Lessons from Frank Oscar Larson

You may be thinking, “What the heck are a bunch of museum educators doing dressing up in 50s garb? Don’t they have classes to teach?”. But apart from being incredibly fun, we are taking the time out to mimic our favorite photos from the current exhibit Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories to understand the subjects of the photos that line the museum walls. By the way, that’s me on the left.

The amazing images found at the link are from a Queens man who was a banker by day and photographer by night. His photographs were left unnoticed until after his death when his grandson Soren Larson decided to approach the Queens Museum of Art with an exhibition idea. I think you can see from the quality of images that the curators wouldn’t have been able to say no.

Frank Oscar Larson took the little free time he had to pursue his real passion of photography and I really took that to heart when I saw these photos. I think it’s incredible that he was able to keep the energy up on the weekends to hone his craft and I was inspired to continue working on my own artwork even with a mountain of work to do from Monday through Friday. Most advice I give to first-year Allies has to do with not stressing out and keeping their own selves in mind ,sometimes in a job where they are usually thinking of others, and I couldn’t have found a better illustration than Frank Oscar Larson. And I find it lucky to be in a space where his work just happened to be hanging right outside of my office door.

The desktop gallery

Whenever I see a piece of artwork that the visiting school kids make on their trips to the museum that really blows me away, I take a photo of it and set it as my desktop picture on my computer. I realized over the months that I had started amassing a cache of these photos and by rotating them it was kind of like a rotating exhibition. It became a “Desktop Gallery” where I got to showcase the artwork to folks walking through the Education Department.

Here’s my current desktop and ultimate favorite from a group of 4th graders who were here last week, creating a collage artwork based on the watershed model. They used these patterned papers to represent mountains as one of the steps on the water cycle. I love the advanced design sensibilities they had, and wonderful decisions they made in the pattern choices.

A POL preview

At the end of our ten months at Public Allies we do a Presentation of Learning in front of our community members to display what we did for the ten months at our placement. I got the opportunity a few weeks ago to present mine from last year to the first year allies (I’m a 2nd year ally). It was great to be able to show more people what I had been up to at The Parent-Child Home Program and thought it would be useful for the Allies reading this blog and everyone else interested in communications for non-profit organizations, early childhood intervention, and Public Allies in general to see my presentation. So here is the entire thing as a PDF. It would be great to have your feedback and I hope it helps for your POL.

A day in the life of a Public Ally: a walk in the park

7:30am – I start my commute from Brooklyn to Mets-Willets Point, home of the Mets, and also the train station for the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.  My walk through the park to the museum starts with the boardwalk below. Any unusual feature in the park like this just makes me assume it’s a leftover from the 1939 or 1964 World’s Fairs.

Objects With A Story: PANY 2nd Years Team Service Project

Fellow Public Ally Harley Jones at the Queens Museum of Art wrote a fabulous blog post on our TSP project, and I really could not have said it better myself. Check out the below to read her words on the exciting art exhibit we have brewing in May. And stay tuned to see the final products.

Queens Teens Create Objects with a Story

Harley Jones is a Public Allies 2012 fellow at the Queens Museum of Art, working as a School Program Educator as well as a Family & After School Programs Assistant.

Every Wednesday that school is in session, our Queens Teens travel from Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Astoria to the Queens Museum of Art. Around 4 pm they materialize, with backpacks, cups of ramen and massive donuts from a bakery in Forest Hills I’ve never heard of. An incredibly reflective and (too) smart (for their own good) paid corps of high school students, they work alongside Tim Miller, Manager of Family and After School Programs, and me, Family and After School Programs Assistant, engaging families with QMA’s permanent and rotating exhibitions in the museum’s galleries and art studios.

But for the next two months, their focus is primarily their own art. Each Teen will create a series of two and three dimensional mixed media works for a month-long May display at the Flushing Library. The inspiration for their pieces: a Queens community member whose story intrigues, influences, and inspires them. School Programs Assistant Pema Domingo-Barker joins us for the project, entitled Objects with a Story, as photographer and my team co-captain.

Below you’ll find an interview excerpt by Queens Teen Yocelyn Zare of community member Errol Quest. This Wednesday, we asked the Teens to identify the interview answers they found most compelling. From there, each Teen created a big, bold, preliminary project sketch; they mapped out their first concept, a literal and metaphorical rendering of one interview characteristic on either side.

Yocelyn’s first concept sketch. She literally illustrates Mr. Quest’s unrealized life experience on the left, and figuratively interprets his actual personality on the right.

YZ: Why did you want to become a teacher?

EQ: My mom. I was inspired by my mom, who was a teacher, and my grandmother was a teacher, and my aunt was a teacher, and a couple cousins. I think I was destined to be a teacher because I grew up among teachers, and I loved what they did, and I loved working with kids.

YZ: How did you want to influence kids with science, your subject?

EQ: Science is everywhere. Science is a part of our lives. And in other countries, they stress science more than in this country. I’m trying to encourage students to study. I’m trying to be a role model from the African American community, to show kids from my community that they can strive to become anything. If you look at the stereotypical scientist, it’s not me. It’s the old guy with the white beard and the white lab coat. I’m just trying to influence students to achieve.

Quinn Hu

Peter Keehn

Selena Matos

Miriam Jovanovic

Megan Basaldua

Aubrey Miller

Ian Tousius

Retreat from the City

L to R: 2nd years Harley Jones, me, and Juliann DiNicola, 1st years Chui-Hung Wong and Kate Shaffer at Camp Greenkill. Photo Credit: 2nd year Ally Cea Weaver.

A chance to escape the bustle of New York City is always welcome and that’s exactly what we got to do when 54 Allies journeyed up to Lake Hugenot, New York for our Mid Year retreat this past weekend. Connecting with nature is always my favorite part of these trips since this was my third (yes third!) retreat with PANY. As a second year I thought it might be repetitive, but getting to walk around the frozen lake on a partner walk with everyone in that photo was actually a great time to relax and enjoy the company of fellow Allies.

The trip was also a big reminder that I’m a second year Ally and the experience is completely different. The second years were able to facilitate an Ally-Led Station – workshops where we get to share our interests – examples being Salsa classes, portrait photography tips (which I helped Kate above in blue to do), art making, and yoga.

Teaching photography tricks with Kate. Photo Credit: Max Chang, PANY Program Manager.

We as 2nd years decided to create a workshop in self care and de-stressing, which turned into a big sister session for the first year Allies in answering their questions on how we were able to juggle our work at Partner Organizations, our work with Public Allies including trainings and Team Service Projects, and oh yes let’s not forget our personal lives.The main thread that I took away from that session was that if you want something to change at work, or if you are overwhelmed, be proactive about it! Yes your Program Managers are there to aide you on your journey but you have to help them help you in your anxieties and try and help find solutions. It makes sense but we forget this sometimes. And if all else fails, just host an awesome spelling bee like all of us in Cabin #4 did (below)!

Photo Credit: Janine Mascari, Public Allies 2011-2012.

I would love to know for anybody juggling many things at once: How do you manage to de-stress and take care of yourself?

Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service

We asked our bloggers to reflect and report back on their MLK days of service. Expect to read more from each blogger about our various service days around the network!

Monday January 16th was a day ON not a day OFF for Public Allies New York. I had the pleasure of helping to plan the art component of our day of service much like last year’s. We hosted 250 kids at IS 218 in Brooklyn along with the Police Athletic League for a Reflect and Act day of service. Inspiration for the stenciled t-shirts and wall mural projects came from the words of Martin Luther King Jr., and everyone was able to have a great time creating art and reflecting on the meaning of leadership, service and community.

Building community through the arts

Public Allies New York (PANY) has a monthly Everyone Leads Conversation Series (I would be curious to know if you do this at other sites, Allies). This month’s conversation was particularly interesting because the topic was Building Community through the Arts featuring the following panel:

• Charles Rice Gonzalez, Executive Director, Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance
• Sheila McDaniel, Deputy Director, Finance & Operations, Studio Museum in Harlem
• Risë Wilson, Founder of the Laundromat Project

Lately I have been really wondering about impact the arts may have on community and this panel came at a very welcome time. Check out the video below to find out more…

Ezra Ezzard, a PANY alumnus, mentions at the end of the video that art is always around us (he mentions Starbucks and the Barack Obama campaign), and that we take it for granted. This theme came up a lot in the discussion and was a possible reason why we consciously don’t think about the importance of art. Charles Alvarez, PANY ’12, said “Everything you do is art related…everyone has something to say.”

As far as art’s impact on the community, Risë Wilson asked herself how art can make a community space and she started the Laundromat Project. She wanted to find out how culture is a force in change, and how people disenfranchised with culture can have a revitalized spirit in their individual lives.

Allies discussing the panel’s comments.

Sheila McDaniel and Charles Rice Gonzalez touched on another point Ezra mentioned in saying that art has the power to affect the community economically especially in New York City. Both Harlem and Hunts Point (where the Studio Museum and BAAD are located, respectively) had seen an improvement once their institutions arrived in the community. Merchants followed the artists, and there was a gentrification in the neighborhoods.

Our Program Managers Marissa Gutierrez-Vicario, Sabine Blaizin and Max Chang.

Eddie Gonalez-Novoa, PANY Executive Director and panel moderator, says in the video that the dichotomy of social services and the arts is a false one, and Shelia agreed that you have to get away from either/or (i.e. fire departments, education, police), not to pit them against each other.

Education and the arts was another topic that Kate Shaffer, PANY ’12, explored by reminding us that schools improve when the students are engaged on something that isn’t on a test, and wondered how we could bring art to a math class.

The beautiful, festive art space at Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance

The most interesting topic of conversation to me was how we can use art as a tool to improve other organizations in our community, as second-year Ally Cea Weaver asks. She mentioned art in homeless shelters as a way of interacting with peers, and using art for things that might be more pressing. Joanne Sterling, PANY ’12, said, “Art is a form of revolution, making your experiences tangible…expressing what society tells us is real.”

Join the conversation: What do you think about what was expressed that day? What did we leave out? Why is art important to you?

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” – Pablo Picasso

Manager of School Programs Lindsay Smilow asks, "Who here is an artist?"

My job here at the Queens Museum of Art is to give support to the education department’s K-12 programming and school trips. What this actually means is to bring over 16,000 children a year to our museum to experience the Panorama of the City of New York, the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass, the scale model of the New York City Watershed, and our rotating contemporary art collections. Museum trips for children might not be as earth-shattering to them as we would like to think (as one colleague put it the other day, “The only thing I remember from museum trips as a kid was what I listened to on my Walkman and what my mom packed for lunch”). What makes the QMA different however, is engaging the kids with studio workshops that let their imaginations take free reign using materials they might not usually get their hands on at school or at home. I completely agree with Picasso that every child is an artist, and hopefully these much-needed arts programs for kids will help them stay creative and constantly imagining when they grow up.

My initial goal before I started my second year as a Public Ally at the QMA was to get at least one child to become a lifelong lover of the arts. There are many examples of kids coming back to our programs year after year as kids, then eventually becoming a Queens Teen, and then begininng to bring their own kids to Sunday workshops. I can’t measure this goal in one year but I’ll let you know how the journey goes. I would love to hear about how art has affected your education and am curious: What is your earliest memory of art-making or an art museum?

From Global Nomad to Public Ally

I have always thought of my brain as 1/3 art, 1/3 travel, and 1/3 everything else. I grew up as a “Global Nomad” as I followed my parents wherever they were stationed for their United Nations jobs. I was born in Nepal to a Filipina mother and an English father, and went on to spend most of my youth in Zambia and Thailand.

The constant change of environment and exposure to so many different faces, landscapes, airports, foods, customs, skies, architecture, oceans, streets, gave me an incredibly strong will to express myself through visual art. I painted. I sculpted. I doodled. I designed. I did whatever I could to help myself understand what I saw.

The other effect of my international exposure was the yearning to solve what I saw as the same types of social and environmental problems I experienced in different countries. I wondered how I could use art as a way to foster solutions to the infinite injustices we face daily. It brought me to decide to study interdisciplinary visual arts and international studies at the University of Washington in Seattle (a place where I experienced huge culture shock and was also an inspiration to bring me where I am today).

Always on a journey somewhere!

After university in Seattle, then London for grad school, I went back to Asia for a year where I spent my time volunteering. After globetrotting for so long I decided I wanted to settle down in a place that would have everything I love about the places close to my heart, but where I could pursue my love for art as well: New York. I decided to go solely into art and after working for a while in the for-profit world, I became more and more jaded and thought that New Yorkers could only treat creativity as a commodity. I was settled in a comfortable job that let me expand my design skills but wasn’t fulfilling my need to be a contributing member of society. I was actively pursuing ways to switch my professional trajectory but really didn’t know how, and it was at that point where I found Public Allies.

It was an opportunity for me to get a support network to find the bearings I needed when I thought I was lost: Combining creativity and common good. I spent my first year at the Parent-Child Home Program, doing communications and outreach work, and now find myself pursuing a second year at the Queens Museum of Art in the education department. I feel lucky to have found an ideal situation where I provide support to an incredible museum that is very close to their community, and wouldn’t have found it without Public Allies.