100 Assignments From Nayland Blake

Nayland Blake at work (all images courtesy the artist)

Editor’s Note: The following text has been excerpted with permission and adapted from My Studio Is a Dungeon Is the Studio: Writings and Interviews, 1983–2024 by Nayland Blake, edited by Jarrett Earnest, published by Duke University Press on November 4, and available online and in bookstores (Copyright Duke University Press, 2025).

I’ve taught for 30 years in colleges, residencies, and sex parties. I’ve come to view teaching as a necessity, a way of putting back into the world the culture and ideas the world has poured into me. The bedrock of teaching art is the assignment. And the basis for my own work as an artist is being able to give myself assignments. The right assignment at the right time can answer a need we ­haven’t been able to articulate to ourselves. The assignments we need tell the story of how we view the work and the world, even if they tell it slant. I give my students assignments that ­were given to me directly in school as well as others that I’ve gleaned from the writings of artists and thinkers in vari­ous fields. Finding a good assignment provides a thrill. I give them to ­people for vari­ous reasons — to build a par­tic­u­lar skill or to perhaps lead someone to a dif­fer­ent sense of how they could look at what they do. Some of ­these I’ve honed over years of classes in vari­ous disciplines; some are for no one but myself. When I doubt what I do or am unable to get myself to work, the only ­thing that has got me out is a self-­administered assignment. They have been my technique for creating myself. Good assignments are not easy to come up with, but one princi­ple that has helped me comes out of recovery: Take the action, and let go of the result. Many times people attempt to use assignments to force ­people to come to a conclusion, to predetermine the outcome. Good assignments awaken us to the breadth of possibilities available to us rather than narrow ­things down to one possibility. They are the scaffolding we build to touch the unexpected and wild within ourselves. They are how we stretch. ­There is no right or wrong answer. ­There is only the next ­thing to do.

While ­these assignments ­will not turn someone ­else into me, they ­will provide the practitioner with a path to the deviations within themselves.

The right assignment at the right time can answer a need we ­haven’t been able to articulate to ourselves.

1. Reconstruct, without photo­graphs, a childhood toy, including what it felt, smelled, and tasted like.
2. Design a sculpture to be taken internally.
3. Make a crown. Give it away.
4. Purchase an issue of a magazine that you have never opened before.
   Treat it as the only surviving artifact of a vanished civilization.
   Use it to reconstruct the attitudes and values of that civilization.
   Create your own artifact as part of that civilization.
5. Draw the feeling of someone —­ a relative —­ lying on top of you and snarling while you strug­gle to get up.
6. Combine two pieces of your clothing into a garment that neither was designed for.
7. Find a collaborator. Have them touch you fifty times over a period of two hours.
8. Draw the previous US presidents from memory. Draw the next 10 from your imagination.
9. Make a piece using only materials you have obtained by barter, without currency.
10. Make a guardian packet: a bundle to be worn ­under your clothing to keep you safe. It must have 10 ele­ments. Wear it for a week.
11. Holding your arms out from your sides, ­measure the distance from your left to your right hand. Make something that is that length, plus two feet.
12. Make daily drawings that cannot contain words.
13. Build your divination deck. Include the activity of adding a new card on your birthday.
14. Design your dream body: How many limbs does it have? How many holes? What is it covered with? Scales? Fur? Where is it most sensitive? What part is it proudest of? What kind of bed is most comfortable for it?
15. Describe your dream body to an audience and ask them the question of how they would care for it. Make drawings of their responses.
16. Build a sculpture that produces the ­pleasure of being ignored.
17. Make a hopeful piece.
18. Try again if your piece is about how hope never works out.
19. Carve a block of wood and say goodbye to every piece you take from it.
20. Say goodbye to yourself until the word loses all meaning. Then sing it.
21. Describe the subjecthood your upbringing has granted you and ask where you are dissatisfied with it.
22. Draw the feeling of when your genitals feel wrong for how you want to masturbate.
23. Make a piece that lies to you about your heritage.
24. Write a 500-­word explanation for a piece you ­will never make.
25. Cast your elbows, knees, crotch. Use the resulting fragments to make one smiling face, one frightened face, and one asleep face.
26. Masturbate and note the exact qualities of the image or scenario that tips you into orgasm.
27. Every time you take a photo­ graph, shift six inches to the side and take another.
28. Paint a ­family food onto the side of a building.
29. Once a week, make 10 drawings, each one by four inches. Leave these drawings as bookmarks in nooks on the shelves in secondhand stores.
30. Take a vinyl rec­ ord and drill a hole 9/32 inches in dia­meter one inch from its center. Using this as the new spindle hole, play the record and rec­ord it, using the recording as the basis for new musical compositions.
31. Practice drawing feet and hands.
32. Tell the story of your ­family, once as a triumph and once as a tragedy. In both tellings, only whisper.
33. Pick a favorite ­album. Make one piece for each song.
34. Sit near a wall and trace your shadow. No, the other one.
35. Learn how to program a game for the original Game Boy.
36. Make a piece, and hang it in your home. ­After one year, revise it. Repeat the ­process for the next four years.
37. Purchase a potato. Take 50 photo­graphs of it, trying to make each as dif­fer­ent from the previous ones as pos­si­ble.
38. Make a sculpture that confines you ­until you are comforted.
39. With a chisel, carefully nick the laminate from a dresser you have found that was discarded. Gouge the particle board that is revealed until the entire surface looks fuzzy.
40. Wash ­until a shape is changed.
41. Fix a prob­lem from a previous piece in a new piece.
42. Tell lies. Enjoy the taste of them.
43. Walk ­until the ideas come.
44. Draw the feeling of ­people turning away from you in embarrassment when you ask for help.
45. List your failings; make a piece for ­every item on the list.
46. In a public library, find a favorite book. Count 10 books to the left and then use that book as the basis for four new pieces.
47. Using scrap fabric, make a flag for the country you ­will establish after you leave this one.
48. Design two traps.
49. Create a pedestal for a famous sculpture.
50. Make a banner for each of your friends.
51. Install shelves on the street. See what ends up on them.
52. Make a ­performance for just one person. Show it only to them. Do not document or make any other rec­ord of it.
53. Have someone sew ribbons to your skin.
54. Design a holiday and the parade that celebrates it.
55. Every day: a painting made of 10 strokes. Its surface can be any size or material; strokes can be any length.
56. Make a drawing about the statement “I am inside myself.”
57. Take the technique of a sundae as the basis for a sculpture.
58. Design a monument to another artist.
59. Build the components for a piece that ­will be fi­nally assembled 10 years in the future.
60. Make note of ­every joke your ­family tells about itself. Rewrite them as songs.
61. Draw on yourself with bruises.
62. Draw the feeling of ­those around you.
63. Remember the potato you took 50 photo­graphs of? Eat it and write a description of how it tastes on a shirt.
64. Wear that shirt and ask 50 other ­people to take a photo­graph of you in it.
65. Paint a ­recipe — no words.
66. In 10 photo­graphs, show how a par­ticu­lar person does their job. Only do this with their consent.
67. Write two lists of 50 items each: “In my work I always ______________” and “In my work I never ______________.” For each of the next 10 weeks, pick five of your “nevers” and do them.
68. Design a barrier. A sonic one.
69. Take Hamlet. Pre­sent the narrative of the play in 10 found images. Edit the play to 100 lines.
70. Practice drawing with feet and hands.
71. Find a painting made before 1600; re-­create one object depicted in it in three dimensions.
72. Stash pieces where they ­will not be found ­until at least 10 years after your death.
73. Find a black bag. Cut a hole in it. Put a white bunny in the bag.
74. For a day hold every door open for at least six people before you go through it.
75. Create a drawing across a city by tracing your steps. Scribble. ­Every 10 blocks, observe something and draw it.
76. Sculpt a self-portrait where ­every part of your body that you feel is vulnerable is rendered at twice its normal size.
77. Draw what you miss.
78. Script a ­performance of your cowardice.
79. Make 10 paintings on the theme “I forgive you.” Send them to 10 people picked at random.
80. Narrate the apocalypse as love at first sight.
81. Destroy all the documentation you have of a past piece.
82. Make a piece that every­one ­will call “intimidating.” Make a piece that every­one ­will call “generous.” Show them together and try to guess which is which. Contemplate the extent to which ­those words are the same.
83. Set up a collection point for other ­people to donate things that ­will cover over a piece that you have made.
84. Draw the stacks of books in your home, bringing out the way that they represent a weight that confounds any other small bit of progress in your life. Draw the impossibility of moving them and the ache inspired by that realization.
85. Define your race and then betray it.
86. Make guardian packets (see assignment 10) for five of your closest friends.
87. Design a piece that ­will provide a thank you for the person who cleans an exhibition space. Make it.
88. At a paint shop, find the color that is the fury you feel when on a vacation with your partner knowing that you ­will break up with them once you return home. Purchase enough of the color to paint your bedroom. ­Every morning pour some on the floor and walk through it.
89. Cover up a tattoo.
90. No beards without dresses; no dresses without beards.
91. In any room, ­measure a space three feet in from the walls. Move any previous contents of the room into this new boundary. Spend three days within this new collection of objects. On the second day, request that collaborators make paintings to rec­ord your situation from the periphery. On the fourth day, clean yourself and the contents of the condensed room. On the fifth day, replace the contents of the room with the paintings.
92. Write fan mail.
93. Create a ­T-shirt; then form the band to go with it.
94. Gather a list from friends of 10 words they associate with private. Wear ­those words publicly.
95. Go to an exhibition. Note the name of each piece. Go home and draw each piece from memory and your list of names.
96. Take your initials. Draw a self-­portrait using the letterforms as the only mark you can make.
97. Once a week, create one object to furnish your Utopia.
98. Devise assignment 99.
100. Do what you have left undone.

Nayland Blake is an artist, curator, and codirector of the Studio Arts Program at Bard College. They are coeditor of In a Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice and author of…
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