This spring, I got to spend a week each at three Chicago parks—Rowan, Clarendon, and Sumner—as one of the teaching artists representing the Museum of Contemporary Art in the Park Voyagers program.

At each site, I facilitated activities for youth (voyagers!) about making art from closely observing and absorbing spaces around us, transforming familiar things, especially through abstraction, and creating art that can travel with us wherever we go.

Across these activities, voyagers explored a range of strategies for experimenting and generating work—including repetition, fragmentation, reframing, playing with color, making rubbings of textured surfaces, and more. In one of this year’s new activities, voyagers used contour drawings of each other—(most) made without looking at the paper—to create pop-up sculptures that they can fold to take anywhere with them! I found those resulting pieces to be especially surprising and delightful. :)

For the final portion of the Park Voyagers program, I was joined by the amazing Jory Drew, a fellow teaching artist at the MCA, to co-facilitate two intergenerational workshops and a field trip for the youth artists, family members, and staff of Sumner Park. I especially valued this extended involvement with one group, and that opportunity to continue to build not only on our artistic projects but also on our relationships.