Contemporary art curriculum pecha kuchas

Art making approaches in support of the new art standards

Stepping into our 'standards and art making approaches' workshop last night Olivia Gude invites us to think of the new visual art standards as a discursive and potential space

Olivia's standards presentation posted on the NAEA site

Creating Surrealist drawings 
"Linger in the image, re-submerge, change the angle, no talking."

Jess' arm. This is not a Surrealist drawing but it's gorgeous to look at the contrasting lines and textures.

Paula drawing from the subconscious 

A gallery walk of teacher Surrealist images 

Spaces for Possibility 

Art Making Approaches/Curriculum Development 

prompt

With the introduction of the new CORE Art Standards there is less of an emphasis on formal art making approaches connected to the elements and principles. Olivia is helping us think through how to develop contemporary art curriculum around art making approaches such as the Surrealists, Mark Dion’s anthropological, re-enactments, kinetic movement, etc. These art making approaches invite us to step away from what is already known and familiar to us to envision art making approaches that support experimentation, and increased student autonomy. 

We’re asking you this year to create curriculum that takes into consideration the following factors:

1) Identify an art making approach that you haven’t worked with before. 

2) Generate concepts, values, vocabulary, open-ended questions around this art making approach. Look at the Art21 website for inspiration. 

3) Engagement question: What will your students do when you stop talking?

4) Create a teacher sample or pilot to share with the Spaces group mid-year for feedback, implement this new approach in the winter/spring in your classrooms. Share your final art-making approach in the spring with the whole group.

A collaged art making style - Trenton Doyle Hancock images are amassed over 15 years

Trenton Doyle Hancock 

The Former and the Ladder or Ascension and a Cinchin' 2012

Mark Dion uses an anthropological art making approach

First day of school and the Assemblage

Good morning lovely teachers,

I'm thinking of you on this first day of school. How quickly this first day comes around again.

As I hear back from you about your participation in the group this year, I've begun to think of our group as an assemblage - an open-ended collective, a non-totalizable sum, that has a vital force as each member makes a contribution to the group. These ideas are taken up by Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter.  This concept of the assemblage is a productive way for us to conceive of our collective efforts together. The assemblage has a distinctive history of formation and usually has a finite life span according to Bennett. 

Assemblages are not governed by a central head. The "effects generated by an assemblage are emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered alone." (p. 24).  When we talk about materiality here, we are thinking about you, your students, and the materials in the art room as active forces that play off of each other. 

As a learning community/assemblage, we come together to act and make contributions toward something larger than our individual selves. I will continue to talk about these ideas on the blog and in our gatherings. This is a weighty good morning but why not start the school year off with some philosophical images and thoughts?

I'm thinking of you on this day and thinking about what we can be together as an assemblage.

Best wishes,

Kate

Lee Bontecou, Untitled,  the concept of non-totalizable sums

The concept of no recognizable central head

The possibility of emergence with no clear beginning or end

a

Sitting with "carpet woman" to experience closeness

Hello my friends,

In the past week Parvin Peyvandi, a visiting artist and art teacher from Vancouver, Canada has been visiting your schools (Ravenswood, Armstrong, Hancock, and Peck Elementary). Parvin is originally from Iran and brings a beautiful and vibrant connection to her own culture to the students and teachers of Chicago.

In her performance "carpet woman" she invites students to sit with her to consider the history of the Persian carpet and how a piece of fabric can bring us into proximity with each to other to experience closeness. This performative experience has allowed students to talk about racial segregation in Chicago; the act of sitting together to form a connection with each other; what a life long art practice can be like, and much more. Parvin is like a radiant flower in the center of the carpet, emanating love and openness. Like Marina Abramovic's performances which involve a sense of being in connection with each other, Parvin opens up the space for conversation and touching through materiality.

The invitation to join Parvin on the carpet is extended.

First grade students from Armstrong Elementary School are eager to sit close and touch the carpet and Parvin's hair. The little ones are open to more than just sitting. Touching is often a part of being together.

6th grade students at Ravenswood Elementary are considering their own cultural heritage. Parvin's visit comes at just the right time. There is much conversation around how people feel connected through sitting on the carpet. Some students are aware that there is segregation in Chicago and comment on the recent police brutality events in Baltimore. Parvin says as an artist she cannot control the actions of others but through this gesture of sitting together she hopes to bring people together to experience closeness.

Mature bodies, less room for sitting but still high school students at Hancock are more than willing to sit close for a conversation. I notice that the students of various ages hold their bodies differently on the carpet. The little ones fidget and wriggle to find a sense of comfort. The 6th graders hold their bodies with a sense of comportment. Their minds are open to many different associations - the carpet in Chicago extends all the way to Baltimore. In the high school, students are comfortable with being together but they are unaccustomed to sitting on the floor. From first grade to high school, these students have travelled great distances with their bodies. This performance is a beautiful connecting point for the bodies in proximity to each other over time. We never lose the sense for needing to be with each other. 

Student Reflective Writing

This ain't on any standardized test!

Curie HS Art 1 Students are doing reflective writing during their critique. That's right! Our students think and process and then think about their thinking! That's art education and we have to let the parents and administration know what we are doing in the classroom. (That is thinking deeply and reflecting throughout the creative process). I'm always surprised when others are surprised that art teachers do this. So many don't realize the depths we bring our students to.

Click on the link to go to our blog. There will soon be another post of some of the studies with the student writing attached. I regret I did not video the discussions. It is so hard to document and run the session at the same time! I need to get that equipment so I can set up the video camera and let it run on its own....

teachers after hours

Valerie Xanos
Curie HS

"Vibrant Matter" in the art room

"It is never we who affirm or deny something of a thing; 

it is the thing itself that affirms or denies something of itself in us." 

Baruch Spinoza, Short Tretise II

Hello my friends,

I visited Jeanne Walker's room today at Hancock High School. The art room was gorgeous and full of vibrant matter and possibilities. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I am reading about new materialism and post humanism. Now I look at this beautiful art room exploding with "thing power" and wonder what might these "things" be calling us to do?

Reinforcing the sculptural chairs with paper mache.

A non-chair related project involves these beautiful mannequin heads covered in gold leaf. The beauty of these materials cannot be captured by a photo. One has to feel the materiality of gold leaf.

This one seems to speak to me as a throne.

Recently I have been wondering, what if we were to re-conceive of the art room's materiality differently?  Jane Bennett who I mentioned in the last post says "'thing power' works because it's in the nature of our bodies to be susceptible to infusion, invasion, collaboration by or with other bodies." Are these "things" that are in the art room more than mere objects? How do they call to us? How do our bodies interact with a sense of inter corporality through the "things'" bodies? Our bodies and the bodies of "things" have a protective membrane and yet somehow these "things" become us or do we become them? They permeate us and we permeate them. 

In our Studio Night conversation yesterday several people spoke about the way in which school administrators cannot see the potential in the art room. So often the administrator is baffled by the "chaos" present in the art room. I think we could re-think what is actually going on in the art room through the concepts of vibrant matter and new materialism. I also want to share what Elizabeth Grosz has written in her book Chaos, territory, art. She says "the arts produce and generate intensity, that which directly impacts the nervous system and intensifies sensation." (2008, p. 3). So what if the outsider entering into this "chaos" is actually having a somatic experience where the material sensations in the room are so powerful they shut a person down? As visual artists we take for granted that materials speak to us and that perhaps "chaos" opens us up to new possibilities. 

These materials do indeed stimulate the body and produce new sensations, new ideas, new potentialities. How can we help others enter into this experience especially when students and teachers are in the midst of production/creation? This is time of great intensity. These are really exciting ideas to think about because they do produce real affects (overwhelm, claustrophobia, fear, longing) and real effects (low ratings on teacher evaluations due to a misunderstanding of what the art room does).

The materials collected for these chairs are indeed vibrant. I invite you all to consider these questions. What if we write a piece together and/or co-present at the NAEA next year in Chicago around these ideas? I am always honored to come into your exquisite spaces. Thank you.

Jeanne's students are working on these stunning sculptural chairs that invite people into safe spaces to have difficult conversations. These chairs/sculptures will be installed outside of the school for a performance/celebration on May 12th from 4-6 p.m. for a project called On the table.  A cookout and conversations will be held to inaugurate the chairs in the space and feature the opening of the safe spaces art and sculpture exhibition. Please come to 56th and Kosner (near Pulaski) for this special event!

new materialism and post humanism

I attended the American Educational Research Association's annual conference April 16-20th in Chicago. As you can imagine there were thousands and thousands of educational researchers from around the world milling about like particles of matter beautifully collected and diffused at the same time.  

The conference topics were as diverse as the people. I tended to gravitate towards arts-based research, gender/queer studies, social justice and experimental research sessions.

By Sunday I had fallen into a crowd of people who were pursuing research in the areas of new materialism and post humanism. I had not yet encountered these ideas and found it really thrilling to come into contact with these new concepts. I'm an incurable conceptualist! 

New materialism and post humanism addresses life beyond the human subject. We are so drawn to looking at our lives on this planet through the lens of the human subject that to imagine a different way of looking requires a radical alteration of thinking, being, feeling. How might we look at other perspectives beyond our own? I love this lecture by Jane Bennett on Artistry and Agency in a world of vibrant materiality. Here she is looking at hoarders and their "thing power". How many visual artists and art teachers love to collect things and what might these things be saying to us? How can we attune to things rather than humans? Bennett talks about some intriguing ideas with regards to hoarders. She says that hoarders find comfort in things as they have a longer mortality than humans. Perhaps this is a way for us to cope with what is unbearable - loss. She says the hoarder sees things as extensions of the "self." This a lovely ideas in terms of our attraction to objects. They call to us. 

Around ideas related to new materialism theorist Karen Barad suggests we turn our attention away from the human subject through a process of diffraction. Barad refers to Donna Haraways' concepts of diffraction in this interview: 

"As Donna says, “diffraction patterns record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference. Diffraction is about heterogeneous history, not about originals. Unlike reflections, diffractions do not displace the same elsewhere, in more or less distorted form, thereby giving rise to industries of [story-making about origins and truths]. Rather, diffraction can be a metaphor for another kind of critical consciousness.” What I was pointing out is the difference in the shift from geometrical optics, from questions of mirroring and sameness, reflexivity, where to see your image in the mirror there necessarily has to be a distance between you and the mirror. So there is a separation of subject and object, and objectivity is about mirror images of the world. And instead, the shift towards diffraction, towards differences that matter, is really a matter of what physicists call physical optics as compared to geometrical optics. . . By contrast, diffraction allows you to study both the nature of the apparatus and also the object. That is, both the nature of light and also the nature of the apparatus itself.  .  . Diffraction, understood using quantum physics, is not just a matter of interference, but of entanglement, an ethico-onto-epistemological matter. This difference is very important. It underlines the fact that knowing is a direct material engagement, a cutting together-apart, where cuts do violence but also open up and rework the agential conditions of possibility." (taken from New materialisms: interviews and cartographies).

Are you with me now? I'll write more soon. My head is swirling.