Class Photos

Hand Made: Artist Faith Ringgold

Hand Made: Artist Faith Ringgold

Artist Websight

"I think that has been a benefit to me because I think most people understand quilts and not a lot of people understand paintings. But yet they're looking at one. When they're looking at my work, they're looking at a painting and they're able to accept it better because it is also a quilt." Faith Ringgold

PBS Interview

Hand Made: Artist Miriam Schapiro

Miriam Schapiro

"I wanted to validate the traditional activities of women, to connect myself to the unknown women artists who had made quilts, who had done the invisible 'women's work' of civilization. I wanted to acknowledge them, to honor them." -Miriam Schapiro,1977

Politics of Gender:

How do the materials and techniques used to create each work of art convey meaning? How does the artist's gender come into play when we interpret his or her work?

Richard Serra, A Matter of Time, 2005, steel

Miriam Schapiro, Connection, 1978, quilt

William Kentridge: Tapestries

William Kentridge, born in Johannesburg in 1955, creates iconic images of porters and processional characters that have come to represent the transitional conditions that have plagued South Africa both under the apartheid regime and after its decline in the mid-1990s. Kentridge’s motifs evoke daily existence in the face of inequity, speaking both to South Africa specifically and to the world at large.


To produce the tapestries, Kentridge worked in close collaboration with the Stephens Tapestry Studio in Diepsloot, a suburb of Johannesburg, whose mission focuses on weaving as an artistic medium. 

"...weaving transforms Mr. Kentridge’s ideas by reinterpreting them through a human activity that is not attached to an individual creator, but is instead a 'generic creativity' that can be expressed by anyone, in this case, trained in and attentive to the craft."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/arts/31kent.html 

Representing Labor in Contemporary Art

How is the personal, political, social, and economic meaning of work and labor conveyed in the context of art production?


Lesson #3: With the globalization of the economy in full swing, the relationship of textile and cloth to labor (and often exploitation) make the issues raised by this lesson of special interest today. Almost every piece of textile we encounter holds the charged history of outsourced garment workers; the different systems of production and consumption in factories and homes; and insinuations about class, gender, and sexuality through clothing. When textile is used in art making, it may comment on the messy politics of its production, its mobility between nations and the power dynamics those exchanges symbolize. 

What separates the labor that the underpaid workers in South Asia do to make clothing and how artists use textile to for their art? They are laboring in the same way to create a product. But it is a sense of cultural significance and purpose separates them, a commentary meant to be reflected on in a museum rather than being worn. These works are made to be shown publicly, as opposed to being used in a private and individual way.

In her video work Gioconda (2007) Karina Svirsky uses the so called immigration crisis as an entry point to explore the plight of recent immigrants who work long hours doing menial jobs long after emigration. Blurring the lines between the documentary and the fictional, the video charts Gioconda’s every movement as she ardently cleans a hotel room. The soundtrack mixes cleaning sounds with sampled tracks from Hollywood border films evoking Gioconda’s own crossing from Mexico into the US-a memory that remains part of her sub-conscious even as she successfully emigrates to the United States. Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008, video and installation In this video, Takala documents her stint as an office intern where she didn’t do any work.  To realize the project, the artist worked for a month as a trainee "Johanna Takala" in the marketing departement of Deloitte where only few people knew the true nature of the project. During the month long intervention an initially normal-seeming marketing trainee starts to apply peculiar working methods. Gradually she shifts from the position of someone others believe normal to the object of avoidance and speculation. The videos and slideshow reveal a spectrum of ways other staff members respond to the odd intern in the office. Sincere interest and bewildered amusement is juxtaposed with demands directed at the superior regarding the strangely behaving worker. One of the videos shows her spending an entire day in an elevator. These acts or rather the absence of visible action slowly make the atmosphere around the trainee unbearable and force the colleagues to search for solutions and come up with explanations for the situation. Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, 2010, installation at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall The work consists of roughly 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds covering a vast expanse of floor to the depth of about four inches, and visitors were invited to wade right in. Some 1,600 residents of a village called Jingdezhen, that once provided porcelain to the imperial court, produced them over the course of five years, as documented in a video (above) that accompanies the piece. Ai came into the village when it had fallen on economic hard times and most of the traditional artisan methods used in the town were disappearing. He gave the workers a new form of income with the sunflower seed project, but the project was still criticized for its similarity to procedures in China's other factory towns, where laborers work long hours with little return. The piece has a subtle political commentary apart from its manufacture, since in Ai's country of origin, China, Chairman Mao used to be represented in propaganda posters as the sun, while the Chinese people were shown as sunflowers turning towards him.

"Consider Trockel’s piece a...meditation on how America has come together and how the country speaks with many different, even jumbled voices. She also seems to be pointing out that there’s no one way to read America."

Rosemarie Trockel, Untitled, 1986

Lesson Plan #1 - March 15, 16, 21, 22

Occupy I.S. 187            

What do you imagine Occupy protesters stand for, or want? What would you do if in charge of the protests? These questions and more are posed to students in Occupy I.S. 187. Putting into practice the contemporary idea of art as social activity and incubator for critical dialogue, students discuss their opinions of the movement and its effectiveness, while also dissecting the subjectivity of individual photographs and symbols from the media that have come to represent the 99% and 1%. Addressing the power of images and the Internet in the Occupy movement, a power utilized by corporate media and the everyday citizen alike, the class works to analyze content from the perspective of four different groups: the protesters, the Wall Street workers, the police department, and the media.  Form, arrangement and subject matter can represent the same event in a myriad of ways. But who has control over public perception? How can we detect the ideology behind a photograph? Is it possible to be objective? To decode photographs and digital images brought in by students and presented by Ms. Dunn, students are asked to come to a consensus about the intentions of the image, what the photographer chooses to represent and what they imagine actually lies outside of the frame. As Ms. Dunn provides suggestive examples, thought-provoking case studies, and unique techniques for interpretation, the lesson focuses much more on critical thinking and talking about visual culture than object making. In this open forum, asking targeted questions takes precedence over quick answers and the gap between art and politics is reduced.

  

Lesson Plan #2 - May 2, 3, 4, 7

Flag Mania: Cultural Branding and the Power of National Symbols

At the end of the Occupy I.S. 187 session, students will be asked to conduct interviews with family, friends, school teachers or community members as part of the next session. The interviews will serve as a starting point for lesson #2, an artistic re-interpretation of whichever national flag the student and/or their interview subjects most identify with. Students will be encouraged to address a national mythology or ideology in their revamped/updated flag, but may also address more personal or local symbols from their daily life. Postings on the blog will provide context for the project by including examples of artists engaging with national identity and the flag as symbol. The introductory discussion for this session will center on the use of symbols, as well as the difference between nationalism and patriotism.

Students will be given a sheet of paper on which they will depict an alternative flag for their country of choice. In the process, Ms. Dunn will encourage them to think abstractly and use symbols rather direct narrative representation or imagery. Traditional formats, like the separation of the flag into three sections or colors, can provide structure for the new content students will add.

Lesson #3 - May 11, 14, 18, 23

Hand Made: Labor, Craft, and Mass Production

This lesson plan would centers on the issue of outsourcing, the way the United States exports manufacturing responsibilities to countries like India, China, and Vietnam. Unfortunately, the laborers in these countries must succumb to horrible working conditions, often becoming human capital. Ms. Dunn, who uses textiles in her own artwork, will engage students in a quilting project for this lesson, showing them how much labor goes into textile manufacturing, but also the beauty of alternative economies (making your own clothes, growing your own fruit and vegetables, etc.) Ms. Dunn will bring in her own knitting machine to show the type of machinery workers in the outsourced countries may operate, countries where reforms the students learned about in their social studies or law class (New Deal economic reforms banning child labor, etc.) do not exist.

Students will consider artists such as Miriam Schapiro (and others involved in the Pattern and Decoration Movement), Faith Ringgold, and Rosemarie Trockel in their exploration of labor and process within contemporary art. How does the type of labor that goes into the artwork (here stereotypically feminine or domestic actions like knitting, sewing, and quilting) speak to the issues it grapples with? What constitutes private labor and public labor?