Walker Art Center - Teaching Artist Ilene Mojsilov - 2.5 hours
This week at the Walker, I helped Ilene prep for her a lesson in the Art Lab for a group of high school students from Finlayson, which is about an hour north of the cities. This group of students had gone through the Hippie Modernism exhibition and were doing a lesson that explored the idea of what Utopia is and what their personal utopia would look like. I really like working with Ilene because she is always great about discussing her techniques and and reasoning behind her teaching style.
We started the lesson after the students had eaten their lunch, so they were in social mode. Ilene went to the front of the classroom and explained the project, providing context and asking questions to give the group a good starting point. She opened the art supply cabinet and told them they had free range over the whole inventory. She then stood back while everybody got into craft mode, and after answering a few clarifying questions I was amazed to see how the group really started to focus and got to work on ideating and creating their projects. She told me that she likes to stand back and gauge how the group responds to her instructions after she gives them, and let them kind of click into mode by themselves.