Teens from Studio Museum’s Expanding the Walls Program Visit Youth Insights
Jul 16, 2013
Teens from the Studio Museum’s Expanding the Walls program join YI students for a day of art exploration at the Whitney, July 2013. Photograph by Kate Nadel
On July 16, teens from the Studio Museum’s Expanding The Walls (ETW) program visited YI at the Whitney. Since I participated in Expanding the Walls last year, I had a very keen sense of what these s had done during their semester at ETW. I knew that they would be producing photographs and curating a show of their own works, in conjunction with the works of James Van Der Zee. Even though I knew that we would not be talking about their experience in depth, I was curious to see how our group would interact with them.
YI participant Zeus stands front and center during a group activity, July 2013. Photograph by Kate Nadel
With the ETW students, we made wire sculptures in order to explore works by Alexander calder in the American Legends: From calder to O’Keeffe exhibition. Next we saw David Hockney’s first video installation, The Jugglers, June 24th 2012 (2012) and then we went to Robert Irwin’s installation Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977 to do our own drawing and collage exercise based on multiple perspectives. The activities showed me that our groups had similarities and differences. For instance, we are all independent thinkers interested in art, but we come from different schools, have different cultural backgrounds, and reside in different parts of the city. These distinctions did not create conflict, they only made the experience more rewarding, and by the end of the program, I found myself wanting to know more about the ETW group.
By Zeus, Youth Insights Summer participant