Break in the Action

Margaret Kilgallen, Installation view at UCLA / Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 2000, Courtesy Deitch Projects, New York

Teaching with Contemporary Art is taking a break this week in order to complete special two-part interview with Esopus editor, Tod Lippy, which will be published here on the Art21 blog starting next Wednesday. Stay tuned for this unique look into a very, very distinct art magazine that has wonderful potential for art educators.

Also…. If you are a K-5 art educator and are interested in sharing how you work with contemporary art in your classroom, please e-mail me at: joe@art21.org so we can talk! I will be putting together a column in April focusing on the variety of ways elementary teachers approach working with contemporary art in their classrooms.

Authoritarian?

Matthew Ritchie, "The Dead: Belphegor," 2004

As I mentioned last week, the Teaching with Contemporary Art column over the next few weeks will focus on questions generated at the recent NAEA conference in Minneapolis. This week’s question comes from Clyde Gaw from Indianapolis, who wrote, “Much of the teaching that takes place in art rooms today is authoritarian and actually restricts personal expression. Is this beneficial in any way?”

First of all, I do not agree that much of the teaching that takes place in art education classrooms is authoritarian. Mimicry can be a problem, but I can’t say that I’ve encountered many instances where the teaching could literally be called authoritarian. What I do find, as Olivia Gude pointed out in our Art Practice, Teaching Practice panel at the conference, is that many art educators are desperately clinging to old models of teaching from their childhood and/or teacher training. Using the elements and principles of design to drive a curriculum, for example, is simply not enough, and in some cases it’s misguided altogether.

Bringing contemporary art and artists into the classroom through the incorporation of Art21 education materials or sites like artbabble.org allows teachers to make important connections between the strengths in an existing curriculum and the gaps that curriculum faces. For example, taking ever-present artists like Andy Warhol or Alexander Calder and juxtaposing them with Margaret Kilgallen or Tim Hawkinson can teach more about all of the artists and ideas involved. What are the similarities between Warhol and Kilgallen? What do Calder and Hawkinson have in common and how is their work very different? What do Warhol and Kilgallen teach about working with popular culture? How do Calder and Hawkinson each attempt to redefine sculpture?

If, as Clyde points out, art education in your school or district leans towards an authoritarian model, then my suggestion might be to share (and model!) how contemporary art promotes choice, play, uncertainty, chance, undiscovered relationships, and new perspectives. Good teaching, much like contemporary art, has a lot to do with taking risks. Perhaps the first risk may be to push an existing curriculum into new territory.

Working Without Warhol

Margaret Kilgallen, Work on paper from installation at UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Last month, five different Art21 artists were featured in the first five pages of Scholastic Art magazine, an issue that celebrated contemporary women artists including Laylah Ali (featured on the cover), Margaret Kilgallen, Kiki Smith, Susan Rothenberg, and Ida Applebroog. While the overly simplified titles of the two articles, “Drawing People” and “Sketching Animals,” didn’t exactly make me lean forward in my seat, the fact that Scholastic Art has made the move (and not just with this issue) to more comprehensively include contemporary art in the magazine is encouraging. Most art educators have memories, whether they are fond or frustrating, of utilizing Scholastic Art in our classrooms. But often, we would find more than one or two issues in a relatively short time span devoted to telling stories and sharing techniques that had been shared before…and perhaps before that. Images of certain artists and artworks forced some things to be pushed into the “Stairway to Heaven” category—a classic you just don’t want to hear (or see) anymore.

In the February issue of Scholastic Art students and teachers can learn about one of the approaches Laylah Ali uses to pull viewers into her paintings and the kinds of women Margaret Kilgallen features in her work. Readers can also learn more about Ida Applebroog’s strategy of separating her paintings into panels and about Susan Rothenberg’s dreamlike drawings. The second article even concludes with a description of the etching technique used in Kiki Smith’s Wolf Girl.

Besides Scholastic Art and the usual mix of glossy art mags available in art classrooms, are there other magazines—online or hard copy—that you are using in the classroom? BOMB has become a favorite for many of the classes I work with specifically because it features artists talking with other artists. Other suggestions?

Art21 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Art21 is collaborating with the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) on a public program series titled Art:21 at SAAM. The film series presents episodes from the award winning television program that include artists in the museum’s collection. Place (Season 1) will be shown on Wednesday, January 14 and features artists Laurie Anderson, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Sally Mann, Pepón Osorio, and Richard Serra. To whet your appetite, below is a clip from the episode.

Mark your calendars!

Art:21 at SAAM Films
Place, Season 1,  Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century
Wednesday, January 14 – 6:00 pm
McEvoy Auditorium, Lower Level
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Stories, Season 2,  Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century
Thursday, February 12– 6:00 pm
McEvoy Auditorium, Lower Level
Smithsonian American Art Museum

For more information on this and other programs at SAAM, visit AmericanArt.si.edu/calendar. Questions about this series should be directed to saamprograms[at]si.edu or (202)-633-8490. Dates for the spring series will be announced later this winter. Stay tuned!

Update: Beautiful Losers in New York

Beautiful Losers, the 2008 Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard film about contemporary art and urban creative culture, is currently showing at the IFC Center in Manhattan. Featuring a group of artists who “developed their craft with almost no influence from the ‘establishment’ art world,” the film includes Art21 artists Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen (both Season 1), as well as Cheryl Dunn, Harmony Korine, Mike Mills, Stephen Powers, Thomas Campbell, Shepard Fairey, Jo Jackson, Ed and Deanna Templeton, Geoff McFetridge and Chris Johanson. The film screens at IFC through Thursday, August 21, 2008; click here for showtimes.

Berliner Salon: Aaron Rose curates “Passion for the Possible” at Circle Culture Gallery

Aaron Rose, the California-based curator/musician behind the now-infamous Beautiful Losers exhibition, which championed the work of subculture “street artists” like Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen (both Season 1) and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2), has another genre-defying exhibition currently on view in Berlin at Circle Culture Gallery, the city’s preeminent commercial space for urban contemporary art. Entitled Passion for the Possible, this show presents a surprising facet of urban pop art (especially in conjunction with street art and all of its subversive implications), specifically the obsessive print-making efforts of Sister Corita, a one-time Catholic nun.

Actually, Sister Corita was more of a deviant than her sanctified vocation avowed and she ultimately left the church after being labeled “a guerilla with a paintbrush” (according to the press release). Her artistic practice is thus a fitting anachronism for Aaron Rose’s curatorial framework and general penchant for blurring boundaries between disparate cultures. The works on view, a combination of silkscreen prints, murals and sculpture incorporating “popular culture images such as archetypal American consumerist products…alongside spiritual texts, song lyrics and literary writings,” explicitly oppose the conformity typically associated with her brand of Catholicism’s hyper-conservative doctrine.

Sister Corita was predominately active in California during the 1960’s and 70’s. Her use of collective consumer imagery in mass-produced prints is noted in the press release as “the positive west-coast alternative to Warhol, possibly pre-dating him.” She left the Church in 1969, only to be diagnosed with cancer in the early 1970’s and given six months to live. She didn’t succumb to her illness for another seven years, but she nonetheless began an intense period of artistic production immediately following her diagnosis. Her work and her biography are both inspiring and inherently American (in relation to the bygone era that her work represents), bridging the divide between public service and self-expression, social responsibility and anti-institutional rebellion.

Passion for the Possible runs through May 30th. A monograph of works by Sister Corita, aka Corita Kent, entitled Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita, was recently published by Four Corners Books.

Beautiful Losers at SXSW

Headed to Austin, Texas this weekend for the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference? Don’t miss the world premier of Beautiful Losers, a film showcasing the work of artists Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen from Season 1 of Art:21, and Spark-featured artist Chris Johanson.

Pioneer skateboarding legend and musician Tommy Guerrero, also featured on Spark, will perform at SXSW this weekend with Money Mark, the composer of the Beautiful Losers soundtrack.

Educator guides related to the Spark films on Tommy Guerrero and Chris Johanson are available for free download.

Beautiful Losers trailer

Beautiful Losers, the new film about contemporary art and urban creative culture‚Äîprimarily springing from an East- (NYC) and West-coast (San Francisco/LA) do-it-yourself ethos‚Äîthat follows the book and exhibition by the same name, will hit theaters in Spring 2008. The film showcases a roster of artists whose work, inspired by the subcultures of skateboarding, surf, punk, hiphop, and graffiti, brought them together from the early 1990’s on. It also features exclusive footage of Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee shot by Art21. Other artists profiled in the documentary include Ed Templeton, Jo Jackson, Chris Johanson, Geoff McFetridge, Mike Mills, Steve Powers, Harmony Korine, Shepherd Fairey, and more.

Watch the trailer here.