UPCOMING & ONGOING PROGRAMS
David Gersten
Élan Vital: Living in the Still Life
A Weekly Seminar
Every Tuesday 4:00-6:00PM
Description
This fall, Arts Letters & Numbers opens Élan Vital: Living in the Still Life, a weekly seminar with David Gersten, to the wider community.
The seminar begins with a simple proposition: a creative life grows from the sustained pursuit of one’s questions. When we follow our curiosities with patience and attention, they become more than subjects of study; they become a way of living. Over time, this practice of attention can prepare us for moments of creative leap, élans vitaux, or vital surges, that shift our understanding of the world and our place within it.
Drawing from more than four decades of work as an educator and creative practitioner, David will move across architecture, art, film, theater, music, literature, philosophy, and education, sharing works, stories, questions, and encounters that have shaped his thinking. The seminar asks how seemingly separate disciplines might illuminate one another, and how our own practices can become places of inquiry where materials, images, movements, histories, emotions, stories, and ideas meet.
At the center of the seminar is the question of attention: how we recognize moments of transformation, and how periods of stillness might allow something previously unseen to become legible. These are the “still lifes” within life—intervals in which attention settles long enough for us to register where we are, what is changing, and how we might respond.
The seminar also takes seriously the proposition that many of the crises of our time are crises of comprehension. By expanding the ways we see, listen, question, and make, creative practice can become a means of understanding the world more fully and imagining responsible ways of acting within it.
Élan Vital: Living in the Still Life is an ongoing weekly gathering for artists, architects, writers, musicians, students, educators, neighbors, and anyone interested in the questions that emerge through creative life.
Details
WHEN: Tuesday 4:00-6:00 PM (Beginning October 13, 2026)
WHERE: In-person at the Main Studios, Arts Letters & Numbers | Averill Park, NY
FORMAT: Weekly sessions. No prior participation at Arts Letters & Numbers is necessary. Come for one Tuesday or return each week.
COST: Free and open to the public
Program Director’s Bio
David Gersten is an internationally recognized artist, architect, writer, and educator whose work spans drawing, writing, film, performance, pedagogy, and the creation of new cultural and educational infrastructures. Based in New York City, he is the Founding Director and President of Arts Letters & Numbers, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding the experiences understood as education through studios, workshops, residencies, youth programs, mentorship initiatives, exhibitions, performances, and global collaborations at its campus in Averill Park, NY, and around the world.
An alumnus of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, Gersten served on its faculty from 1991 to 2025, holding roles including Distinguished Professor of Architecture, Associate Dean under Dean John Hejduk, Acting Dean, Director of Interdisciplinary Learning, Director of the Civic Projects Lab, and Program Director for Cooper Union’s 165th Anniversary Celebration. His teaching fostered collaborations across the Schools of Art, Architecture, Engineering, and the Humanities, shaping generations of students through studio-based, interdisciplinary learning.
Gersten’s educational work extends globally. He has been a visiting professor at institutions across the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America, including engagements at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Aarhus School of Architecture, Brown University, and the United Nations International School. He has delivered keynote addresses at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Venice Architecture Biennale, UNICEF EXPO in Kazakhstan, CAFA’s Chancellors Summit, Big Picture Learning, Reggio Emilia’s international conference, and numerous universities and cultural institutions. He also codirected a collaboration between UNICEF’s Office of Innovation and Arts Letters & Numbers on “Information Poverty: Scarcity in the Age of Distributed Communications,” bringing together leaders working at the intersection of technology, art, education, and social justice.
Gersten’s creative work—including drawings, stories, essays, films, performances, and buildings—has been exhibited internationally and is held in the collections of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the New York Public Library, and private collections around the world. His long-running project “Hunting Life; A Forever House,” comprising more than 200 stories and architectural drawings, has been exhibited widely and published by Éditions Firmin-Didot in Paris. He has directed or codirected numerous films and performances, often in collaboration with filmmaker Bill Morrison and composer Michael Harrison, including 24 Hours @ Once, Galapagos In C, Oppenheimer’s Table, Suddenly a Chora, Hinges Mirrors and Eclipses, Zoetrope Sun, and Constitution.
He has curated major exhibitions, including Cooper Union’s 165th Anniversary timeline exhibition titled ‘A Work in Progress’, shows at the CAFA Museum, the RISD Museum, Omi International Arts Center, Wilmer Jennings Gallery, and multiple international biennials. He directed and curated Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibitions for the 17th and 18th Venice Architecture Biennales, including SunShip: The Arc That Makes the Flood Possible and Archives: Infinite Fragile Double.
Gersten is currently participating in the Xu Bing Space Art Residency Program, an extraterrestrial residency based on the first satellite of China’s Star Chain of Arts Project. Launched into low Earth orbit in 2024, the satellite serves as a platform for artistic research and projection, including The 25th Hour, a recent transmission of his project 24 Hours @ Once into space.
Earlier in his career, Gersten founded Tree Time Workshop, a 20,000-square-foot multidisciplinary design and fabrication studio in New York City that produced hundreds of projects for film, television, theater, music, and commercial clients. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the Education Reimagined working group, and serves on the Board of Directors of Big Picture Learning, a network of more than 200 schools worldwide.