Intrinsic Value in Contemporary Art Collaborations…and Learning Through Them

I am thankful that I was recently introduced to the work of the Slow Art Collective through Louisa Penfold, who writes Art.Play.Children.Pedagogy. The Slow Art Collective creates interactive installations, which are based upon “the slow absorption of culture through community links by creating something together and blurring the boundary between the artists and viewer.” They go on to state that their work “is a sustainable arts practice, not an extreme solution; a reasonable alternative to deal with real problems in contemporary art practice.” Slow Art Collective’s collaborative art work is very much inline with several major theories in education such as social and emotional learning, embodied learning, cross-disciplinary STEAM, and the Reggio Emilia approach. I want to focus on the latter approach in relation to the Slow Art Collective’s work.

The Reggio Emilia Approach was founded in Italy after World War II. It focuses on nurturing pre-school and early childhood student-centered learning environments, and is based on Constructivist educational methodology.  philosophy is based around these principle beliefs:

• Children must have some control over the direction of their learning
• Children must be able to learn through experiences of touching, moving, listening, and observing
• Children have a relationship with other children and with material items in the world that they must be allowed to explore.
• Children must have endless ways and opportunities to express themselves.

Within the Slow Art Collective’s installations, there are a multitude of tactile environments that engage children (and adult visitors) in a collaborative materials based exploration, where the viewers actively contribute to the aesthetic and conceptual design of the art work.

While the visitor moves throughout the various components of the installation, they are partaking in an exchange of value, not in the monetary sense (which is often unfairly/unfortunately tied to art), but in the sense of appreciating the way creative experiences connect us and help us to become better members of our community. Art that is collaborative goes beyond the traditional artist/viewer relationship and forms open-ended art works, where viewers become participants and experience the work of art through a combination of physical and intellectual engagement. By having collaborative components, the artists are sharing some control over the direction of the work with the viewer/participant. Additionally, the work is made replete through the viewer’s touching, moving, listening and observing. Furthermore, these installations create a safe space where visitors form relationships with each other by sharing in a cooperative creation of an art work, as well as a profound individual and shared experience.

The playful (yet serious) approach to art making promotes both self and collaborative expression, and teaches us that it is the process –the work we put into relationships and working together creatively– that matters the most.

Advertisements

We Live, We Learn, We’re all in this together. REMAP: Collaborative and Community Driven Learning

REMAP is a collaborative multi-disciplinary art project, conceived by Anna Adler, Julia Rooney, and Corinne Cappelletti after volunteering at some of New York’s homeless shelters during More Art’s Engaging Artists fellowship program.

The goal of the project was to create a mutual partnership between the homeless and formerly homeless residents of the city through various modes of social and physical interaction (such as art making, cooking, and somatic movement exercises).

This took place during several workshops where both homeless and formerly homeless individuals discussed their personal experiences living in New York City (whether in homes, shelters, or on the streets or subways) and what it means to belong to a place, to travel within that place, or to be displaced from a place you call home. Participants mapped out their various and diverse paths in their lives. In doing so, they discovered a strong sense of belonging to a community and claiming New York City as home.

Learning is best achieved when the teacher/facilitator (in this case the three artists) and the students/participants are in collaboration and there isn’t an authoritarian separation of power. Learners come into the educational setting with prior knowledge and experience, which a good teacher will help them to expand upon in new and unique ways. In this manner, education can have profound results for social change. Dewey (1897) wrote that “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.”  REMAP is an example of critical pedagogy, where the artists employed instructional scaffolding techniques (compelling guidelines, resources and materials, advice, modeling a task, and inspirational ‘coaching’, to name a few), which gave the participants autonomy and confidence to empower themselves and each other in a democratic environment.

---

Notes:

Dewey, J (1897). My Pedagogic Creed. New York and Chicago: E.L. Kellog & Co.

Social and Emotional Learning – Our Public Space, our Personal Experience Pt. 1

Freire (1970) called for an educational model where we learn by participating in social and political events. To him, education and politics are inseparable and the student is as equally responsible in the creation of knowledge as the teacher is. There are many examples from contemporary art that vividly depict these ideas. This ongoing examination will take a look at socially engaged works of art within the public space that are made in collaboration with diverse populations.

Ofri Cnaani’s Moon Guardians (2013), was a video installation (produced by More Art), which the artist projected on a historic building in Gansevoort Plaza. The site-specific project examined the socio-historical context of New York City’s Meatpacking District, which has undergone significant changes throughout its storied history. In realizing this project, Cnaani worked with local public High School students who interviewed several longtime residents from the neighborhood. Many of these residents, including a butcher, a drag queen, an art gallerist, and an elderly couple, could no longer afford to live there. By reflecting on their memories of the neighborhood before it became the fashionable hub it is today, they portrayed a vibrant narrative of its diverse history. Cnaani filmed them in a style that is distinctly haunting. Each of these characters appeared every night, lit up from a vista on the building, and performed moments from their lives when they lived there. The result was a powerful juxtaposition of old and new New York.

Moon Guardians symbolically details the relationship between the oppressor (gentrification) and the oppressed (displaced longtime members of the community) by conflating the two groups together. We are invited into the past, but cannot fully escape reality because we are aware that the people we’re viewing are essentially spectres that appear from within an unfamiliar frontier. The working class, small business person, and loft dwelling artist have vanished in favor of high-end products, chic-boutiques, and luxury apartments. The contradictions between the gentrifiers and the gentrified and the realization of the inequity between the two groups is exemplary of what Friere coined the ‘critical conscious.’

Ofri Cnaani speaks about Moon Guardians (2013) from More Art on Vimeo.

---

Notes:

Freire, Paulo (2007). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.