“The Aperture On Sight curriculum is designed to teach visual literacy through working with photography and creating photobooks. It builds students’ abilities to communicate as visual storytellers, develops them as creative and critical thinkers, as well as building their capacity for academic and professional success.”
Full curriculum and resources are available online for free download.
“The Photoville Passport was created for Photoville Education Day, an annual art education initiative that gives local middle and high school students an inside look into the exhibitions, artists and curators that make up New York City’s premier pop-up photo destination, and the power of visual storytelling.”
More teacher resources available here: https://unitedphotoindustries.com/education/resources/
Using pictures of Froebel School, a site of the 1973 student uprisings in Chicago, and made in a workshop with artist and educator Nicole Marroquin
“How the patron saint of progressive urban planning’s ideas and ideals were implemented - and corrupted.”
List of books that address critical pedagogy, critical multicultural education, anti-racist education and more!
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in Schools by Mica Pollock
The U.S. Constitution and The Great Law of Peace: A Comparison of Two Founding Documents by Gregory Schaff
Emergent Strategies by adrienne maree brown
A selection of interactive prompts pulled from Art21’s Educators’ Guides, the Learning Library offers both discussion questions and hands-on activities in relation to Art21 artists and film segments.
Use themes and big ideas driven by essential questions to frame your investigation.
Give students options: introduce multiple artists and media sources.
Push beyond a media-driven curriculum.
Think and talk more; make less.
Emphasize process over product.
Use themes and big ideas driven by essential questions to frame your investigation.
“The first catalyst for the curriculum was Paulo Freire. In his book, Teachers as Cultural Workers, Freire discusses the traditional practice of teachers—“reading a class of students as though it were a text to be decoded”—and envisions classrooms where students reciprocate, “observing the gestures, language…and behavior of teachers.” Of course, students are already doing this, all the time; however, they are not typically invited in any structured way to share the results of these “readings” with their teachers or with each other. The power dynamic that Freire is uncovering here, the fact that assessment in almost all public-school classrooms travels in just one direction, from teacher to learner, was one of the major themes running through “Assessment as Dialogue.” For a long time, I’d wanted to redress this imbalance in my own classroom, and Freire’s words added urgency to that desire.” -Todd Elkin, Art21
“Over the past fifty years, street art has become one of the most common forms of contemporary art in urban public spaces. Sometimes it’s called vandalism and other times the more generic term, ‘graffiti.’ These aesthetic acts in public spaces are not only worthy of discussion, but also important to teach since they often contain social cues that help us decipher the visual landscapes in which we live. Teaching students an academic vocabulary to discuss street art helps them understand and analyze the nuance that can exist in what appears to be mere paint splatters on a street sign. An important conversation is happening in our urban spaces, and you don’t need to purchase an admission ticket to see it.” - Nick Kozak, Art21
This widely-recognized method nurtures the development of artistic works-in-progress through a four step, facilitated dialogue between artists, peers, and audiences. The Process engages participants in three roles:
1. The artist offers a work-in-progress for review and feels prepared to question that work in a dialogue with other people;
2. Responders, committed to the artist’s intent to make excellent work, offer reactions to the work in a dialogue with the artist; and
3. The facilitator initiates each step, keeps the process on track, and works to help the artist and responders use the Process to frame useful questions and responses.
The Critical Response Process takes place after a presentation of artistic work in any discipline. Work can be short or long, large or small, and at any stage in its development.
The facilitator then leads the artist and responders through four steps:
1. Statements of Meaning: Responders state what was meaningful, evocative, interesting, exciting, striking in the work they have just witnessed.
2. Artist as Questioner: The artist asks questions about the work. After each question, the responders answer. Responders may express opinions if they are in direct response to the question asked and do not contain suggestions for changes.
3. Neutral Questions: Responders ask neutral questions about the work. The artist responds. Questions are neutral when they do not have an opinion couched in them. For example, if you are discussing the lighting of a scene, “Why was it so dark?” is not a neutral question. “What ideas guided your choices about lighting?” is.
4. Opinion Time: Responders state opinions, subject to permission from the artist. The usual form is “I have an opinion about ______, would you like to hear it?” The artist has the option to decline opinions for any reason.
“Over the course of those four years as part of ART 180, and in partnership with Legal Aid Justice Center and later RISE for Youth, Performing Statistics helped advocates close a youth prison, change laws and policies on school suspensions and expulsions, and advance Virginia’s investment in community-based alternatives to incarceration. The project has been seen by tens of thousands of Virginians, been introduced to 20,000 classrooms through the Amplifier Foundation, and has trained more than 150 officers and recruits in the Richmond Police Department. This profound impact has happened in a short amount of time, and now it’s time for the project to extend beyond Richmond and beyond Virginia.” - Performing Statistics Website
“If we teach students to see racism as an idea that's expressed through behaviors, institutions and cultures rather than an immutable character trait, we free them to see things more accurately and with more openness to change, argues Cyndi Kernahan.” -Inside Higher Ed
“Archives capture history insomuch as they enshrine the perspectives of those who have been privileged enough to narrate and control how it is recorded. At the core of Mark Sealy’s work is a motivation to challenge the notion of archives as singular repositories of historical truth-telling, which he argues has influenced not just the history of photography, but our collective understanding of history itself. By being open to diverse perspectives, Sealy aims to broaden our understanding of history, and expose the power structures that have, and continue to, allow established narratives to dominate.
“I think once we get ourselves over the idea that photography is not this fantastic invention, the undisputed eye of the world, but is just another dominant tool used to narrate Eurocentric perspectives, then I think we’re in a place where we can begin to unpick photography’s social meanings through the prism of different ways of seeing… It’s a form of curatorial resistance work. It’s about understanding that things aren’t always the way that powerful cultural institutions tell us that they are.” The solution lies in locating “our silent history”, as he described it when speaking at a Magnum talk on archives at the Barbican.” -Magnum Photos
"It’s a form of curatorial resistance work" - Mark Sealy
In 2017, Brooklyn Historical Society launched Muslims in Brooklyn, a multi-year, public arts and history project to amplify stories of Brooklyn’s diverse Muslim communities.
For well over a century, Muslims have lived, worked, and prayed in Brooklyn, making it a major center of Muslim life for New York City and the nation. As such, the histories and experiences of Brooklyn’s Muslim communities hold great resonance for national conversations on religious diversity and pluralism.
Episode #211: This episode of ART21 "Exclusive" features artist Tania Bruguera collecting signatures as part of her socially engaged performance project "The Francis Effect" (2014). For fifteen weeks Bruguera stood outside of the Guggenheim Museum in New York asking passersby to sign a petition to Pope Francis that requests Vatican City citizenship for undocumented immigrants. "A lot of people know it's impossible," says Bruguera. Yet she believes "the impossible is only impossible until somebody makes it possible." In her engagement of our political imaginations, Bruguera demonstrates the power of art to change perceptions and mobilize political action. Tania Bruguera explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change, staging participatory events and interactions that build on her own observations, experiences, and understanding of the politics of repression and control. Her work advances the concept of arte útil, according to which art can be used as a tool for social and political empowerment.
Learn more about the artist at: http://www.art21.org/artists/tania-br...
Sign the petition at: http://dignityhasnonationality.net/sign
CREDITS: Producer: Ian Forster. Consulting Producers: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Ian Forster. Camera: Rafael Salazar & Ava Wiland. Sound: Ava Wiland. Editor: Morgan Riles. Translation: Michela Moscufo. Artwork Courtesy: Tania Bruguera. Special Thanks: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum & Rebecca Mir. Theme Music: Peter Foley.
“While the United States has become increasingly diverse since then, the culture of our schools has remained much the same as in my childhood: white middle-class. American Alphabets is an attempt to remake the buildings blocks of our language to reflect our differing cultures. The young people I worked with chose the words and suggested the imagery of their alphabets. I created a Spanish alphabet with Spanish-speaking children of immigrant farm workers. The words they chose—like nervioso or impostor—were symptomatic of their uprooted way of life. Taken as a whole, their lists of words amounted to a kind of cultural self-portrait. Students in Cleveland worked with me on an African Alphabet and girls in a private school on a Girl’s alphabet. At the Queens Museum I collaborated with Arabic speaking middle school students to create the Arabic Alphabet. The students had emigrated with their families from Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco and Lebanon.” Wendy Ewald
“When I moved to Connecticut in 2017, I learned that the walls of our home were painted with Patriot White and Opulence White. Looking for alternate whites, I stumbled across a paint color called Colonial White. I was stunned. I grew up in France, which has a continuous history of colonization and where the word colonial is used to represent that oppression and supremacy. But in the US and especially in New England, the word colonial has become ubiquitous. And I wondered how can the word colonial be reduced to an architectural style? But then looking at it again, I thought that the paint chip Colonial White is actually making visible the reality of America and its history.
By asking participants to visually merge the Colonial White paint chip with a place/object/situation that embodies colonial white to them, I am hoping to reframe the term colonial in its historical and present context amid a collective reflection and conversation about structural racism.” Charlotte Lagarde
“Slave Rebellion Reenactment is a conceptual community-engaged performance that will restage and reinterpret Louisiana’s German Coast Uprising of 1811. This was the largest rebellion of enslaved people in United States history and took place outside of New Orleans. SRR will animate a suppressed history of people with an audacious plan to organize, take up arms and seize Orleans Territory, to fight not just for their own emancipation, but to end slavery. It is a project about freedom.
The artwork will involve hundreds of reenactors in period specific clothing marching for two days covering 26 miles. It will be reenacted upriver from New Orleans in the locations where the 1811 revolt occurred—the chemical refineries and trailer parks that have replaced the sugar plantations forming its backdrop.” By Dread Scott