The Art Room: A Social Practice Speculative Curriculum by Two Curious Art Educators
Emily Hogrefe-Ribeiro and Lisa Novak
Introduction
In this article we propose an experimental curriculum for a children-led art museum, titled the Art Room, that focuses on providing young people with the opportunity to lead and reimagine roles usually reserved for adults. Our speculative curriculum seeks to understand the formulas necessary to make possible a collaboration between adult-educators and children who are tasked to dream up what a contemporary art museum could be. Even though it is difficult to think of any social, political, cultural institutions or systems that do not affect and shape the everyday lives of young people, youths are seldom invited into the “decision-making processes that drive our society” (O’Donnell, 2018, p. 12). From gun control to COVID-19 school reopening debates, the concept of the child continues to be used as a political tool, but few decisions about their lives consider their input and voices. This project offers an invitation to (re)think the contributions of children. It is an exercise in trusting children with(in) the spaces of an art museum.
This curriculum is inspired by our respective research, and is a culmination of our complementary practices as museum and gallery educators and doctoral students. While Emily works with K-12 school and teacher audiences in a mid-size academic museum and considers social justice programming with elementary school students, Lisa explores the (im)possibilities of the youth-led in social practice, facilitating collaborations with young people and arts institutions with the School of Collaboration and Invention. Our project, guided by the principles of social and transpedagogical practice, inspires us to think differently about our respective interests, imagining what is (or is not) possible within the future of museum education. Supplemented with an imaginary pamphlet for a children-led art museum, and supported with illustrations by our child-artists Kaya and Solon Pitt, this text assists us in thinking-through children-led social practice in art museums.
Social Practice
From serving curry to the visitors of an art gallery in Rirkrit Tiravanija’s who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green, to children cutting the hair of adults in Haircuts by Children, social practice is a hybrid and multidisciplinary form of engagement that exists somewhere between art and non-art, where the social becomes artistic material (Bishop, 2012; O’Donnell, 2018; Helguera, 2011; Thompson, 2012). Although various terms are used to describe the field, the most common definitions used include relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002), new genre public art (Lacy, 1995), social acupuncture (O’Donnell, 2018), dialogical art (Kester, 2011), social collaboration and participatory art (Bishop, 2012). Pablo Helguera (2011), artist and author of Education for a Socially Engaged Art and curator Nato Thompson note that although the descriptor remains a working construct, this (non)art form proclaims social interaction, the organization of bodies in space, public participation, collaboration, and the renegotiations of authorship to be some of its most crucial functions (Bourriaud, 2002; Helguera, 2011; Thompson, 2012). Projects that center these principles focus on sociability, the collective production of knowledge, and allow for “unusual social configurations or realities to exist, if only for the moment of a performance” (O’Donnell, 2018, p. 23). The collective production of knowledge and the pedagogical possibilities offered by social practice allow for meaningful and creative ways of challenging conventional notions of power, pedagogy, and nurturing autonomous communities of practice.
Transpedagogical Practice
Transpedagogy, a core component of social practice, is defined by Helguera (2011) as “projects by artists and collectives that blend educational processes and art-making” (p. 77). Transpedagogical projects offer experiences that are different from more conventional or formal art and museum education experiences. In transpedagogy, knowledge production is central to the artwork and produced in collaborations with communities, artists, and educators from across the disciplines (Helguera, 2011). So what can socially engaged, transpedagogical practices look like in a formal museum environment? Helguera (2011) posits that while museums have worked to include socially engaged projects and to activate unadventurous gallery spaces by offering varied formats of community engagement, “these efforts, while almost always valuable to a degree, blur the boundaries between an artist’s gesture and a face-painting event for members.” (p. 68). It is difficult to enact social practice programming in a way that does not become subservient to the overall structure and traditional community engagements of the museum that Helguera critiques in his text. Our intention is to push, bend, and trouble what is, or is not, possible in such an (overly)regulated space.
Projects outside the traditional museum that have engaged in transpedagogical frameworks to form alternative coalitions include Mammalian Diving Reflex’s Haircuts by Children (since 2006) and the Dr. Martin Luther King School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA). These are discussed below and inspired our trajectory toward thinking about a children-led contemporary art museum.
Haircuts by Children — An attempt at role reversal
First presented by Mammalian Diving Reflex on four weekends in May in 2006 and staged internationally since, Haircuts by Children “involves children from the ages of eight to twelve who are trained by professional hairstylists, then paid to run a real hair salon, [while] offering members of the public free haircuts” (O’Donnell, 2018, p. 122). Considered a “whimsical relational performance that playfully engages with the enfranchisement of children, trust in the younger generation, and the thrills and chills of vanity” the project allows young people to assume a role usually reserved for wage-earning adults in spaces that are most frequently run by elders (O’Donnell, 2018, p. 122). While adults are trusted to participate as docile workers in the disciplinary apparatus of capitalist production, children and young people “are almost entirely barred from producing any value within the formal economy” (O’Donnell, 2018, p. 29). The “strong antipathy toward the idea of children working” (O’Donnell, 2018, p. 29) overshadows the fact that aesthetic and relational experiences composed for and by children, can empower rather than exploit them. While we appreciate how Haircuts by Children invited young people to playfully reverse the relations and social contracts so commonly enacted between adults and minors, the framework of the project was developed for and not with its young participants.
KSMoCA — a contemporary art gallery in a school:
Another inspiring and transgressive example for child engagement in the arts includes the Dr Martin Luther King Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA) in Portland, Oregon. Established in 2014 by Harrell Fletcher (Professor of Art and Social Practice, Portland State University) and Lisa Jarrett (Associate Professor of Community and Context Arts, Portland State University), KSMoCA is a prime example of the possibilities of art education in a school setting that goes beyond a school art style (Efland, 1976) and engages young people in the real-life processes of a contemporary art museum. In this nontraditional contemporary art gallery, young students work closely with adults to foster an experiential and transpedagogical environment. Students participate in curatorial practice, attend lectures, host workshops, international art fairs, and a podcast, and collaborate with renowned artists which, to this date, include Hank Willis Thomas, Wendy Red Star and Beatrice Red Star Fletcher, Byron Kim, and Laylah Ali. KSMoCA offers a student-led design studio titled Recess!, where 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade student-designers investigate the power that design holds over our lives, and how it shapes our environment. Commissioned by members of the school community, students design a variety of material, including posters for lectures, and exhibitions at the museum. Our speculative curriculum builds on the student-centered engagements of KSMoCA and asks what happens when children are trusted to create and lead an art museum beyond established museum etiquette and the control of adults.
Transgressive Transpedagogies
Haircuts by Children and KSMoCA stand as examples of how shifting power dynamics invite children- and youth-led pedagogical and socially engaged collaborations. These transpedagogical projects become emancipatory by transgressing into new territories of relations and active participation (hooks, 1994). Thought of as a transgressive practice, this curriculum makes it possible for children to set up a framework for a new type of museum led by young people. Wondering what would happen if the role-reversals of Haircuts by Children and student involvement at KSMoCA were combined and (re)thought, we began to explore the (im)possibilities of a children-led art museum, tentatively titled the Art Room.
The Art Room
The Art Room, a non-existent and speculative contemporary museum space, is an experimental model of a children-led art museum that focuses on providing young people with the opportunity to lead and (re)imagine roles usually reserved for adults. It attempts to answer the question: What would happen if we let children run our contemporary art galleries and cultural spaces? Emulating the practices essential to the day-to-day operations of an art museum, the young staff of the Art Room apply their knowledge and experience to engage intergenerational audiences, develop collaborations, workshops, lead socially engaged educational programming, and curate exhibitions. It encourages children aged 5 to 12 to assume leadership roles, cultivate agency, and (re)imagine an art museum on their own terms.
This speculative curriculum draws on transgressive transpedagogical frameworks, and encourages children to (re)consider museum practices by focusing on experiential engagements and emancipatory learning. The pedagogical process-as-art project is the core of the curriculum.The children-led contemporary art museum itself, and the all-encompassing experience, becomes the artwork in which young people are invited to develop the principles and tactics of social practice to rethink cultural spaces and community-oriented programming. Together, the children and facilitators of the Art Room will (re)contextualize art and its histories and engage in various forms of radical and non-hierarchical meaning-making. Importantly, the Art Room invites adults to trust children with running a gallery space and challenges social and institutional power structures in art museums, as well as processes of surveillance and archival practices.
As we imagined this speculative curriculum and children-led endeavor, we considered the following guiding questions:
● What would happen if we allowed children to run a contemporary art museum?
● What role can the principles of social practice — participation, collaboration, sociability, community engagement — play throughout this entire project?
● How do we create a program that is alive with active engagement?
● How do we work through the discomfort of letting go, and letting children take the reins of these “prestigious” spaces and objects?
● And what is the role of the adult in a children-led art museum?
As the curriculum took form, practical considerations emerged:
● Does a children-run art museum necessitate longer-term training, as was done in Haircuts by Children, where participants worked closely with hairdressers to acquire the necessary skills? And what are “necessary skills” in this context?
● In this speculative proposal, children take on a multiplicity of roles, including that of educator, cultural producer, director, curator, and so on. Do we need to find new titles, and can children rethink these positions? If so, what does curation speak to in the context of a children-led art museum?
● Does a children-led art museum necessitate a spatial rethinking of the museum as a place of surveillance? Will children, too, observe the behaviors of visitors, or is another type of gallery etiquette instigated with the implementation of a child-led structure?
The below artifact, created as part of a doctoral course in curriculum theory with Dr. Lynn Sanders-Bustle at the University of Georgia, is a culmination of our practices, a work-in-progress, an ever-evolving, imperfect document that helps us think through (im)possibilities of this project.
And: Final Encouragements
In lieu of a conclusion, we leave you with a series of further questions to guide your transgressive transpedagogical teaching. Three themes emerged as we continued to think about the (im)possibilities of a children-led art museum;: (1) rupture, (2) space, and (3) discomfort as accelerator — which, in turn, provoke the questions particular to each theme. These ideas continue to trouble how we (re)think the development and implementation of children- and youth-led (and socially engaged!) curricula.
- Rupture: The Art Room project wants to rupture the adult-led operations of the museum, as well as adult ways of seeing, knowing, and hierarchizing. What can rupture look like, or achieve, in your programming or art educational setting? How can the concept of rupture become a useful tool for you to think and do art and museum education differently?
- Space: Developing transgressive and transpedagogical curriculum requires space for uncertainty and playfulness in pursuit of a more community-oriented social practice program. How can your curricula make space for active participation and responsive collaboration?
- Discomfort as Accelerator. In his book Haircuts by Children, and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract , O’Donnell (2018) addresses the inevitable appearance of feelings of discomfort in collaborations with children and “between real people in real situations” (p. 10). To us, as educators working with children and youth, discomfort is a familiar feeling, and we are therefore drawn to O’Donnell’s notion of discomfort as an accelerator rather than inhibitor. Instead of retracting, this concept tasks us to lean into our discomforts, which are “absolutely central” to socially engaged work. How can you apply the notion of discomfort-as-accelerator to our programs?
This children-led art museum makes it possible for us to think of transgressive transpedagogies as art educators. Our speculative curriculum invites varied opportunities to (re)imagine the ways in which young people can contribute to and shape the arts, museums, and art education and challenge the structures of the museum and traditional museum education pedagogies.
Lisa Novak
Previously based in London, England, and on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Nations, Lisa is an Austrian educator, social practitioner, and doctoral candidate in art education at the University of Georgia, whose practice and research focuses on youth engagement in art and social practice, self-organized art education, disobedient curriculum, and gallery and museum education. She is the founder of the School of Collaboration and Invention (socai.org), and has led numerous workshops and youth-led arts intensives across Canada and the United States.
Emily Hogrefe-Ribeiro
Emily is the Assistant Curator of Education at the Georgia Museum of Art (GMOA) where she manages school and teacher programs. As a PhD student in art education at the University of Georgia, her research explores intersections of social justice curriculum and single-visit school tour programs for elementary school students. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in art history from Tulane University, focusing on contemporary art of the African diaspora. Prior to joining GMOA, she was a graduate fellow at the J. Paul Getty Museum and worked in art museums in New Orleans and Connecticut.
As White women, we acknowledge our racial, socio-economic, and academic privilege which impacts our approach to this chapter. We question the way power circulates through pedagogical practices and work to destabilize hegemonic ways of doing and knowing.
References and Endnotes
Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Verso.
Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational aesthetics. Les presses du r el.
Efland, A. (1976). The school art style: A functional analysis. Studies in Art Education, 17(2), 37.
Helguera, P. (2011). Education for socially engaged art: A material and techniques handbook. Jorge Pinto Books.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
Kester, G. H. (2011). The one and the many: Contemporary collaborative art in a global context. Duke University Press.
Lacy, S. (Ed.). (1995). Mapping the terrain: New genre public art. Bay Press.
O’Donnell, D. (2018). Haircuts by children, and other evidence for a new social contract. Coach House Books.
Thompson, N. (2012). Living as form: Socially engaged art from 1991- 2011. Creative Time.
Endnotes
During these precarious times, we invite you to donate to KSMoCA, so that it can continue to produce its exceptional programming: http://www.ksmoca.com/support-ksmoca
Pamphlet Text:
THE SPARKLY SHOW
Art Room Child-led Curatorial Team
Opens 1st April, 2022
We saw an artwork by artist Ebony Patterson, and decided to explore the museum’s storage to see what else was sparkly, then we realized that art is always sort of sparkling. We began to wonder why and how artists have used different materials like gold or glitter in their artworks, and what it means to be sparkly, or represented as such. We came together to discuss and think about what it means to be and exist sparkly — the Sparkly Show, an exhibition curated by the children of the Art Room, is the result of this exploration.
PROJECT AND PROGRAMS, APRIL 2022
ART SANDWICH
9th to 10th April 2022, 1:00pm
Art Room Frontyard and Courtyard
Over the course of five months, the Art Room worked closely with community members, local farmers, bakers, gardeners, and artists to develop ART SANDWICH, a children-led participatory project that explores the intersection of art, food, and ecology. Presenting their “community sandwiches” developed over conversations about local food justice, food insecurity, and ecology, guest are invited to participate in an edible walk around and near the building, collaborate with scent artists on herbal tinctures, bake bread sculptures, and participate in children-led dialogues about the role of food and ecology in socially engage and community-oriented art projects.
The event accompanies the Art Room’s spring pop-up exhibition Sandwiches in Art: 1500–2000, and all edible artworks produced during the two days will be exhibited in the Casio Gallery on the 2nd floor until 1st June, 2022.
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
Hosted by the Art Room Film Archive
3rd and 17th April 2022, 2:00–4:00pm
The Art Room presents The Kids Are Alright, a new documentary filmed on the occasion of the exhibition The Kids Are Alright: An Art Room Retrospective. Directed by the Art Room Film Collective, a diverse group of 12 to 14 year-olds, the film documents the many community collaborations and socially engaged projects made possible at the Art Room over the last year.
Children-led interviews with artists, including Ebony Patterson, Nan Goldin, Kehinde Wiley, and Wendy Red Star and behind-the-scenes footage, accompany insights into the everyday life and community collaborations of the Art Room as it continues to (re)imagine itself as a place in which the children take reign.
MAKE YOUR OWN WAY
Hosted by the Art Room’s Educational Team
Every Thursday, 4:00pm
Why not get lost in the museum? One of the Art Room’s ten-year-old associate educators will meet you in the lobby, start your tour by introducing their favorite works of art at the museum and explain what attracted them to those work. Then, equipped with a map and a handful of stickers, you will see where the art takes you.
Leave a record of your tour by marking the stickers on your map and meet back up with your group at the end to share your paths and create a quick zine about what happened when you made your own way. This weekly Thursday-afternoon tour is great for adults with young children or anyone who enjoys getting lost.
PET DAY ANIMAL TOURS
Hosted by the Art Room Tour Guides
16th April 2022, 2:00–4:00pm
Inspired by an ongoing discussion about the role of museum rules, Art Room staff invite you on an Animal Tour. Bring your (real or imaginary!) furry, scaly, or fishy friend to the museum and join our team of eight-year-old tour guides on a journey through the Art Room to discover the many different animals in the museum’s collection.
After the tour, you are invited to add a representation of your pet to our nonhuman companion community quilt. Tours will be offered every hour during Pet Day, and all proceeds are donated to our neighborhood animal shelter.
