Studio Sessions
On ‘Social Form’
with Rosa Glaessner Novak
November 2026
About the Studio Session
The concept of “social form” has been defined and re-defined throughout history. From Marx’s idea of the Commune as a new “form of social life” to Rosa Luxemburg’s suggestion that a mass strike is much like the movement of water, ebbing and flowing with the tides of revolution, “social form” has become an open and flexible concept used to think through myriad modes of self-organization, from the soviet, to the council, to the ayllu.
In this Studio Session, we will explore the concept of “social form” in relation to clay. Participants will learn about some of the ways in which clayworkers have organized and aggregated into historical social forms–concretizing in the clay strike, the clayworkers’ paper, the clayworkers’ local, the clay lodge, and the clay studio. We will discuss the relevance such historical structures have in our present world. Marxist thinkers past and present will inform our consideration of the ways in which clay as a material–its plasticity and its brittleness, its groginess and its stickiness, and the very ways it holds its shape–can so aptly metaphorize the building and rebuilding of social form.
About the Lead Artist
Rosa Glaessner Novak is an artist working across ceramic practice, archival research, and Risograph printing based in Detroit, Michigan. She co-runs the small press, Each and Every, through which she publishes editions of book-scaled ceramics, booklets on the organizing histories of arts workers, and translations of clay into print. She is currently completing her PhD in the History of Art at the University of Michigan, where she is writing a dissertation on clayworkers’ collectivity, their strikes, and the social forms produced by their organizing. She is an adjunct professor of Ceramics at Oakland Community College and has taught ceramics previously with A-B Projects and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. With Each and Every, Rosa regularly exhibits at art book fairs near and far from home, including in New York, Paris, San Francisco, Mexico City, and Madrid.
Logistics
This session is scheduled for Mondays, November 2, 9, 16, & 23 from 11am-1pm PST (that’s Los Angeles time).
Registration is $320 and includes all four sessions.
Participants gather via Zoom.