As part of the July 6 Agora series, I had the privilege of hosting a conversation with attendees addressing the question: How Will Art Solve Problems?
Posts in ‘Learning and Engagement’
Continuing the Conversation: How Will Art Solve Problems?
Continuing the Conversation: How Will Art Survive Us?
How Will Art Survive Us? I had the pleasure of presenting on this beautifully provocative topic at MoMA’s Agora program this past July. I discussed two works, one ongoing pedagogical project, School of Apocalypse at Pioneer Works, and one sculpture, Eroding Plazas and Accumulating Resistance, made with the Occupy Museums collective. Facing social and ecological changes that may threaten the very survival of our species, our times require large-scale collective adaptation. The arts, and arts institutions, are crucial here. They hold space for new stories and act as arenas for the rehearsal of new structures and modes of engagement that will be the most effective tools for surviving what we have become.
Degas in Process: Why Monotype?
For the past five weeks, we have organized a series of weekly monotype printmaking workshops, Degas in Process: Make a Monotype, in conjunction with the exhibition Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty, on view on MoMA’s sixth floor through July 24. Taking Degas’s innovative use of the monotype as a starting point, these workshops are led by teaching artists—Justin Sanz, Sophy Naess, Neil Berger, Kerry Downey, and Bruce Waldman—each of whom brings a unique creative approach to their session and offers a glimpse into the sustained relevance of the monotype technique in contemporary artistic practice.
Art Lab for All
Art Lab: Process is an interactive space where families and other museum visitors can discover different ways of making art and engage in their own creative process. As an educator in the space, I consider how I can help visitors maximize their time in the lab and in the museum.
Prime Timers’ Thoughts on Aging and Art
I’m an educator here at MoMA, and I am 30 years old. When I teach in MoMA’s galleries I am mostly talking with people who are twice, sometimes three times my age. It’s not something I anticipated when I was an art history student 10 years ago, but it is one of the more informative and enlightening aspects of my job: discussing art with people who have far different—and far more—life experiences than I do.
Experiments in Engagement with Wafaa Bilal
As the fellow for public programs at MoMA, part of my focus is working with artists to develop experimental programs that position the Museum as a resource for the public, artists, and “non-artists” alike. This season, I worked with artist Wafaa Bilal to develop a two-day public workshop, Dynamic Encounters: Experiments in Engagement to develop, execute, and present what Bilal calls an “open-ended performance” workshop that became a space for experimentation not only for participants but for Bilal and the Museum as well.
“It’s amazing we don’t have more fights”: A Workshop on Museum Intimacies
Two weekends ago I had the pleasure of facilitating “It’s amazing we don’t have more fights,” a workshop version of my ongoing project The Book of Everyday Instruction. The Book of Everyday Instruction is an eight-chapter project (continuing through the end of 2017) investigating one-on-one social interaction. Each chapter focuses on a different central question. For chapter four, “It’s amazing we don’t have more fights,” I want to know how we shape stories simply through the relationship of two bodies in space.
Touching Art: Teaching with the MoMA Library’s Artist Book Collection
Earlier this month, I worked with artist and educator Mark Joshua Epstein to bring a group of workshop participants to view objects in the MoMA Library that are not typically associated with modern art: artist-made flip books. This visit was part of Making the Moving Image: Past to Present, a studio workshop about experimentation with animation techniques that predate the invention of cinema. I watched participants hold and manipulate the books and was struck by how the direct physical contact with an artist’s work makes visiting the library’s collection of artist books so unique.
Freedom to Create, Rethink, and Uncover: Participating in Broodthaers’s Process
If you’ve read some of my other blog posts, you’ll know that MoMA has been experimenting with “pop-ups”—drop-in learning and art-making spaces—in closer proximity to the galleries for the past couple of years. These impromptu spaces are something that the Department of Education has long advocated for because offering hands-on activities helps visitors make connections to the art on view.
Learning with Museums: On Place and Proximity
This past Veteran’s Day I had an extraordinary experience at MoMA. Aaron Hughes, an artist and Iraq War Veteran, invited two small groups of strangers into an intimate exchange: he made tea for us. He made tea for us in what might seem a very strange place within the museum, on a bridge next to MoMA’s Walid Raad exhibition, near Take an Object, and in proximity to Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War one floor above—all of which include work that reflects artists’ responses to war. Walid Raad, a friend of Aaron’s, was excited that this would take place near his installation.
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