Words during the Art in Odd Places public art festival in downtown Greensboro on November 1st, 2013. Click here to learn more.

Citylab

READ THE CITYLAB PUBLICATION. Click here to learn more.

Testimonials

“I brought my entire graduate seminar class from the University of Michigan to Elsewhere for a week-long residency. It was an experience without parallel. George and Stephanie assembled a sheaf of theoretical texts that had informed their founding of the space and emailed them to us ahead of time, so even before arriving, our group was developing a set of shared concerns. After touring the space, each grad student picked out an area and began working on individual projects within the space. Each of us had a school desk on which G&S would leave little notes and readings and inspiring tokens. Throughout our time, a small economy of desk-sharing became a part of our discourse; what was so interesting in this was realizing that we could be having material conversations as much as language-based exchanges. In fact, these various modalities of exchange grew organically during our stay and continued into the rest of our semester at the U of M. Our stay at Elsewhere was an absolute highlight of our semester and galvanized our group. There’s no doubt that the level of trust and intellectual exchange we attained within the seminar was due in large part to the experience we shared at Elsewhere.” – Dan Price UMichigan