“Speaking to Ghosts”

The Museum of Contemporary School Partnership Program partnered me up with art teacher Debra Ryder of John F. Kennedy HS for a three year in school residency, working with three different classrooms over a 20 visit schedule each year.

The common themes amongst all three projects were based on how artists visually communicate with each other.

For this project, we focused on color and minimal abstraction. The students were challenged to imagine participating in a “séance” with Josef Albers. There would be no verbal communication though, Albers would only use his paintings to “speak”, and our class would create six different “translations” of a visual reply in his language. Each student chose their strongest two sketches to make paintings of, and they were installed together seamlessly to create a large scale response.