How did the exhibit influence the workshops?
I was bemoaning the end of our process exhibition and workshop series to my mom and she said, “Don’t worry. The next workshop is just around the corner.” My response to her was “Yes, that true, but not an art exhibition. Somehow I like them better together.” Perhaps this is an extension of my persistent inquiry about blurring the lines between my artist and educator selves; the way I engage with the accordion book work comes closest to uniting these parts of myself. Throughout the exhibit at the Arnhiem Gallery, I was interested in this question: How does the exhibit (the artworks and process) influence the nature and experience of the (learning in) workshops?
Even as arts educators we seldom acknowledge the aesthetic dimension of learning. It is the advantage that a museum educator or an outdoor educator has over a classroom teacher. The young folks they work with are encircled by interesting and beautiful objects and environments. Exciting and engaging them, and getting them into a mode of creating and learning, becomes so much easier in such rich environments.
Originally, we considered facilitating the workshops in a separate classroom adjoining the Arnheim Gallery, but that just did not feel right. So we decided to hold the workshops right in the middle of the exhibition! As a result, the exhibition and the workshops we conducted within the space played off each other in some interesting ways:
Annotating the Exhibit: The exhibition, like the book, can feel overwhelming and intense. To help visitors and workshop participants enter the exhibition, we used Todd’s frame of grabbiness — something is “grabby” when it catches and holds your attention. We asked participants to be alert to the things in the room (images, explanatory text, quotations, elements of the environment itself) that caught and held their attention. We alerted them to not only think about stuff they “liked,” but also to notice how things that are repulsive, challenging, confusing, or ambiguous can also catch and hold their attention. Although we did not ask participants to do so, they started annotating the exhibition with their observations. I was surprised by this, but over the week I felt that it really helped to have this growing annotation around the artworks and process — it was almost a residue or trace left for participants to see how others had been “caught” by different aspects of the exhibit. Simply recognizing that the maps were of the Boston Area, or particular quotations that resonated with visitors, or the vulnerabilities of being lost, became easier entry points into the density of the exhibit and also began, gently, to make learning processes visible.
Accessibility of Materials: We had planned to have the art materials against the process wall, but when the process wall started growing, it became clear that would not work. The density of the process and the density of materials would not allow viewers the visual and physical space to get close enough to really examine what was there — which was necessary for understanding the process wall. So the materials table became the spine of the room, dividing the gallery into thirds. That automatically created spaces with distinct functions: a making zone, a gathering and meeting circle, and a critique space. The materials were easily accessible from all sides. This facilitated an easy flow during large workshops but more importantly the variety and richness of material became visible and accessible. The types of materials also played a significant part in the dynamics of ease-of-use and level of visual impact. Stamps, stencils, iron-on fabric, and water colour crayons, in addition to more typical art materials such as paint, glue, collage materials, and markers, made image-making easier and less daunting.
Accordion books as Aesthetic Arenas that Encourage Flow: Some of the ways that accordion books encourage making process visible, stem from the accordion fold. It allows you to work across pages, build flaps, and extend thinking outward. The intentional use of heavy craft paper is because brown is often less intimidating than white paper. It also absorbs materials like paint and glue without buckling. Sharing Todd’s and my personal accordions, and inviting participants to think about their accordion books as an aesthetic arena, encouraged them to move beyond words and into images. The process wall reiterated moving away from the preciousness of these book-objects and toward a way of working that is more about creative flow. A couple of participants drew connections to images around the room like roots, water-pipes, fish, and maps that mirror the flow of the accordion itself — encouraging flow and meandering thoughts and connections through reflection over multiple pages of the accordion. We also had on hand examples of Lynda Barry’s collages and Brian Eno’s oblique strategies as entry points if participants needed help getting started.
Seeing the Non-Linear Arc of the Work: At a very basic level, because this was a process exhibition, visitors were able to see the arc of the work from process to product. They saw a recursive dynamic with ideas and images reflected over and over again as they changed across different prototypes, scales, and styles. They saw the process of thinking made visible in our own personal accordion books, on the process wall, through the different prototypes, and then in two very different product outcomes — the fabric panels and the artist book. This thinking-made-visible seemed to give permission in some way to this open-minded way of working.
I teach workshops all the time and I walk into any space, rearrange it as best I can to feel like a safe and collective learning environment, share a wide range of materials (often my favorite materials), and try to make choices about facilitation that give workshop participants permission to explore. But something about this process and set of workshops felt different in the gallery space, and I am trying to put my finger on it. The norms of a gallery — a place for awe, observation, and inspiration — were bumping up against the norms of a classroom — a place for learning, dialoguing and exploring — or perhaps it was more studio than classroom — a place of making, remaking, collecting, and testing. This might not seem like a big distinction, but as I reflected in my accordion book one night, “I like to find cracks and fissures and openings between worlds (say gallery, studio, classroom) and then dig into them to make walls and boundaries (read norms) less clear and more permeable.”
