Educational Activities During Gego's Measuring Infinity Exhibition
During Gego's exhibition 'Measuring Infinity,' I had the opportunity to further develop my style as a problem-based arts educator. Drawing inspiration from Gego's critical pedagogy and her work at the 'Spatial Relations' Seminar at the Neumann Design Institute, as well as Luis Camnitzer's art-thinking education methodology and under the mentorship of Guggenheim educator Maria Gonzalez, I designed the following exercises.
Life-lines in perspectives
This exercise was introduced to me at the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise during a museum leadership course at Columbia University. It involved tracing an individual's history through a Cartesian grid, marking ups and downs, joys and sorrows, lefts and rights, past and future, across time. The exercise stimulates social-emotional awareness.
Participants first performed the traditional exercise shown above, then shared their personal stories. The goal of this sharing was to use discussions and relationships as tools to question certainties about the meaning of each of their lives through the continuum, drawing on each other's perspectives. I interjected, introducing the concept of perspective, and we invited each other to challenge a linear perspective of time or binary interpretations of life experiences. Subsequently, students were asked to recreate their lines, using the potential of color and form to express new meanings. Sharing some samples below:
Infinite Viewpoints
Under the premise of teaching transversal/21st-century skills following UNESCO's curriculum, students formed a circle at the rotunda, engaging with apparently simple questions or hot-button issues phrased as polar interrogatives. For example: 'Do you agree that we should stop deforestation?' Myself and other educators then introduced more complex issues disguised as simple questions, emphasizing the need to hold space for multiple perspectives to engage in dialogue. Afterward, students visited Gego's Sphere in Hexahedron and shared final thoughts connected to both our earlier dialogue and the new work.
Creative Resourcefulness: Empowering Artistic Expression in Scarcity
Inspired by Gego's precarious system of construction, I immersed students in an environment of 'scarcity' and discussed how creative communities in other cultures use creativity as an alternative capital given their economic and political realities. The discussion then centered on how students could create meaningful art without traditional art supplies.
Afterward, I asked them to think about places where we could find supplies, whether out in the open or hidden. Some answers were obvious, and we were able to supply them: Information Technology at the Guggenheim shared their E-waste, and my dear colleague Anna Martin thought of me and collected motherboards from Materials for the Arts, which I had readily available. The supplies brought by the students the next day, combined with studio supplies, allowed the process of solving and sourcing to become as important as the product.
Afterward, I asked them to think about places where we could find supplies, whether out in the open or hidden. Some answers were obvious, and we were able to supply them: Information Technology at the Guggenheim shared their E-waste, and my dear colleague Anna Martin thought of me and collected motherboards from Materials for the Arts, which I had readily available. The supplies brought by the students the next day, combined with studio supplies, allowed the process of solving and sourcing to become as important as the product.
