Mapping Out A Sky

Each summer, members of the Rooftop Art Committee meet to talk about the opportunities for arts learning that we see ahead, and we begin to identify the works of art for study that are available for community exploration.  We discuss possible themes that we hope our school community will enjoy exploring. Over the past 7 years, we have implemented these ideas and grown an arts education program known at Rooftop as "Art Is..."

Art Is... is a Rooftop art education program that uses works of art to provide an inexhaustible resource for exploration, reflection and understanding. The program actively engages students, supports learning across the curriculum, and builds critical thinking skills through “hands-on” art making, reflection and research.

Art Is... will bring works of art (music, dance, theater and visual art, with a focus on multicultural work) to all Rooftop students and develop partnerships between teachers, teaching artists, arts organizations and art parents to develop integrated, interdisciplinary curriculum that will support learning for all students.

Rooftop's Art Is... studies have framed areas of exploration, in hopes of helping the Rooftop school community to connect art and life with learning: 

Coming Together (2012-2013), Expression (2011-2012), Illumination (2010-2011), Innovation (2009-2010), Shaping Memory (2008-2009), Jazz (2007-2008), Asawa (2006-2007).

The choosing of the works of study is a purposeful act of curation. As we begin our eighth year of engaging the community through this model, we should note that we are now working in a time of great transition.  At the systemic level, the purposes, processes, challenges and successes of an educational system are being examined, and at the school site, new ways of teaching are being implemented. Of course, each new school year brings change as families and teachers enter and exit.

http://www.hbs.edu/pelp/framework.html

The SFUSD Strategic Plan Progress report puts forward this Theory of Change.

If we
• engage students, families and the community in this effort;
Then, every student who enrolls in our schools can achieve his or her maximum potential.
• deliver a rigorous core curriculum with high quality instruction and a results oriented equity mindset;
• invest in adult learning, leadership, and change; and
• engage students, families and the community in this effort;
Then, every student who enrolls in our schools can achieve his or her maximum potential.

This Theory of Change, created by the Harvard Business School, sets out to establish a formula for success with quantifiable educational outcomes. But what of the aspects of learning that are much harder to measure, and no less important to a life?

Important personal discoveries such as passion, wisdom, empathy and purpose.

ART IS A WINDOW

First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson said, “Art is the window to man’s soul. Without it, he would never be able to see beyond his immediate world; nor could the world see the man within.”

After eight years of creating “Art Is...” studies, we have gathered quite a bit of information, resource materials and experience.  It’s a good time to take stock of things.  A letter written on September 11, 2006, when the program began, offered some thoughts about the role of the arts in shaping the soul of a community. 

When we make art, we leap without ever completely knowing how and where we will land. The detours, the myriad of choices, the surprises and the resulting illumination are the reasons why the arts can transform a life, or even a community.

Today, the works of art and the people who have come together to work are different, but hopefully, the passion and purpose for the art-making — the desire to transform the ordinary is still the same. 

With three weeks until the start of school, it’s time to go to the window and pull back the curtains.
Take a good look around and get started. Time to begin mapping out your slice of the sky.

Window to the Sky by seren*

I Was a Teenage Art Curator

Audrey Banks received more than 700 submissions from about 300 artists after putting out a request for submissions from artists ages 12 to 19. She put out the word through her Facebook event page, had high school students around the city post fliers, and contacted art teachers and youth programs at museums like the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum.

— NY Times: “An Exhibition Whose Curator Is 17”

Banks was an intern at No Longer Empty, an organization that “takes empty lots, storefronts waiting to be rented out, and temporarily turns them into art galleries.” NLE Curatorial Lab ("NLE Lab") has a 12 week program that guides participants through six distinct phases:

1) Fundamentals of curating;

2) Historical and community based research;

3) Development of exhibition themes and selection of artists;

4) Creation and installation of the exhibition with all the supplementary materials;

5) Running the exhibition and public programming and

6) Evaluation and impact assessment.

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NURTUREart is dedicated to nurturing new contemporary art by providing exhibition opportunities and resources for emerging artists, curators and public school students. Check out their Flicker Photostream and PDF exhibition catalog.

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The Young Curators of the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey offers an intensive 7 month excursion for high school juniors and seniors into the business of curating. Each participant took an in-depth look at one work of art.

John Baldessari (b. 1931)
"Two Unfinished Letters," 1992-3
Photolithograph
Ed. 60/80
Sheet: 31 ½ x 21 in.
33 ¾ x 23 ¼ x ½ in.
Gift of Beth and George Meredith
2005.23.1

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Curate This! is a student project directed by Sabatini Gallery associate curator, Betsy Roe at the Topeka Public Libary, for selected, area high school youth.

Students work with a curator to choose artwork from the Library’s permanent collection for exhibition in the front gallery (Hirschberg Gallery). They are also asked to create the text panels, write curator’s statements and work with our Communications & Marketing department on various marketing elements.

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The Urbano Project's Young Curators respond to a theme while working with staff to produce exhibitions and events in Boston.

Interactive media artist Alison Kotin and performance artist Risa Horn worked with students to explore their Boston neighborhoods, considering physical, social, and cultural boundaries between communities. Why do we only visit certain neighborhoods and never go to others? What does the city look like from the point of view of a visitor? What do you love or hate about your own neighborhood? Where do you feel safe? As we travel to many sites throughout the city, we are working collaboratively to create a large art installation, live performance projects, and a web-based interactive project.

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The Art Institute of Chicago's Curate IT offers students the chance to create their own exhibitions via the Digital Youth Network. Mary Erbach, Assistant Director, Interpretive Exhibitions and Family Programs, Art Institute of Chicago

How to Write A Label, Curation by the Art Institute of Chicago, Teen Programs.

Literary Lots

There's a great entry on the Library as Incubator blog, Literary Lots: The Library as Place Maker, about Literary Lots, a Kickstarter project that was funded to bring books to life in vacant lots in Cleveland. 

The idea of a Literary Lot is to bring children’s books to life by re-creating images, scenes, and ideas from those books in tangible, visible, and physical ways over a few weeks of summer.  While many urban neighborhoods are close to institutions (such as museums or non-profits) with programming, families in many of these neighborhoods may not have the means to attend.  Being geographically close to a cultural or institutional asset doesn’t mean that someone can access that asset.  One of the main goals for Literary Lots is to bring institutions together in a place they may have previously  dismissed as vacant or empty.  Literary Lots wants to transform once-empty spaces into new experiences for kids to see books in a way they never have before – by walking through them. We want people to bring their kids, participate in programs, play, or just sit and read all day in a place that’s there, in their neighborhood – someplace literally “out of a book.”

This concept of place-making and storytelling through books could be a great idea to explore in our art show, "A Slice of Life."

Stories are at the heart of Flo's reason for art-making.

For her show at the Luggage Store,  75: Flo Oy Wong . . .The Whole Pie, she has invited 75 local, regional and national artists to submit art pies.

All of these works created by Wong and the invited artists share a common thread. They are narratives which either address the deconstruction of a stereotype or tell the stories of under-represented men and women whose lives and hard work have made a significant yet unknown difference in this country. 

Gwah Gai: Crossing the Street, the performance that came out of her collaboration with Marcus Shelby and Rooftop School, captures and honors the childhood stories of her husband Ed, also known as Baby Jack.

Family is a major theme that Flo has explored through her 35 years of art-making. Our opportunity to hold an art show in the Luggage Store Gallery comes with Flo's induction into The Family of Rooftop, the incredible roster of hard-working creative people who have brought the arts to Rooftop's community over the past forty years.  

Coupled with the creation of Little Free Libraries and an invitation for the extended community photographic installation based on The Family of Man, the Literary Lot concept could be a really fun way to engage classrooms in the curation process.

Teachers, families & artists coming together to enjoy a big slice of the Rooftop Art Pie. 

The Family of Man

In 1955, a decade into the Cold War, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened its doors to a monumental photography exhibition, an aesthetic manifesto visualizing ideas of peace and “the essential oneness of mankind.” Edward Steichen, then director of the MoMA photography department, curated 503 photographs — from a pool of two million — by 273 artists from 68 countries with the at-once simple and grand goal of definitively “explaining man to man.”

Steichen called The Family of Man the most significant work of his career, writing later in the exhibition catalog — which has since sold millions of copies — that it was the “most ambitions and challenging project photography has ever attempted.” An immersive installation of monochrome prints glued onto wood frames upwards of 13 feet in length and often suspended from the ceiling, the exhibition was grouped by themes thought common across all cultures: birth, love, labor, joy, and others. The roster of photographers contained many names that remain in obscurity, but many more that have gone on to achieve legendary status: from Elliott Erwitt and W. Eugene Smith to Alfred Eisenstaedt and Nina Leen.

 — Excerpt from Time Lightbox article on “Steichen’s Family of Man Restored: New Life for a Photographic Touchstone” by Eugene Reznik

Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2013/07/11/steichens-family-of-man-restored-new-life-for-a-photographic-touchstone/#ixzz2ZqfILq9g

Exhibit guide from Fred Turner's 

The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America

The exhibition was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2003.