2019 marked my third year as a teaching artist for CoCre8!
Created and run as a partnership between Urban Gateways, the Smart Museum of Art, the Logan Center for the Arts, and Arts + Public Life, CoCre8 is an experimental model of collaborative arts education that brings together a cohort of high school students and educators, artists, and arts administrators to look at, talk about, and make art. Through engaging in these activities across monthly workshops in the spring and a weeklong intensive in the summer, the cohort seeks to dismantle traditional hierarchies and embrace multiple roles as learner, teacher, and maker. Collectively, participants explore the many ways in which art can help us think critically and creatively about our world.
The weeklong intensive culminates in the creation and public sharing of collaborative artworks, each developed by a group comprised of high school teachers and students and a teaching artist. By chance, I had the incredible opportunity to work as part of a group of women—Charnice, Dara, Esi, LaQuana, Nora, and me—who also (perhaps only partially by chance) had recently been experiencing or thinking a lot about rage. After discussing a range of work (including that of several youth poets, Leonardo Drew, and Gingarte Capoeira Chicago, which we encountered at the Smart Museum and the Logan Center), we decided to video-record ourselves as we performatively destroyed various objects that held symbolic meaning for us individually or collectively, and then constructed something new with the broken pieces and transformed material.
My group’s process resulted in Rage Remade, a multimedia piece. As our exhibition statement read:
We started out with a question of rage: what causes ours, and what if we let it out? A dozen plates, 6 political signs, 5 found poems, 4 books, 3 pieces of video equipment, 2 broken bottles, and 1 dome later, our rage was remade—built from the foundations of frustration, and transformed by our collective choices.
At the conclusion of the program, we and the three other groups were invited to install our final works in the Arts Incubator’s gallery, in a short exhibition that CoCre8 participants named “Art, ______.” Check out this Urban Gateways blogpost for more info about the exhibition and all four groups’ new works!
Images: Photos # 1, 2, 6, 7, and 9 are by me; # 3 and 4 by Alayna Kudalis; and # 5, 7, and 10 by Lucas Anti. Images show the multimedia artwork “Rage Remade” in progress and completed, with some images of just the artwork (part or all), of its final installation, or of people at the exhibition opening.
