Snow Farm 2010!

This summer marked my fourth year teaching at Snow Farm Summer Art Program for high-schoolers! And it was awesome as per usual!

(This is a stuffed dino-dude I made for a staff collaboration that was never completed. Which was fine by me because this guy got to hang out in my studio all session!)

My studio assistant of years past was unable to return to camp due to getting a job running costumes on the set of Conan the Barbarian in Bulgaria (seriously). So I called in my good friend Liz to fill the position:

(Shown here holding her "worlds best liz" trophy made by artist Heather Beck.)

Liz is a spectacular fibers artist and textile designer as well as being an absolutely splendid person to teach with! We started the session with dyeing and shibori:

(MX Chemical dyes and Indigo! Check out those sweet Arashi style, Indigo dyed t-shirts there on the end!)

I've taught this class four times now but this summer really made it clear that I have to think of a new assignment for the dyeing/shibori. I've been having students make samples, which is something I love to do, but they seem to have a hard time connecting the tiny pieces of brightly colored cloth with the rest of their projects: they're just not that excited about them. I'm always left with a ton of abandoned samples at the end of the session. I've been working on some ideas for how to make the first few days of dyeing fun. Part of me wants to have them do a whole new assignment that would tie into the screen printing... or maybe just having them jump in and start by dyeing a t-shirt... I'll keep brainstorming for next summer.

After the dyeing we moved onto screen printing!

(Miriam helping Lauren print her print exchange image: lace!)

When I was in college I always wanted to participate in the print making department's print exchanges but they seemed skeptical because I was printing fabric instead of paper. But print exchanges are awesome! So I have my students participate in our own exchange.

(Caleb and Simon printing Caleb's Dali image.)

The assignment is to design an image to fit inside an 8" x 8" space and to print a set of those images onto dyed fabric squares measuring 10" x 10". I try to get the students to think about color, contrast, use of space, images/symbolism, text and directionality. The hope is that making a set will be enough practice with printing and registering that they will be able to print however much they'd like to for their final project.

(Caleb, Lucie and Joni exchanging prints.)

We had a pretty good critique about the images in both my morning and afternoon class. The students, although a bit hesitant at first to talk about eachother's work, had some pretty insightful comments. Critique is something I struggle with at Snow Farm: there is so much work to do and not a lot of time for discussion. As my syllabus evolves it is another thing I'm going to designate time for.

(Many of the prints as they were hung in the end-of-session gallery.)

The third and final project of the session is the flat-patterning and sewing of a three dimensional object or garment. Early in the first week of class we take a field trip to the local (HUGE) Salvation Army so that each student can start thinking about their final project. Then, they learn how to take their garment/object apart, lay it flat to create a pattern and then recreate the garment/object out of their own dyed and printed fabric. In the process, they also learn how to operate a sewing machine and sew a variety of seams and hems.

(Liz with her deconstructed garment.)

This summer we had a couple of dresses, a few skirts, a painterly corset, a pair of dapper vests and an extremely awesome handbag! I'd like to see more students choose to make objects instead of garments but whatareyagonnado.

(Joni was clever enough to pick a simple garment. Which meant that she, unlike some of the rest of us, had ample time to complete her project. Nice work, Joni!)

This is definitely the most challenging project of the session and it's a project that I think needs to either be altered a little or made the main focus of the class. I like doing the print exchange a lot but I realized this year that as that assignment has come into it's own more, the garment construction has lost a little bit of time. Which ends up meaning that many students don't have enough time to finish their projects.... which is a bummer. Next summer I hope to have a set of assignments that fit better into the two week period.

(World's Best Liz demonstrating the Map Project.)

I love fiber art for a lot of reasons but one of the biggest is that it inherently carries with it history, culture and the weight of global economies. For that reason, I try to infuse my classes with discussions about textile history as well as the ramifications of a fashion-based culture that treats cloth as something that comes from H&M and can be disposed of as soon as the season changes. Which is false! Cloth goes through so many process to get from the plant or animal to the clothes we buy for super cheap and there are hundreds of individuals and environmentally detrimental steps in between!

Last year I started a project to initiate conversation along these lines: I bought a huge world map and, at the beginning of class, had each student place a pin into the country that produced the garments they were wearing.

(The morning class "mapping their clothes:" Ronni, Sarah, Rachael, Miriam, Lauren.)

The project helps to remind us that the things we take for granted come from somewhere real. It also acts as a great geography review: I have to admit that even I had to google a couple of the countries/regions that produced our clothes! But seriously... highschoolers should know where Nicaragua is. (They do now: lots of pins in Central America.)

(Not so many pins in the US.. but thanks to American Apparel we got a bunch sticking out of LA.)

I love teaching... but I also really love the all-camp field trip! This summer we went to local glass artist Josh Simpson's studio:


... and then we went to MassMOCA which is one of my favorite art museums ever!

From the Material World: Sculpture to Environment exhibit:

Tobias Putrih, Re-projection: Hoosac, 2010.

Orly Genger, Bog Boss, 2009-2010

Michael Beutler, Lightning Generation, 2010
(Actually... a detail shot of the piece next to the window. I really liked how the textures of the sculpture and the space related to one another.)

Alyson Shotz, The Geometry of Light, 2010

MassMOCA is semi-permanent home to the largest collection of Sol Lewitt wall drawings in the world! They installed it last year in it's own wing of the spacious museum:

It's pretty amazing. If you get a chance: go!

Back at camp... Snow Farm theme nights are some of the best. This year? Pirates!

(Arrrrrgh, mateys!)

(So goooooood.)

(The piratey staff of first session, 2010.)

(Arrrrrrt camp? Pirate camp!)

And as always, the end of the session brought on a flurry of last minute staff screen printing! It's secretly my favorite part of the session: staff members bring clothes to print on and we have a farmhouse printing party all night long! I think we counted around 40 printed garments in one night this year!

(Me, Rumi and an armload of t-shirts.)

I am so lucky to have found such an amazing place to return to every summer and reconnect with smart, funny, supportive artists. I have a lot of friends in my life in the city(ies) but for some reason spending two weeks in the woods with the Snow Farm staff recharges my battery: I leave feeling motivated and excited and capable. Which is sooo important to me seeing as, for some reason, I also always seem to leave Snow Farm in some state of homelessness. This year, having just moved to Chicago and feeling a little nervous about it, Snow Farm was especially reassuring. It felt like home. :0)

Thanks, Snow Farm, for another amazing summer!

Snow Farm Summer 2009!

After one of the best summers at Snow Farm Summer Arts Program for high-schoolers, during which I took (I kid you not) maybe 200 photographs, I managed to accidentally delete all but 4 of them.  !!!!  So, here is a visually truncated description of this year's totally fantastic session.  

(Camp Director Christine with Assistant Director Jocelyn.  Apparently, they were Just 

Married.)

Almost the entire staff had returned from past summers, so we started the session like a well oiled machine.  The night before all the students arrived, Abigail and I silk screened enough t-shirts to clothe the entire staff!  Unfortunately, however impressive this show of momentum was, as soon as Mike was hit with the first water balloon we were embarrassed to realize that we had used the WRONG kind of printing ink...  washable.  All the shirts were running and staining!  Egads!  So we took all the shirts back and vowed to replace them by the end of the session.  We tried not to get too down about it and started classes with resolve.

(Photo by Abigail Heuss, metalsmith extraordinaire.)

Unlike last year's textile classes, this year we had plenty of students to fill both the morning and the afternoon class!  Plenty of ideas and enthusiasm to go around.  Susannah and I also fiddled with the content and schedule of the class- mixing up the tried and true(ish) schedule of the last two summers.  The newly written course description reads like this:  

 

The two week summer textiles program examines both the artistic and socio-economic life-cycle of a garment.  Students will not only have the opportunity to design and create their own garment/creation, they will also get a broader view of the global textile market.  The class will move from 2-d design into 3-d:  starting with dyeing and shibori (a highly controlled Japanese resist-dye process similar to tie dye), then adding patterns and images through silk-screening and finishing the session by using the fabrics they have designed/ printed to sew a functional garment or object.  Class conversations focus on the social, economic and ecological implications of fashion-based culture and how each student can start their own revolution by using their ingenuity to redesign their wardrobe.  Although the class is based around garments, individual students are always encouraged to use their new skills to make other things:  stuffed animals, non-functional art pieces, etc.  The more creative the better!  This is a great class for anyone who loves color, imagery, patterns and thinking outside the box.

The socio-economic part of the class was the most exciting new element for me.  I bought a huge map of the world and, as part of our daily class routine, I had the students "map" their clothing by putting a pin into each of their garment's country of origin.  It ended up being a great experiment!  We didn't even know

 where a lot of the countries were,  so it often doubled as a geography review.  It was great to see which countries ended up with the most pins:  China, Mexico, the US, El Salvador....  There were tons and tons in Central America.  Unfortunately, sessions at Snow Farm sort of hurtle to a finish and although I was hoping to be able to do some statistical analysis of our findings, no suck luck.  Oh well, next year!

(I even told them that if anyone complained about being "bored" I'd make them go look up sweatshop conditions in the countries with the most pins.  Nobody complained...)

It was the perfect jumping off point from which to have a conversation about Where Stuff Comes From and Where It Goes when we're done with it.  Our annual trip to the Salvation Army served as a perfect example of the latter part of that equation.  The Salvation Army in Hadley MA is one of the largest thrift stores I've ever been to:  row upon row upon row of perfectly wearable garments, organized by garment type, color, size.  Literally, anything that you could be looking for- no matter how specific your criteria- you can find there.  And no matter how much stuff you buy, there is always more stuff getting hung up.  The life-cycle of a garment is not simply defined by the amount of time that it is in fashion, or even by the amount of time an individual chooses to wear it.  It begins with fiber cultivation- farm to harvest to yarn, moves onto weaving/knitting and then into a factory for garment construction. It's packaged and shipped to a store all before consumers even have access to it.  Hundreds of people have touched each and every

 garment that you wear.  And once we've decided to discard clothes, they don't just disappear:  thousands of pounds of textiles are recycled, donated, and sent to third world countries every year.  

This year's textiles class had a chance to enter into that conversation and were given the opportunity to take control of their own participation on the system through new techniques for designing their own garments.  And they made some really amazing stuff!

(Myself and Jasmine in dresses that we made:  hand dyed fabric, silk screened, and patterned from a dress we bought at the Salvation Army!)

We also FINALLY got the photo emulsion with sun exposure to work this year!  We've been trying every year since I started at Snow Farm so it was so exciting to finally have success!  To celebrate, I had the classes participate in a print swap!  Each student made a screen using the photo emulsion and then printed enough patches for everyone else to get one.  At the end of the session we swapped and everybody got to go home with a piece of art from everyone else. It was awesome! 

(Left to Right.  Top row:  My Gentle Alpaca, Emily, Jasmine, Drew.  Second row:  Juliana, Juliana, Kelsey.  Bottom row:  Eliana, Chelsea.) 

One student, Emily, even decided to use the mapping project as inspiration for her patch!  She drew a picture of the globe and labeled the countries:  the size of the label reflects the ratio of production as reflected by the number of pins in the class' map.  Fantastic.  It reminds me a lot of the WorldMapper,

a project that redraws the earth's continents according to different statistics.  (Definitely play around with it if you have a moment!  It's enlightening, to say the least.)

(A terrible cell phone photo of Emily's print.  Apparently, my scanner isn't working either.  Damn.)

We also had our first male student in class this year who decided to take the class because he was interested in toy design.  He was a 2-d artist who drew these amazing characters and he was hoping to learn how to make them into 3-d stuffed animals.  It was great to try to help his realize that goal!  And he totally did it!  Nope!  I don't have any photos of it!  (Damn damn double damn.  Hopefully, I'll eventually get my hands on some and I'll add them to the bottom of this post, I promise.)  Drew added a wonderful presence to the class and although I was worried that he would feel ostricized by the girls who have a strange but undeniable commitment to listening to Disney music during class, he informed me one day that "what?  Hercules is my favorite movie."  AMAZING!  

(A stuffed monster I made with a teeth-shaped-welt pocket for eating things like the dried up fabric markers.)

Outside of classes, the session was full of fun activities!

Like cardboard robot dance battle fashion shows!

Stealing whole bowls of gluten-free chocolate cupcakes!  (Ok, that one was just me.)

Complaining dramatically about how loud the kids were at night time!

Building a pizza oven!  (Technically that was second session but I'm running out of photos..)

After the session was over and the students had all gone home (or away until second session) we had one of the most prolific silk screening parties of all time.  Seriously,  I silk screened for almost 15 hours straight!  Including!  New and improved (aka NOT washable) staff t-shirts!  

This summer was fantastic.  I'm so thankful to all my co-teachers, art friends and amazing students.  Snow Farm is one of the most fun and satisfying things I do all year long.  Hopefully, nothing will get in my way of coming back next summer!