Museum
For some time now I have thought about teaching. My first year at UCLA I worked as museum educator at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History on campus, a job I loved. I gave tours of the galleries to K-12 school groups. The most requested exhibit for tours was Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives, their permanent exhibit showcasing pieces from all over the world. It opened with a display of faces -- masks, puppets, or busts to introduce the idea that objects represent personal or communal identity. I would first ask the kids to identify elements of the pieces that stood out to them and prompt them to interpret the meaning behind those creative decisions. After a quick overview into the background of a piece, I'd encourage them to think about how similar relationships are expressed in their own lives. For example, in response to Hopi Katsina dolls - what toys or playthings did or do they use to learn about their culture, or to emulate adults? Or, relating to a king's robe and items, what do people with authority in their life, such as a school principle, wear or carry to signify that authority?
Other favorite exhibits from my time there were:
Earth Matters, a really expansive collection of works made with earthen materials, through which African artists negotiate their relationships to land and nature, and -
Sinful Saints and Saintly Sinners, that explored how people take icons into their own hands to create folk saints, heroes for those who don't fit within social bounds, such as the Santa Muerte, Coyote, or Marie Laveau.
After leaving the gallery we'd lead the group through an activity to allow them to put to practice some of the concepts brought up in the tour. For Intersections, we'd make two-sided paper masks. For Earth Matters we sculpted with clay, and we made votive candles for Saints and Sinners. I recommend going thru the Fowler's web pages for these or other past exhibits, and if you're interested in connecting with others looking at musem artifacts, there is a Hyperlink club for it - Virtual Museum Explorer Club
When I moved to Pittsburgh five years ago I hoped to return to museum education. I took some of MoMA's courses on coursera.org, and I had a couple of interviews with the Carnegie Museum of Art's education department. That job would have been at most 10 hours a week, on a busy season, so when I was offered a full time job at the county health department before getting a decision from the museum, I took it.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic it had been years since I'd spent any holidays with my family. Now many people have been forced to get on board with video conferencing and while it took almost 3 hours for everyone to get on the same functioning Google Meet call (or it might have been Zoom?), I spent last Thanksgiving virtually together with my siblings, then Christmas and New Years. And now, I don't have much to add to the Virtual education discourse, except that I led my first group animation workshop on Hyperlink.Academy last week, will begin teaching a full six-week course soon (details in an upcoming newsletter), and I believe this is a step that would have been much more difficult if I were seeking in-person opportunities for teaching, regardless of the pandemic. And, mobility! I am currently based in Pennsylvania, USA and am planning to move to Finland in a few months where if all goes well, I should be able to continue the course with minimal adjustment.
Internet
Hyperlink.Academy is a platform striving to be like a liberal arts college on the internet. Teachers and students approach their subjects with playful curiosity, courses are peer driven and the people building the platform seem genuinely interested in expanding the realm of adult education beyond hierarchical academia or careerism. I participated in a class for helping potential facilitators hone their course ideas, and now I'm in a newsletter creation club and Juan Fernandez's comics club Comics for the Rest of Us. I was attracted to Hyperlink as a platform largely because of Juan's stated intent for the comics club to provide a space for artists to cultivate a regular practice without any focus on professional cartooning. I've always sought activities that could be done relatively simply, cost-effectively and within the confines of my home space. I think animation is often seen as a tech-heavy, tedious expensive medium. And...it can, but doesn't have to be. I've never worked in a studio, never had an internship with a professional animation company, basically have had no "ROI" on my master's degree, but I continue animating and would like to make a course for those who may not want or have the option of a more formal animation training to get started animating using accessible tools and spaces.
The Demo class I hosted went really well! We watched a few videos to start identify household items used for animating, and the way they move. Then, we used Stop Motion Studio to create short bouncing ball animations using materials that could be manipulated to create the illusion of squash and stretch: yarn, paper, fabric. The longer course will more or less follow this format, perhaps borrowed from my my museum teaching days, of seeing, identifying, and making.
This project is the impetus for starting this newsletter. I have dabbled with blogging in the past, and now that I have something to promote, I will try again. The primary subject of Puppetry of Ghosts will be animation - my process, the materials I like, thoughts on other animated work, etc., but also will contain snippets of other ~ related ~ things of interest to me, such as this week I have been eating too many olives that came in lemon infused brine. I highly recommend adding lemon pieces to your olive brine. Also, the plan is this will be released every two weeks, on Tuesdays.
