Personal Museum Map Project

Today we will begin our Personal Museum Map Project.  These will be individual projects that will reflect upon our museum experiences thus far.  Since our experiences in the museum are unique to our own personal interests, navigating the museum is an important part of how we create lasting impressions.We will be creating personal map collages that describe who we are as individuals and how we record memories, collect images and sketch ideas that inspire our work.  Many artists have used the idea of a theme of the map as collage or have used the concepts of collecting, space, time, and architecture as ways to create beautiful works of art that define themselves as individuals.  Here is a list of artists that work in this manner that you can look at to draw from for inspiration:

Mark Bradford
Mark Bradford (Art 21 video)
Joyce Kozloff
Landon Mackenzie
Matthew Ritchie
Julie Mehretu

Mark Bradford
Whore in the Church House, 2006
Mixed media collage on canvas
103 x 142 in. (261.6 x 360.7 cm)

                                   
                                                                 Copyright © 2009 Rubell Family Collection. All Rights Reserved.

More....Roger Brown Study Collection Field Trip Pics

This album contains pictures taken at the Roger Brown House on our field trip on Wednesday, October 19, 2011.  The collection offered more than enough IRONY, which made me think more about the meaning behind each piece.  Hopefully this field trip gave you some insight about what a "collection" is and inspired ideas about how a collection and its content can tell a story.

Meredith and I would love to read your comments on these pictures and about what you took away from this experience at the Roger Brown House.  If you took pictures, please remember to post them on your blog!

Thanks,
Joel

Visual text

This week we're going to start off with some poetry-writing, which we will install on our Collaborative Mapping Project in a visual way.  Here are some examples of artists/designers working with text in a visual way.

Courtesy of Axis Maps

Holstee Manifesto

Stefan Bruggemann

Leon Ferrari and Mira Schendel (MoMA exhibition)

Axis Maps

Paula Scher

Catching up!

Since we started this class blog a little late, I'll do my best to play catch-up on what we've been doing so far.  The first three weeks of the program were very busy!  We've been keeping ongoing notes and sketches in our physical sketchbooks, which we kicked off with personal collages, as well as digital sketchbooks in the form of our blogs.

We've spent a lot of time in the galleries, starting with writing diamante poems.  Then we did a Directed Wandering Project, where we searched out works that fulfilled certain criteria.  Then we picked one of those criteria and developed a whole album of images from the collection, along with captions annotating our observations, thoughts, and reflections.

We've been on a fieldtrip to the MCA, where we saw Pandora's Box: Joseph Cornell Unlocks the MCA Collection.  We looked at works by Joseph Cornell and other contemporary artists affected by his ideas and work.  Back at the Art Institute, we looked at some Cornell boxes in our own collection and did an exquisite corpse writing exercise, inspired by Cornell's Surrealist contemporaries.  Cornell not only collected ephemera from his daily life, he arranged it in thoughtful ways through his boxes.



Then we had a special treat when guest artist Regin Igloria visited Teen Lab to talk about his sketchbooks and how other artists have used sketchbooks as part of their practices.  He brought sketchbooks of his own (and ones by his students) to show us.  We are beginning to think of our own  sketchbooks as spaces for brainstorming, documenting, collecting, daydreaming, creating, and problem-solving.

We also began a Collaborative Mapping project, in which we're tracing our paths to the museum by collecting images, text, and ephemera on our way to the museum and combining them into a group collage.  Most recently we went on a fieldtrip to the Roger Brown Study Collection and saw how this artist collected all sorts of objects and arranged them in his home.

Here's a slideshow of images from the Roger Brown Study Collection. I created my own mini-collection of textile pieces I liked:

Documenting Teen Lab

Welcome to the Teen Lab Fall 2011 class blog!  You are all keeping blogs to serve as  your Digital Sketchbooks throughout the program.  While your Digital Sketchbooks are personal to your own experiences and ideas during the term, this blog will serve to document the class as a whole and provide resources.