Learning Exchange:
Art Education Matters
A selected series of conversations led by artists, educators, scholars and emerging voices, ‘Learning Exchange: Art Education Matters’ highlights collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to learning in New York.
The event launched the Learning program at Hauser & Wirth New York, 18th Street on Friday 10 November 2023, a new dedicated space for Hauser & Wirth Publishers, Editions and a dynamic hub for Learning initiatives in West Chelsea.
The series of panel discussions explored: how exhibition spaces influence the learning experience, mentorship, exhibitions as spaces for learning and some of the most pioneering approaches to teaching that nurture sustained artistic and intellectual growth. Invited panelists that share the gallery’s passion for learning included artists and long-term friends Angel Otero and José Lerma, followed by Rika Burnham, Adjoa Jones de Almeida, Mickalene Thomas, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Jane South, Davinia Gregory-Kameka, Filippa Christofalou and OreOluwa Badaki.
Chaired by Debbie Hillyerd, Hauser & Wirth’s Senior Director of Learning, Learning Exchange: Art Education Matters is part of the gallery’s active learning programs—creating a dialogue between art, artists and a diverse audience with a focus on first-hand experience. The event builds on existing learning partnerships in New York with Hunter College, Culture for One and Project EATS.
‘The word ‘Learning’ appears on the façade of this building. In our minds, that is simply another way of saying ‘Welcome’ to everyone—to our neighbors, to educators and students, to curators and artists, to writers, and to interested members of the public.’—Manuela Wirth
Photo: onwhitewall.com
Photo: onwhitewall.com
About the Panelists
With a practice that spans painting, collage, and sculpture, Angel Otero experiments with innovative techniques to create abstract works about memory, identity and his lived experiences. Otero is best known for his ‘Oil Skin’ works, where he applies oil paint onto glass and peels them off to create layers that he reassembles into new images. His works are included in the collections of the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, Istanbul Modern and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, among other institutions.
José Lerma is a painter and installation artist who explores innovative and expansive approaches to portraiture. He lives and works in Puerto Rico, is a professor at SAIC in Chicago, and is represented by Nino Mier, Kavi Gupta and Almine Rech Galleries. His solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and MOCADetroit and galleries including Andrea Rosen, Xavier Hufkens and Lehman Maupin. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Saatchi Collection and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Rika Burnham is a leading theorist and practitioner of art museum teaching. Currently a Lecturer at Columbia University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she was previously Head of Education at the Frick Collection, Museum Educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Project Director for TIME/Teaching Institute for Museum Education and Museum Scholar at the Getty Research Institute. She is co-author of ‘Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience.’
‘Today is about time to share experiences, to hear about other people's projects, to think about our ambitions for learning.’—Debbie Hillyerd, Senior Director of Learning
Photo: onwhitewall.com
Photo: onwhitewall.com
Adjoa Jones de Almeida is Deputy Director for Learning & Social Impact at the Brooklyn Museum, where she is re-imagining the role of museums. She has worked with a variety of community-based organizations activating art and culture as vehicles for personal and social transformation, including Sista II Sista (SIIS), El Puente, and Diáspora Solidária. Reflecting on her experiences, she contributed to the award-winning anthology, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex’ (2007, Boston: South End Press).
Mickalene Thomas is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. She is known for her elaborate paintings composed of rhinestones, acrylic and enamel. Not only do her masterful mixed-media paintings, photographs, films and installations command space, they occupy eloquently while dissecting the intersecting complexities of black and female identity within the Western canon. Thomas is also a Tony Awards nominated co-producer, curator, educator and mentor to many emerging artists.
‘I think we all respond differently to what we stand in front of or the experiences that we have and and what we can take out of that to apply to our thinking, to our everyday life.’—Angel Otero
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist who creates socially conscious music, film, and visual art through an autobiographical lens. Although it has been nearly two decades since her release from a Pennsylvania prison, Mary’s time spent on the inside continues to shape the direction of her art and practice. Her entertaining but poignant works offer a critical perspective on the particular challenges women of color face when they become immersed in the criminal justice system. In January 2023, Baxter opened her first solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum entitled, ‘Ain’t I a Woman’ to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Baxter's work has also been exhibited at venues including MoMA PS1, African American Museum of Philadelphia, Yale University, Frieze LA, Eastern State Penitentiary, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Brown University, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Ms. Baxter is a 2017 Right of Return Fellow, 2018- 2019 Mural Arts Philadelphia Reimagining Reentry Fellow, 2019 Leeway Foundation Transformation Awardee, 2021 Ed Trust Justice Fellow, 2021 SheaMoisture and GOOD MIRRORS Emerging Visionary grantee, 2021 Frieze Impact Prize award winner, 2022 S.O.U.R.C.E Studio Corrina Mehiel Fellow, 2022 Art 4 Justice grantee partner, 2022 Pratt Forward Fellow and a 2022 Artist2Artist Art Matters foundation grantee and grantor.
Jane South is Chair of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute and co-director with Mickalene Thomas of Pratt>Forward. Born in Manchester, UK, she moved to New York City in 1989. Solo exhibitions include ‘Halfway Off’ (2023) and ‘Switch Back’ (2020) at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NY and ‘Floor/Ceiling’ (2013) at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT. Southʼs work has appeared in The New York Times, LA Times, Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, ArtNews, and The New Yorker. Awards include a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant.
Photo: onwhitewall.com
Photo: onwhitewall.com
Dr. OreOluwa Badaki is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Teachers College, Columbia University. Bridging research in critical literacy studies, multimodal scholarship and environmental justice, she examines how power moves through bodies and spaces within food and land systems. As a writer, movement practitioner and educator, Dr. Badaki works with youth and communities to explore environmental justice through the creative and performing arts. Dr. Badaki’s current projects focus on embodied understandings of place and center African diasporic experiences with food and land.
Filippa Christofalou, M.S.Ed. is a public engagement, museum education and participation professional, with extensive work experience in different institutions across many countries, including Saatchi Gallery, London National Maritime Museum, Chicago Art Institute, Whitney Museum, MCA Chicago, and National Archaeological Museum of Athens. As a doctoral candidate in Museum Education, in the Art & Art Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University, she is interested in the ways that body based pedagogies in museum spaces disrupt institutional violence and calibrate epistemological imbalance. Filippa is also a performance artist and the founder of The Drama Science Lab, a series of evolving projects that use the body as a medium to explore the boundaries between art and science.
Dr. Davinia Gregory-Kameka is an interdisciplinary writer, researcher and educator. Her work as Assistant Professor in Arts Administration at Teachers College Columbia University synthesizes her teaching, museum education work and research that have been rooted in material culture studies, Caribbean studies, the sociology of Race, diaspora studies and cultural policy studies. Her courses encourage students to make critical connections between their professional practices and an increasingly complex socio-political reality. This is done through interactive, workshop-style teaching and assessment that challenges the hierarchies and inequalities that the arts can either serve to sustain or disrupt. Her research bridges the gap between what policy documents say about the role and function of cultural diversity in the arts and what happens (and is needed) on the ground. Her signature course, Race & The Arts: The role of the arts in racial capitalism, has just been made a permanent offer within Teachers College's Department of Arts and Humanities, and will be taught in the Spring of 2024. It focuses on ways of leading in the arts that are both economically sustainable and disruptive of neoliberal capitalism's social machinations. Most recently, Dr Gregory-Kameka has been working with Blackstar Projects as a Research Fellow in arts leadership.
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