Artists

2007-2008

YI teens worked with 2008 Biennial artists Neighborhood Public Radio, Marina Rosenfeld, and Mika Tajima. In fall 2007 they worked with painter Jaya Howey.

Neighborhood Public Radio is a guerilla radio broadcast group that uses portable FM transmitters to air community-based, non-commercial programs. With their help, the teens broadcast their own creative public service announcements, built their own radio transmitters, and created “radio plays.”

2008 Biennial artist Marina Rosenfeld creates music and performances that challenge ideas of the conventional visual and audio experience. She invited YI teens to star in her Biennial performance, Teenage Lontano at the Park Avenue Armory, which focused on highlighting the complex relationships between audience, performer and music in a single piece of art.

Mika Tajima is an independent artists and member of the artists collective New Humans. Her practice bridges the gap between painting, sculpture, performance art, and design. For the 2008 Biennial, Tajima and New Humans mixed all of those media in the piece Disassociate, which takes collaboration itself as a subject. She and the students collaborated in their quest for a design that reflected the spirit of the Whiney and the Youth Insights program.

Jaya Howey is an abstract painter who joined YI teens in discussion about art as activism and the artist’s responsibility within the community. Teens visited Howey’s studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to take a look at Howey’s works in progress. Howey assisted the teens in creating critical visual art responses to the exhibition, Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See.