There appears to be a huge gap in my Tekno work from November to February. Not true! While I didn't keep up with the blog, I definitely was working on many aspects of the work.
The first aspect was working with the Glowforge team. They really helped me understand the machine and get more confident with it. But that was not my dream project. The second (and main aspect) of my work was the student-led exhibitions. My students put on six exhibitions prior to the shut down! These exhibitions taught me how to delegate the majority of the exhibition tasks to the students and put them in roles where they had to work collaboratively and lead the work. Not easy for me or them at first! I tried archiving them on this weebly site, but by the time the exhibitions were installed, we were all exhausted and burned out, no one wanted to dedicate themselves to faithfully archiving the work. I still need to figure out how to make this happen consistently. Here is a list of the exhibitions: (1) September-October - Advanced Art put on the (Im)Permanence exhibit in our brand new exhibition space at Lansing High School. (2) November - Studio Art and Drawing put on Evanescence at the Mezzanine Gallery in the Benjamin Peter store on the commons (3) December- Photography students put on a show titled Through the Lens: Theme Edition in the Bobcat Artist Gallery in the Lansing High School (4) December - Digital Art held an exhibit at the Lansing Library titled Oh the Places We Know! , which featured panoramic images from the Lansing community (5) February - Photography students put on a show titled Defining Me: Self-Portraits in the Bobcat Artist Gallery in the Lansing High School (6) March - Studio Art installed a sculpture exhibit aptly titled Broken World about social activism topics With each of these exhibitions, I experimented with how best to hand over the planning, designing, preparing, and installing to the students. Students were capable of all this (with resources and coaching), and the even documented each show, but we never made time to archive the shows, mostly because I did not have a classroom account for ThinkLink and would have had to have one student at a time working on the archive with my account. While I did not produce digital archives during this time, I learned a tremendous amount about teaching students to collaborate and teaching students how to take on exhibition roles. These skills do come into play in my final project, where students will create an online exhibit of their Empathy Portrait Project.
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Artist & EducatorI have been teaching art for over 20 years at the elementary and secondary levels. I am currently instructing high school students in courses such as Studio Art, Digital Art, Advanced Drawing and Painting, and AP Studio Art. For four summers, I also instructed a master's level course at Ithaca College on Integrating Art into the Elementary Classroom. I am also finishing my MFA in Visual Art with an anticipated graduation date of July 31st, 2019. In my own work, I am investigating themes related to perseverance and resilience. -Jessica Stratton Archives
May 2020
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