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WORKSHOPS

art education / curriculum building / teaching 

As a teaching artist, I am invested in connecting audiences and students with the ideas and materiality of contemporary art. Moreover, I’m fascinated by how learning happens and I work with pedagogy as a medium. I develop and design new curriculum for specific groups and lead learning engagements both at museums, for organizations and businesses, at local schools, and in my studio. My approach is to create multisensory learning environments with multiple entrance points for different types of learners. I use sound, color, and materials to encourage a holistic and accessible engagement with art and ideas.

SUSTAINABLE, REGENERATIVE, AND BIODEGRADABLE: artmaking in the time of Ecological Crisis

@ Dia: Beacon, 2024

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This workshop asks what is the environmental future of all non-biodegradable artwork? What living artists are making ethical choices in the material consideration of their practice? How can our art practices’ adapt towards an ethical future?

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This two-part workshop took place in late autumn. The first iteration held at Dia: Beacon encouraged mark-making with raw pigment on large scale pieces of paper and embedding found materials with encaustic materials. During the second workshop, held at Common Ground Farm in nearby Wappingers Falls, we made our own paint and ink from foraged natural materials. Just before the first frost, we collected berries, leaves, and burnt wood from a fire pit. Before pulverizing the organic matter to make paint, we looked at the diversity of what we had collected. We arranged our found materials on a grid, and then photographed them.

 

This workshop draws inspiration from three artists from the Dia collection -- Delcy Morelos, Meg Webster, and Michelle Stuart -- who use natural materials in works and are known for their philosophies on environmentalism, land reclamation, and a reverence for nature. 

SHADOWS & LIGHT 
@ Dia: Beacon, 2024

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Evergreen Minds is an organization that offers people living with dementia opportunities for meaningful connections and pathways to physical, social, and emotional well-being through mindful immersions in nature and expressive arts. Through the Dia: Beacon partnership with Evergreen Minds, I developed a day-long workshop to explore the abstraction of abstractions that is embodied by Andy Warhol’s artwork, Shadows 1978-79.

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The workshop was set to a playlist of the Velvet Underground, music likely heard in Warhol’s Factory. Everyone was encouraged to experiment with shadows using flashlights and a selection of vintage office supplies, because the abstract work Shadows, is said to have derived from a shadow in Warhol’s office. Participants were given paper to trace the shadows that interested them. After tracing the shadows on different colored paper, participants cut out and rearranged the forms on a second piece of paper. The abstraction continued further with new arrangements of the silhouettes in positive and negative configurations. We used colored paper inspired by the Warhol palette: fluorescent pink, acid green, silver, violet, yellow, dark charcoal gray, and blue.

PURE CONSCIOUSNESS EXTENDED: time and communication as 2nd graders experience it 

@ Dia: Beacon, 2023

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The Artist Educator Program at the Dia Beacon places working artists in the public school system for a prolonged engagement every spring. This six-session program took the life and work of On Karawa as its catalyst. Kawara’s most famous body of work is the Today Series, a selection of which is in the permanent collection at Dia: Beacon. Starting in 1966 through to the year of his death in 2014, Kawara painted the current date on individual canvases. A seemingly simple endeavor became a nearly 50-year mediation on the passage of time, reflecting on days that are personally or historically significant, the days in between, and the human construct of the calendar.

 

Through weekly sketching, letter writing, and performance, second graders engaged with the concepts of time and communication in contemporary art making. Through these various mediums I led students in making work that spanned from 30 seconds to forever (and various time frames in between) while sharing their own impressions of time-based art. The program was held across four classroom sessions and two visits to the museum; it culminated in an exhibition of their artwork at the museum.

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