The Park School of Baltimore2425 Old Court RoadBaltimore, MD 21208

Baltimore Lab School2220 St. Paul StreetBaltimore, MD 21218

Language+: Let’s art a conversation! has been organized and curated

by Qianfei Wang for her thesis at Maryland Institute College of Art’s

MFA in Curatorial Practice.

E X H I B I T I O N

R E C E P T I O N

January 21 to March 16, 2014

March 28 to May 23, 2014

Thursday, March 6, 2014, 3:00 – 5:30 pm

Thursday, May 8, 2014, 4:30 – 6:30 pm

The Park School of Baltimore

Baltimore Lab School

Project website: www.languageplusproject.comProject email: languageplusproject@gmail.comProject Facebook page: www.facebook.com/languageplusproject

P A R T N E R S

The Park School of BaltimoreBaltimore Lab SchoolMICA’s MFA in Curatorial Practice

A R T I S T S

Nancye HesaltineLiz PeltonJulia Kim Smith

S T U D E N T - A R T I S T S

Park School Lower School 2nd gradersPark School Middle School 7th gradersPark School Upper School Design & Beatz studentsLab School Wednesday early aftercare students

1

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T

2

4

6

7

18

21

24

25

Curatorial Statement

Code Switching Peter Bruun

The Doing and Being of Arts Integration Allison Yasukawa

Exhibition

Educational Programs

Public Programs

Student-Artists

Credits

2

C U R A T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T

Language+: Let’s art a conversation! provides an opportunity for students from The Park School of Baltimore and Baltimore Lab School to develop artistic forms of communication through workshops with professional artists and talks by guest lecturers. The workshops and talks incorporate the schools’ curricula and interests into multiple formats of art making that introduce students to auditory, visual, and kinesthetic modes of self-expression.

Both Park and Lab School embrace contemporary, progressive education, making them ideal partners for Language+. The schools share the belief, espoused by John Dewey in his book Education & Experience, that education should be based on an individual’s needs and experiences. This project uses movement, art making, design, and music to further explore that notion. It offers young people a variety of opportunities for discovering new interests and enhancing existing skills. Language+ also showcases what the schools have in common, strengthens those ties, and presents opportunities for future partnerships.

Through three levels of curatorial vision, Language+ has the potential to foster sustainable and reliable opportunities for institutions to develop interdisciplinary research models for youth. Here are the three levels of curatorial vision:

1. Diversity in our societyAs individuals, it is increasingly important to develop awareness of diverse opinions and shared values. Art, because it is something of a common language, can help facilitate that process by transcending cultural barriers and tapping into human similarities. In the Language+ workshops, students utilized various art-making formats, but they expressed similar ideas with common themes. Such results indicate how an interdisciplinary learning approach could benefit students by developing skills for self-expression that lead to positive outcomes.

2. Models of collaborationLanguage+ emphasizes the benefits of collaborative art making. In this instance, several classes at Park School worked together and also collaborated with Park’s Lower School art teacher, second-grade teachers, the Lower School science teacher, and performance artist Liz Pelton to develop ideas around the theme of water for their workshops. Second graders explored that theme through different media, such as performance and dance, drawing, painting, and writing. Through multiple learning options—including nature walks—students developed an in-depth understanding of water and its importance.

At the Middle School level, the seventh-grade language art teachers collaborated with mixed-media artist Julia Kim Smith and the middle school

3

Qianfei Wang

art teacher on installations that helped students understand the concept of Euphemisms. In language art class, the students studied Euphemisms by reading Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and the workshops deepened their understanding through hands-on, in-depth exploration of the concept.

An Upper School design class and a beatz (electronic music) class collaborated on a project that encouraged students to think about the relationship between design and music. Each class began with separate, independent projects. The design students created posters based on specific words and illustrated their meanings in a variety of graphic styles. The beatz students composed music based on specific words, as well. Then, the classes exchanged artworks to create an entirely new piece in response to the work they received from their partners. Instead of teaming up with an outside artist, the design and beatz students facilitated their own projects and worked individually and collaboratively. Visiting lecturer Ellen Lupton, director of MICA’s MFA in Graphic Design program, spoke to the students about related design concepts and issues.

At Baltimore Lab School, ten aftercare students participated in weekly workshops that used art as a vehicle for studying water and community. The ten students also visited Park School, where they worked with Park second graders and attended a lecture by science teacher Laura Jacoby. By the end of the exhibition, Park second-grade students and their teachers will have visited Lab School and viewed its Language+ exhibition.

3. The philosophy of Language+

Traditionally, curators select artists and finished artworks for exhibition. As a result, they focus on the final product more than the process. Language+ subverts that tendency by, not only encouraging student-artists to explore the materials and media that appeal to them, but also by documenting the process and product in the final exhibition.

Meaningful curatorial practice can arise out of process-oriented projects that aren’t competitive or hierarchical in nature. By utilizing a process-oriented approach, the work of professional artists and student-artists can naturally co-exist in an exhibition setting. Language+ is a curatorial and educational method that can enhance existing programs and expand learning opportunities in community and institutional settings.

As Dewey explains in Experience & Education, “The most important attitude that can be formed is that of the desire to go on learning.” Language+ uses art making to help instill and solidify that attitude in diverse student populations.

4

C O D E S W I T C H I N G

There are advantages to having a shared language, and by language I do not only mean words but also the entire mix that comes with commonly held cultural touchstones. It is affirming to be amongst one’s own tribe; one understands, and feels understood by, others.

But turn the table—consider the experience from the other point of view:“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison, author of The Invisible Man, expresses the alienation he felt as an African-American in his own country. His “invisibility” results not from absence of language, but rather from his own language—his essential being-hood—remaining unseen.

No doubt, Ellison’s plight is one shared by many: the newly arrived immigrant, the dancer amongst scientists, or the new kid in school who doesn’t yet know the ropes. Probably every one of us has felt outside at one time or another, apart from the common vernacular, unnoticed.

For better or worse, a necessary condition of insider-ness is an outside. Our language is just that: our language, and not yours.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

To be with others within your own language is a good thing—to leave it at that is not.

The outsider has an advantage here. To thrive or even sustain herself, the outsider needs to go beyond her own zone, into the language of the otherwise alienating world around her. The outsider needs to code switch comfortably.

Code switching happens when somebody alternates between two existing languages. With specific linguistic roots, code switching has also come to refer to a way of shifting one’s entire affect depending on situation: a black person at home with fellow black family and friends, for example, may present himself quite differently from how he might do so at a predominantly white work place or school.

Code switching is a form of adaptation, but also a mechanism for understanding. A code switcher is not pretending to be something other what she is; rather, she is moving seamlessly from one milieu to another. A code switcher is not limited by the confines of a single language; his world is larger than that.

5

Peter Bruun Director of Bruun Studios

In its incorporating dance, installation, design, art making, music, and more, Language+: Let’s art a conversation! is promoting a kind of code switching. As such, it is fully in synch with its partner institutions’ pedagogies. Both Park School and the Baltimore Lab School rely on the theory of multiple intelligences as a centerpiece for learning—the belief that our intelligence is not based on a uniform cognitive capacity but in fact resides within multiple channels. At both schools, learning happens across a tapestry of modalities, or languages; code switching (broadly defined) is happening all the time. And the schools’ students are rewarded with insight, empathy, and the sense of belonging to a bigger world.

Language+ posits a societal ideal in which we engage in languages in and out of our comfort zones all the time; a notion of everyone perpetually prepared to code shift. It is a radical and challenging idea. But were we to take up the challenge, we would have nothing less than an antidote to the sort of invisibility of which Ralph Ellison writes, and a cure to the shrunken world Wittgenstein laments.

We would have a world of genuine diversity at its best.

6

As the title of this curatorial initiative, Language+: Let’s art a conversation! inspires many possible avenues of reflection. This essay takes the initial word, language, from the title as its point of departure. Language, like art, provides its users with component parts (parts of speech) that serve as vehicles of communication. Verbs as the driving action of communication help to define and focus our avenues of inquiry. By focusing on two common verbs—to do and to be—we are able to ask to questions central to the core concerns of this project, namely, What do the arts do? and Who is an artist?

What do the arts do?I have little to say about what the arts do that practitioners don’t already know from personal experience: The arts foster expression, problem-solving, and reflection; they invite dialogue and community-building; and they allow for new forms of engagement with the world. In the classroom setting, these outcomes, in addition to the development of motivation, tolerance, and academic skills (Carterall, 2002) support a shift in thought about arts education that uproots the discipline from its historically isolated location on the pedagogical periphery and repositions it in direct dialogue with subjects at the center. This reframing finds its name in arts integration. Arts integration champions the reappraisal and repositioning of the arts and promotes the reciprocally beneficial relationship between arts learning and subject area learning outside of the arts themselves (Burnaford, 2001). Language+ participates in this reconceptualization of arts education by activating the potential of arts-based learning.

Who is an artist?A second shift that is central to arts-based learning concerns the choice of name designation of the makers themselves. In other words, we should ask what happens when ‘student’ or ‘student artist’ is replaced simply by ‘artist’? Opponents of this renaming may argue that the distinction of terms is important because it is reflective of the very real difference in competency and craft between the learner and the professional. While this way of thinking is not incorrect, it fails to account for the effects—whether overt or unintended—on the expectations and outcomes of the making process. To name young makers ‘students’ instead of ‘artists’ is to locate their point of departure in a place of inferiority and limitation. When they are less than artists, we expect less of them and they expect less of themselves. Conversely, by simultaneously acknowledging that one who makes is an artist and that different artists make in different ways by drawing on different contexts, knowledge-bases, and fluencies is to return the right to access an artistic language to the makers themselves, and in turn, to expand the very definition of what an artistic language can be—in other words, to create a Language+.

T H E D O I N G A N D B E I N G O F A R T S I N T E G R A T I O N

Allison YasukawaFaculty of MICA’s Foundation & English as a Second Language

7

E X H I B I T I O N

Marquee WallPared de la Marquesina

Here, There, “Elsewhere”Aquí, allí, en otra parte这里，那里，“其他地方”

主题墙

8

Euphemism Guessing StationEstación de adivinanzas Eufemismo委婉语气猜谜处

Poster + MusicCartel + Música海报＋音乐

9

Euphemism Guessing StationEstación de adivinanzas Eufemismo委婉语气猜谜处

Poster + MusicCartel + Música海报＋音乐

10

DocumentationDocumentación

DocumentationDocumentación

过程记录

过程记录

11

DocumentationDocumentación

DocumentationDocumentación

过程记录

过程记录

12

Night StreamArroyo nocturno

About WaterDel agua

StreamArroyo

Ripple EffectOnda expansiva

MicrocosmMicrocosmos

NightstreamArroyo nocturno

right:

middle: right:

left:

left:

夜晚的小溪微观世界

夜小溪 小溪关于水

涟漪效应

13

Shell, Water, FlowerConcha, Agua, Flor

NightstreamArroyo nocturno

WaterfallCascada

right:left:

夜晚的小溪

瀑布贝壳， 水， 花

StreamArroyo小溪

14

Here, There, “Elsewhere”Aquí, allí, en otra parte这里，那里，“其他地方”

15

16

Here, There, “Elsewhere”Aquí, allí, en otra parte

Here, There, “Elsewhere”Aquí, allí, en otra parte

这里，那里，“其他地方”

这里，那里，“其他地方”

17

Here, There, “Elsewhere”Aquí, allí, en otra parte

Here, There, “Elsewhere”Aquí, allí, en otra parte

这里，那里，“其他地方”

这里，那里，“其他地方”

18

E D U C A T I O N A L P R O G R A M S

P E R F O R M A N C E W O R K S H O P S

A R T - M A K I N G W O R K S H O P S

Professional dancer Liz Pelton introduced body movement as a way to express and communicate during monthly performance workshops. Park School second graders and Lab School students used body language to imitate water and different animals’ behaviors and movements.

Nancye Hesaltine led art-making workshops in response to the monthly performance workshops and helped students to better understand how performance and visual art can express ideas and opinions.

19

I N S T A L L A T I O N W O R K S H O P S

M U S I C & B E A T Z C L A S S E S

Julia Kim Smith helped seventh graders deepen their understanding of Euphemisms by making artistic installations.

An Upper School design class and a beatz (electronic music) class collaborated on a project that encouraged students to think about the relationship between design and music.

20

W E D N E S D A Y W O R K S H O P S

At Baltimore Lab School, ten aftercare students participated in weekly workshops that used art as a vehicle for studying water and community.

The ten students also visited Park School, where they worked with Park second graders in performance and art-making workshops.

21

P U B L I C P R O G R A M SL E C T U R E S

Laura Jacoby spoke with Lab students about the environment of the stream near Park School and had an in-depth conversation about water.

Visiting lecturer Ellen Lupton, director of MICA’s MFA in Graphic Design program, spoke to the students about related design concepts and issues.

Lecture II: Our Stream

Lecture I: How to Think Like A Designer

22

V O I C E L E S S C O N V E R S A T I O N

C U R A T O R / A R T I S T S / S T U D E N T - A R T I S T S T A L K

Voiceless Conversation encouraged parents and teachers to experience the performance workshops. Liz Pelton and student-artists led workshops and taught various movements related to water and animals.

The curator, artists, and student-artists held assemblies/public talks to introduce the exhibition, explain their process, and showcase the final artworks.

23

L A B S C H O O L T O U R

G A L L E R Y T O U R

A curator-led gallery tour introduced the process and ideas behind each piece of artwork.

Park second-grade students and their teachers visited Lab School and viewed its Language+ companion exhibition.

24

Maya AbrahamArielle AdlerDara AlpersteinMichael AndreaDean AngelosDaisy ApplefeldSireen Badr Max BaranLouise Baron Carlie Baumann-FurtawOlivia BenalcazarEly BerkowitzBen BermanJoey BlockWayne BradleyWill BradyLauren BrooksRylen BurchettEthan BuschLila CampagnaChloe CelestinGabby CelestinSimona ClampinAlex Cohen Ben CohnAnna ConnorsElias CorbinAlexa CosbyCooper Cromwell-WhitleyWill DavlinLeah DavidsonStephanie DavidsonJames Detling-EdsallSoren DhruvBrett DiamondOliver DrachmanRuby ElbertStephanie FauraKatie FeeDaniel FieldJosh FinkelsteinMike FishmanEthan ForrerQuintin ForrerAdam ForwardIan GreenbergJacob GreenwaldManya GerstleyAlex GogelLuke Goodinson-ParadisElla GottliebThea GoucherNettsaanett GrayJacob Greydanus

S T U D E N T - A R T I S T S

Linley GrosmanEmma HellerMia HenryGraysen Herbel-ChristopherZach HobbsDean HolmesMatthew HudesElli IrwinNick ImhoffAmit JakobJennie JacobsMeg JacobyKyle JamisonAsha JohnsonRohan KalahastyEthan KalvarCharlie KalvarJonathan KaplanNoah KaplanLucia KelemenDasha KhristichCassandra KitchenCharlotte KittelOlivier KnoppMargot KohnAlex LawsonSamantha LeeGrant LehnertSydney Lowe Julia LujiakPeter LuljakOliver MackEvan MagladeryOlivia MahaffeyPaige McDonaldJaiden McKenzieMelissa MillerRachel MillerWills MillinAnsel MontgomeryHelen MoosMax MorrisonJacob MullAmani Murray-LompoAdina Newman-TokerJacob NorinJenna NotaroDanny O’RourkeCici OsiasZach ParksBrenton PeguesJane PeltonRebecca PickeringMolly Pickus

Ben PolyakovAaron PomerantzCaitlin PriceAlex QuintingSam Rabb-JarosMolly Rabb-JarosLaney RehCatherine ReidDavid RenbaumTanner RenickCelka RiceJosh RiceSydney RichmondLance RombroSophia RubinJulia RusselAllie SachsGabriel SachsOwen SahnowRey SanchezDrew SchwartzmanBen SegallAnnie SegallGabe SemenzaJack Segel-LandonBranch SeidenmanJordin SirodyZachary SirodyLeah SmithMoira SmithWyatt SmithZach SmithShelby SnyderZach SternAnna StewartAdam StomblerPaul StumpfKarinne SummersKatrina Surcel-DebesFaye TennisOllie ThakarErica TraunerWill TuckerCatie TurnerNicholas WalkerAlex WetzlerGeorge WhalenGabe WittmanDaniel WolfJake WolfMaggie WulfEvan YermanTaura ZarfeshanHank Zerhusen

25

S P E C I A L T H A N K S T O

C R E D I T S

Program Director

Thesis Review Committee

Thesis Advisors

Design

Photography

Printed by

George Ciscle

Marcus CivinLaura Parkhurst

Carole Poppleton-SchradingCarolyn Sutton

Emily BlumenthalJeremy Hoffman

John Lewis

Victoria BullivantQianfei Wang

Cheng CaoMax Frost

Qianfei WangXiaotian Yang

Baltimore Lab School

Patti ChildAnn Haney

Elizabeth HollisterKatrina Holmberg

Doug JamesonRommel LoriaGeoff Meyers

Marilyn MiltonAkua Peprah

Janna RiseChristine Tillman

Molly Watt

©2014 by Language+: Let’s art a conversation! project. All rights reserved.

Language+: Let’s art a conversation!

www.languageplusproject.com | languageplusproject@gmail.com