Teen Lab Day One!
Day one of Teen Lab was all about welcoming everyone into the space, getting to know each other and deciding how to make Teen Lab’s Studio Space a safe, inclusive and encouraging environment. Teen Lab, in partnership with After School Matters encourages teens to discover their own artistic practice with the Art Institute of Chicago as their springboard for engagement, activities, and exploration in the galleries. Click here to see our awesome group of teens for the Spring 2016 semester!
After breaking the ice by sharing embarrassing stories, Fatimah, the Lead Instructor, introduced us to the theme for this session, Collaging Community:
"The theme for our Spring 2016 semester was Collaging Community. In the last two semesters at Teen Lab, we spent a lot of time talking about our own individual identities, exploring the complications of race, gender, sexuality and class and how that all shows up in our work. Exploring all these aspects of our identities was a great way to learn more about ourselves, and create artwork that we felt was a reflection of ourselves. We also spent a lot of time creating a very intimate community in Teen Lab, being a support system for each other and a safe space to come to united around art-making. When I came up with the theme for this semester I was thinking about all of the different communities that we come from, and how to create site-specific work that is for those communities. How can we engage the people and communities we most care about through our art work? How can our art work have interactive components? How does the specific places we are from and the specific places we create art impact our work? I thought that the principles of collage were a great way of thinking through some of those questions-- collage being a medium that draws upon found objects, that pulls existing images that are around us and reforms them into a new dialogue and conversation."
To help us think and share our ideas about community, we used post-it notes to write down words or phrases that represented “where we are from.” Then, we curated a window looking out to Millennium Park with our stories.
We finished the day by creating a “Community Agreement” for Teen Lad. While Studio B in the Ryan Education Center is where our program meets, how we want to shape our Teen Lab community is up to us. Together, we built a list of guidelines that we all agreed to abide by throughout the semester.
What do we want our Teen Lab community to look like?
This is what we came up with:
Official 2016 Teen Lab Community Guidelines:
1. Be Chill! Let’s not be mean
2. Don’t talk over people
3. Listen!!
4. Judgment free zone
5. Keep an open mind!!
6. Have fun!!
7. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it
8. Give respect and receive respect
9. Respect boundaries and personal space
10. Think before you speak