“Gravity” means “the geometry of spacetime.”
March - June of 2019
I was assisting one of my coworkers on their mural project in Bayridge with what felt like a million classes back to back of extremely energetic 4th graders. The mural was titled 'The Games We Play', something selected by the executive director and the principal with no student or teaching artist feedback. The idea, in such a deeply multi-cultural neighborhood, was that these young people would share stories and drawings of pastoral outdoor games played in some distant homeland that many of these children hadn't been to or left before they could remember much. When my coworker told the students the title of the mural they were going to help us design - in every single room, a million voices whispered 'Video Games!'. When asked what kinds of other games students knew or played, there was only your normal, all american run-down - basketball, soccer, jump rope etc. It is hard to describe the quality of helpless frustration we shared with how painfully out of touch the people in charge of decision-making were with what young people were actually experiencing. In a deft sidestep, my coworker had students do drawings of their favorite video game characters playing those outdoor versions - Optimus Prime playing soccer was my favorite drawing, after Greg, who only drew different kinds of sharks (I save a drawing of a hammerhead shark playing hockey that he made, for my next tattoo). When my coworker submitted the mural draft for approval (after a lot of hours translating their drawings into a final image which she had no idea, after years of working with this program, that she should have billed for) the principal responded by telling her that there will be no video game characters on the mural. Again my coworker pivoted and made the original characters into students with video game references on their shirts - but when students saw the final design, in every single class there was a cacophony of sad groans. The mural painting was painful, from a million unhappy 4th graders, being poorly supported by our company and met with constant issues created by our director that slowed us down coupled with pressure from him to finish.
Since then her work grows in such leaps and bounds, I am always so charmed by her style and ability to cocreate playful worlds with young people - but that was an important inflection point for us both as teaching artists.
January of 2020
Another school in Bayridge, only I am the lead and my assistant is asleep half the time and eventually stops coming. 5 classes of 7th graders and the theme I was given by the director and principal, from a conversation I was not present at was Community. In all of the student spaces I had been in the different neighborhoods and burroughs, I noticed the young people I interacted with had very little experience outside of their neighborhood, especially in undocumented or lower income working families, and a lot of these young people were finding community through social media and online gaming, and also were drinking in global news/information at the same time - all of it surfacing randomly in our explorations as they processed their sense of the world and the things in it. In the spirit of this ultra modern and pretty ubiquitous experience of being a young person in developed countries - I proposed a mural exploring exactly that - how they reached out into the world from the safety of their homes and schools, using portals that live in both the digital and physical worlds, as well as imagining how we might represent our many connections to each other, like a web, or a tapestry. The principal immediately rejected it, telling me he was thinking like a dragon (for the large chinese population) and some sugar skulls (a mexican symbol he clearly thought applied to all of his latin american students) - you know, like the graphic appliques a dollar store sells for cultural holidays. Obviously I wasn't going to use his suggestions, because I knew the richness of what the students were going to come up with were going to be far beyond what he could conceive of. Pretty quickly I realized that almost 90% of my students didn't speak much english, and the word Community was actually quite a sophisticated concept for a new language learner. I was given 3 walls to cover and found a way to incorporate almost every student idea, and when I passed out the intial drafts - the phrase 'My Idea!' rippled through the room. When I took them to the principal for approval, he was floored (in a good way) - and later his only request was to change a section where a student had created an Intergalactic Community, of humans and aliens - I noted that particular subject to think about later, and the disconnect that he might have felt - and the next week, when we were supposed to start painting, the shut down happened. Suddenly all students in nyc were on screens all day for school, and I thought about how my first idea would have perfectly mirrored our reality. I replaced that girl's drawing with a treasure map of the neighborhood. She asked me why I changed it.
April 2022
5th graders this time, in the Bronx. The theme I chose to orient our drawings around Exploration - what tools do we use, what locations do we go to. Very quickly it became space focused, and I realized they were studying the Moon in science. As I listened to them, I was - how do I say this? - sharply attuned? to a reoccurring discussion about Elon Musk and his plan to colonize Mars, sophisticated queries about governments and sustainability and funding that have come to them through social media feeds. The narrative that emerged in our play was human children on Earth exploring their world, interacting with nature, growing a garden (the school has a community garden embedded in the playground) - and on the opposite side there are alien children doing the martian mirror of them - an incredible imagining that is structured with empathy, as well as a way to look at ourselves through imagining how we might be perceived by a completely foreign entity. Again, I am asked to remove the aliens - they became human children in the future, so the narrative wasn't broken, but again I am asked by the girl who first drew the alien girl - why was her drawing changed. The principal seemed nervous about the aliens being perceived by other adults in a way that felt uncomfortable and I make another mental note. Luckily we had a fantastic time painting together and I'm really in love with the outcome - it isn't my strongest mural, but with the wall and time constraints, it does a lot.
May 2023
Character design at a technical high school for graphic design. I was nervous about trying to start from scratch teaching something as sophisticated as photoshop (and illustrator, tho i haven't used it since college), and the school threw a lot of disruptions at us just as we were beginning to transition into digital formats. After a lot of floundering and frustration from students as they were being asked to draw in ways that lived really far outside of their comfort zone - the second I switched onto the computer I felt their quality of attention shift. The way they looked at the board, the sophistication of the questions they asked - it was like we were suddenly speaking the same language after then desperately trying to become fluent in a new one. I can't quite describe the kind of clarity that suddenly opened up between me and my students one we had entered into the digital realm. As I think back to that shift, I'm also remembering working with a student who was having a complete block about translating physical drawings to digital ones - this is my favorite part - is that computer programs force you to think in terms of shape and depth via layers. Painting is the exact same thing, and drawing should be as well - we are always trying to show 3 dimensional space on a 2 dimensional plane, but we learn to outline, so we think in outlines, and there is a huge intellectual shift that has to happen to grasp the difference. Contour lines are for living in a flat world composed of negative space on a 2 dimensional plane. Foreshortening, movement, torque, things embedded in environments and effected by gravity are motivated by 3 planes and we have to be able to map that 3rd dimension onto the flat surface of a page while drawing - in the computer you just make a new layer and move it closer to the top or farther in the back of the pile depending on where it needs to live to have the impact you want. I explained to my stuck student how i can use familiar textures, like sunlight on the bottom of a pool, as an overlay that sources in the viewer their own embodied awareness of every pool they have seen in a movie or jumped into, or like the jean and hair texture I dropped onto my chracter - we use our audiences awareness and experience of the world as a resource to communicate with them. Art is always necessarily a 2 way street, a CONVERSATION. If we didn't hope someone would see it and respond, would we bother making things?
I am reminded, however, of how the current flood of AI also sources the previous experiences and writing and thoughts in a very similar way, but without the yearning. I am thinking about how young people's brains are inherently different then mine because of growing up passing between digital and analog worlds in a way I very much did not. I had a typing class I hated in 6th grade, was given my first cell phone my freshman year of college. I grew up reading huge maps as a navigator for my mother, and when I moved to nyc in 2010 with my flip phone, I had to mapquest directions to places, write it all down and stumble around on streets I'd never been down trying to figure out up from down. It feels like there are a lot more known and knowable variables for them then there was for me - and while I have strong navigation skills and excel when given limitations - I think freedom from rules and boundaries means something very different for them then I could ever fully fathom - and not being able to see their destination when they have always been able to look up and know everything about where they might be going or what something will look like - is probably way more uncomfortable then I had really realized. That is something I can scaffold with more intention. But I'm just seeing a whisper, a glint of an idea. Gotta keep listening.
Watching the people in charge of young people stuff consistently make choices that negate or pastoralize into some romantic untruth their actual experiences of the world is something that I wish could be addressed in a way that our elders could receive without feeling the need to reject it. Someone born in the 20s and becoming an adult in the great depression has a completely different sense of themselves and the world compared to someone born after WWII and becoming an adult in the late 50s - that is a single generation. My college professors who were teaching us the business of art and design and setting us up to dive into the job market after college were all working adult illustrators in the 80s - before the internet. I graduated into the recession and a job market that looked nothing like what they told me.
There is a blindness and hierarchical hubris to the assumption that children know nothing and must be filled with our knowledge. This is exactly how all humans and in turn the AI that mirrors our conscious and unconscious biases keeps the failing and dehumanizing structures we claim to want to escape - exactly where they are. The world our young people are going to graduate into will look nothing like what we know - but we may not be able to even conceive of the difference to ever become aware we are living in separate realities. How do we weave the worlds together constructively rather then feeling the need to negate each other's experiences? How can those experiences support rather then destabilize each other?
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