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It’s OK to Make Art…

Edward Hopper, "New York Movie", 1939 Image: heaviestcorner.org

It’s amazing… After over twenty years teaching I still get nervous. And I’m not thinking about the first day of classes (everyone gets nervous then), I was actually thinking about putting together an exhibition of student work. While it doesn’t carry the weight of big-ticket shows in Chelsea, student shows on college campuses, high school galleries, community centers, middle school hallways and even elementary school gymnasiums carry the weight of student ambition and often serve as a form of self-assessment for everyone involved, not just the students.

In a few weeks I am putting together an exhibition of student work at Hopper House here in New York called Reasons to Paint. This is the second show I have organized in the small, three-room gallery that once was the ground floor of Edward Hopper’s home. The first, an exhibition called Common Ground in 2008, paired student and teacher work side by side. Art educators from across our district were asked to identify a student who, in some way, shared a common concern, theme or approach in their own work and then exhibit alongside them. I was interested in students and teachers having the chance to show together on the same walls. In the end the opening was packed. Everyone was enthusiastic to be part of an exhibit in a professional gallery space. Best of all, parents and community members got to see the students in a way they didn’t experience all that often- seriously talking about their own work and having a dialogue about the works of classmates and teachers. Many of those students were at critical stages in their own school careers at the time, and I sincerely believe the opportunity to be part of a unique exhibit really made a difference as they began thinking about their own next steps after graduation.

This show, which opens on November 20th, asks students to take a work by Edward Hopper and simply be inspired by it to create a new work of art. The artist himself once said, “If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint,” and students are being asked this time around to look into the work they select in order to decide what exactly it is that’s so inspiring. Whether it’s the way unexpected colors come together, the gesture of two figures, the memory a particular image recalls, or even the ambiguity of a solitary figure in a room, students need to take that point of inspiration and create a work in response. Some students have understandably decided to paint, others have chosen photography or mixed-media. I even have one student who has chosen to make a sculpture… in a glass box, of course.

So why am I sweating it? Because I am dealing with high school students who have little regard for the word DEADLINE. While works were “due” this past Monday I still have these wonderful student artists casually coming by the classroom (as I am nearing a stroke) and saying things like, “I was thinking about cropping that photo we discussed instead of using the version we agreed on.” Whaaaaat??

Regardless of how they understand what it means to be prepared… in advance… I am hanging a show next week. And many of these students, like the students in Common Ground years ago, have some important decisions to make. This show, if we’re lucky, will be a tipping point for some that not only says it’s “ok” to make art, but it’s important to make art.

William Harsh on Tradition, Anonymity, Picasso and the Barbaric Yawp

This past summer, San Franciscans were treated to an art smorgasbord from Paris’s Banquet Years, before the Great War. A Picasso exhibition came to the de Young Museum, and an exhibition of the Gertrude and Michael Stein collections came to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Cubist faceted planes were everywhere, and artists who [...]

Bedfellows | Suburban Seriality

We were not the same, though when we came together, we acted as one. Growing up together, seven girls in the suburbs of Northern California, we told each other’s stories and slept in each other’s beds; we shared bras and earrings and anything else that fit. We squished into the backseats of our parents’ cars, crowded [...]

Money/Market

Let’s face it. Occupy Wall Street, and just about everything else, is about money – who has it and who doesn’t – and how the market can help or hurt these two groups. Money I recently bought an iPhone. While this may seem trivial, I hadn’t had a cell phone for over 10 years. Although [...]

Teaching with New York Close Up: Keltie Ferris Spray Paints in Solitude

While watching Keltie Ferris Spray Paints in Solitude, I kept wondering to myself… What can students and teachers learn from engaging with this five minutes of film? I wanted a reason to share it because I was so enamored with her love of color, her approach to abstraction, even her definition of abstraction, and all the while not taking herself too seriously. After all, she is an artist who believes, “Making paintings is an enterprise in solitude,” and that, “It’s hard to do something that’s not justified by anything.”

After thinking about it for a while and hitting rewind a few times I decided that working with this film can initially be about Ferris’ approach to making art and simultaneously an opportunity to ask the questions: So why paint if she is well aware that her paintings aren’t something that’s necessarily needed in the world and could very well be in the dumpster tomorrow? Does Ferris make sense of the world by trying to “see through to other worlds”? Can painting be, like it is for many of us, a form of meditation? What does she gain by working in solitude? What do viewers gain by engaging with her paintings?

Sorry. All I have are questions this week.

What I also enjoy is watching Ferris share Josef Albers’ work and being blown away by it. I enjoy the way she talks about abstraction as “trying to undo the nameable things in life”. I enjoy the fact that she lets us into her studio to see a work in progress that she considers awful. There’s an excitement in the way she talks about her art that’s infectious.

One more idea… Juxtaposing Keltie Ferris, a painter who obviously fits the image of an artist slaving over a hot canvas, with someone like Fred Wilson, Oliver Herring or even Allora and Calzadilla, can broaden a student’s perspective on what being an artist looks like today. It allows for contrasting her approach with artists that specifically engage with people in order to realize their work.

Getting Set for PS1′s “September 11″

John Chamberlain, "King King Minor", 1982 Image: artinfo.com

In two weeks I am taking a group of students to visit the September 11 exhibition at PS1. Most of the high school students in these two classes have some recollection of 9/11 since they were about five or six years old when it occurred and it goes without saying that for some the memory may be much different than others. So for starters, as I prepare to visit a potentially charged exhibit like this one, I want to be thorough on the “front-end’’ of getting ready. Some of my students may have lost friends or even family members in the attacks and I need to talk with them in advance to discuss how comfortable they are about the trip itself.

With 41 artists represented in this show, many of you may already know that a majority of the work was made prior to 9/11. This is also a good time to tell you that one of our biggest reasons for attending the show is not necessarily to continue reflecting on the events of 9/11, but rather to see how a curator worked with this very specific theme in order to select and assemble a body of work. This approach to organizing an exhibit is much different from a single artist working with a theme or historic event and putting together an exhibit. For the curator, working in this case with a very particular moment in history offers an opportunity to process and represent the range of emotion, confusion, anger and even solidarity that resulted from these attacks. The show allows us to see how Peter Eleey has chosen to visually reflect on the events that took place a decade ago and have us think about the lingering effects.

A few days before we attend the exhibit (and after I speak with any students who have any personal experience with 9/11) classes will view selected images from the show and immediately begin thinking about how and why the works may have been chosen. Asking students to make connections and draw conclusions first is just as important as me filling in the gaps and sharing information that may not be apparent, such as how Christo’s proposal from 1964 to wrap two buildings in lower Manhattan may somehow be symbolic of the particular protection or safety we once felt inside our homes and workplaces.

Installation view: "September 11". Image MoMAPS1.org

The day before the trip we will talk about the exact agenda for the visit itself- departure and arrival time, expectations for working in the museum (including whole class discussions and partner work), guidelines and questions for working in their sketchbooks, and of course… lunch plans.  I have learned that one of the keys to a solid trip with students involves having as few surprises as possible, so everyone is prepared for what will take place.

During the visit I hope students will take special note of how some artists approach themes such as loss, security, privacy and American identity. I want students to see a breadth of examples where artists, art, media and strategies are also connected by a single element, or in this case, a simultaneously tragic and monumental event. I want students to imagine, as my colleague Jessica Hamlin pointed out, what life may have been like before 9/11.

More to come.

Whiplash

Jenny Saville: Continuum, installation view at Gagosian Gallery

Last week, I had the displeasure of experiencing exhibition whiplash at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue. On one side of the building, “Continuum”- an exquisite show by Jenny Saville and her first New York exhibit in eight years. On the other, “The Asia Series” by….. Bob Dylan. While I admire Bob Dylan in many ways, his work with a brush is not one of them. The fact that throngs of people kept asking where the Bob Dylan show was, while I stood with just a few others in the spectacle that was Jenny Saville’s exhibition really, well, annoyed me.

Few painters today deal with the human form, or flesh, like Jenny Saville. She zooms in on the mass that is the human body vs. focusing on how bodies engage with space in a given environment. There are tremendous figurative painters out there including Phillip Pearlstein and Marlene Dumas, but the flesh belongs to Jenny Saville, especially after the recent loss of Lucian Freud. Educators who spend time working from the figure with their students can benefit from considering Saville’s work. Between the way she implies form and utilizes color, especially a range of reds, viewers at Gagosian could almost be seen shaking off sucker punches. I know I was. Each of the huge paintings is like a concentrated storm in your line of vision.

Upon entering the gallery, I was confronted with one of Saville’s recent works inspired by Renaissance nativity portraits. Study for Pentimenti IV features a pregnant woman and a young child, repeating the two forms to create a rhythm that leads the eye quickly around and through the work. Perhaps one of my favorite pieces in the show, another large painting titled The Mothers, pictures a pregnant woman literally trying to hold two young children simultaneously- one is cradled close and another is literally slipping from her grasp. I kept returning to this work thinking about how many people must identify with this particular mother and the feeling of being completely overwhelmed.

Jenny Saville’s beautiful and straightforward exhibition is absolutely worth a visit for anyone even remotely interested in figurative painting through October 22^nd. While you’re there you may be tempted, as I was, to explore the Bob Dylan show hoping that his work as a painter may come close to his dominance as a songwriter. But you’ll be left disappointed and probably mumbling to yourself, I warn you. If caught in this particular situation you can remedy the whiplash by retracing your steps and simply going back into the Saville show.

Taking the Long Way Home: Working With a Theme in a Series

One of the students in my advanced classes is taking on the theme of “looking vs. seeing” for her first semester portfolio. She wants to explore the things people tend to overlook (or under-see) and over the next four months will create about a dozen works of art that explore the theme from different angles: [...]

Bedfellows | Both a Science and an Art, Part 2

    Alison Kendall creates drawings and paintings in which viewers’ expectations are breached by dreamlike intruders. The San Francisco–based artist went to school for scientific illustration, learning to draw animals and plants for field guides and textbooks, to inspire understanding rather than wonder. While she continues to work part-time as an illustrator for scientific textbooks, [...]

Letter from London | Rarely Pure, and Never Simple

  Maybe Thomas Struth’s 1995 photograph of the interior of the church of San Zaccaria in Venice is too obvious a way to epitomise the relationship between contemporary art and the art of the past. Not only that: it’s also nearly 20 years old, it’s over-familiar, and it’s representative of a moment in photography that [...]