#cocre8

It’s that CoCre8 time of year again! That magical time when teachers, teens, and teaching artists come together to transform creative seeds (like what may look like a pile of disparate objects on the floor) into things like collaborative performances involving homemade instruments, large-scale paint splattering, and various forms of audience interaction (these are just a few hints...).

Anyway, save the date for our final show on Friday, June 29, 6-8pm, at the Arts Incubator!

2019 marked my third year as a teaching artist for CoCre8!

Created and run as a partnership between Urban Gateways, the Smart Museum of Art, the Logan Center for the Arts, and Arts + Public Life, CoCre8 is an experimental model of collaborative arts education that brings together a cohort of high school students and educators, artists, and arts administrators to look at, talk about, and make art. Through engaging in these activities across monthly workshops in the spring and a weeklong intensive in the summer, the cohort seeks to dismantle traditional hierarchies and embrace multiple roles as learner, teacher, and maker. Collectively, participants explore the many ways in which art can help us think critically and creatively about our world.

The weeklong intensive culminates in the creation and public sharing of collaborative artworks, each developed by a group comprised of high school teachers and students and a teaching artist. By chance, I had the incredible opportunity to work as part of a group of women—Charnice, Dara, Esi, LaQuana, Nora, and me—who also (perhaps only partially by chance) had recently been experiencing or thinking a lot about rage. After discussing a range of work (including that of several youth poets, Leonardo Drew, and Gingarte Capoeira Chicago, which we encountered at the Smart Museum and the Logan Center), we decided to video-record ourselves as we performatively destroyed various objects that held symbolic meaning for us individually or collectively, and then constructed something new with the broken pieces and transformed material.

My group’s process resulted in Rage Remade, a multimedia piece. As our exhibition statement read:

We started out with a question of rage: what causes ours, and what if we let it out? A dozen plates, 6 political signs, 5 found poems, 4 books, 3 pieces of video equipment, 2 broken bottles, and 1 dome later, our rage was remade—built from the foundations of frustration, and transformed by our collective choices.

At the conclusion of the program, we and the three other groups were invited to install our final works in the Arts Incubator’s gallery, in a short exhibition that CoCre8 participants named “Art, ______.” Check out this Urban Gateways blogpost for more info about the exhibition and all four groups’ new works!

TOMORROW! Teaching artists + high school students + teachers all being creators, learners, and educators together...resulting in the cocreation of thoughtful, collaborative works of art.

Check out our CoCre8 exhibition, “Art, _______.”—opening tomorrow night at the Arts Incubator. There will also be public gallery hours on July 1 and July 2, from 12-6pm each day.

RSVP on Facebook.

For the last few years, I have been proud to help develop and administer the CoCre8 program—a partnership between Urban Gateways, the Smart Museum of Art, the Logan Center for the Arts, and Arts + Public Life. CoCre8 is an experimental model of collaborative arts education that brings together a cohort of high school students and educators, artists, and arts administrators to look at, talk about, and make art. Through engaging in these activities across monthly workshops and a weeklong intensive, the cohort seeks to dismantle traditional hierarchies and embrace multiple roles as learner, teacher, and maker.

In 2017, I had the opportunity to do something even more exciting to me than administering this program—serving as a teaching artist for CoCre8 for the first time! :D 

My amazing collaborators included teachers Rhonda and Rosette and high school students Makya, Dae’leown, Isaiah, and Arrielle. Our group’s final project was Changing Perspectives, a large-scale mural created with transparency, spray paint, and paint pens. Changing Perspectives was inspired by performances of two poems—Reborn Poetry Ensemble’s “A Love Letter to Chicago” and Rebirth Poetry Ensemble’s “Patched Up”—which specify several negative aspects of our city but also reflect deep love and loyalty for where we live. As we developed our creative response, my group talked about how—to us—the heart of the city isn’t downtown, but where we live, go to school, spend time with family, make memories, and more. We re-oriented the map of Chicago, imagined a new transit system, and selected symbols of personal importance. We chose to use transparency because even the same painting and writing look different on both sides of it, and the material could be layered to create different visual perspectives. To reflect multiple experiences, we invited other people to answer the questions “What are you loyal to?” and “Where is your heart?” and installed our piece so that visitors to our culminating show could walk around and inside the artwork, challenging and maybe even changing their perspective.

As in past years, participating in CoCre8 was a delightful, exhausting, messy, illuminating, innovative, conceptual, hands-on, multigenerational, specific, ambiguous, and inspiring (among other things) experience. I am already looking forward to next year’s one-of-a-kind-and-never-quite-repeated iteration of this very special program. <3

I’m thrilled to be a teaching artist with CoCre8 this spring! Last week, I got to collaborate with two teachers, a teen, and a baby to make a creative response to a Chicago Dance Crash piece. This photo shows part of what happened.