Weekly Roundup

Charles Atlas, "Son of Sam and Delilah", 1991. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Greek tragedy, cross dressing, cooking shows, needlework, rowdy teens, storytelling, nighttime walks, and a few mystery plays in this week’s roundup:

• Virtuoso Illusion: Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde at the MIT List Visual Arts Center explores how experimental art has been enlivened and advanced by artists who cross dress as part of their conceptual process. “The show is not intended,” according to MIT, “as an exploration of identity issues specifically, but more as an in depth look at current and historical strategies of cross dressing as an art of the irrational, the unexpected.” Artists include Charles Atlas, Matthew Barney (both Season 2), Claude Cahun, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Marcel Duchamp, Michelle Handelman, John Kelly, Katarzyna Kozyra, Kalup Linzy, Ma Liuming, Manon, Pierre Molinier, Yasumasa Morimura, Brian O’Doherty, Ryan Trecartin, and Andy Warhol. Atlas created video mock documentaries about the evolving twentieth-century performance avant-garde during the years he collaborated with Merce Cunningham. In Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), Atlas provides “a transporting view of a flock of gender indiscriminate performers.” Virtuoso Illusion, organized by guest curator Michael Rush, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, is on view through April 4.

• The highly anticipated exhibition Kiki Smith: Sojourn opens at the Brooklyn Museum this Friday. Smith (Season 2) draws on a variety of experiences in the cycle of life, from the milestones of birth and death to the daily chores of domestic life, with particular attention to the lives of women artists. An eighteenth-century silk needlework by a woman named Prudence Punderson that inspired Smith’s installation is on loan to the museum from the Connecticut Historical Society and included in the exhibition. Via the museum website: “Punderson’s stark depiction of a woman’s journey from childhood to death in the years leading up to and immediately after the United States gained its independence intrigued Smith because rather than following the stereotypical rites of passage in a woman’s life of the period…this young woman chose to depict a life of the mind for her subject, presenting a woman engaged in creative work.” Smith will install her work in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art as well as in two of the museum’s eighteenth-century period rooms. Sojourn closes September 12.

• Works by Laylah Ali (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Ghada Amer, Shary Boyle, Amy Cutler, Chitra Ganesh, Wangechi Mutu, Annie Pootoogook, Leesa Streifler, and Su-en Wong are on view at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Ontario, Canada. The exhibition, titled Pandora’s Box, offers a new twist on the myth of Pandora in which it is no longer about what is hidden inside of the box, but what is metaphorically reflected on the outside. Pandora’s Box continues through March 21.

• Through February 28, Tank.tv is showing two works by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. Both works — cut from two days of taped performance at a community television studio in 1987 — feature Season 1 artist Mike Kelley. Tank.tv calls the videos a “disturbing tableaux of familial horror, steeped in the stomach turning abjection” of McCarthy’s practice. Performed within a “barely credible domestic set,” the format and characters in the videos enact several tropes of television entertainment: the unruly teenager (Kelley), and the how-to format of cooking and DIY programs.

• Fifty photographs of nocturnal landscapes by Robert Adams (Season 4) are on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in the exhibition Summer Nights, Walking. These images of trees and houses, mountains and streets, fields and sidewalks captured between dusk and approaching dark were made between 1976-1982 near Adams’ home in Longmont, Colorado. Adams first showed photographs from this series in 1985. He recently said of editing his night pictures: “When I have looked again at the photographs that I might have chosen but did not, it has seemed to me that if I had included a wider variety, the result would have been, though less harmonious, more convincing, closer to our actual experience of wonder, anxiety and stillness.” This exhibition celebrates the publication of Summer Nights, Walking, co-published by Aperture and the Yale University Art Gallery, a revised and updated version of an earlier book. The exhibition continues through April 17.

• Delusion, a new work by Laurie Anderson (Season 1) will premiere at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, February 16-21. The piece is described as “a series of short mystery plays” populated by “nuns, elves, golems, rotting forests, ghost ships, archaeologists, dead relatives and unmanned tankers.” Delusion was commissioned by the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and The Barbican Centre in London. Tickets can be purchased here.

• The lecture series Critical Conversations at the Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles features talks by visiting artists, curators, theorists, writers, and other cultural producers, who engage in open conversations with graduate students and attending members of the public. Season 4 artists Mark Dion and Mark Bradford will speak on February 23 and March 2, respectively.

• Season 5 artist William Kentridge will lecture at The Cooper Union in New York City tomorrow, February 9. The event begins at 8pm and is free and open to the public.

• BMW has announced that Season 5 artist Jeff Koons will design their 17th art car. Read more about the project here.

Dan Phillips: Not Merely Vernacular, Pt. 2

Dan Phillips, "Chateau," 2008. Courtesy Phoenix Commotion.

In my estimation, Phoenix Commotion’s ongoing project (founded around 1998 by Dan Phillips) does much more than simply supply a university town with a rich dose of local color. While Phillips and his crew are building upon traditions of southern vernacular art, which have made significant and often under-acknowledged contributions to the evolution of American art—perhaps most-recognizably through the work of Texas-native Robert Rauschenberg—their project simultaneously engages with issues enjoying currency in contemporary art discourse. Most notably, this involves the impetus to devote one’s art, including one’s artistic process and not just the finished project, to the goal of raising an ethical awareness of our interconnectedness to each other and to the natural world.

Phillips’s project, which decades ago may have simply been understood as an example of “outsider” art and the product of some “place apart” (psychologically, culturally, and geographically), is today implicated in an ongoing and evolving international debate. The members of the Commotion do not simply belong to a cultural group entirely removed from the reach of influences acting on other contemporary artists whose similarly-minded, if aesthetically-divergent projects, have received critical attention, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija’s The Land Foundation (begun 1998), Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West and A-Z East (West begun 1999 and East begun 1994), or Tyree Guyton’s The Heidelberg Project (begun 1987). The Phoenix Commotion shares with these projects an exploration of eco-friendly, low-cost solutions to design problems, and the commitment of one’s art to transforming local social conditions. But while Phillips has and continues to spread the philosophy of the Phoenix Commotion near and far, and while his project resonates with these other contemporary examples, the end products of his creative labors remain rooted in his homes of Huntsville. The Commotion’s ideas and methods may circulate in regional, national, and international circuits, but their final artworks stay resolutely put in a place that, in the end, is somewhat removed yet also intimately connected.

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What’s Cookin at the Art21 Blog: A Weekly Index

"The Misfits of Modern Agribusiness", SVF Foundation Newport, RI; NY Times Slideshow, January 5, 2010

This week What’s Cookin is sent to you directly from Newport, RI  an eclectic little city on the Atlantic coast. Home to some of the best clam chowder and crab cakes I’ve ever eaten, everything seems to be within walking distance including a farm of rare animal breeds, mansions preserved from the Gilded Age, the infamous mystery tower, and the country’s first lending library, the Redwood...I’m always hungry to learn more, meanwhile here’s what’s been happening at Art21:

• It’s a mix-tape tape that flirts with Caribbean Kitsch, romance and hushed Rothko reverence, glitter(!), paint and fesis. Curate your mind around Ben Street’s letter on Chris Ofili’s retrospective at the Tate Modern in London. It sounds like an exhibition not to be missed.
• Welcom Leanne Gilbertson, the latest in the Art21 Guestblogosphere! A teacher at the Sam Houston State University  she is also preparing a manuscript that explores the relationships between the emergence, in the 1960s, of both feminist and queer consciousnesses, and the intermedia artistic experimentation occurring at both Warhol’s Factory and Judson Memorial Church.
• FLASHPOINTS: How does art respond to and define the natural world? For the past twelve years, Dan Phillips and members of the Commotion, including his wife Marsha, have been committed to building affordable and visually-distinctive housing out of largely post-consumption building leftovers, waste from the fabrication of industrialized materials (including “landscape timbers,” a plywood by-product), and other free or discarded materials.
• Nicole Rounds Them UP!  You’ll read about two anniversary exhibitions, 6,000 shapes upstate, masterworks in the Midwest, some road trip souvenirs, a whole lotta prints, and a sale you won’t want to miss.
• Teaching with Contemporary Art: Art 21 has ventured into the land of teacher institutes. Joe Fusaro reflects on the importance of  ‘teaching with ideas’ and introduces Year 2 of the Art21 Educators summer institute will run from July 7-14, 2010 and is now accepting applications from pairs of teachers. Click here for more information and to download an application!
• Grand Canyon Journal 3:  the Painter of Video to Life. Has there ever been such an elegant dramatization of the power of illusion as David Copperfield’s “The Painter”? Art and magic share the stage (which strangely recalls both David Letterman’s set and Monica’s apartment from Friends) in a trick that only gently conflates the initial discomfort of Harold and Maude with Copperfield’s problems with the law…
• If You Can Remember the ’60’s You Weren’t There. “When I moved from Berkeley to Los Angeles five years ago, I thought I was done living in a town that was devoted to perpetually remembering the ’60s. But I soon discovered that Los Angeles also carries a mega-torch for that transformative decade.” Lily Simonson thinks continues to inspire the Los Angeles as a California culural center in relationship to the Ferus Gallery and the Samuel Freeman Gallery.
• Art21 Launches the next Flash Points topic, The Ethics of Art. Ethics are defined as “a system of moral principles” which constantly factor into the choices we make. However, these decisions can become confused, making this system of principles more gray than black and white, especially when competing priorities are at work. Over the next two months, we’ll explore the relationship of ethics in art from a variety of perspectives and question the role that they should — or shouldn’t — play.
• The Dust Settles After the First Culture Wars. On January 28, Art21 and 92YTribeca piloted a program called Culture Wars: A Night of Trivia with Art21. The night began with a music play list created by artist Mary Heilmann (Season 5).
• VIDEO EXCLUSIVE — Julie Mehretu | Workday. Filmed in her Berlin studio, Julie Mehretu discusses the ups and downs of her daily studio practice. Mehretu is shown working on the painting Middle Grey (2007-2009), one work in a suite of seven paintings commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim as part of the exhibition Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, which travels to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York later this year (May 14 – October 6, 2010).

Julie Mehretu | Workday

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Filmed in her Berlin studio, Julie Mehretu discusses the ups and downs of her daily studio practice. Mehretu is shown working on the painting Middle Grey (2007-2009), one work in a suite of seven paintings commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim as part of the exhibition Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, which travels to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York later this year (May 14 – October 6, 2010).

Mehretu’s paintings and drawings refer to elements of mapping and architecture, achieving a calligraphic complexity that resembles turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Architectural renderings and aerial views of urban grids enter the work as fragments, losing their real-world specificity and challenging narrow geographic and cultural readings. The paintings’ wax-like surfaces—built up over weeks and months in thin translucent layers—have a luminous warmth and spatial depth, with formal qualities of light and space made all the more complex by Mehretu’s delicate depictions of fire, explosions, and perspectives in both two and three dimensions. Her works engage the history of nonobjective art—from Constructivism to Futurism—posing contemporary questions about the relationship between utopian impulses and abstraction.

Julie Mehretu is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Systems of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Ian Serfontein. Sound: Paul Stadden. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Julie Mehretu.

The Dust Settles After the First Culture Wars

On January 28, Art21 and 92YTribeca piloted a program called Culture Wars: A Night of Trivia with Art21. The night began with a music play list created by artist Mary Heilmann (Season 5). By 6:30pm all 18 teams were registered, seated with beers in hand, and ready for the main event.  In addition to the general public forming teams, there were also teams representing institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, Cambridge University Press, Bomb Magazine, and 20X200.

Culture Wars was comprised of four rounds, ten questions per round. Every round had a different theme including; Ripped from the Headlines devoted to questions about current events in the art world, Personnel Changes was an audio round of selected song clips that represented a sonic shift because a personnel change (loosely inspired by a newly appointed director of LA MOCA), Art and the City explored the geography of NYC through public art, and finally the Best and Worst of the Naughts which was a decade of art, music, and film in review. For those of you unable to attend the first Culture Wars, the next event is set for March 24, 2010 at the 92Y Tribeca, so mark your calendars!  We also captured some rough footage with a small pocket video camera to give a sense of the evening.

Art21 Culture Wars: An Introduction from Art21 on Vimeo.

Perhaps this selected twitter feed is a better document to give you a sense of the event and the crowd.

6:46 PM    lisa_hoang I’m at Culture Wars Art21 – 92YTribeca w/ @thatwaszen.

6:55 PM    thatwaszen http://twitpic.com/1084fd – Great crowd at @art21’s #culturewars at the 92Y (via @thatwaszen)

7:33 PM    VAJIAJIA Team Guggenheim getting butts kicked at @Art21 Culture Wars at 92Y Tribeca. Hoping to make a comeback in non-audio trivia. Continue reading »

Flash Points: The Ethics of Art

Gordon Matta-Clark, "Bingo," 1974. The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nina and Gordon Bunshaft Bequest Fund, Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest Fund, and the Enid A. Haupt Fund, 2004. Installation photography © Francois Robert, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Gordon Matta-Clark works © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Today we launch the next Flash Points topic, The Ethics of Art. Ethics are defined as “a system of moral principles” which constantly factor into the choices we make. However, these decisions can become confused, making this system of principles more gray than black and white, especially when competing priorities are at work. Over the next two months, we’ll explore the relationship of ethics in art from a variety of perspectives and question the role that they should — or shouldn’t — play.

In the 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark took a critical stance against the Hooker Chemical Company with his work Bingo, which highlighted the unethical — and as a result, dangerous — decisions they made in the community of Love Canal, New York. Throughout this topic, we’ll feature artists who make this ethical debate a focus in their work, from artists who question the role of the institution, such as Hans Haacke or Marcel Broodthaers, to artists like Alfredo Jaar, who examines the disparity between an oil-rich government and a poverty-stricken populace in his work Muxima.

Ann Hamilton. "Accountings," Jan. 22 - April 5, 1992 (installation view, Henry Art Gallery). Steel tokens, soot, steel, glass, cast wax heads, canaries. Photo: Richard Nicol.

Ethical decisions also factor into the artistic process. Does a photographer who sells a portrait owe anything, financially or psychologically, to the work’s subject? What kind of ownership does an artist have over reproduced images of his or her work? We’ll also look at the discussions taking place around the use of animals in art, such as the range of responses — from acclaim to criticism — received during Ann Hamilton’s exhibition Accountings (which included live canaries), or the severe case of Tom Otterness shooting a dog for his art (an act for which he has since apologized). Ethical issues can even come into play after an artist’s death, especially in the handling the artist’s estate and the management of his or her legacy.

Controversies and arguments abound as ethical decisions, or the lack thereof, play a role in institutional practice. With the ever-shrinking gap between commerce and culture, the prioritization of good business over public service creates an increasingly blurry set of ethical guidelines. Collector-based exhibitions, conflicts of interest, deaccessioning practices…do museums have a responsibility to their public? And if so, is this a part of institutional culture and is it being taught in today’s museum studies programs?

Marcel Broodthaers, "Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section Financière (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, Financial Section)," 1970-1971. Gold bar stamped with an eagle. Courtesy Galerie Beaumont, Luxembourg. Photo: J. Romero, courtesy Maria Gilissen.

Here are a few of the questions we’ll be addressing over the coming weeks. We’d love to hear your thoughts, and any ideas you have for additional sub-topics, in the comments below:

• How do ethics factor into institutional practice?
• How do artists address ethical issues in their work?
• What kind of ethical decisions are made during the artistic process?
• Are ethics emphasized in art education today?
• Must art be ethical?

If You Can Remember the ’60s, You Weren’t There

Ed Ruscha, "The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire," 1968, oil on canvas. Courtesy edruscha.com.

When I moved from Berkeley to Los Angeles five years ago, I thought I was done living in a town that was devoted to perpetually remembering the ’60s. But I soon discovered that Los Angeles also carries a mega-torch for that transformative decade. It’s easy to see why that era is appealing and continually inspiring these California cultural centers, respectively—it was during the 1960s that Berkeley distinguished itself as a hub of counter-cultural development and progressive action; meanwhile Los Angeles finally began to transcend its reputation as a vapid entertainment factory and, peeking out from under New York’s shadow, started to develop into prominent epicenter of contemporary art.

In her latest post, my co-columnist Catherine Wagley recounted how, during a recent panel discussion at LACMA, a young man asked what he should “take from” from art produced before his time. It just so happens that LACMA has good news for those of us who agree with Catherine’s conclusion that younger generations should make the most of things and “take as much as [they] possibly can” from the art of previous generations. This week, the 1960s art world became even easier to remember for those of us who weren’t really there (and even those of us who were). Two days before Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s slick Kindle rival, LACMA announced the creation of an online Reading Room–a virtual space in which the museum will present digital versions of LACMA’s publications. While the virtual Reading Room will eventually include more current books, their inaugural collection is exclusively comprised of out-of-print publications that focus on the Los Angeles art scene during the late 1960s (and late 1950s).  Now, the iPad Generation can virtually experience catalogues from ten seminal exhibitions including Six Painters and the Object, Six More, Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties, and Late Fifties at the Ferus.

Ed Moses, John Altoon, Billy Al Bengston, and Irving Blum, 1959. Claxton Photo, courtesy ferusgallery.com.

Speaking of which, the Ferus Gallery, which exhibited almost all of the artists currently featured in LACMA’s Reading Room, has been enjoying a major revival. Last weekend, in conjunction with Art Los Angeles Contemporary (yet another new LA Art Fair, this time held at the Pacific Design Center), New York dealers Tim Nye and Franklin Parrasch mounted an exhibition entitled Ferus Gallery: Greatest Hits Volume I, at the exact site of the original Ferus storefront gallery space at 736-A North La Cienega Boulevard, which has served as a tailor shop in the intervening decades. The exhibition featured Ferus veterans John Altoon, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Jay DeFeo, Llyn Foulkes, Craig Kauffman, Ed Kienholz, Roy Lictenstein, Ed Moses, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol. Word on the street is that Nye and Parrasch may take the show on the road, reprising it at The Armory Show this Spring.

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Dan Phillips: Not Merely Vernacular, Pt. I

Dan Phillips, "Tree House," 2008. Courtesy of Phoenix Commotion.

As a northerner recently transplanted to the Greater Houston area, I admit to having reservations about all things Texan. I have found this a tough place to love at first sight. Yet, this particular region nurtures a unique host of fascinating figures and issues in contemporary art, along with sometimes frustrating contradictions and striking visual treats—including a wealth of handmade signs and arresting juxtapositions of natural beauty confronting the manmade. In this and subsequent posts as a guest blogger, I hope to sketch out some contributions to contemporary art made by the creators, institutions, and museum professionals who have chosen to either make their homes in and around Houston, or have come here to reflect upon the region in site-specific and installation projects. In the process, I will also reflect on some of the ethical issues in contemporary art that living removed from more established art centers has allowed me to better flesh out.

On my first trip to Huntsville, where I teach art history at Sam Houston State University, I was given a drive-by tour of several structures built by Dan Phillips and his Phoenix Commotion team. Intrigued by what I saw, I visited his “tree house” (where my colleague Annie Strader is the current tenant), and last December I invited Phillips to speak to my Contemporary Art class about his project. For the past twelve years, Phillips and members of the Commotion, including his wife Marsha, have been committed to building affordable and visually-distinctive housing out of largely post-consumption building leftovers, waste from the fabrication of industrialized materials (including “landscape timbers,” a plywood by-product), and other free or discarded materials. Examples of Phillips’s sustainable building aesthetic include: a roof made from recycled license plates, floors made from wine corks, an artist’s studio ceiling lined with salvaged picture frame samples, and a range of other less-than-perfect or blemished building materials destined for the landfill that have been recovered and put into unexpected, unanticipated use.

Since 1996, the Phoenix Commotion, a for-profit rather than non-profit organization, has completed thirteen structures in Phillips’s hometown of Huntsville. In 2004, Phillips, with the cooperation of the city, established a warehouse where recyclable building materials are donated, stored, and then accessed by charitable groups and low-income housing projects. To achieve their aesthetic and ethical goal of increasing the availability of out of the ordinary, low-cost housing in Huntsville, Phillips and his crew are not only building, but have also created an alternative infrastructure that enables materials typically considered building “wastes” or “leftovers” to be creatively reused by the community.

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Grand Canyon Journal 3: The Painter of Video to Life

Our previous guest blogger, Karthik Pandian, continues his Grand Canyon journal in the following post. — Ed.

Has there ever been such an elegant dramatization of the power of illusion as David Copperfield’s “The Painter”? Art and magic share the stage (which strangely recalls both David Letterman’s set and Monica’s apartment from Friends) in a trick that only gently conflates the initial discomfort of Harold and Maude with Copperfield’s problems with the law. This trick has surprisingly old-fashioned art direction compared to the techno-industrial fetishism we’ve come to expect from Copperfield. Perhaps this is to suggest that art is the dustier of the two illusory practices, in need of far more maintenance by doddering old maids. Indeed, in the first few moments of the video, Copperfield’s artist puts down the paintbrush in favor of the magician’s rose. While “The Painter” is certainly not his most spectacular trick, it thematizes an emerging struggle between art and magic that is surprisingly relevant to the experience of post-thematic Las Vegas today and does so through a romantic vision of geriatric love without recourse to even a single bathtub!

“Video to Life” provides more evidence to support our hypothesis that members of the Italian architecture collective Superstudio art-directed Copperfield’s performances after they disbanded in 1978. The recurrence of the motorcycle in his oeuvre (it’s one of his go-to entrance and exit strategies) also warmly reminds us that we got here not only from the Grand Canyon on David Copperfield’s magic carpet, but also Ed Harris’s trusty steed. But what “Video to Life” also brilliantly dramatizes is how video as conjured by television, and not painting or even performance, is the central medium of Copperfield’s work and of the countless magicians that follow in his footsteps to take advantage of this already deeply illusionistic medium. However, rather than play with the formal codes, framing and documentary pretentions of television in the age of the flatscreen á la David Blaine (who is the verité-dedicated Jean Rouch of illusion) and Criss Angel (the more gothic Grunewald-ian who gets extra points for location scouting and the use of available light), Copperfield is more like the Nam June Paik of magic, preferring to use TV-like objects in his performances. The box in “Video to Life” is in between an inverted rear-projection TV (with the projector on the outside) and a magic hat which Copperfield pulls televisual objects out of. Copperfield works his magic by conducting the beliefs and disbeliefs that are entangled in this strange object. These include our belief in the light projected from a projector and the shadows cast by a body moving before it, our disbelief in the images projected from that projector or any TV, but also our totemic belief in television as a medium that speaks to us and that we have the potential to occupy. Thus, there is another immaterial projection, embodied by the physical projector at the bottom of the frame, that speaks to our desire to enter the image, to get on the motorcycle, to be Copperfield: “David Copperfield.”

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In the Middle: Art21 Educators

K-1st grade texture and color study submitted by June Edmonds

About six months ago, Art21 ventured into the land of summer teacher institutes. We invited 15 teachers from across the country to come to New York City and spend a week with us learning about ways to bring contemporary art and artists into the classroom using Art21 resources. It was a ton of work and an equal amount of fun. Since then, these teachers have had the opportunity to plan curriculum, try new teaching strategies, develop units and lessons that are driven by big ideas, and even work with some Art21 artists in the process.

We have now hit the mid-point of our first year working with these 15 teachers, and over the past few weeks I’ve had the chance to reach out to many of them and discuss their experiences so far- from the summer institute this past July to their current plans for this spring. It’s been extremely interesting to find out that many teachers now find themselves working with IDEAS as opposed to materials-based strategies or teaching particular styles. It’s has been tremendously gratifying to hear that experiences with artists and art works- firsthand- became a springboard for learning about other artists, art, and approaches to creating. The group has also shared hundreds of photos (literally) and dozens of classroom videos through our interactive Ning website devoted exclusively to this cohort of teachers.

As we move into the second half of our year together we look forward to visiting teachers in their classrooms, learning more about the successes and challenges they face, and even making time to talk with students about how learning with contemporary art has made a difference for them.

Year 2 of the Art21 Educators summer institute will run from July 7-14, 2010 and is now accepting applications from pairs of teachers. Click here for more information and to download an application!