Students in Maureen Hergott's class transform the space

Last week when I shared an interview with Julia CopperSmith and Maureen Hergott, two of our current Art21 Educators, one set of quotes particularly struck me. At one point I was asking about whether they both had an “a-ha” moment during our summer institute together and how that moment has influenced their teaching. Allow me to rewind for a moment:

How has that “a-ha” moment affected the year so far?

Maureen Hergott: Rather then designing “projects” for our students to make, Julia and I have been trying to develop lessons that allow our students to have contemporary art-making experiences.  We try to give them the foundation and confidence to be able to explore a variety of materials and make artistic choices on their own.  We want them to have a sense of pride in and ownership of their artwork.   Often times, we have the students working collaboratively so that they can share ideas and learn from one another.

Julia CopperSmith: I see my students once a week.  As an adult it is easy to forget that for an elementary school student a week is a long period of time. It has been helpful for my teaching to begin lessons by showing my students video clips from the prior week’s lesson. Using documentation as a starting point for discussion has assisted my students in building upon their prior learning experiences.

Maureen and Julia both make important points in this part of the interview and I wanted to highlight two of them this week…

First, if we want to truly transform art-making experiences for elementary age students and move away from step-by-step craft projects that are more about following directions than being creative, then we have to construct experiences for young students that allow them to think and behave like artists. For example, less “Here’s is how we are going to transform our space” and more “How can we transform our space?” Giving students the opportunity, not to mention power, to make creative choices is extremely important as we begin to expand on what elementary art education can be.

Second, Julia’s point about using video documentation to inspire discussion is an fantastic suggestion. There are literally tons of ways to take, make and share video at this point, and using video to bridge the often gargantuan gaps between elementary art classes can be a wonderful way to maintain continuity. Students don’t need to rehash the entire previous lesson, but a few minutes of reflection, discussion and planning can go a long way. And is it any surprise that students would love to see themselves in order to inspire themselves? I mean, really.

Many thanks once again to Julia and Maureen for agreeing to the interview and for sharing their perspective with us!

Julia and Maureen sharing a laugh in the classroom

This week I want to share a conversation that took place between myself and two of our current, amazing Art21 Educators…

Julia CopperSmith and Maureen Hergott teach elementary art education at Scott and Westdale Elementary Schools in Melrose Park and Northlake near Chicago. Their work has been inspiring to all of us here at Art21 so far this year, especially since they are finding ways to work with contemporary art and engage some very young students in the process. Since we will soon be accepting applications for year 4 of Art21 Educators, I am happy to post this interview which was just wrapped up last week. Enjoy!

Joe Fusaro: First, could you both talk about why you applied to be a part of the Art21 Educators program? Did one person convince the other? If so, how?

Julia CopperSmith: I learned about Art21 in college after watching an episode of Art in the 21st Century in an undergraduate studio foundations class. Art21 really impacted my thinking; I thought it was a really exciting program. I remained abreast of Art21’s programs, educational resources, and read Art21’s blog. I learned about Art21 Educators through the blog and immediately informed Maureen about it. Maureen and I had already been collaborating on lesson planning and attending other professional development activities together. We already had a great collaborative practice and parallel views about elementary art education. We were already focusing on teaching using contemporary methodologies and practices, and had both used Art21 artists and films in our lessons. So we thought this would be a perfect experience to participate in and hoped it would enrich our teaching practice.

Maureen Hergott: 
I remember being so excited and a little nervous when she first forwarded me the information.  While we had participated in several local contemporary arts professional development activities, this whole Art21 thing seemed like so much more of a big deal! I had seen a few Art21 episodes throughout the years and really enjoyed them, but never used the many resources Art21 had to offer in my nine years teaching art. Julia and I decided right away that we would be thrilled to participate in the program, so we embarked on the daunting application process.  I say “daunting” because, well… it IS daunting. Daunting yet do-able.  Actually, the application process turned out to be quite a learning experience for both of us.  We never really experimented at any length using iMovie, and we did just that to make our application videos.  We basically started learning some of the skills that would be required of us throughout the year as soon as we began the application process.

JF: What were you hoping to get out of participating when you first applied?

JCS: We wanted to have more of a conversation about how to incorporate contemporary art and art making practices into the elementary classroom. We had been discussing this topic between ourselves, and we wanted an opportunity to have this discussion with other teachers as well. We were also excited to meet other educators and hear about what they were doing with their students. We liked the idea of being in a community of educators, and wanted to see how they successfully incorporate contemporary art into their curriculum.

MH: In many of the other professional development workshops we attended together, there was a strong focus on how to teach with contemporary art at the high school level.  We felt (and still feel) that it was just as important to teach using contemporary art and art making practices with our elementary students.  We wanted to further expand our knowledge of using contemporary art in our classrooms.  We were also hoping to meet other art teachers with similar interests who wanted to teach in ways that might inspire our own teaching practice.

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This is the first January in a decade that I am not returning to a full time work schedule, and I am rediscovering the academic limbo that is winter break. Most schools will not reopen their doors to students until late in the month, and after spending nearly every day with something due the next one, I was feeling symptoms of withdrawal. As a creature of habit, I craved some structure. By stroke of luck, I managed to secure a teaching assistantship with Daniel Shiffman, the renowned guru of processing. He is teaching a two-week intensive course on programming and code-based art to a group of NYU Abu Dhabi undergraduates, and I get to sit in to occasionally help.

Daniel Shiffman, "Swarm," 2002. Courtesy the artist.

I am, by far, getting the better end of the bargain. I have taken two courses with Shiffman already, and his teaching style never ceases to amaze me. He takes on very difficult concepts on algorithms and programming and can explain them for both the experienced coder and the technophobic artist in one entertaining package. He is also one of the nicest people I have ever met, and one specific benefit of that is he has many talented friends. Two of them, Jer Thorp and Marius Watz, gave a guest lecture.

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Ai Weiwei, "Sunflower Seeds", 2010 installation view. Image: dezeen.com

In just a few months there’s going to be a lot happening here at Art21…. Even more than usual.

On April 13^th, we kick off season 6 of Art in the Twenty-First Century on PBS with the Change episode featuring Ai Weiwei, El Anatsui and Catherine Opie. That alone has us smiling.

But fast-forward to July and we also get to launch year four of Art21 Educators. If you know a little bit about the Art21 Educators program but would like more details, read on!

Art21 Educators is an intensive, year long professional development initiative designed to support K-12 visual arts, language arts, humanities, social studies, and media arts teachers who are interested in bringing contemporary art, artists, and themes into their classroom. The program serves to help teachers broaden their curricular focus to include inquiry into contemporary issues and questions that demand cross-curricular knowledge.

Our fourth year begins in early July with the Summer Institute here in New York City. For that first week participants work with Art21 staff, visiting artists, and guest presenters to develop their familiarity with contemporary art and artists, as well as learn strategies for planning and teaching with big questions and an interdisciplinary focus. Accepted educators explore ways to use Art21 films and educational materials in the classroom, consider new documentation strategies and participate in collaborative reflection.

All participants (that’s right- everyone) receive a complete set of Art in the Twenty-First Century DVDs, related Educators’ Guides, Companion Books, a video camera, and an introduction to a variety of online media resources and strategies for teaching with contemporary art. Participants design and develop curriculum related to their own classrooms, watch and talk about films, visit museums and galleries, and get to talk with artists and other educators. Teachers return to their classrooms with a unique unit of study that they have designed to teach during the school year, as well as lesson ideas and resources generated by fellow participants.

Sessions this summer will include:

• Contemporary Art in Contemporary Classrooms
• Exploring Contemporary Questions
• Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Contemporary Art
• Curating the Classroom
• Interdisciplinary, Thematic, and Postmodern Practices in the Classroom
• Technology tutorials
• Studio visits and guest presenters

For application information, stay tuned to art21.org for details in the coming weeks. And for an inside scoop on what the Art21 Educators program is like, check out the Teaching with Contemporary Art column next week when I will interview two of our current educators, Maureen Hergott and Julia CopperSmith.

See you then.

Paul McCarthy, "White Snow and Dopey, Wood", 2011. Image: artobserved.com

Up until recently, I was unaware of how difficult it is for some students (and perhaps adults) to reach into their memories and use a past event, sound, place or even scent to influence the development of a work of art. A few weeks ago as part of a larger sculpture unit exploring how memories can be represented, I asked one of my classes to sketch two different memories in three different ways for a total of six small drawings. The three ways included:

1. Sketching the actual memory as best they could- no shading or intricate details necessary at first
2. Sketching an abstract representation of the memory using shape, color, texture, etc.,
3. Choosing a word that somehow describes the memory and then finding a way to draw or design the word itself as a representation of it.

Getting students to think about the two memories in three different ways, I had hoped, would allow them to explore what they recalled in more detail. But I was amazed- no, floored- at the number of students who “couldn’t think of a memory to try” or students who bitterly complained they “didn’t want to draw a memory.” I kept thinking that the assignment, which was part of an introduction to representing memory three-dimensionally, was broad enough to have students reach back as far as they liked in order to share a fun, funny, bizarre, bitter or celebratory memory and influence their initial brainstorming. But getting these first sketches done was pure agony for some.

Now that we’re further into this particular unit, I look back on that first week and wonder how I may have started off differently. I thought a lot about what students needed in the beginning in order to more freely explore their own memories and share them. In the end it was no surprise that I came up with basically my own advice, given to other educators many times before… Share better examples and do more “front-end” work.

While I had asked students to draw two different memories to start, I hadn’t shared very many artists at that point who use memory to inspire their own work. I also hadn’t asked students to talk with their parents or family members about what they remembered about their own childhood, just as a way to trigger certain ways of thinking. Sure, we had discussed and briefly looked into works that gave specific memories form, such as the Iwo Jima Memorial and Janine Antoni’s “Moor”. We even had the opportunity to talk about how memory is constructed and the fact that specific events can be remembered very differently by people who experience them together. But we didn’t do enough to get good quality ideas going in and as a result I have quite a few half-baked sculptures (both literally and figuratively) that explore memories even the students themselves consider inconsequential.

Looking back a few weeks, and looking forward to trying this again in the future, I would share a more diverse range of artists and art works that specifically deal with memory in various ways. I would consider sharing Josiah McElheny’s work and paintings by Susan Rothenberg. I’d (carefully) select works by Paul McCarthy and perhaps Judy Pfaff, Mark Bradford and Mike Kelley. I would even include a range of works by surrealists such as René Magritte.

Working with memory presents challenges, like many themes and ideas we choose to teach with, that are terribly difficult to get rolling without an organized, broad and juicy introduction. Still, the great thing about teaching is that we get to continuously reflect on our work and make it better for the next time around.

Katharina Grosse, installation view of One Floor Up More Highly at Mass MoCA. Image: ContemporaryArtDaily.com

Following up on last week’s post, I’d like to conclude with a few more shows that flew under the radar in 2011:

“Katharina Grosse: One Floor Up More Highly” at Mass MoCA. Hated this show the first time I saw it and loved it on the second and third visits. Grosse teaches us, like many artists who work with installation, that an exhibit has to work on you before making a decision about whether or not you “like” it. Spray painting directly onto the walls as well as huge mounds of dirt and Styrofoam, this show had the effect of stepping into another world. And while Grosse sees her work as neither representational or abstract, one couldn’t help associating some elements with massive piles of dried pigment or hyper-enlarged ice crystals. Another thing I really enjoyed was how the installation changed dramatically depending on where you stood in the gigantic space.

“Dana Schutz: If The Face Had Wheels” at the Neuberger Museum. As much as it kills me to admit it, especially after what I wrote about him last year, Jerry Saltz really said it best: “Given the continued imbalance in the system, for a woman to paint at all is still a political act; for her to do so in a vaguely gestural figurative style is almost insurrectionary. The show proves that like all outstanding artists, Schutz probably has an extra wrinkle in her frontal lobe.” Besides, how can anyone resist “Shaking, Cooking, Peeing” as a metaphor for…. everything?

“Richard Serra: Junction/Cycle” at Gagosian Gallery. Serra’s two new sculptures at Gagosian left me with the same reactions I had experiencing his work for the first time many years ago. While feeling a little seasick I simultaneously wanted to walk and weave through the spaces, encounter other visitors unexpectedly and run my hands along the orange-brown walls that tilted and loomed in many of the tight spaces. Getting these two pieces into Gagosian’s gallery must have been one hell of a trick and I wonder if anyone has it on time-lapse video? That would be something to share with students.

“Glenn Ligon: AMERICA” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Stepping off the elevator and into Ligon’s silkscreened photograph, Hands, was a tremendous start to a show that was both gorgeous and provocative. In so many of the works, both  literally and figuratively, America stared us in the face and then turned away, leaving us with nothing but space to reflect on where we are in this place and time.

“Laurel Nakadate: Only the Lonely” at MoMA P.S. 1. What I enjoyed most about this show was how Nakadate experiments with meeting strangers and role playing in order to create films and photographs. It literally made me fear for her safety but also admire that ability to inject herself into very different situations in order to make the work.

Happy New Year to All and THANK YOU for reading in 2011…

George Condo, "Jesus", 2002. Collection of Nancy and Robert Magoon.

The past year has been inspiring and simultaneously unpredictable when it comes to exhibitions. Whether it was celebrated blockbusters like Alexander McQueen or the current DeKooning show at MoMA, there is and was plenty to see, especially for educators interested in contemporary art. Think about it… In 2011 you could have spent 24 hours with Christian Marclay or done a long, slow pour with Lynda Benglis. You could have taken it outside for Art in The Streets at L.A.MoCA or grabbed your walking (not to mention, driving) shoes for Pacific Standard Time.

But some shows flew a little under the radar, even a few housed in major museums, and they had plenty to offer when it comes to teaching. This week I wanted to share the first of two posts dedicated to some inspiring shows that made me look again this past year. Links are included to the shows and/or examples of the work.

“George Condo: Mental States” at the New Museum. Forget about any renewed possibilities for hanging a show salon style, even though that’s probably worth looking into, this show thrust Condo’s portraits of invented characters into my line of vision when I was actually at the New Museum to catch the Lynda Benglis show. Condo’s exhibit proved one can most definitely be blown away by surprise. His work, to me, felt somehow comical and compassionate all at the same time. Portraiture gone wild. Kanye West knew what he was doing.

“Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989)” at ClampArt. I had seen Morrisoe’s work reproduced before, but never in person. Looking into the Poloroids had me imagining, over and over, the stories behind the pictures (or the pictures behind the stories- one of the two). During this exhibit I realized some of the best photography first makes you wonder about the story and then… the photographer. This isn’t always the case with drawing, painting or sculpture.

“Nick Cave: Meet Me At The Center Of The Earth” at the Seattle Art Museum. Cave’s narrative about the original Soundsuits, conceived shortly after Septemeber 11^th and reproduced on the wall of the museum, had me hooked from the start. While McQueen’s threads were certainly entertaining, I still find Cave’s more energetic and compelling. Brash, infectious inspiration that isn’t just for sculptors or those interested in textiles.

Howard Hodgkin at Gagosian Gallery. This show (still on view through the end of the week) is a wild and joyous example of precision in gesture and color. Hodgkin’s painting taught me to examine the texture and juxtaposition between lights and darks in his paintings on wood. Often literally working outside the box, this exhibit encouraged a physical response, even if it was simply to sit on the benches and linger. (Imagine that? Lingering? On benches? In a major gallery with Hodgkin’s color and brushstrokes everywhere you look?). Can bold, gestural painting make you slow down and see? Absolutely.

“Day Job” at The Drawing Center. This was one of the more inspirational group shows of the year, curated by Nina Katchadourian, and featured artists who created works somehow related to their jobs or used the exhibition theme to begin a new project. I was introduced to the exquisite drawing of Pasquale Cortese and the layered constructions of Luis Romero, and that’s just for starters. Working artists left there thinking, “I can do this.” At least I did.

Next week:

Richard Serra returns.

Love it or hate it- Laurel Nakadate.

Katharina Grosse at Mass MoCA.

And more!

Wishing everyone a wonderful holiday…

JF

This past weekend was ITP’s annual winter show, which marks the end of our Fall semester. I decided not to submit any of my own work because the incredibly slick Yale Evelev of Luaka Bop made my Gamelan Orchestra an offer we could not refuse: to play four amazing nights at The Stone, John Zorn’s well regarded experimental and avant-garde performance space.

Luaka Bop Residency at The Stone, December 2011. Courtesy Luaka Bop.

Yale went to Indonesia for the first time in 1979 and was struck by the casual ambience of gamelan and wayang kulit performances in the villages of Java. “…The audience and the performers were on the same level and interspersed,” Yale explained. “It was magical for me hearing these sonorities up close without the distance of a stage and the normal formalities of a western concert.” He wanted to recreate this experience by pairing us with some amazing acts, one of which I have been following for quite some time.

I first discovered Lucky Dragons, the band/art-collective consisting of Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara, while researching fabric capacitive sensors for a touch-sensitive curtain. I was directed to their “Make a Baby” project and became hooked on their music. Lucky Dragons often require their audience to touch each other in order to complete a circuit, creating electronic sound with their interaction. This basic model effectively translates a pure human-to-human experience to the digital world.

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This work is about the way light shapes things when “cut” by physical obstructions.- Isadora Rosenbloom

A few weeks ago I wrote a post (public therapy, actually) about my anxiety as I organized a student exhibit at Hopper House here in New York. The seventeen artists who participated were each asked to choose a work by Edward Hopper and create a new piece in response to being inspired by the artist. Students were even told in advance that a small reproduction of the painting they chose would hang alongside their work, as well as a short narrative or quote they would write upon completion.

This week I want to share some of the works that were created as part of the show, “Reasons to Paint”. Hopper once said that if it could be said in words, there would be no reason to paint. And while many of the seventeen artists chose to indeed respond in painting, others chose photography and even mixed media. Here is a sampling of works from the show, which runs through December 24^th :

In this photograph I wanted to explore the extreme contrasts of light found in Hopper paintings.- Nikolai Stern

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