Jethro Gillespie, his son and some friends at a TASK event

Over the past few weeks I’ve thoroughly enjoyed talking and e-mailing with two more of our current Art21 Educators, Jethro Gillespie and Jack Watson. Jethro teaches Studio Art, 3D Design, Ceramics and more at Maple Mountain High School in Utah while Jack teaches 2D Art and Art History at Chapel High School in North Carolina.

Similar to Julia Coppersmith and Maureen Hergott, whom I interviewed a few weeks back, Jethro and Jack have an infectious passion for the the things they teach and accomplish with students. Both look for ways to better engage their classes on a consistent basis and avoid “window dressing” projects that may look pretty but aren’t necessarily about very much…

Since participating in the summer institute, could you describe a significant change, improvement or extension of your teaching practice? Has the experience also in some way affected your own art making?

Jack Watson: There are lots of little ways that the Art21 experience works its way into my classroom – visual brainstorming with post-its, discussion prompts, the “parking lot” – but I think the most significant change to my pedagogy is reframing my curriculum within central questions, as opposed to objectives.  Like most teachers, I was trained to construct lessons rooted in standards with clearly defined objectives.  This is useful if you want your students to produce the same result, but frustrating and limited for working with open-ended ideas and contemporary art practices.  A framework of central questions opens the space to dialogue, ideas and possibilities.

As for my own practice, I’ve learned to embrace chance, and to focus more on the process than the product.  I think in particular of our visit to Oliver Herring’s studio in Brooklyn.  His work is so process-oriented, and he made such a strong impression on all of us that week.  I was most surprised that his studio was devoid of any of the trappings of a traditional artist’s studio: no easels, paints, etc.  Aside from some photos and a pile of TASK artifacts, I remember it being an open space full of possibilities- much like the classrooms we’re trying to create.  He might resist this metaphor, but it left an impression on me!

Jethro Gillespie: The most visible change in my own teaching since the summer institute is the inclusion of TASK parties. I’ve organized various TASK events with my own students at school and at 3 different conferences for fellow art educators since the summer institute. And to echo what Jack said, meeting Oliver Herring was for me probably the most memorable and inspiring part of that experience.

For me, TASK is so simple and so brilliant- I think the underlying, formative ideas behind TASK have to do with the relationship of the participants that engage with it, and also focusing more on the process than the product. As a teacher, having a TASK party with my students (right at the beginning of the school year) demonstrated and nurtured a genuine trust between me and my students, especially when it came to issues of power and control in the classroom.

In my first few years of teaching I tried to “manage” my class with some admittedly top-down, almost militant strategies in order to try and ‘control’ different situations. This ultimately left most kids feeling dis-empowered and often led to power struggles that I didn’t want to deal with. I’ve since tried to examine and focus my teaching practice on building a healthy and generative class environment in order to help students feel more empowered- especially when it comes to creating meaningful student art projects. Being involved with TASK has really helped me to re-examine my own teaching practice concerning these issues of relinquishing control in order to form relationships of trust with my students. And as an art teacher, TASK has also helped me shift my focus away from simply getting students to produce things, and towards getting students more involved with the process of creating.

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This week, we continue our introductions to each of the eight pairs of educators who were chosen to participate in the third year of Art21 Educators. Last week we met Maureen Hergott and Julia CopperSmith from Chicago, IL. Now we are excited to introduce Jack Watson and Holly Loranger.

Jack Watson and Holly Loranger hail from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Jack has been teaching for six years. He currently teaches Art History and 2D Visual Art classes at Chapel Hill High School with Holly, a Social Studies teacher whose classes include Arts Focus US History and Comparative Religions. Jack admires his partner’s ability to engage students in critical thinking and says, “There are times when my students come into my classroom continuing a conversation about religion or culture that they started in her class, sometimes days earlier.” Holly is excited to work with Jack in a formal collaborative setting. She describes her experiences working with her partner, remarking that, “he is an incredibly innovative and inspirational colleague.”

In his video profile, Jack tells us about his family, city, and students, and he introduces himself as an artist, musician, and top-five list-maker. (Note: while we were impressed with Jack’s album selections, our musical taste had no influence in our decision.)

Jack learned about Art21 Educators last spring, when he and several of his students went to a TASK Party hosted by Art21 artist Oliver Herring at the University of North Carolina. Herring later visited Jack’s classroom and recommended that he apply to the program. As part of his application, we asked Jack to describe a specific work of art, artist, or exhibition that recently inspired him and/or his teaching practice:

I saw Mark Bradford’s solo show at the Wexner Art Center last summer and was inspired by the way he reclaimed the castaway detritus of his neighborhood — old signs and posters, record covers, permanent-wave end papers, etc. — and the way he layers them in dense and complex abstract compositions. The surface beauty of his work seduced me, but when I watched his Art21 segment, I became interested in the idea of palimpsest and trace memory and how layered images can create a juxtaposition of ideas.

When I returned to school that fall, I planned a project for my advanced students called Paradox Drawings. Students were asked to select a paradoxical idea and investigate it in a mixed media work that utilized paradoxical processes: concealing and revealing, traditional and non-traditional mark making, found surfaces and prepared surfaces . . . Students responded well to Bradford’s work . . . and matched my enthusiasm for both the concept and the visual experiment.

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Binh Danh, “Ghost of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum #2,” 2008. Daguerreotype, 11 3/8 x 9 1/2 inches. Courtesy the artist

Binh Danh: In the Eclipse of Angkor at the North Carolina Museum of Art reveals Vietnamese born artist Binh Danh’s search to imbue photographs with meaning not only through subject matter but also through process. The subject of Danh’s latest photographic series, The Eclipse of Angkor, is the anonymous victims of genocide in Southeast Asia.  Danh re-photographs the portraits of unidentified victims of the Khmer Rouge who were executed in Cambodia’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison, which, along with the Killing Fields, became synonymous with the Khmer Rouge’s brutal reign of terror. Danh employs two photographic techniques to produce his images—the daguerreotype process and a unique chlorophyll method invented by the artist.

The photographs in In The Eclipse of Angkor stem from Danh’s 2008 trip to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Choeung Ek, the site of the Killing Fields and Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s celebrated twelfth-century temple complex.  During the trip Danh was struck by the meticulous photographic documentation on the part of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge of the estimated 30,000 Vietnamese and Cambodians who were imprisoned and died in Tuol Sleng prison between 1975 and 1979.  Danh, who was born in Vietnam in 1977 to a Cambodian father and Vietnamese mother, has no personal memory of the Vietnam War or Cambodian genocide.  His family fled to the United States when he was only two years old, and he did not return to the region again until 1999.  Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Danh’s artwork aims to restore and reclaim memories, identities and histories—both personal and collective— in an effort to come to terms with a dark period in Cambodian history.

Binh Danh, “Memories of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum #1,” 2008. Chlorophyll print on nasturtium and resin, 12 x 10 inches. Courtesy the artist.

The first photographic process Danh uses to make his prints of the Khmer Rouge era images for his In The Eclipse of Angkor series is a chlorophyll process, which he invented. The process involves placing a photographic negative of one of the re-photographed images directly onto the surface of a living leaf, securing both leaf and negative under glass, and exposing then them to sunlight for days or weeks at a time.  Through the natural process of photosynthesis, the image from the negative becomes printed into the leaf’s light-sensitive surface, incised directly into the leaf’s very structure.  Danh then preserves the resulting image—which he refers to as a “chlorophyll print”—by coating it in resin.

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