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: