Whitney Museum of American Art: Blogs: EducationBlog

_Sinister Pop_ Family Day

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:57:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

On Saturday, March 9, kids and their parents took center stage at the Whitney’s Family Day in conjunction with the Sinister Pop exhibition. In the spirit of Pop art, families explored what it means to be a celebrity and how icons are created, with guest appearances by artists Dave McKenzie and The Bumbys. Other Pop art and celebrity-inspired activities included print-making, karaoke, performance, and activities in the galleries, and posing on a red carpet for paparazzi-style Polaroid pictures.

On View: _No Room (Gold) #42_

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

The Blues for Smoke exhibition explores a wide range of contemporary art through the lens of the blues and blues aesthetics, introducing the blues, not just as a style of music, but as a more pervasive sensibility that informs the work of visual artists as well. The exhibition traces the influence of the blues among artists varying in age, race, and gender, and working in such diverse media that the show surprised and demanded reflection at every corner.

Though bright colors and unconventional materials enticed me as I walked through the exhibition, I was drawn to a group of three paintings from Glenn Ligon’s No Room (Gold) series. The series is comprised of thirty-six canvases which all display a single quote by stand-up comedian Richard Pryor (1940-2005), taken from a 1971 concert video Live & Smokin’. The quote reads:

I was a nigger for twenty-three years.

I gave that shit up. No room for

No room for advancement.

Ligon stenciled the quote in bold black lettering on a gold background in the center of a square canvas. As I looked at the quote on each of the three paintings, I realized the text layout forced me to read the line just as Pryor may have delivered it on stage, with the words “no room for” repeated twice and separated by a line break—the visualization of a stutter and correcting pause by Pryor.

To compose his text paintings, Ligon often uses stencils. As the stencils are used and reused, the paint congeals on the edges, making the text increasingly illegible. While the No Room (Gold) paintings display a single quote, there are subtle variations among the canvases. I peered closely at each work to examine these nuances. Each letter is stenciled uniquely depending on how much paint was applied, and the remnants and lingering outlines left by letters that have been painted over are slightly different on each of the paintings on view. Looking at the marks made by the stenciled letters I found myself caught between the visual and the textual, at once exploring the letters as abstract shapes and reading the words to decipher their meaning.

I found that Pryor’s provocative and poignant words created a dramatic contrast with the seductive gold background. The longer I looked the more I noticed distinctions between both the letter forms as well as the words. In the third painting Ligon changed Pryor’s line by substituting the word negro for nigger. His interference in the repetition of Pryor’s quote seem to mimic the subtle formal alterations in the letterforms and marks on the canvas. What strikes me about these works in the context of Blues for Smoke is their apparent process, repetition, and improvisation that, like the blues, represents lasting qualities—an ability to confront and challenge, embrace mistakes, endure, and overcome.

By Brittni Zotos, Interpretation Intern

Teen Art Programs Research Project Update

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:43:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

In fall 2011, Whitney Education began a three-year research initiative to measure the long-term and continuing impact of participation in contemporary art museum teen programs. The study focuses on program alumni, the museums themselves, and the communities where the alumni live. Funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Whitney leads this project in collaboration with the Walker Art Center (WAC), the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). All four institutions have long-standing teen programs that offer a diverse group of participants the opportunity to learn about art, go behind the scenes at each institution, and take on leadership roles within the museum and in their community. As we approach the half-way mark of this groundbreaking study, we are excited to share the progress we have made thus far.

The first step of the study was to research and contact program alumni. Between the four museums there were a total of 600 alumni dating from the beginning of the first program through the end of the 2011 school year. We set a goal of verifying current contact information for at least 75% of all alumni from each program. After an extensive process of outreach and online research, team members at each of the museums were able to acquire current contact information for 472 alumni—nearly 80%! In May 2012 an online survey was launched and administered to this group, and the response rate was extremely positive, with 84% responding to the thirty-four-question survey.

Youth Insights Leaders Visit Fred Wilson’s Studio

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:20:00 -0500

Categories: EducationBlog

New York City teens enrolled in the Whitney’s Youth Insights (YI) Leaders program have been invited by the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund to make art and showcase their work in a special exhibition this spring. The exhibition will include artwork created by the teens through a collaborative project with renowned contemporary artist Fred Wilson. On Monday, February 25, Leaders headed to Wilson’s studio in Bushwick to meet the artist, learn about his practice, and begin an ongoing conversation about the work they will make together over the course of the semester.

Warmly welcoming the group, Wilson brought the twelve teens to a worktable in the corner of his studio. There, he opened a bag and let a multitude of bright red apples spill out. Wilson instructed each Leader to take an apple and really look at it, then return it to the bag. Wilson opened the bag once again, and each teen was able to quickly and confidently identify his or her original apple from what had at first been a mass of identical fruit. Wilson explained that this principle of being able to look closely at something and see it in a new or unique light is what the teens should keep in mind as they begin to create their own art.

As apples were stowed away in pockets and backpacks, Wilson talked about the works-in-progress and the walls of the studio. He brought out prints from his storage room, which houses artwork, supplies, and archives of articles and books written about his work. He later invited the teens to explore that room and its contents. When everyone returned to the main studio space, the lights dimmed for a slideshow presentation that took the Leaders through the highlights of Wilson’s career up to the present. As he shared some behind-the-scenes stories about creating his work and collaborating with museums, he was humorous and candid.

When the presentation ended, Wilson invited questions from the Leaders. They were particularly interested in works such as Wilson’s Friendly Natives (1991), which critiques the way in which cultural institutions have historically treated Native Americans, indigenous people, and their artwork and artifacts. Wilson and the Leaders discussed at length how museums are taking steps towards exhibiting and preserving objects in ways that honor Native customs and traditions. From there, the conversation ranged from Wilson’s thoughts about working closely with a museum or cultural institution in order to create work that questions that same institution, as Wilson does in works like Mining the Museum (1992), to his own experiences as an art student at SUNY Purchase, which one Leader is considering attending next year.

Leaders left the studio with instructions to keep thinking about the kinds of ideas they might want their collaborative art project to explore—and with the promise that they would see Wilson, and discuss those ideas, again soon. A huge thank you to Wilson and his studio assistants Heather, Justin, and Karlito for such an amazing experience—the YI Leaders can’t wait to come back and continue working together!

By Correna Cohen, Youth Programs Fellow

Eleanor Antin: _Conversations With Stalin_

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 16:55:00 -0500

Categories: EducationBlog

On Friday, February 1, artist Eleanor Antin took center stage in the Whitney’s Lower Gallery to read the final four chapters from her coming-of-age memoir, Conversations With Stalin. This was the final event in a four-part series of readings conducted across New York City—the previous three took place at The Jewish Museum, Ronald Feldman Gallery, and the Brooklyn Museum. Known for employing a variety of mediums spanning photography, video, film, performance, and installation, Antin has often delved into history as a means to explore the present. In Conversations with Stalin, she excavates several layers of personal and political histories to better understand her own childhood and life as an artist.

The first half of each chapter in Antin’s book offer humorous and touching anecdotes from her childhood. A chapter entitled “Twitches and Ticks” referred to her anxieties generated in part from her experiences at a private school in New York City. The next chapter, “Frogs,” chronicles stories from summers spent in the Adirondacks. “Cats and Dogs” covers her budding sexuality and its relation to her growing passions for performance and poetry, and the final chapter of the book, “The Dead,” focuses on deaths she experienced in childhood, from that of Franklin D. Roosevelt to a neighbor’s daughter.

The second half of each chapter responds with poetic and serious conversations between a young Antin and an imagined Joseph Stalin, the former leader of the Soviet Union. In these fictional conversations, Antin seeks solace for the things she can’t understand (such as intelligence, compassion, sexuality, and death)—conundrums which Stalin’s guidance, unfailingly (mis)informed by his Communist politics, only obfuscate further. Antin’s recounting of these stories can be seen as an attempt to reconcile her upraising in what she recounts as an oftentimes confounding socialist and bohemian household.

Seeing _Sinister Pop_ Through the Eyes of Adam McEwen

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:45:00 -0500

Categories: EducationBlog

On Wednesday, January 23, artist Adam McEwen and Donna De Salvo, Whitney Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs led a gallery talk through Sinister Pop, an exhibition that focuses on the darker side of Pop art as it questions and critiques the American dream. The opportunity to accompany McEwen through the show and discover the ways in which he appreciates, engages with, and understands the works was a real treat for me. Drifting fluidly from gallery to gallery, McEwen shared anecdotes from his childhood and thoughts about how the works on view continue to amaze, inspire, and remain relevant to him, decades after their production.

On View: Oscar Bluemner, _Last Evening of the Year_ (1929)

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:34:00 -0500

Categories: EducationBlog

American Legends highlights works from the Whitney’s collection of American art from the first half of the twentieth century and is organized around artists that the Museum has collected in depth. Some of these artists, such as Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Alexander Calder, are well known; others, such as Elie Nadelman and Ralston Crawford, are less so. One of the artists in the latter category is Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938). Bluemner moved to the United States from Germany in 1892 and initially worked as an architect, but turned to painting in his late thirties. He saw early success, including a solo exhibition in 1915 at the influential 291 Gallery in New York, but his difficult personality led to an estrangement from the art world and he remained largely forgotten for the rest of his life. However, as I walked through the American Legends exhibition, Bluemner’s brightly colored landscapes left more of an impression on me than some of his better-known contemporaries. One painting in particular, the small (approximately fourteen by ten inches) canvas Last Evening of the Year, cast an odd, shimmering effect that caught my eye and drew me in for a closer look.

As with much of Bluemner’s work, the painting integrates elements from the natural and manmade worlds. A small, boxy structure—possibly a shack or cabin—stands on the bank of a canal in a wintry twilight scene. The rendering of these forms hovers between a representational depiction of the scene and a dreamlike abstraction. Anchoring this composition is a setting sun—it too, a harmonizing force between day and night as well as, according to the title, the end of one year and the beginning of another.

What most intrigues me about the painting though, stretches beyond its iconographic elements or composition. Rather, there is the sense that all of these efforts of harmony and balance are in the service of a certain phenomenological effect, a strange auratic power that the painting exerts on the beholder in the gallery space. Bluemner studied painting techniques in books from the Renaissance and mixed his paints to provide them with unique, almost alchemical properties. His palette corresponds to the colors one sees in nature, but they are intensified to the point of unreality. For example, the vermillion red used in the clouds in the upper-left hand corner lends the image a hallucinatory, nightmarish quality. When viewing the work in the gallery rather than on a screen, these colors seem to pop even more. The result is that the viewer’s relationship to the painting is physical. While the delicacy of the composition invites one in, the combination of colors, along with the highly particular luster of the surface, interact in one’s mind to run a mild, but pleasant shock through the body.

By Gene McHugh, Interpretation Fellow

Whitney of the Future: Topping It Off

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 10:16:00 -0500

Categories: EducationBlog

On Monday, December 17, Whitney staff and Trustees gathered at Gansevoort and West Streets to celebrate a significant milestone—the final piece of steel was placed atop our new building!

On View: Claes Oldenburg, _Giant Fagends_ (1967)

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 13:13:00 -0500

Categories: EducationBlog

While many iconic works of Pop art employ bright colors and playful themes, the Whitney’s collection works on view in the Sinister Pop exhibition explore the movement’s darker edges. Walking through galleries of painting, prints, sculpture, and photography, I felt that the exhibition did an excellent job of capturing this grim underbelly of modern commercial culture. The work that perhaps best articulated the sense of this for me was Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Fagends (1967).

Giant Fagends consists of oversized, urethane-foam cigarette butts crumpled-up on top of one another in a white, polygonal ashtray. They look like cigarette throw pillows made out of synthetic leather. Whatever negative, non-glamorous associations one has about cigarettes—carcinogenic smoke, grubby fingers, stained teeth, and so on—come to the fore here. It literally puts a bad taste in one’s mouth. Oldenburg accomplishes this effect through making an everyday object larger than life. By altering the scale, the viewer is put in a position to consider the cigarettes in ways that extend beyond their functional use. Additionally, he transforms their surface—not into something hard and timeless like marble or bronze—but rather into something soft and squishy.

These were strategies employed by the artist in his many “soft sculpture” works, beginning in 1962. The soft sculptures were a breakthrough in American art because they pointedly embraced low subjects of the modern world such as cigarettes, light switches, ice bags, hamburgers, telephones, and toilets. But through Oldenburg’s seemingly simple gesture, they allowed the viewer to see these everyday objects afresh, as if they’d never really looked at them before. Thus, despite the whimsical qualities of a work like Giant Fagends, Oldenburg accomplishes a significant artistic goal—to represent the world as the world really is. The irony is that Oldenburg did so by distorting the appearance of the cigarettes, making them at once both monstrous and uncannily familiar.

By Gene McHugh, Interpretation Fellow

Painting Now: Abstraction and Figuration

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 09:49:00 -0500

Categories: EducationBlog

Whitney courses are multi-week programs that examine key issues in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American art and culture. Painting Now, a five-part course offered this fall, examined the legacy of painting within Modernism and its enduring importance in contemporary art. The course began on October 18 with a lecture entitled Abstraction and the Crisis of the Figure. In her lecture, Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow and program instructor Anna Katz spoke about how figurative and abstract painting, although seemingly at odds, could not truly be separated from one another. Katz discussed the works of numerous artists and themes during her lecture, yet I was struck by one idea Katz conveyed by comparing the abstract work of Jackson Pollock and the portrait painting of Elizabeth Peyton—that artists can simultaneously explore both figuration and abstraction.

On View: Richard Artschwager, _Destruction IV_ (1972)

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 12:00:00 -0500

Categories: EducationBlog

Although in dialogue with Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art, Richard Artschwager’s work remains untethered to these or any of the other dominant movements of twentieth-century art—a fact which is evidenced in Richard Artschwager!, the Whitney’s career retrospective of the artist. Walking through the galleries of painting, sculpture, and drawing, I observed that while Artschwager’s work is often beautiful, its aesthetic appeal is just as often challenged or disrupted by the artist’s use of non-traditional materials: rubberized hair, Formica, and, in the case of much of his painting, Celotex—a textured fiberboard that is regularly used in home insulation. Destruction IV, (1972), part of Artschwager’s Destruction painting series, is an example. Each work in the Destruction series depicts a chronological stage in the 1972 demolition of the once-luxurious Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey—the first in the sequence depicts the hotel just before its implosion, the final only a large, billowing cloud of dust and debris. Destruction IV occurs somewhere in the middle. The use of the fibrous Celotex material in this work creates a different effect than would canvas. It blurs the image; and this effect, in turn, becomes crucial to forming an understanding of the painting.

Artschwager based the work not on his first-hand account, but rather a newspaper photograph that documented the event. This is an important point. Destruction IV is, for Artschwager, not a representation of reality, but a representation of a representation of reality—and a grainy, debased one at that. Exhibition curator Jennifer Gross notes in her catalogue essay that, for Artschwager, the perception of reality in the twentieth century was transformed by media and new technologies. More often than not, reality is mediated through an interface, such as a newspaper photograph or a screen. The use of Celotex is key to capturing the sense of this in Destruction IV. A dynamic, violent, thoroughly real event is tempered and made abstract, just as it would if one encountered it through media.

By Gene McHugh, Interpretation Fellow

Wade Guyton and Star-Struck Sixth-Graders

Whitney Museum of American Art — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 06:00:00 -0500

Categories: EducationBlog

“Wade Guyton is my favorite artist!” and “He is so creative to use an inkjet printer to make paintings!” were some enthusiastic declarations made by a group of sixth-grade students from West Side Collaborative Middle School 250 after their guided tour of the exhibition Wade Guyton OS. Interestingly, these were not their initial responses when Ms. Fitzgerald and Ms. Caruso, their Arts Lab teachers, first introduced Guyton’s work to them in the classroom.

Welcome Baby Whitney

Whitney Museum of American Art — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:01:00 -0500

Categories: EducationBlog

Amid the recent storm turmoil, we were thrilled to receive the news that baby Whitney Hyun-Joo Yang was born on Sunday, October 28. Her parents—Margaret and Austin Yang—first met eleven years ago while working in the Whitney’s Education Department. Margaret was the Youth Insights Program Assistant and Austin was the Education Assistant. Unknown to most of the Education staff, their secret summer romance flourished in 2001 over iced coffees at Marché Madison and Summer Stage in Central Park. Margaret and Austin have since relocated to the West Coast.

“When we found out we were having a girl, we knew that we wanted to name her Whitney. Not only is it a great tribute to where our relationship began, but we love that she will share the namesake of a strong female pioneer of American Art.” said Austin.

As Whitney came into the world on the same day the San Francisco (formerly New York) Giants swept the Detroit Tigers to win the World Series, her father hopes that she will share a love of the arts and be a baseball aficionado for life, just like him. We hope that she and her parents will visit us soon, and we are delighted that Whitney will definitely be a lifelong fan of her namesake Museum!

By Dina Helal, Manager of Interpretation and Interactive Media

The Haunted Studio: A Whitney Halloween

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:39:00 -0500

Categories: EducationBlog

On Friday, October 26, teenagers from across New York City gathered in the Whitney’s Studio and Sculpture Court for an evening of contemporary art-themed Halloween events. The centerpiece of the evening was a performance, co-led by the Whitney’s teen Youth Insights Leaders and Biennial 2012 artist Tom Thayer, which turned the Whitney Studio into a contemporary “Haunted Studio.”

Interview with Family Programs Staff

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 10:09:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

At the tail end of summer, we welcomed Billie Rae Vinson, our new Coordinator of Family Programs, and Jamie Rosenfeld, our new Education Assistant. Billie Rae joins us from the Brooklyn Museum, where she recently completed the Intern Educator Program and Jamie was a Whitney intern with School and Educator Programs for the 2011-2012 school year. Now that they’ve had some time to settle in, I asked Billie Rae and Jamie a few questions.

GM: How did you become interested in working in museum education, specifically with families?

BRV: I started working in museum education and community outreach when I was an undergraduate fine art student. I found myself meeting such magnificent people and engaging with them creatively through art. I knew at that moment that museum education was the field that I wanted to work in. Family Programs is specifically important because I truly believe in the value of adults and children learning together, where each individual benefits from the others creativity and unique perspective. For me family learning is a collaborative experience. I am inspired by artworks and the artists that create them which is also a key reason for my passion for museum education.

Connecting the Dots On Obsession

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 13:18:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

Are artists uniquely dispositioned to be obsessive and sensitive to the world around them? That long-standing view of pathological creativity was the topic taken up by a recent roundtable discussion on the occasion of the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Whitney. Kusama, who voluntarily admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital in Japan in 1977 and has resided there ever since (and whose work exhibits obsessive tendencies of repetition), is often cited as a paradigmatic example of the manifestation of this condition. Invited to sort out fact from fiction were psychoanalyst Robert Langan, critic and scholar Lyle Rexer, and artist Janine Antoni.

Tactile Sound Accumulation With Julianne Swartz

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 12:36:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

On Friday, July 27, as part of the Whitney’s My Turn series, sound sculpture and installation artist Julianne Swartz led a live action event. Organized in conjunction with the Yayoi Kusama exhibition, Tactile Sound Accumulation encouraged visitors to contribute to a sound collage by recording their voices, movements, and interactions with tactile instruments and toys.

In her own work, Julianne Swartz stretches the limitations of what sound can do, exploring the intersections between the five human senses. Swartz found inspiration in Kusama’s large-scale installations and accumulations, as well as the Happenings Kusama staged in the late 1960s. In particular, Swartz was fascinated by Kusama’s use of materials, from the burlap seed sacks she used as supports for her early paintings to the stuffed fabrics employed in her soft sculptures. Using this wide array of fabrics, materials, and textures as a touch point, Swartz wondered how modern day visitors could seek out sound as texture, and experiment by making tactile sounds of their own, such as the sounds of a hand touching a wooden table, a balloon bouncing on the ground, or teeth chewing an apple. One of her goals for the program was for participants to explore the concept of “synesthesia,” or a crossing of sensory modalities, for example, experiencing sounds in response to touch or visual stimulation. Swartz would then compile each of these visitor-produced sounds to create a collaborative sound file or what she calls a “collage” of sonic textures.

Much like the theme of accumulation in Kusama’s work, the program offered its participants an enormous collection of objects that could produce distinct and intriguing sounds, including tambourines, drum sticks, clappers, balloons, bike horns, tissue paper, and streamers.

Making Art Accessible: Verbal Description and Touch Tours

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 13:28:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

For each exhibition, Whitney educators think about how to make art accessible for all visitors. The Museum offers Verbal Description and Touch Tours for visitors who are blind or partially-sighted. Educators leading the tours are trained to provide a comprehensive description of all the visual elements of a work of art including size, color, shape, and placement, while also offering relevant contextual information about the artist, artistic style, and time period. Working in tandem with the Whitney’s Conservation Department, Education staff identifies artworks that may be touched gently by visitors wearing gloves, allowing them to get a better sense of the object through tactile exploration. But what happens when a work is deemed too fragile to touch? Whenever possible, the educators provide some kind of hands-on experience that will add to the visitors’ understanding of the work. This was the case for Eva Hesse’s sculpture, No Title (1970), on view in the exhibition Singular Visions through August 5, 2012.

The rope that comprises Hesse’s sculpture at first seemed knotted, or purposely tangled, but closer examination revealed that the rope has been coated in latex and that the sticky nature of the medium has caused the rope to stick together in various spots over time. The latex, however, has hardened and become extremely brittle and delicate over time, therefore it cannot be touched. As the Access and Community Programs summer intern, I learned how to deal with situations like this creatively and effectively. I was given the task of making a reproduction of Hesse’s sculpture that could be easily handled in the gallery. Without knowing it, I would be recreating Hesse’s process on a smaller scale.

Family Fun Art Workshop: It's a Pile Up!

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 09:25:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who spent sixteen years working in the United States. Best known for her use of dense patterns of polka dots and nets, as well as her intense, large-scale environments, she has worked in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance, and immersive installation. On Saturday, July 21, kids and parents were invited to spend time looking at and discussing works of art in the exhibition, Yayoi Kusama, on view through September 30.

On View: Matthew Day Jackson, _Sepulcher (Viking Burial Ship)_

Whitney Museum of American Art — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 13:23:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

Featuring works from the Museum’s permanent collection, the Whitney’s exhibition Singular Visions (December 16, 2010-August 5, 2012) encouraged visitors to slow down and engage with art in an intimate way. I experienced just this when I viewed Matthew Day Jackson’s Sepulcher (Viking Burial Ship). In this 2004 work, the vessel sits on a funeral pyre constructed of roughly cut wood. At first I was struck by the commanding presence of the structure. I noticed the ship’s majestically puffed sail, pieced together with the logos cut from a motley assortment of well-worn T-shirts to create a patchwork of punk bands and beer brands.

These T-shirts reminded me of the concert souvenirs and thrift-store finds that my friends wear in an effort to assert their personal taste, cultural predilections, and sometimes, an ironic sense of humor. As an art history student, I observed that the grid of white, black, red, yellow, and blue shirts mimics the composition of a painting by the twentieth-century Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. This Modernist quotation merges with the clothing to represent both a now canonic, perhaps outmoded, approach to art and the assertion of a hip, self-aware identity.

Inside the boat rests an elaborate costume: an assemblage of hardcore band patches, funky textiles, leather lined with menacing silver spikes, and Birkenstocks. I recalled the gutsy teens I knew in high school who expressed their discontent, individuality, and outsider status through this kind of distinctive clothing. Created in honor of the artist’s thirtieth birthday, the construction of this funeral ship stages Jackson’s fictional death. But it also represents a very real passing— the sending off of youthful, outdated styles of expression and creation. Sepulcher (Viking Burial Ship) evokes the rite of passage that is the transition from youth into adulthood, whether anticipated, remembered, or (for me), a current experience.

By Elizabeth Rooklidge, Interpretation Intern

On View: Oskar Fischinger, _Raumlichtkunst_ (Space Light Art)

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 10:55:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

Born in Germany in 1900, Oskar Fischinger produced what he called “visual music,” in which he combined animation, film, and music to create a synthesis of visual and auditory art. Steeped in the milieu of German experimental filmmaking, he explored innovative methods of cinematic creation, employing materials such as melted wax, tinted liquids, and projected colored lights.

Fischinger’s film, Raumlichtkunst (Space Light Art) (1926/2012) was first screened as part of a series of film performances in 1926 in Germany, attracting attention within the German film community. Accompanied by music, Fischinger’s multi-screen projection of animated abstract images spin, pulse, spiral, and shape-shift.

Collage Course at SAGE Senior Center

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:59:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

In its mission to support life-long learning, Whitney Education offers collaborative Senior Programs to our Community Partners, a group of over fifty senior and community centers that provide care for elders in New York City. This spring, the Whitney worked with a group of fifteen seniors from SAGE (Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Elders), the newest addition to the Museum’s roster of partner centers. As the first official community center for LGBT seniors in the United States, SAGE fosters connections between LGBT elders from all walks of life, providing an all-inclusive, warm environment for people to interact and thrive.

What’s Up with the Whitney: Family Programs at the High Line

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 16:47:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

On Saturday, May 19, families visited the High Line park for What’s Up with the Whitney. We partnered with Friends of the High Line on this sun-drenched day to check out the Whitney’s new building site and design how we envision museums in the future.

On View: Yayoi Kusama, _Fireflies on the Water_

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 15:26:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

As a graduate student in art history, I find myself constantly thinking about a work of art in relation to history, culture, and art historical scholarship. During my internship, I have been reading up in preparation for the exhibition Yayoi Kusama at the Whitney. I have read about her obsessive practice in which she painstakingly paints polka dots or glues airmail stickers to canvas. Since childhood, she has had hallucinations of vast expanses of dots, visions that have continually informed her work.

After all my reading, I went to see Kusama’s Fireflies on the Water, an installation that is on view in the Museum’s Lobby Gallery. When I entered through the slim white door and walked into the dark space glittering with lights, I forgot everything that I have pored over. As the work immersed me in what appeared to be an endless landscape of floating lights, I was overcome with a simple yet intense delight that I do not often experience when I consider a work of art in all of its complexities with my usual scholarly approach. The delight I felt in Fireflies on the Water is a sensation to be reveled in.

By Elizabeth Rooklidge, Interpretation Intern

Education Visits _The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront_

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 15:07:00 -0400

Categories: EducationBlog

On June 14, Education staff visited the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art to see their latest exhibition, The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront, (April 4 – July 7, 2012), the first museum show to focus exclusively on the uses of the Hudson River docks by New York City artists. Between 1971 and 1983, the piers became a site and subject for photography, sculpture, video, and performance. Much of the work on view bore witness to the gay, lesbian, and transgender community that emerged in Manhattan before the AIDS epidemic.

Curator Jonathan Weinberg led the group through the galleries, and discussed the transformation of the neighborhood. Once an integral part of the city’s busy shipping industry, the piers below Fourteenth Street fell into disuse and ruin by the late 1960s. Nearly a decade later, artists such as Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, and Gordon Matta-Clark reclaimed these spaces for their art. The work on and about the piers challenged the more conservative definitions of ownership, privacy, and conventional sexual mores, and they continue to resonate with contemporary audiences.