NYU ART+EDUCATION CERTIFICATION

Visionary Studio

Manufacturing Addiction

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Students posing in front of artwork at the opening exhibition.

Manufacturing Addiction: How can art move the conversation about drug addiction from personal problem to the systems that support it?

Many people take medication daily — to stay healthy (vitamins) or prescribed medications to relieve physical pain due to illness or operations. Across the United States, pain-killers, also known as opiods are increasingly being prescribed by doctors contributing to widespread addiction and deaths. Led by the pharmaceutical industry, the infrastructure that supports this system of legalized addiction has a long history and a complex set of current powerbrokers. We have long considered drug addiction the fault or problem of the victim alone. How have artists helped to raise awareness of the larger structures and systems that influence drug dependency and also imagine alternative forms of support and healing? In this class students will explore the connections between addiction and the pharmaceutical industry, create artwork in different media in response to this crisis, and imagine the possibilities for sharing their knowledge with others.

 Student artwork. Student artwork. Student artwork. Student artwork.  Student artwork. Student artwork.Student artwork. Student artwork. Student artwork. Student artwork.  Student artwork. Student artwork. Student artwork. Student artwork. Student artwork. Student artwork. Student artwork. Student artwork.

100 Ways to Mobilize exhibition.

Student painting during Visionary Studio 2018.

White Out!

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White Out!: What do our public monuments tell us about our past and our present?

Public statues and monuments serve as reminders of our past, paying tribute to people and events that have shaped our history. But what if these histories do not represent all voices and perspectives, or contradict the values and beliefs of citizens today? We are often told that history is told by the victors, and monuments reinforce these stories in public, providing a constant reminder of who is considered important in our society as they stand in our public parks, in public buildings and government offices. Many monuments are now understood as controversial because they represent racist, sexist “patriarchal”  histories and the dominance of White power over other narratives and points of view. The history of slavery, the genocide of Indigenous people, and colonization are not visible, nor are the many contributions of African-Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx visible. Contemporary artists have challenged how we understand monuments and the stories they tell, opening up conversations about who and what should be recognized in our public spaces.In this class students will explore how monuments tell stories about racial and patriarchal hierarchy in our society, investigate the function of monuments as public art today, and design alternative monuments and forums of public storytelling about our past, our present, and possibly our future.

Student working on a sculpture during a Visionary Studio session, 2018 Student working during a Visionary Studio session, 2018

Student painting during Visionary Studio 2018

Visionary Studio, Fall 2016: Unplugged

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Students drawing on large piece of paper together

By Daniel Aktas, Peter Tresnan, Caitlin Nicole Gibbons

Technology continues to generate new tools for communication and artistic production.

We are all undeniably dependent on technological tools and gadgets in our everyday lives. The Internet, virtual reality, social media, digital self-modification, and other tools and digital spaces alter our lives and the ways in which we communicate and see ourselves and the world around us.

Contemporary artists are increasingly using technology in their work: both as an artistic medium and an opportunity to question and critique our use of it. After looking at the work of artists such as Krzysztof Wodiczko, Cory Arcangel, and Trevor Paglen, this unit introduces a wide range of artistic media to explore the state of technology and consider different perspectives.

Students consider and visualize their own ideas about technology and create work in response to the question: Does technology control us or do we control technology? Over the course of eight weeks, students tackle this big questions through an investigation around a series of sub-questions. These include:

  • What is technology?
  • What is the difference between the oral, the written, and the technological? How can we respond to messages/ information around us?
  • How have analog behaviors changed to digital ones? What does “outdated” mean? What happens when a physical object’s purpose becomes mechanized?
  • How do we communicate with each other today? Has technology redefined a “conversation”?
  • What is the difference between a user and a machine? Who uses technology?
  • How does technology intersect with culture and media? What role does technology play in our lives?

Visionary Studio: Unplugged, Unit Plan

Student holding her phone in one hand and painting on canvas. Student working together in the studio Student holding green vine Student work taped on the wall Students standing in hanging lights installation Student installation from Unplugged Students tracing at a window

Visionary Studio, Fall 2016: Gender Lines

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Student wearing a backwards red hat, a drawn on mustache, and holding flowers

By Rebecca Salmon & Shannon Kopunek

Gender Lines is an introductory course to the relationship between art and gender.

Students are encouraged to question and explore the complexities of living within and outside of the gender binary. They learn about several mainstream and counterculture artists who make art dealing with feminism, restricting masculinity, and queer identity, finding inspiration in their stories.

In the course of the unit, students develop their own voice and personalized identity within the ever-shifting world of gender. They are encouraged to use this in their own artwork to promote positive growth.

The broad question under which the unit is centered is:

What is the future of the gendered body?

Students examine their own understanding of gender and their position along the spectrum of gender identity and expression. They use art to critically explore conventional expectations of the gender binary within the reality of an increasingly fluid, contemporary global conversation. During the course of eight weeks, this unit of study examines these questions with regards to gender:

Section 1: In our lives. How has gender been defined in the past and across cultures?

Section 2: The gender binary in a contemporary context- what works? What doesn’t?

Section 3: Gender and Contemporary Art—How can art impact society’s understanding of gender?

Section 4: What is the future of the gendered body?

Visionary Studio: GenderLines, UnitPlan

Students posing and wearing backwards hats and painted facial hair. Students using face paint during Gender Lines class. A student and teacher looking at a photograph on a camera. Two students working on an artwork that reads, "You Cannot Define Me."

Student working on artwork in class. Students drawing portraits from a distance, with a crayon attached to a long stick.

Visionary Studio, Fall 2016: Vote This

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Students painting the United States on a large canvas

By Sasha Spare & Cherry Kim

Each national election season our country gets caught up in debating whose vision for America is the best one.  For many people the election season is long, often leaving us exhausted from the media coverage, skeptical of politicians, and unable to think critically about how democracy does or does not impact our daily lives.

Through an examination of the work of contemporary artists including Nari Ward, Faith Ringgold, Elektra KB, Mike Cloud, who use their artwork to express, critique, and challenge ideas about democracy, students will engage with their own personal experiences and ideologies regarding this system of government, using a range of media to explore the question: What does democracy look like? What are our personal experiences of democracy? During the course of eight weeks, this unit of study examines this larger question through an investigation of sub questions including:

  • What kinds of images do we think of when we think of democracy? How can we reclaim and alter the language and meaning of texts and images using current media, images, or transcriptions of the Constitution?
  • How can we use art to talk about democracy? How do artists use fabric and textile-based arts, sewing, and embroidery to create political and activist messages?
  • How can we categorize our stories by motivations or objectives?  How have artists utilized photography and media to illuminate and advocate for marginalized truths? How can we use photography and text to create and share counter-narratives?
  • How can we, as artists, pool ideas to create an artwork that serves a democratic purpose? How do we edit, curate, and present our findings and artworks in a gallery space?

Student artwork for Vote This, Visionary Studio

Students in Visionary Studio 2016 Student painting in Visionary Studio 2016  Students painting in Visionary Studio 2016

 

Visionary Studio, Fall 2016: No Justice No Peace

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Students working together in the studio.

By Gehan Habashy, Sailesh Varadan & Morgan

The intersection of art and social justice.

Racism, from the height of European colonialism to our present-day conflicts and injustices, has fueled unthinkable violations of human life. Art practices can be a powerful tool for artists invested in confronting and overturning racist ideologies. Feminist cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldua once asserted, “Creative acts are forms of political activism employing definite aesthetic strategies for resisting dominant cultural norms and are not merely aesthetic exercises.”

Working with this understanding, this unit challenges students to consider the ways in which their artistic practices can be subversive and provide an avenue for visions and actions for racial and social justice.

The unit takes on the larger question of: #NoJusticeNoPeace: How can artists contribute to racial justice? Sub-questions tackled in the course of this eight week long unit include:

  • How can art be used as a tool for racial justice? How does contemporary art challenge our institutions and histories?
  • What are the impacts of underrepresentation and misrepresentation? How can we respond to historical underrepresentation and misrepresentation in art history?
  • What does racial justice look like? In what ways are different forms of oppression intertwined? How can we imagine intersectional liberation?
  • How can our art practices work toward social justice?

Closeup of student drawings

Closeup of a student drawing.

Student work from Visionary Studio 2016

Student artwork that reads, "No Justice No Peace."

Student artwork

 

 

Freedoms Exhibition, 2016

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Saturday Art Workshop is an 8-week program that combines the excitement of creating art with issues in social justice. Saturday mornings, from 10am-12pm, teens research significant social themes and discover a rich array of innovative, multidisciplinary approaches through which they can visually express their ideas. The themes for this year’s Workshop were “Vote This,” “Gender Lines,” “#NoJusticeNoPeace” and “(un)Plugged.”

Classes are taught by teams of graduate students completing their Certification in Art Education program at New York University. Together, students and teachers consider ways in which artists influence society, and experiment with techniques that include drawing, painting, printmaking, video, photography, 3-dimensional media, and installation. These workshops challenge students to think outside of traditional artistic media and explore how artistic boundaries and influence can be stretched to include what has historically been excluded.

The program culminates in a final exhibition inviting a wide audience of parents, friends, teachers, and NYU faculty, to see the resulting student work.

Group of the teachers from the Freedoms Exhibition, standing in front of the exhibition sign.Student working. She wears a denim jacket that reads, "Ain't Nothing Like the Old School."Aerial view of the opening of Freedoms Exhibition.Group at the Freedoms Exhibition.Group at exhibition opening for Visionary Studio 2016Group of students from Visionary Studio 2016.Two teachers at the Freedoms Exhibition.Group of teachers at the Freedoms Exhibition.

Visionary Studio, Fall 2015: Going Home

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Student work from Visionary Studio, Going Home

by Stephanie Marchena

The idea of home has inspired a range of imaginative and playful works by artists across the globe.

Exploring how artists have engaged with this theme in different contexts—from mobile homes and beach houses to haunted houses and broken homes—going home explores our complex relationships with the idea of home, and the equally complex responses in which gender, race, class, location and status overlap, and that through these relationships we turn a specific place into a home.

Through an examination of the question: “How does contemporary art address the idea of home? How do artists working today reveal and question commonly held assumptions about land, home, exile, and migration?”, students address their own ideas of home, making work employing a wide range of materials and media.

Sub questions explored during this investigation include:

  • What constitutes a home?
  • What do we mean when we talk about “identity”?
  • How does the home reflect family values, ancestral and local culture?
  • How do we feel at home? When we are away from home?
  • What kinds of things affect our access to a home?
  • What power dynamics play out in the home? Who decides this?
  • When traveling, moving to a new home, or forced to re-locate, what parts of your “old home” would you take with you? Which values and systems of power or oppression follow you?
  • How does gentrification affect urban neighborhoods?
  • Who benefits from gentrification? Who loses?

Going Home, Unit Plan

Student work from a Visionary Studio Saturday session Student working during a Visionary Studio Saturday session Student work from Visionary Studio, Going Home

Visionary Studio, Fall 2015: Farm to Table

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Student artwork from Visionary Studio, Farm to Table

by Jungwon Park

Food is a basic human need and right. From cafeterias to five star restaurants, this unit is an investigation into the issues that influence where food comes from, how it is produced and who eats it.

While we used to produce our own food, we now rarely see how our food reaches our plates. Many artists today are looking at food production and consumption in order to propose alternative systems for generating, sharing, and representing food, as a means to promote awareness, diplomacy or communication between adverse groups of people. Other artists are using art as a means to research and raise awareness about the food we eat, and challenge gender stereotypes and eating disorders.

In this class, students examine a wide range of artistic projects related to food and food issues, and make work that explores the intersections between food issues, social awareness, and art.The central question that the unit focuses around is:

What are the politics of the food industry and what is my role within it?

Students painting MTA subway maps. Student painting on canvas. Students working at a table in the studio.

Visionary Studio, Fall 2015: A Matter of Time

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Closeup of a student's workbook from Visionary Studios.

by Letizia Balzi

Repeat, fast-forward, rewind, pause, recycle, live, delay: these terms are part of the language we use to describe how temporality is manipulated in the contemporary world.

The work of contemporary artists examined in this unit explores some of the tensions embedded in recent experiences of time. These experiences include watching time pass; marking, suspending, condensing, or elongating its flow; developing narratives based on cyclical, organic, or illogical models of time; addressing history through the memory of oppressions, displacements, and alienation; and considering how the past infects the present.

Centered around the question, “How do artists evoke and transform time in their work?”, students develop their own time based work in this unit, employing relevant strategies to question its history, passage, duration, or logic.

Subquestions examined as part of this investigation of time include:

  • How does your lived past affect you today? How have you changed over time? In what ways have your life or you as an individual improved? Worsened?
  • How has our collective past influenced our present? What major changes have occurred in the past century? What change was the most significant to you? What implications have they had on your life?
  • How is history told? Where can we find stories of the past today? Who is telling the story? What parts of the (hi)story are factual or fictitious?
  • How do we tell the stories of our personal stories or communal histories? How can reflecting on the past and acting in the present make changes for the future?

A Matter of Time, Unit Plan

STUDENT WORK AND PROCESS

Student artwork.

Student artwork. Students in the studio participating in Matter of Time. Students in the studio participating in Matter of Time. Student plan for Matter of Time.