Teens displaying their photographic masks in Central Park
Through a series of adventurous performance-based actions, the teens in our “Stop Or I’ll Shoot!” workshops have formed themselves into a functioning arts collective to negotiate and investigate ideas surrounding public and private space, altered perceptions, and challenging interactions.
Teens react to their surroundings after entering Flux Factory for the first time.
In her session of In the Making, teaching artist Kerry Downey has been tackling the difficult world of abstract art and the way in which non-representational art can express emotions. For her first field trip of the season, she took the group on a strange, confusing, and ultimately beautiful journey through the amazing environs of Long Island City’s Flux Factory.
In the Making is a free, ten-week program for NYC teens that offers studio art making as led by various artist-educators in the field. For the past 6 weeks, MoMA educator Mark Dzula has been leading the teens in his Music for the Eyes class through the strange and wonderful world of sound-art and sound-based installations.
In the Making On the Line workshop
Teaching artist Mark Epstein has been running our In the Making—On the Line workshops this fall. Through studio activities and in-gallery discussions, he and the teens have been exploring the different definitions of what a line can be, while looking at the various ways in which the artists in the Abstract Expressionist New York and On Line shows have tried to express themselves through this most basic of forms. For this journal, Mark gets in-depth about a very unconventional drawing activity that he created with his students.
Teaching artist Kiran Chandra has been taking the teens in her Text & Image workshops on a trip through the strange and sometimes confusing arena in which the written word and the visual arts collide. Whether viewing the work of Raymond Pettibon, Christopher Wool, and Paul Chan, or traveling down to Chelsea to meet with the staff of Printed Matter, Inc., these activities have definitely expanded the participants’ ideas of what it means to “write” an artwork or “read” a painting. Here, she discusses one of the group’s earliest art-making experiments.
For this series of posts, I’ve asked the teaching artists from this season’s In the Making Art Classes to reflect on what they’ve been doing over the past couple of weeks with their teenaged students. Each In the Making class meets once a week—Tuesday or Thursday nights—and focuses on introducing the participants to the materials, techniques, artistic theories, and exhibitions currently on view in MoMA’s galleries. It’s a great way for teens to find a community of positive, creative peers outside of a high school setting, and all classes are offered completely free of charge to the participating students. For this entry, teaching artist Grace Hwang explores her process of introducing students to the themes and philosophies behind our Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement exhibition.
Photo by Brenda Zamora
You probably didn’t hear about the huge exhibition opening last week at MoMA—it didn’t make the front page of The New York Times Arts or Style sections; no one was interviewed on NPR about it; no pictures of the artists appeared on Art Fag City. And yet it was definitely the place to be if you are interested in mingling with the freshest faces in contemporary art.
In the Making Alumni, Summer 2010, during the artmaking workshops.
We’re all familiar with the time-honored “What I Did Last Summer” essay. For many of us, this dreaded homework assignment meant trying to glamorize the hours we spent busing tables at a local restaurant or counting license plates on a family road trip. But for five hundred New York City teens, “What I Did Last Summer” is a chance to revisit their experience as participants in The Museum of Modern Art’s intensive studio art program, In the Making: Summer at MoMA.
What’s so unconventional about painting? According to the teens in MoMA’s Unconventional Painting class, a lot.
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