The Museum Teen Summit is a collective of youth leaders representing different museums in New York City dedicated to improving and promoting the role of youth in museums.
Thank you to everyone who made it out to the teen night we worked on with the New Museum. We even got a New York Times mention!
We're excited to announce the Teen Night at the Guggenheim. We met with many of the Guggenheim staff back in the end of April to start working on this! This teen night will be slightly different, in that the night will revolve around one artist: Rineke Dijkstra. Dijkstra's works are mainly portrait photography and videos capturing youth (they are absolutely incredible). The artist will be onsite, in conversation with one of the subjects of her portraits, Almerisa, and the curator of the show, Jennifer Blessing.
Here's the rundown:
WHAT: Guggenheim Teen Night in conjunction with Rineke Dijkstra: a retrospective
WHERE:
Guggenheim New York
1071 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10128
WHEN: Wednesday, July 18th, 2012 5PM-8:30PM
WHY:
Photographer Rineke Dijkstra, subject Almerisa, AND curator Jennifer Blessing will be there to talk about the work
Chance to hang out in one of the coolest architectural spaces in the WORLD.
Music and refreshments
uh....FREE!
SO HOW NOW WHAT?
RSVP! This is required. Space is limited, so register ASAP.
It's been a while since we've posted, but we're back! The NYC Museum Teen Summit has had a busy several months. A recent collaboration we have is with the New Museum, developing a Teen Night. We've been meeting with Audrey Hope, who runs gclass and oversees the New Museum's teen programming to plan out the first ever teen night at the New Museum. We're super excited to announce that the featured exhibitions will include Phyllida Barlow, Klara Lidén, and Carlos Motta, music performance by Mykki Blanco and DJ Physical Therapy and many hands on activities. We're at a one week countdown now! Come by, bring all your friends. It'll be a great summer kickoff.
What: NEW MUSEUM TEEN NIGHT
Free and open to teens aged 14–19 with high school or government ID. No preregistration is required.
Where:
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002-1218
When: JUNE 15TH, 2012 6:30PM - 8:30PM
Why: Art, music, friends = perfect Friday night
Check out some work from exhibiting artists and performers:
Hope to see you all there! -NYC MUSEUM TEEN SUMMIT
Photos by New Museum Teen Night at the New Museum is a G:Class program developed in collaboration with the NYC Museum Teen Summit. *G:Class is the New Museum’s
interdisciplinary art education program. G:Class empowers youth to think
critically about global cultural issues and develop their own cultural
perspectives and provides resources for professional educators to carry
this forward. For more information visit gclass.org.
Thanks again to everyone who attended our workshop session at the National Art Education Association (NAEA) Museum Preconference. Also, special thanks to NAEA, Metropolitan Museum of Art for hosting us, and Marit and Angelina for helping us put together everything! Our workshop dealt with engaging teens through the use of social media. Each of us (teens) will be posting our debriefs here shortly.
In case you missed our presentation today or would like to go back on some things we metnioned, we'd like to put our Powerpoint, notes and our take away sheet to download! Share it with yourself, other educators or anyone interested! Notes Powerpoint Take Away Sheet
If you have any lingering questions, comments or just want to greet us, you can find us at museumteensummit@gmail.com.
Happy social-networking, Museum Teen Summit
twitter.com/nyc_mts
facebook.com/nycmuseumteensummit
The Super Art Museum was really great at letting us host an event in their space!
First, we went around on a gallery tour with one of the artists exhibiting at the SAM. It was really interesting to hear the inspiration behind his work, as well as take questions and listen to our reactions as we went around the space.
At the end of the gallery tour, we were lead to the SAM Educational Center to make some artwork based on the artist's exhibit. We loved getting to work with a real artist and play around with some materials. We all walked away with a piece of artwork, and couldn't be happier.
After the art-making session, there were some refreshments and the SAM gave us passes to come back again! Then, one of the educators told us that the night wasn't over just yet.
For the last activity, we all created an interpretive dance based on everything we did and saw that day. We've never done anything like that!
Come join MTS at our Museum Meet Up
Thursday March 1st, 2012 from 3-8 pm at the Super Awesome Museum
Get ready to get your hands dirty as you make some artwork inspired by the upcoming exhibition at the SAM, after getting a gallery tour of the museum. There will be an artist guest speaker who will be leading the gallery tour. Stay for some free food, passes so that you can visit again to see things for yourself, and have a dance off to end the evening!
Crumpled paper from Sanja Ivekovic: Sweet Violence
This week, MTS met at the Museum of Modern Art. With many of us recently affiliated with their teen programs (including Marit!), it was an exciting to be back in the beautiful Cullman Education and Research Center. We took a quick look through the atrium space and the recently updated contemporary galleries. The atrium is currently occupied with the Sanja Ivekovic: Sweet Violence show. Centered is a shrine like sculpture topped with a gold piece, and scattered across the grey tiled floors are crumpled pieces of paper.
We strolled through the contemporary galleries in search for the Felix Gonzalez-Torres pieces, which evolved from a corner pile of candies into an entire room of silver wrapped pineapple treats. How could we resist? Toward the end of our exploration we found the Keith Haring piece. Absolutely stunning. We cannot wait to see his show at the Brooklyn Museum. At the smack middle of the room is Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank by Jeff Koon, which we saw in the Hennessy Youngman video How to Make An Art this summer.
Walking through the Keith Haring and Jeff Koon pieces
Unfortunately our adventures were cut short by the museum's 5:30pm close time. We gathered back in the classroom to meet with Calder Zwicky, who conducts the teen and community outreach programs at MoMA. Calder described the teen programs in three tiers:
Art Underground - or simply teen night. These happen every other Friday (next one on 2/17). They are at a first come first serve basis and all you need to attend is a student ID. It is open to all teens in New York City.
In The Making - Requires an application. Studio based classes which generally are designed to work with a special exhibition or a portion of the museum's permanent collection.
Museum Studies/Art Conservation/Cross Museum Collective - Required application. Alumni only programs which are much more involved in the behind-the-scenes of museums.
Calder also runs community programs which work with organizations around the city, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, to provide an internship style opportunity to help these specific teens learn about the job opportunities in the art world.
The last portion of our session was all about the National Art Education Association Conference on February 29th. We will be giving a presentation on what we do, what we've found, and how to use technology to promote outreach to teens. Our target goals to are present:
What are the miconceptions of teens and museums?
What social networking means to teens? How is it used?
How to take a goal oriented approach to social networking with a teen audience?
Tutorials on setting up/expanded social network footprint.
We are extremely excited to be presenting at these conference in front of art educators from around the nation. We hope that the information culminated since our summer sessions will be able to help some programs expand through media use.
Follow our Twitter, like our Facebook for #teensinmuseums, updates on teen programs and art!
-MTS Team
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Tuesday we visited the Jewish Museum and had a personal tour by the Teen programs coordinator Jamie Auriemma exploring the galleries that hosed the most impressive Hanukkah lamp collection one could ever imagine. Like many art and cultural institutions the Jewish museum reminds one how beautiful religion, history and culture really is. Museum summit teens where even invited to explore their newest exhibition “Composed: Identity, Politics, Sex” a small gallery space featuring photographs that focuses on the constant battle we all encounter of self identity. In the sense of where are place is in history, present day society and the connections between the two. Noted as Jamie’s favorite pieces Debbie Grossman (American, b. 1977) series of Photoshopped photographs from Russell Lee in 1940 in Pie Town, New Mexico, where Debbie re-wrote history to be an ideal place for herself. After some time to digest this topic I feel this is a lot of what teens in museum education do. We set out to re-write preconceptions about adolescents. To some professionals teenager is viewed as a dirty word, same way as almost all minorities where at one point. By having this opportunity to be involved with museum in any way there is always a space where your opinion is valued, in my experiences this is one of the most rewording parts about being part of MTS. ☺
This week, the Museum Teen Summit was at the Guggenheim to work on our three main goals of Outreach, Community, and Research.
Before we settled down to take care of business, we took a quick tour through the museum led by Sharon Vatsky, the director of education, school and family programs. The museum is currently going through some renovations to uninstall Maurizio Cattelan's All,a retrospective of his often political and provocative works, individually hanging from the ceiling of the rotunda.
If you were to watch the above video in reverse, you'd get a good feel as to what's going on at the Guggenheim for the next few weeks.
We were able to view some of the long-standing galleries, and found out a lot about the architecture and history of the museum itself. Sharon pointed out the geometric shapes and changing ceiling heights throughout the museum that makes it so unique. Did you know that in all of the Guggenheim that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, there are no right angles?
After our brief and informative tour of the museum, we got down to business to discuss our three main goals, and set some deadlines.
Outreach
MTS is always looking for new and better ways to spread the word about teen programs and events, as well as reach a wide audience of teens and teen programmers.
We focused on the social networking portion of outreach for this week. We are working on using different platforms to fit our needs, and relay information more efficiently. We spent some time discussing options for blogs and social networking such as event sharing on Facebook, creating a more permanent site such as the blog you are currently reading, and compiling a database of teen programs throughout the museums we all represent.
One of our goals in Outreach is to get 100 likes on our Facebook page by Valentines Day, so help us reach our goal byvisiting our page and clicking like. Feel free to browse all the events we have shared, comment on our pictures, and write on our wall!
One of our community goals is to continue to sponsor teen "meet-ups" at various museums to create a fun atmosphere for like minded teens to hang out and learn something new. These "meet-ups" are events run by the teens at MTS and give you a chance to explore the museum with your friends and discuss artwork with other like minded teens. We want these events to be as interesting to museum-going teens, as to those who rarely are involved in the arts.
We are planning out our next MTS Museum Meet-Up, so stay tuned for more information.
Research
MTS is currently working on combining all of our knowledge of the various teen programs at our respective museums as well as those we are in contact with to create a database of these programs. Updated by MTS, this list will give you a view as to what programs are going on in museums around the five boroughs in one place, as well as a description of each program and eventually testimonials and reviews.
Thanks to the database/web team, we have a new tumblr site!
nycmuseumteensummit.tumblr.com
Keeping checking this blog for updates on our process but keep an eye on the tumblr for news, research, and program profiles about Teen Programs across NYC.
The latest re-cap from Billy:
For the past several weeks, MTS has been moving all around town. Our first stop was El Museo in Harlem. After the programmer's meeting, we went straight to work, reviewing all the questions given to us. We established a structure to divide up the work: a communications team, database/research team, and events team. One or two people established themselves as team leaders, making sure all tasks were being accomplished, and several "floaters" freelanced projects from two or more of the teams. Our method of finalizing a decision? Quick discussion then vote!
Next week, we headed over to International Center of Photography in midtown, where we were given a quick walk-through of ICP's school, filled with fancy darkroom equipment and printing centers. We even had a surprise visit from a curator! After we immediately jumped back onto our projects and started brainstorming. Each team started to develop a list of tasks and goals to be done within the next week or so. Communications worked on a facebook group/page, twitter account, google site, and outreach to school coordinators. Events began planning the ins and outs of a community event. Research produced a criteria for teen events, listed events to attend, and planned a tumblr and google docs to convey finds.
The past Wednesday, MTS gathered at the new Children's Museum of Art over in West Village where we were given a tour of their awesome new space. We ran through a thorough check-in with the progress we've made over the past week. Events planned Saturday community days, which latched onto already planned teen events: Brooklyn Museum on December 3rd in conjunction with Free First Saturday and Whitney Museum of American Art on December 10th on an artist drop-in event. We established a structure for these meetings: socialize, special learning, activity, announce teen programs, and chat with programmers. Communications began on their social networking pages where they will post event updates and share info. Finally, we wrapped up this intense meeting with a list of ideas for the programmers at CMA to help launch their new programs.
Go team!
For the past several weeks, MTS has been moving all around town. Our first stop was 