Entry No. 3
3.14-15.23
#makeweirdart
thinking:
Recently I have worked with CSU’s BRAINY program, as well as Polaris’s Adventure/Intensive Week programs. In these programs, as a leader and educator, I have been pushed beyond my regular comfort zone just a tad…
In BRAINY we work on a somewhat rushed schedule, teaching kids from Title I schools art museum rules, looking at and discussing art with them, and then doing a craft with them that reflects on all the things we just packed into 30 minutes. Also, did I mention they were 4th graders… Yeah, all that, PLUS maintaining the attention of miniature hordes of nine and ten year-old humans. But its delightful. In BRAINY, as I mentioned before, one of the things we do is discuss the shows within the museum with these 4th grade students.
One of the shows currently exhibited in the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art is Kei Ito’s “The Beginning, in the land around me”. This work discusses the artist’s connection to Hiroshima and WWII, as his grandfather survived the Hiroshima bombings. This was a bit of a daunting topic to cover in around ten minutes, especially with students we’d never met, and this being our first time working with fourth graders in a purely academic context (different from babysitting, afterschool programs, or even interactions my classmates and I have had with our siblings and/or children). It ended up being okay, and they were more excited about the thermal cameras from CSU’s Little Shop of Physics, utilized to understand how Ito created the photographs that make up Eye Who Witnessed.
In the Polaris Intensive Week, students had chosen an “Art Education” themed week in which they would visit CSU’s Art Department for 2 days and do different art activities with my peers and I. I, working with my partner, created a curriculum in which our students made paper, created linocuts, bound their homemade paper into books, and printed their linocuts into their new handmade journals! It was immensely fun but a bit intimidating as, until our trial run day, I had never made paper from scratch, and I had only done book binding once, and my partner had never done bookbinding. Linocuts were a comfortable space for me as I am a printmaking concentration, and they are an accessible and easy to learn medium within printmaking.
On day 2 we were trying to help students steam-iron their papers so they could easily bind their books… and the entire room’s outlets had a power outage. Me and my partner, as student teachers got a little nervous, and the Polaris teacher and my professor began trying to figure out what was happening? Where was this room’s breaker? What could we do? Our students stood there kind of bored, kind of confused, wondering what we were going to do next. Somehow, despite the fact I was running on three hours of sleep and a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich I solved a part of the problem so that we wouldn’t lose our student’s interest- I sat them around a table while my partner and our professor talked to building admin to find the breaker for the art education room, and I did the book binding demo.
PHOTOS OF OUR WORK IN THE BOOKMAKING WORKSHOP
All this to say- something I learned, and realized my previous art teachers (especially my high school art teacher- shoutout Ms. Martin!) had done well was to teach weird art. They taught outside of their comfort zone. They probably had lessons where they were flying by the seat of their pants, having only tried this in theory, not in reality. What especially comes to mind is my senior year of high school- my art teacher had discovered an intaglio printing press in the depths of the art supply closets she had inherited from the previous art teacher. It was a little broken and didn’t apply pressure or roll quite right, but she was determined to make it work for us. She taught us how to do plexiglass intaglio prints in our AP art class, and created the opportunity to go to the Denver Art Museum to see the Rembrandt Printmaking specialty exhibit that was showing there that fall. It was my first experience with printmaking outside of linocuts and I fell in love. All because she allowed us to try a weird art form. Even though the supplies weren’t pristine, and it wasn’t a traditional metal plate method, she let us explore. She as an educator left her comfort zone for the betterment of her student’s education.
Applying this experience to my more recent ones helps me realize the importance of “weird” art mediums, like the lost art of print, the delightful and resourceful art of papermaking, and so many more. It allows us to have conversations about art that may be uncomfortable- which is good because truthfully, most art is at least a tad uncomfortable. And we shouldn’t leave content out of curriculum just for the sake of a possibility of discomfort. Keep pushing your teaching comfort zone, even if it seems a little unpredictable or uncomfortable.
Keep making weird art. Keep teaching weird art. Keep art weird.
Making:
For this linocut, I created an image of an intaglio printing press. On the press bed it says "TEACH WEIRD ART" and in the background it reads "i fell in love with printmaking through a broken press & plexiglass". This encapsulates my thoughts from the writing I did above into a cute little linocut.
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