Inside the Artist’s Studio: Christa Holka
Christa Holka out and about!
Christa Holka is an American photographer based in London. She holds an MA in Fine Arts from the Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in London, a BFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, and a BA in Literature from The State University of New York. There are many reasons I went through the trouble to meet her at the cozy FIRST OUT CAFE-BAR in central London to discuss her work. At a first glance, Christa struck me to be a stylish, hip, cool, creative, on-the-scene individual with a mission – specifically a queer mission, which she rushed to define for me in Judith Butler’s words:
Christa Holka, "Harley Frosted Beard"
My understanding of queer is a term that desires that you don’t have to present an identity card before entering a meeting. Heterosexuals can join the queer movement. Bisexuals can join the queer movement. Queer is not being lesbian. Queer is not being gay. It is an argument against lesbian specificity: that if I am a lesbian I have to desire in a certain way. Or if I am a gay I have to desire in a certain way. Queer is an argument against certain normativity, what a proper lesbian or gay identity is.
Christa Holka, "Jillian & Nancy NYC"
Christa turned out to be down-to-earth conversationalist, whose vision and agenda is not coincidental but rather rooted in the very core of who she is. Back in Chicago, she was a member of the infamous The Chicago Kings, a drag performance troupe that played a key role in the development of her work. In an Artxxmagazine interview, Christa sums up that experience:
After my first time on stage with the Chicago Kings, I was totally hooked. I mean how could I not be? At our first show there were over 300 people in this tiny back room of a sports bar in a weird neighborhood in Chicago’s West Loop and that night the bar was having some kind of flooding problem, but that didn’t stop anyone. The night was electric. The crowd was hungry and we were feeding them. It was like everyone had been waiting for this moment and finally it was there. What was so attractive about us? Jeez! I’m not sure! Maybe that’s a better question for people who were in the audience? For me, what I liked about it was being on stage, performing and getting so much attention for it. Girls were screaming, always wanting more! I seriously felt like a rock star sometimes. In the beginning I didn’t really think about the provocative statements we were making, it was just happening. It was a lot of collaborating and many of us were artists so it was this big performative collaboration that happened to be drag king performances.
Christa Holka, "Swim-suit boys," London, 2008
A highly social artist, Holka has made it her business to capture moments of queer manifestations with her Canon 5D or the Canon Ixus 960IS (digital point and shoot), Mamiya 645 Pro, or even her Diana Holga. She has long earned the trust of her subjects and nearly 50,000 images prove just that. They can be found on Flickr, Facebook, and her own website. Befriend Christa to get a sense of why she is also knows as the Queer Paparazzi and if you happen to be a socialite in London, be aware of the lady behind the flashes.
Christa Holka, "Liz"
The predecessors responsible for Christa’s career path are: Nan Goldin Claude Cahun, Philip Lorca di Corcia, Tina Barney, Larry Clarke, Brian Finke, Wolfgang Tillmans, Dash Snow, Martin Parr, Guy Bourdin, Nikki S. Lee, Larry Sultan and others.
Read on, simply because what the naked eye sees as a plaid-shirt community, the camera lens re-articulates as a culturally and politically queer archive.
Georgia Kotretsos: Let’s take this from the beginning… tell me about the community that fills your memory cards. What does it mean to you? What are you looking at and for through your camera lens?
Christa Holka: Well, my community is made up of my very close friends, acquaintances and people in general who are engaged with non-normative temporalities, people on a different timeline than heteronormative culture. Like, we go out and play in the park at midnight and ride bikes through the streets and play games at times when people in normative communities are doing the whole reproductive schedule thing: get married, buy a house, have kids, etc. I mean, of course queers are also doing that in various ways, and I’m not against that, it’s just not the schedule I’m on at the moment. My community is also a time and a place where I feel a sense of belonging. My friends mean the world to me; they are a part of me. I think of them like family. I’m looking at my community through my camera, trying to write a part of a queer history capturing glimpses of the time and space I occupy. Like historians, I’m looking for a way to make sense of what’s happening now, looking at the past, to look forward to what’s next.
Weekly Roundup
Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, "Better Dimension (detail)", 2010. Ink and tape on glass slide from an installation of silkscreened wood panels, four Hasselblad slide projectors, one 16 mm eiki projector, resin and steel projection screen, 106 × 252 × 268 in. Collection of the artist; courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.
Biennials, cremated canvases, German faces, cashmere sportswear, sculptural tour de force, fashionable shoes, and an iPhone app comprise this week’s roundup:
- 2010: Whitney Biennial will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday, February 25. Art21’s Ellen Gallagher (Season 3) is one of fifty-five artists selected by curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari for this year’s show. She was also included in the 1995 Biennial, and had a solo exhibition at the museum in 2005. This time Gallagher has partnered with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne on a film installation that includes sculptural construction and silk-screened panels. Gallagher recently told The Providence Journal: “In some ways, it feels very similar to my first Biennial. I mean, it’s a huge honor for any artist to be invited to participate in a Whitney Biennial. In a way, it’s a little like being nominated for an Academy Award. You feel this wonderful sense of validation.” 2010 is on view through May 30.
- Shrew’d: The Smart & Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, a biennial invitational at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art, focuses on the work of artists who question social norms of representation in art, pop culture and daily life. According to the website, the survey “takes a critical feminist perspective on society’s mixed messages about assertive women, which describes what some contemporary women artists have had to become.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), whose work is included in the exhibition, will lecture at the museum on March 30. Shrew’d continues through May 9. (Watch a slideshow here.)
- Pure Beauty is the largest retrospective exhibition ever mounted in Spain that is dedicated to Season 5 artist John Baldessari. The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona display features more than 130 works created between 1962 and 2009. Curated by Leslie Jones, Jessica Morgan and Bartomeu Marí, the exhibition brings together many of the artist’s most relevant works, such as God Nose (1965); Cremation Project (1970), which marked Baldessari’s burning of all the canvases he had produced between May 1953 and March 1966, accompanied by its corresponding urn, commemorative plaque and death notice published in the San Diego Union newspaper; Commissioned Paintings (1969); and Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), featuring the artist singing every one of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five conceptual statements to the music of different popular tunes, such as “Singing in the Rain” and the American national anthem. Pure Beauty (titled for one of Baldessari’s early works) will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- German Faces — an exhibition that draws from a long-term body of work by Season 2 artist Collier Schorr — is on view at Modern Art Gallery in London through March 20. Every summer for the past 18 years, Schorr has traveled to southern Germany, working in and around the small town of Schwäbisch Gmünd. She used the landscapes of artists Sander, Kiefer, Beuys, Baselitz and Chagall as a ground on which to play out imagined and inherited histories of Germany and her own Jewish heritage. Schorr’s images are further influenced by reportage, fictional films, and portrait photography. The installation of this project, completely arranged by the artist, includes photographs, drawings, collages and videos. Schorr was recently named “Artist of the Week” by The Guardian.
- Through April 23, works by Season 2 artist Maya Lin are on view at The Arts Club of Chicago. The exhibition includes wood constructed land formations and bodies of water, wire wall pieces, drawings, pastel rubbings, and a piece created specifically for the city. According to Chicago Art Magazine, “Maya Lin’s show is a sculptural tour de force, which will surely be counted among the year’s best.”
- Art21 artists Vija Celmins (Season 2) and Robert Ryman (Season 4) have inspired recent runway fashions. Payless ShoeSource tapped designer Lela Rose for a special fall shoe collection that debuted during New York Fashion Week. According to CNN Money, “The collection’s inspiration stems from the textural and ‘craggy’ landscapes of the moon and earth, and the graphite works by Vija Celmins featuring lunar floors and nighttime skies.” Huffington Post reports that designer Jason Wu’s fall collection was inspired by Ryman’s monochromatic canvases, resulting in minimalist “sportswear with a highly civilized twist and turn.”
- Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1) and Lari Pittman (Season 4) are featured in the exhibition Disquieted at the Portland Art Museum. The show explores our social condition and how living artists have responded, challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in turbulent times. The exhibition boasts its own iPhone application that includes video interviews with artists; commentary from curators and educators; and a map so visitors can easily locate featured works of art. Disquieted is on view through May 16.
An Artist and a Citizen
Theaster Gates
Theaster Gates is an artist living and working in Chicago. Labeling him an artist certainly does not capture who he is and what he does, though. He is often referred to as an activist, community organizer, and performer, among other things. When asked about his art practice and all the labels attached to him, he responds by saying he is a problem solver. His interests are broad, and his solutions lead him into a variety of genres and material. Lately, he has been giving public lectures and presentations. Many times, his work is presented in exhibitions.
Gates’s work often takes place in the public arena with public gatherings or lectures. When asked what draws him to this method of engagement, Gates’s response is that, “there is a type of power in the public”—either in the ability to voice one’s opinion and know that it is being heard, or through the social aspect. As he explains, “I accept that the byproduct of me getting people together is that people might call it art or call it an activist moment, and that’s just fine. The part I’m trying to concentrate on is this: if I have a set of relationships that are broad and wide, how can I bring those relationships into conversation with each other when necessary or when I’m curious?”
To that end, Gates’s latest project confronts a variety of issues through gathering people around a meal. Gates and I spoke on October 28, 2009 by phone to discuss this developing project. His upcoming projects include Theaster Gates: Resurrecting Dave the Potter at the Milwaukee Art Museum (April 15-August 1, 2010) and an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Kelly Huang: Food has been a reoccurring subject in your work. Back in the spring, we spoke about a soul food project that you will be hosting on the South Side of Chicago in the near future. You describe how food is an important part of every culture—how it shapes people’s memories of place, speaks to history, and has the power to bring people together. Could you tell me more about the project you are working on and how you first conceptualized it?
Theaster Gates: I was approached by Stephanie Smith (Curator of Contemporary Art, Smart Museum), who was thinking about a project called Feast: Radical Hospitality and Contemporary Art. Feast was to be an attempt at surveying the history of food practices in contemporary art. She asked me pretty simply, “What would you want to do?” And I said, I am feeling pretty good about doing things outside of museums and I would like to try and relocate a food space outside of your museum, and concentrate on soul food, because it has such a rich history on the South Side. I decided to acquire a building on my block and over the next one and a half years, slowly build out that space into a sort of soul food temple, where—in the spirit of critical discourse on art practices and social practices—one could eat really good food.
But, it’s not just about food to the extent that food is a signifier of certain cultural behaviors, rituals. Food acts as a material I can play with to tease out certain rituals inherent in black people, Koreans, Chinese, white people, middle Americans. I think that the project has always been my labor and I will benefit from the fact that there are museums and other types of museums that are interested in what you call the “gastro-arts.”
Gastro-Vision: Breaking Bread
John Baldessari, "Yours in Food" book jacket image. Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.
Gastro-Vision is a new monthly column dedicated to all things food in contemporary art and visual culture. This month’s post also falls under the Flash Points topic, Systems.
Yours in Food — by Season 5 artist John Baldessari — had, like many other books, been on my Amazon wish list for a couple of years. When I stumbled upon a used copy at Biography Bookshop in Manhattan (note: across the street from Magnolia Bakery) this summer, what had before appeared fun and frivolous seemed a requisite purchase.
Flipping through, I found provocative images of food, dinner tables and eaters, appropriated from film and video as is characteristic of Baldessari’s work. A group of young men wearing overalls and plaid shirts seated for a meal of mashed potatoes, milk and other ostensibly hearty foods suggests a rural working class family. The face at the head of the table is covered by one of Baldessari’s signature colored dots. In other images, a banquet table procession of porcelain dishware and brass candelabras, flanked by women in sequin dresses and pearls, speaks to high society. A picture of stainless steel cafeteria trays and husky men in denim blue shirts hints at a prison scene. Baldessari inserts his hand again in a candid black-and-white shot of a lodge-like dining scene; a series of white circles obscure the faces of white males, suggesting homogeny and self-segregation. On the book jacket (above), jarred pickles and olives, ketchup, a stack of white bread, and what resembles a can of Cheez Whiz, call to mind the all-American pantry. Between these vignettes, Paul Auster, Peter Schjeldahl, David Bryne, Lynne Tilman, Tim Griffin and other notable writers share tales of love, loss and toast; poverty and onion pie; Thanksgiving gluttony; and other reflections on “taste.” Yours in Food is, on the whole, a study of the shared meal, or “breaking bread.”
"Don't Perish" Dinner #3. Courtesy Joseph Montgomery and Jesse Willenbring.
"Don't Perish" Dinner #3. Courtesy Joseph Montgomery and Jesse Willenbring.
“The act of sharing food and drink with others is…an enduring source of aesthetic inspiration,” writes Stephanie Smith, curator of the forthcoming exhibition Feast: Radical Hospitality and Contemporary Art, “Today, the shared meal has become a compelling artistic medium.” Every so often it also inspires a whole curatorial thesis. For the exhibition Don’t Perish, recently at Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte in Manhattan, curators (and practicing artists) Joseph Montgomery and Jesse Willenbring invited friends and strangers to look at work with them “over a meal.” This group show, dinner series, and food-drive in one–an alternative to passive viewing–involved nine potlucks at the gallery spread out over four weeks. Similar to Baldessari, Montgomery and Willenbring demonstrate how the shared meal is itself a system, or paradigm by which to engage viewers in a concept and body of work. Montgomery says:
We had anywhere from 15 to 30 people per night. Tuesday nights were very crowded. Saturday nights on the smaller side. Conversations changed the work…Everything was not original; conversations were repeated [and] similar dishes cooked, but the act of being there again and again brought strength and endurance to the show…All the smoke, smells, looking, colors, breath, and words were absorbed, polished into the art, tables and shelves.
Urban Homestead
Wood on the stove at Urban Homestead, 2009. Courtesy Nance Klehm.
Urban Homestead is a residency run out of Chicago-based ecologist Nance Klehm’s home. Residents stay with Nance for various periods of time and help keep the home running. This includes working in its huge yard garden, herding quail, and helping compost among other things. According to the website, Urban Homestead “is a residence that is open to working travelers and out-of-towners for stays of a few days to a few weeks and sometimes a few months. It fills the niche of people who find themselves in Chicago perhaps working on art or research or cultural connections who want to live in an urban immigrant neighborhood in a house that has an ecological emphasis.”
Nance invited two past residents to answer my questions with her. The first is Peter Olsen, enrolled at the Jutland Art Academy in Arhus, Denmark and currently on a self-study course in Chicago. He was resident for three weeks in September 2009. The second is Sarah Kavage of Seattle, WA, resident for one week in May 2009.
Bryce Dwyer: Do you see a connection between the practice of homesteading and artistic practice in general?
Nance Klehm: Homesteading is part of my artistic practice. Homesteading inherently involves constant creative problem solving.
Sarah Kavage: I would say that connection is through physical labor, learning by doing, and creating something that exists in physical space.
BD: Would you describe a past resident’s project and speak about how the ecology of the residency influenced it?
SK: I was at the Urban Homestead to do preliminary research on an art project about agricultural production, exchange and distribution, which will begin with the purchase of 1000 bushels of wheat on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Being immersed in the Urban Homestead prodded me to think more deeply about what I was doing, and how to use this project to create real nourishment and abundance. There was a grounding and a clarity that came from being in a space that was a whole system – where I wasn’t just a consumer, but a part of a cycle. I weeded the garden and these weeds became dinner for me and Nance, two chickens and a bunny. The chickens made eggs for breakfast. Our dishwater watered the plants. Our poop (eventually) became manure. It was glorious to think about all that was happening on this little tiny speck of land in the middle of one of the largest urban areas in the country. If you asked me, I’d say, “Of course you get out of life what you put into it,” but the Urban Homestead was a physical lesson in actually doing that.
Peter Olsen: The projects I normally do take place in the area that surrounds me and in public space, so I was very influenced by staying here. First, the location of the residence: an interesting Mexican neighborhood [Chicago's Little Village -BD]. An area you have to face and forces you to think about a Mexican society placed in Chicago. Gangs, Mexican families, Spanish and tortillas everywhere. No white people but me (and Nance). While living in this area I got a very different view of Chicago than if I had lived anywhere else.
Public Collectors
Some of Public Collectors' collections, 2009. Courtesy Marc Fischer.
Public Collectors is a project run by Marc Fischer in Chicago. It began with the notion that there are all sorts of things that libraries, museums, and other institutions that store cultural objects don’t incorporate into their own collections. Alongside the public collecting of these institutions, there are a host of people out in the world who collect just these sorts of “miscellaneous” objects themselves, maintaining them at their home in private collections. Fischer asks these sorts of collectors to organize their collections and make them available publicly. Public Collectors identifies a deficiency in a system and attempts to remedy it with another system. This remedy is less formal, rooted in mutual enthusiasm, and played out in a private space made public.
On the Public Collectors website, one can peruse the inventories of these collections and arrange to visit them. Most of them are in Chicago, but there are also collections in London, Iowa City, Baltimore, and De Pere, Wisconsin.
Last month Public Collectors launched a new blog that spotlights various objects in the collections. So far, they’ve ranged from a twenty-five year old issue of High Performance to a 1960 book of typography, thrown out by a Chicago public library, that instructs the reader in the art of making hand-painted signs. More variously assimilable examples are posted on the blog every few days or so.
Unconventional Residencies
Hideous Beast, "Mini Movie Fest hosted during their InCUBATE residency," 2008. Courtesy Charlie Roderick.
Last November, the National Endowment for the Arts established a new funding category explicitly for artist communities. The NEA defines an artist community as “an organization, whether focused on a single discipline or multidisciplinary, whose sole mission is to provide artist residencies.” This unprecedented recognition of the importance residencies play in the contemporary art ecology also serves as a way for the NEA to support the activities of individual artists without the political liability of direct grants to them. The recent dust-up over an NEA conference call encouraging artists to support certain domestic policy agendas is only the most recent example of how the agency continues to be a political flashpoint.
Residencies are an important step in one path to professionalization taken by artists today. Many artists’ CVs have subheadings devoted to residencies they’ve been on, in addition to documenting their education, exhibitions they’ve shown in, and collections to which their work belongs. Residencies serve artists from every discipline, who benefit from them in a variety of ways. They provide devoted studio space and time to complete work and allow artists to operate in new contexts. They serve as postgraduate institutions where artists can continue working out ideas in a social setting. They offer facilities that an artist might not normally have access to and potential collaborators they might not ever have met. Some residencies are invite-only, and others have competitive application processes. This diversity of organizational models is what allows residencies to serve so many artists — the precise reason that funding them makes sense for the National Endowment for the Arts.
But in addition to the residency organizations currently eligible for funding by the NEA, those that run as non-profit 501(c)(3)’s, there exists a great number of unconventional residencies operating under independent organizational models and at radically different scales. They don’t have traditional boards and tend not to be eligible for public funding. Sometimes they operate out of a spare bedroom at the home of the artist or administrator in charge. Others are nomadic, and never work out of a fixed place. Some are hosted in a string of places that open and close as spaces become available. All of them nurture especially strong connections between the artist on the residency and person or persons who administrate it. With administrative duties minimized, the administrators of these residencies take especially active roles in shaping the artist’s work. What they may lack in artist’s facilities, they compensate for with an intense investment in the artist’s residency experience.
For the past two years, I’ve co-run just such a residency as a member of The Institute for Community Understanding Between Art and the Everyday (InCUBATE). In that time, we’ve hosted fourteen residents (including four collectives) out of a storefront in Chicago. InCUBATE is a research group dedicated to exploring and documenting experimental approaches to arts administration and arts funding. In addition to running the residency, we produce and participate in exhibitions, organize public programs, and co-manage the storefront with three other organizations. We accept applications from people working in any discipline to come stay in a bedroom at our storefront from one to three months and work with us on their projects. These projects are generally interdisciplinary, and produce some sort of resource available for public use. The InCUBATE residency is an opportunity for us, as young arts administrators, to both test out ideas and to collaborate with a wide variety of people whose work we’re interested in.
My own personal investment in unconventional residencies led me to the Alliance of Artists Communities in Providence, Rhode Island. I spent six weeks there this past summer researching other groups and spaces operating residencies at scales and with values similar to InCUBATE’s. Over the course of the next two weeks, I’ll be conducting interviews with some of these residencies and posting them here. I hope to show that they make up an important informal system for a host of people working in modes outside or parallel to traditional art infrastructures.
New guest blogger: Bryce Dwyer
Thanks to Max Weintraub for his considerate and considerable series of posts on Sally Mann, Roxy Paine, Salvador Dali, and the Pictures Generation (don’t miss the lengthy debate that ensued in the comments on this one).
Up next through October 4 is Chicago-based Bryce Dwyer. Bryce is in the final year of the Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism and Arts Administration and Policy graduate program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He spent this past summer in Providence, Rhode Island, researching unconventional residencies at the Alliance of Artists Communities and assembling an archive of AS220’s artists-in-residence program. He is one of the co-directors of the Institute for Community Understanding Between Art and the Everyday (InCUBATE), a research group dedicated to exploring and documenting experimental approaches to arts administration and arts funding. InCUBATE produces and participates in exhibitions, runs a residency program, co-manages a storefront, and puts on public programs. He recently published an essay, “Belgianness and Tactical Nationhood,” in the inaugural issue of Motherwell and, with InCUBATE, will be collaborating with Randall Szott for a public programming series called “In Search of the Mundane” at Chicago’s threewalls in October and November.
Hybrids
Vesna Jovanovic, "New Mitosis," 2008. Ink spills, graphite, pencil. Courtesy the Artist.
In an exhibition currently on view at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, artist Vesna Jovanovic both courts and antagonizes the intersection of art and science in the role of the medical illustrator. In this traditional division of labor, science provides the content and the standards of representation, while art serves as the means of communication. Where other artists have inverted this relationship by employing scientists and scientific techniques as means for producing novel artifacts [such Eduardo Kac's transgenic organisms or Gary Schneider's Genetic Self-Portait (1998)], Jovanovic works within scientific conventions of realism to explore how they have been internalized and how they might be transformed by artistic practice.
This year’s exhibition of Anatomy in the Gallery, on view until October 16, juxtaposes work by students and faculty from the University of Illinois – Chicago’s Biomedical Visualization program with Jovanovic’s series of drawings based on ink spills, Pareidolia. ‘Pareidolia’ is a psychological term for the common tendency to perceive order or significance in random visual or auditory stimuli, like seeing the shapes of animals in clouds, or faces in the moon. Jovanovic uses ink spills, like rorschach tests, for exploring the ways in which scientific imagery and concepts reside in our collective unconscious—where, it seems, medical instruments, chemistry equipment, organs, and blood vessels grow and mutate into monstrous chimeras.
Eva Sutton, still from "Hybrids," 2000. Installation on LCD flat-panel.
I had the opportunity to see selections from Pareidolia, along with pieces from Jovanovic’s Hybrid series, in another scientific venue, the Gordon Center for Integrative Science at the University of Chicago last May. In Timekeeper (Self Portrait) (2007), inkblots are replaced by medical images that reflect a lifetime of the artist’s ailments and injuries. In the shadowy images produced by x-rays and MRI scans, Jovanovic discerns, through a process that could also be likened to pareidolia, a kind of physiological unconscious. The result is an anachronistic cyborg composed of new and old machines, human and animal parts, a body that is at once imaginary and hyper-real.
Contemporary Art in Contemporary Classrooms: Art21 Educators 2009
Oliver Herring - TASK at the Former Federal Security Bank, 2003
Starting today, Art21 is pleased to welcome K-12 teachers from across the country to participate in our first summer institute, Art21 Educators. Jessica Hamlin, Marc Mayer, Joy Lai (our amazing education intern), and myself will be joined by Art21 colleagues, fellow educators, and artists for one week to share approaches for incorporating contemporary art in and out of the classroom—revising and re-energizing curricula with teachers who applied to participate in this annual program. The teachers are:
- Casey Carlock, Mary Lyon Elementary, Chicago, IL
- Jenny Davidson, Sammamish High School, Seattle, WA
- Jennie M. Duke, Beacon High School, Beacon, NY
- June Edmonds, Lawndale School District, Lawndale, CA
- Kristine Hatanaka, Culver City High School, Culver City, CA
- Lluvia Higuera, freelance educator, Los Angeles, CA
- Troy Kroft, Glen Rock High School, Glen Rock, NJ
- Tanya Manabat, Roosevelt Elementary, Lawndale, CA
- Benjamin Morales, Lawndale School District, Lawndale, CA
- Pam Posey, Crossroads School, Santa Monica, CA
- Joyce Riley, High School For Leadership and Public Service, New York, NY
- Joanne Ross, Glen Rock High School, Glen Rock, NJ
- Keeley Marie Stitt, Chicago International Charter School, Chicago IL
- Lucia Vinograd, Besant Hill School of Happy Valley, Ojai, CA
- Stacey J. Ward Kelly, Sargent Elementary School, Beacon, NY
This summer institute begins a year-long relationship and we are excited to work with these teachers here in New York City and in their classrooms over the next 12 months. Art21 Educators is the result of the creation and presentation of Art21 professional development workshops for teachers over the last six years. Recognizing the potential of teachers to support and inspire each other through long-term networks that encourage them to share personal anecdotes and experiences, the initiative will cultivate a collection of case studies, video documentation, and curricular models representing specific ways that teachers are merging contemporary curricular resources and content with innovative teaching strategies.
More to come!
