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Noé Gaytán

MFA Public Practice, OTIS College of Art and Design, 2015

BA Studio Art, University of California, Irvine, 2011

 

website

 

Noé Gaytán: The High Cost of Higher Education
Noé Gaytán ‘15 is a California native who, like most other students, realized that financing education was a major feat for working families. He decided to get his MFA

from Otis even if the degree never earned him a dime. As an artist he felt it was worth it. Still, the thought of debt loomed and the amount he would owe seemed like an abstraction. There are almost 40 million Americans with outstanding student loans, and their cumulative debt is over $1.2 trillion, a huge burden that has become an accepted fact of life.
 

Noe wondered: What would it feel like to come face to face, in a physical and tangible manner, with his debt? For his MFA Public Practice final project, Instituitional Critique, he attempted to pay off his own loans by creating a 1:1 artistic representation of it: he silkscreened $50,000 in various denominations and sold each at face value. He also convened forums for Los Angeles college student to have conversations about the widening, unsustainable student debt in 
the US and what can be done to ensure that future generations can pursue higher education.

Currently Noé lives in New York City and works in the Brooklyn Museum’s education department. He continues as a founding member of the Michelada Think Tank.

 

Updated Spring 2017

 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.