Week 15 Journal

Both Free First Saturday and Sensory Friendly Sunday fell on the same weekend this month! On Saturday, I assisted Hibaaq again, this time with a zine-making activity, highlighting things participants care about! Visitors could choose from 3 templates: one with words and drawings they could color, one with just words, or a blank one so they can write and draw their own ideas. It was warm out on Saturday, so three was less traffic than normal since people wanted to spend time outside instead of in the museum. Most participants needed help with folding and cutting the paper after they were done, so we were both assisting with that pretty frequently as well. There were two kids who were super engaged, one of them asked me to teach her how to draw a cake and her and her brother were begging their dad to take them to see my work that is up in my senior show; it seemed like they really looked up to me and it felt like I had really impacted them by taking the time to have conversations with them!

On Sunday, I assisted teaching artist Nicole Thomas with a seed-bomb activity using colored tissue paper and wildflower seeds native to Minnesota! It was rainy so we only had a couple visitors, but it was a relaxing and meditative project in combination with the weather. Participants made a drawing as a thank you to mother earth, and then a colorful seed bomb. One group who visited were Nicole's friends, and they really enjoyed the activity, and the other person who visited is leading two Sensory Friendly Sunday activities this summer!

Week 13 Journal

This week I submitted my final draft with the accompanying images for the pop-up card art kit for May’s Free First Saturday. I also discovered that writing instructions for folding paper is much, much harder than it seems, and I got quite hung up one one particular step. I asked all my coworkers at my job and a few others in the room how they would go about explaining it and if how I wrote it made sense, and five of us could not come to a consensus! With the images though, it made more sense. I had not realized that there are a lot of moments like these in lesson planning, where something that seems simple in theory is so difficult to explain with words, so it’s of course important to plan as much as possible to have enough time to prepare lessons and instructions for review.

Week 12 Journal

This week I made a first draft of my instructions for the Free First Saturday art kit I’m designing for May, with a theme of giving and receiving care. Sarah, Leia, and I decided on my pop-up card idea, which just so happens to perfectly coincide with Mother’s Day weekend! When I was brainstorming ideas, I tried to look back to the things I enjoyed making when I was younger, and I remember making pop-up cards all the time after I learned how. I can’t remember who taught me, but it really upped my card-making game for my loved ones and made the process of making cards a lot more fun, and it’s definitely a skill that comes in handy for those of us who are better at drawing than writing!

Week 11 Journal

For Sensory Friendly Sunday this month, I assisted Roman with a diorama making activity that he designed. We offered some foam-core that had been glued together to make walls and floors for the background, pipe cleaners, construction paper, wikki-sticks, model magic, and some drawing and coloring utensils as supplies for making the dioramas. Most visitors who participated made animal themed dioramas, and they got really creative. One of my friends who visited made a clown cat, and a younger visitor made one of the only non-animal ones with a cake on a table and a disco ball, as well as some more abstract forms. We had a repeat visitor from last month who made a toucan in theirs! I think the 3-dimensionality of this project really enticed visitors, since there were so many materials to choose from that all had different textures!

Week 10 Journal

For this month’s Free First Saturday event, I assisted teaching artist May Lee-Yang with a poetry activity for national poetry month. We had a couple different options for the types of poems participants could create: 

1. List poem– participants follow the prompt “things that make me happy” to create a poem in the format of a list

2. Cento poem (or patchwork poem)-- participants cut ouyou lines from existing poems on colored sheets of paper and rearrange them to make their own poem

3. Collaborative poem– participants write their own lines of poetry about spring and add them to the paper taped up to the window

It was a pretty busy event, and a lot of visitors stopped by to create their own poems and were excited to write. We had a few kids who weren’t interested in writing but still wanted to make art, so we ended up with a few construction paper creations, and began presenting those as a “visual poetry” option to entice some of the kids who were hesitant to write to join in the activity. The kids who were excited to participate really enjoyed the activity, but compared to the other activities I’ve assisted with, some kids required a little bit more convincing to participate since they didn’t want to think about words, which is where the visual poetry option came in handy! I think the cento poem was especially helpful in getting participants to work with words because they didn’t have to create the poetry lines entirely on their own, so it makes the activity feel less intimidating for those who don’t normally do a lot of writing.

Week 7 Journal

This Sunday, I assisted Roman with a Sensory Friendly Sunday painting activity! Each table is set up with color coding for socialization preferences, two tables each for folks who want to talk to others, might need some quiet but may still ask questions, and want to be left alone. Each attendee drops some marbles into cups of paint, and scoops them out with a plastic spoon onto a piece of paper in a plastic tray. Then the tray is tilted, which rolls the paint-covered marbles around over the paper, creating a piece reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist style. Attendees really enjoyed the event, and Roman and I even got a shout out in the survey for the event! He and I made some pieces ourselves; it was relaxing both to facilitate the activity for others and to participate in it as well.

Week 6 Journal

This week I visited the Walker for Evening for Educators, an event inviting educators to experience Walker tours through an exhibition to gain insight on what that would look like for a class, as well as other educational resources related to some of the work currently on view at the Walker including an activity guide for the David Hockney exhibition, People, Places, & Things, and an information exhibition guide for teacher use. There were also two art-making activities set up for attendees, an iPad drawing station based on Hockney’s digital landscape pieces, and an accordion book station.

I also assisted with Free First Saturday this weekend, which fell on the same weekend as the Kid’s Film Fest. The activity I was helping with was a stop motion film activity with two stations. First, kids and their adults created paper puppets using either templates or cutting out their own shapes and attaching them with brads. After they finished creating the puppets, they brought them over to the iPad station, which I was running, to create a short stop motion animation. Kids were really excited about it, and some wanted to make multiple films. Because the film fest fell on the same weekend, it was very crowded and we likely would have benefitted from a few extra hands, as the activity takes quite a bit of time, and more people were lining up much faster than others were finishing their puppets or films. It was a bit overwhelming, but it helped that every family who visited was very patient and understood that we couldn’t make it go faster, and seemed to be a really enjoyable event for everyone who attended!

Week 5 Journal

On Thursday this week, I was invited by Jessica to observe a Walker virtual art tour! This tour was focused on grades 6-12, and was attended by a high school group. During the tour, the students were taught a method of visual analysis to help them understand contemporary artwork using an example, and then looked at three pieces as a group. Most of the group was pretty quiet, but a few students were very engaged and were using the chat to respond to every question and every piece. After the tour, myself and the team of educators, Jessica, Roman, and Savannah, stayed for a couple more minutes to discuss some of what worked well, and what could increase engagement for another group that age, and whether or not a couple of the questions about gender roles could be posed in a more advanced way for this age group. 

I really feel that the Walker’s approach to teaching visual analysis is very effective with having students start out with simple observations about color, form, etc before moving on to providing context and then reflecting about what the piece might mean. In my art class at that age, my class had a slightly different approach to visual analysis and the importance of making simple observations beyond the media used was not emphasized enough, which led to myself and other students not recognizing the importance of that step, and made the analysis process unnecessarily difficult. I noticed that students were the most engaged with that first step of the process, and even though it is the most simple step of the process, definitely cannot be skipped over, and it seems as if they left the tour recognizing the importance of that step. Overall the students who were participating seemed to have gotten a lot out of the tour and are able to better connect with artwork they view in the future!

Week 4 Journal

Yesterday I visited the Walker to observe Sensory Friendly Sunday (SFS), which is a monthly event that happens for a few hours before the museum opens, designed to have dimmer lighting, quieter spaces, less visitors, and added accommodations like fidget toys, designated quiet spaces, and sound cancellation headphones and earplugs. The map of the activities is also labeled with which areas have higher lighting or sound. I was there for about an hour and a half, and I had no idea how much of the museum experience I had been missing out on all my life until attending SFS for the first time. I have really sensitive hearing and simultaneously not the best audio processing, so museums can be too echoey and distracting for me to focus on the art and read the didactics, even when there isn’t a large crowd. But on Sunday morning, the galleries were so quiet and peaceful. I was able to take as long as I needed to look at each artwork, and not worry so much about how people around me were moving. 

When gallery spaces are designed and when an exhibition is being installed, it’s very important to consider how people will move through the space– but I think it’s often forgotten that other people determine a lot of how we move around the gallery space, more so than even the space itself. If there’s someone behind me while I’m looking at a piece I’m not likely to stay there as long as I would like, because they might think I’m taking too long, for example. SFS eliminated a lot of the stress of crowd movement and distracting noise and I looked much more deeply at the pieces on view because of the lack of distractions. Julie Mehretu doesn’t prime the edges of all of her paintings.

On my way out, I grabbed an art kit! It came with both white and colorful roving, a zip-lock bag, a sketchbook with prompts, a set of colored pencils, and instructions. The project is to make a felted abstract landscape based on the work of Ojibwe artist George Morrison (who also happens to be one of my favorite artists), using the roving, plastic bag, and a little soap and water– employing the use of a horizon line to create space in the finished piece. Naturally as I’ve always done, I strayed a bit from the assembly instructions since I happen to have some needle felting tools and a couple extra colors of roving. My landscape has grass toward the foreground, and a sky that is lavender at the horizon line and fades to a deep periwinkle toward the top of the image. There are a few purple clouds in the sky, and the sun is setting at the horizon line. It’s fascinating how kids and abstract artists often see the composition of landscape as something as simple as a horizon line and some depth of field, and those two elements alone can make up such a lovely landscape.

Week 3 Journal

On Saturday, I helped set up one of the activities for Free First Saturday in the Cargill Lounge, and assisted Hibaaq with the activity. We were doing a season-based activity, where participants would make either summer or winter scenes or city elements using construction paper cutouts, and add them to a collaborative neighborhood (or take them home). So many kids were really excited about the activity, and we even got a few adults participating with their friends! Everyone’s pieces were incredibly creative, one adult made a house with steps to the front door made of paper folded back and forth, so they were 3D. Everything was so colorful, and both the summer and winter sides of the collaborative town were bustling by the end of my shift! 

Having had very little experience working in education settings with younger children, I learned a lot about kids on Saturday, especially in terms of body language. Some of the kids didn’t talk a lot or at all when their adults asked if they wanted to participate in the activity, but I noticed that the adults could usually tell by their child’s body language if they did or didn’t want to join in, and for some kids it was more straightforward than others. Some of the younger kids were so excited they just walked right in without waiting for their adults; one baby kept pointing at my pom-pom earring and smiling. I feel like I gained a lot of insight about what kinds of things excite kids about learning and about art while assisting with the activity! A lot of artists write about this, but I can only agree that the parts of creating that children like really aren’t too different from what many professional artists enjoy about making art as adults.

Week 2 Journal

This week I had two meetings, one with Simona and Lauren to learn more about the WAC Teen Arts Council (WACTAC), and one with Lauren, Jessica, and Sarah A. to learn about WAC school programs and educational tours, which are currently happening virtually due to COVID. We also talked about how the programs work toward making art education in a museum setting accessible to more age groups, and fosters the development of critical thinking skills in an artistic context through its education programs.

Week 1 Journal

This week I had an introductory meeting with Sarah L. and Leia and got to know a little more about how I’ll be assisting with Free First Saturday (FFS) and Sensory Friendly Sunday (SFS) throughout the next few months, what kind of activities they have done in the past– and what’s planned for this year so far.

On Saturday, I attended FFS to observe the activities that were arranged. I have always struggled to navigate museums architecturally; I get lost in them easily. Needless to say that even with a map and very clear directions, I did manage to get lost in the building for a moment! But once I got my bearings– I drifted around the activities to observe the interactions families were having. 

There was an iPad drawing station, as well as a space to draw a portrait of a loved one, both inspired by David Hockney’s exhibition, People, Places, & Things. Both of the drawing activities were less busy when I was floating around in those areas. In the Mediatheque, there was a Japanese stop motion short film called Om Nom Nom playing on a loop, which was personally my favorite part of the experience. It follows the story of a dinosaur who eats a mysterious egg, which hatches in their stomach and gives them a stomach ache– it’s very entertaining. I was alone the first time it played, which was probably good because I was snickering audibly. By the time the loop was starting over, 3-4 children and their adults came in, and it was amazing to listen to the kids reacting to the film, the adults reacting to the film, and then the conversations and laughter shared between them. 

Before I left I also explored the galleries, since I hadn’t been there on my own before and had the opportunity to take my time with some of the works on display, and I really enjoyed spending a longer time with Julie Mehretu’s work, which I hadn’t seen in person since it was in the High Museum of Art in Atlanta– it was just as stunning as I remembered! 

I’m really excited to work more closely with the families showing up for Free First Saturday and to witness all the beautiful artwork being made!