Panel Discussion at Identity Blueprint Opening with Claudia Phillips.

Video of the Identity Blueprint Women!

LA PEDESTRIANE by Claudia Philips, Cheryse Damon and Zafirah Wilson.

One of A Kind Superhero By Katerin Salguero and Hilda Saladin.

The Curious Orange by Yasmine E. Bacon

Please join us tomorrow night, May 7, from 6-9 as we open our culminating exhibition and celebrate the first year of this program! See you there!

Identity Blueprint 2011
Gallery Aferro 73 Market St Newark NJ
Main Gallery
May 7 – June 3, 2011
Opening Reception May 7, 6-9 PM

Artists: Khalida Alexander, Yasmine E. Bacon, Zhana Renee Caldwell, Cheryse D. Damon, Claudia Phillips, Nicole Reynoso, Hilda Saladin, Katerin Salguero, Zafirah Wilson

Teaching Artists: Evonne M. Davis, Ann LePore, Lisa Elmaleh

Young women from Newark’s Public Schools- Malcolm X. Shabazz, Arts, East Side, Technology, University, Barringer and West Side High Schools- came together as a group for 3 months of free Saturday workshops in cyanotype photography, digital animation, and sculptural carpentry, taught by working artists. Come see the results and celebrate the excitement and satisfaction of learning new skills and making new things!

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Newark Arts Council and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Jerry’s Artist Outlet, Flip Video The Home Depot, Valley Arts and individuals like you! Special thanks to Peter Brauch, Anne Dushanko Dobek and Jeanne Brasile for in-kind donations!

Some more artwork that we looked at for inspiration:

We also looked at Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s animations which are here

Artwork that we were inspired by and learned from:

This one is called a zoetrope. It’s a similar idea. Ann told us about trying to build one as a kid with a salad spinner.

This one above, by Robin Rhodes, seemed to have some really useful and wonderful concepts that can be applied to an urban workshop. Chalk is easy to find, and it seemed like any environment could be transformed. There is one video you can find on youtube where a chalk drawing of a record player gets “played.”

See how scale becomes something you can play with? A floor can be an ocean..

So how do you make a digital stop motion animation?
How does it work?

Ann Lepore showed us the video above to introduce the idea of stop motion. She told us about the Mutoscope, an 1894 device that showed hundreds of still images whirled behind a slot. Your eye perceives this as a movie. So hundreds of still images shot of a horse moving can be assembled to make a movie. Notice how the movie kind of “flickers.” What you are seeing is the interval between still images.

What we used to make our digital animations were: Flip digital video cameras and tripods. Though you can, if you don’t have a tripod handy and are careful, just prop the camera on something like a counter. Duct tape will help keep it still. (A tripod is easier!)

We shot small segments (5 seconds or so) of a scene, stopped recording, changed the scene slightly, turned the camera back on to shoot another segment of a similar length, stopped the recording, and so on….

There are endless variations that you can work with using this basic idea. Try changing how much you change the scene, ie how much an actor moves their arm or something…the resulting motion when you edit your film will be more smooth, or more jerky. A simple gesture or change can seem really dramatic.

More Week 5: Digital Animation Part 1

Conceiving of an idea, scouting for locations, figuring out props, shooting and directing in one workshop is a challenge. But there is something about having to work quickly that is also very freeing. It was a nice spring day. The bike is borrowed from a young onlooker.

Week 5: Digital Animation Part 1!

Pizza? Well, we had a working lunch. To get used to working with the Flip digital video cameras, we made a short stop motion animation of the pizza. More on that soon.

The background for the stop motions was the street or the wall for most of us. So a chalk drawing on the street could be a city backdrop for a superhero.

Something that has come up in making negatives and cyanotypes is the relationship between words and images. Text, as we discovered, will often overpower an image. But in the work of many artists such as photographers Carrie Mae Weem’s early work with family photographs, and Lorna Simpson’s challenging combinations of text and different genres of imagery, text and image come together to be something more powerful than either one would be by itself. The image above is by Tracey Emin, a British artist born in 1963. Her neon text pieces are essentially giant reproductions of her handwriting, maybe a diary. Scale can be used to transform text. I think this is one of our challenges with the negatives, and collaging- deciding which elements to make dominant. It’s all about choices.

Lorna Simpson (born 1960) is an African American artist and photographer who made her name in the 1980s and 1990s with artworks such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal. Her work often portrays black women combined with text to express contemporary society’s relationship with race, ethnicity and sex. In 2007, Simpson had a 20-year retrospective of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in her hometown of New York City.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, she attended the High School of Art and Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York, and then the University of California, San Diego. Her earliest work was as a documentary street photographer, before moving her observations of race and society into her studio.Simpson began exploring ethnic divisions in the 1980s era of multiculturalism. Her most notable works combine words with photographs of anonymously cropped images of women and occasionally men. While the pictures may appear straightforward, the text will often confront the viewer with the underlying racism still found in American culture.

Simpson’s 1989 work, Necklines, shows two circular and identical photographs of a black woman’s mouth, chin, neck, and collar bone. The white text, “ring, surround, lasso, noose, eye, areola, halo, cuffs, collar, loop”, individual words on black plaques, imply menace, binding or worse. The final phrase, text on red “feel the ground sliding from under you,” openly suggests lynching, though the adjacent images remain serene, non-confrontational and elegant.

Lorna Simpson has explored various media and techniques, including two-dimensional photographs as well as silk screening her photographs on large felt panels, creating installations, or producing as video works such as Call Waiting (1997). She was the first Black woman to participate at the Venice Biennale. In a recent video work, Corridor (2003), Simpson sets two women side-by-side; a household servant from 1860 and a wealthy homeowner from 1960. Both women are portrayed by artist Wangechi Mutu, allowing parallel and haunting relationships to be drawn. She has commented “I do not appear in any of my work. I think maybe there are elements to it and moments to it that I use from my own personal experience, but that, in and of itself, is not so important as what the work is trying to say about either the way we interpret experience or the way we interpret things about identity.”

Swoon (born 1977) is an artist originally from Daytona Beach, Florida. She moved to New York City at age nineteen, and specializes in life-size wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts of figures. Swoon, real name Caledonia Dance Curry, studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and started doing street art around 1999. Swoon is also a member of the Justseeds Artist Cooperative. Swoon’s worlds are often populated by realistically rendered cut-out street people, often her friends and family. Bridges, fire escapes, water towers and street signs create crisscrossing shadows and spaces through which her figures move. Inspired by both art historical and folk sources, ranging from German Expressionist wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets, Swoon uses cut paper to play with positive and negative space in a conceptually driven exploration of the experience of the streets.

Swoon is a founding member of the art collective the Miss Rockaway Armada, a group which built large rafts out of salvaged materials and floated them down the Mississippi River in 2006 and 2007. In the summer of 2008 she presented a two-part exhibition with Deitch Projects called Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. It was a large installation inside the Deitch Studios space as well as a journey of seven handmade sculptural wooden rafts from Troy, NY down the Hudson River and up the East River in New York City to the Deitch Studios gallery. Every night the crew would stage a performance on the banks of the river, with musical accompaniment from the band Dark Dark Dark. In the same year, Swoon was featured in Chiara Clemente’s documentary “Our City Dreams”. Swoon and a crew of 30 crashed the 2009 Venice Biennale with “the Swimming Cities of Serenissima,” a performance project similar to the Miss Rockaway Armada and the Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea. The crew sailed from Slovenia in rafts made of New York City garbage, as well as one raft made from material scrapped along the coast of Slovenia.

She has said: “.. I had all of these paper posters printed from the blocks I had made. I knew that the pieces were for the streets. It was the first time I had ever done any work on the street and the posters looked horrible. The paper I was using was beautiful, but it was also extremely thick. It wrinkled really badly when I pasted it to the wall. The whole project was a big failure. But because I had failed, I became very determined to get it right. I then started doing work on billboards and did a lot of poster collages.At the time, I was living on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. Every day there was a new street-level billboard on my street. And I hated them all. But I also realized that they were so low on the street that I could actually reach them. A giant light bulb went on in my head, and I went back and made these giant paintings that I then glued completely over the billboards to cover up the advertisements. I wanted to make something that would make people question why it was there in the first place. Advertising is always asking you for something. And I wanted to make something that was completely ambiguous and wasn’t asking anything from anyone.”

The video below has a few too many boring talking heads, but there is great footage of the Swimming Cities project:

Week 4: March 26 Cyanotypes Part 2

We danced with Lisa while the prints were washing.

We Heart Jerrys!!!

Gallery Aferro would like to take a moment to thank Jerry’s Artist Outlet for their generous support of this program! Without the support of individuals, the Newark Arts Council, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Jerry’s, Flip Video, Home Depot and the Center for Alternative Photography, we would not be able to have launched Identity Blueprint for 2011. We are also thrilled to be working in collaboration with Valley Arts, an amazing grassroots community arts space in Orange, NJ. More about them and their neighborhood soon…

“On a personal note:

Because this part of my personal teenage artist experience still seems to be the same today…if you are an artsy kid, you have to find artsy places near where you live- whether it is the burbs, the city, the country. You have to walk there, take the bus, get a ride with a friend, ask your mom to drive you there, drive yourself there if you can…If there aren’t gallery spaces near where you live, often the art supply store, especially if it is independently owned, is the de-facto cultural center. Sometimes coffee shops fill this need too. I worked in a locally owned camera shop as a teenager: I needed a job, and I also wanted to be as near as was possible to what I was interested in, which was photography. They were pretty tolerant of the blue hair too.

Every time I am in Jerry’s (which is often!!) I think about how much I love places filled with tools and supplies, and better yet, when they are run by friendly and helpful people that know about what you’re interested in. Places like fabric stores, specialty stores, art supply stores, hardware stores, sometimes thrift stores…these are places filled with IDEAS.

Here is their site

and the store in West Orange is here

-Emma”

As we have been working in natural light, which means working on the street or the sidewalk in urban places, we have had some issues, luckily minor, with male harassment. I personally really enjoy working in a public context, because I am then able to have interesting conversations with curious adults and kids about art and what we’re up to. So most of our conversations and interactions have been very positive. Being able to claim a public space for one’s artwork can be very liberating- it is space that neither fully belongs to you, or to anyone else. It is shared space. I am very proud that in the instances we experienced that were negative, we were able to confront the harassers in a direct way, or just ignore them!

Here are some interesting links on the topic of street harassment and what to do about it.

http://www.fed-up-honeys.org/aboutus/

http://streetharassment.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/mark-your-calendars-for-intenational-anti-street-harassment-day/

Wait a minute- What is a cyanotype?

A cyanotype (also called a sunprint, or a blueprint) is one of the oldest, and simplest photographic processes invented. The process is easy to learn, and very malleable- prints can be made onto wood, leather, cloth, and many papers including vellum. Images can be made using negatives, collages on acetate, and directly from many 3D objects. Try making one with a dress, some toys, a piece of lace, a housekey, a pressed flower…we found this image of a cyanotype made from pressing a dress onto the paper.

Cyantypes are considered “alternative photography.” Try googling cyanotype to see examples, and learn about some of the vraints n the basic recipe people have come up with. There’s lots out there

Yes, you can buy ready-made cyanotype paper (“sunprint kits) but it kind of like using that pancake mix that comes in a bottle, ready to pour. We having nothing against pancakes, but if you use the mix you don’t learn how to make the recipe, or change it up as you wish. Plus it is more expensive to use mixes alot of the time.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFO:

1) These are real chemicals. They are poisonous. Do NOT eat or drink while making cyanotypes, or stick your finger in your mouth or eye, etc. Wear plastic gloves so chemicals don’t touch your skin. Eye protection is good if you think you might splash while mixing the chemicals. We wore aprons so we wouldn’t mess up our clothes.

Here is something from the site we worked from: “As with other photographic processes, the most common and extreme cause of health problems occurs in situations where artists have inadvertently consumed chemicals while drinking, eating or smoking and for this reason it is recommended that all of these are totally banned in the darkroom area. To minimize this potential it is crucial to wash your hands with soap after you are done working with chemicals and before you eat or drink. Handling chemicals with bare hands is also another dangerous practice, since the chemicals can easily pass through the skin and are absorbed into the bloodstream. Rubber gloves will act as a barrier for your hands.”

2) Use containers for mixing and storing that you aren’t going to use for anything else. Don’t reuse these materials for other art projects, use in the kitchen for food, etc, etc. There will be chemical residue on them. Be careful about any interactions between common household cleaners and surfaces that might come in contact with chemicals. The simplest way to be safe is to either keep containers labeled for your cyanotype making fun, rinse them, and use them only for cyanotypes OR use stuff from the dollar store that you throw out when you’re done.

3) Really! Be careful! And have fun!

THE RECIPE:

This recipe makes approximately 50 8×10 inch prints. The cyanotype is made up of two simple solutions. We used a digital scale to make it easy to measure out exactly 25 and then 10 grams of the dry, powdered chemicals. We got the chemicals from here, but they are sold by a number of stores.

1) First mix your Solution A: 25 grams Ferric ammonium citrate (green stuff) and 100 ml. water. Then mix Solution B: 10 grams Potassium ferricyanide (red stuff) and 100 ml. water. (You can make this in smaller or larger amounts, just keep the ratio the same.) Mix them up with a rod, or a plastic spoon. Mix really well till the powder is completely dissolved in the water.

2) Then mix an equal part of Part A with Part B. Mix that together, and you have your formula to coat paper (or other stuff with)

3) Coat paper (we used a thick Strathford watercolor paper with a smooth finish) with solution using a paint brush, or a foam brush. Coat evenly. Think about whether you want neat, or “artsy looking” edges. What will suit your image best?

4) We used hairdryers to hurry up our drying so we could exposure our cyanotypes in one day. You could also just let them dry somewhere safe and with no UV light in it.

5) Put your paper in the frame (drawing to follow soon!), put your negative down on top of the paper, put down the plexiglass, and clamp it with “A” clamps.

6) Expose in bright sun. Lisa helped us guage when an image was done. It takes a little practice: they can be under or over-exposed with too little or too much sunlight.

7) Wash in running water till all the yellow stuff is gone and the image is blue and white only. You can use hydrogen peroxide (regular stuff from CVS) to hurry up the image turning blue. Hang the cyanotype up to dry on a line with clothespins.

It will always be fadeable in strong sunlight. Not something you want to stick in the window..

9) yay! you made a cyanotype!

Cyanotypes are created when chemicals react to UV light. So you will need to mix and coat your paper with the chemicals in a dim area and store the dried paper in a black garbage bag, light-tight box or a paper safe. (get from BH photo or another darkroom supply place)

Youtube and the internet in general are full of “How to Make a Cyanotype.” We thought this one was pretty good. We used the recipe from this site.

Carrie Mae Weem’s site is full of tons of images and info- it’s very full. She has worked with found imagery as well as family photos, combining writing and imagery.

Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) is an award winning photographer and artist. Her photographs, films, and videos have been displayed in over 50 exhibitions in the United States and abroad and focus on serious issues that face African Americans today, such as racism, gender relations, politics, and personal identity. She has said, “Let me say that my primary concern in art, as in politics, is with the status and place of Afro-Americans in our country.” Weems was born in Portland, Oregon in 1953 the second of seven children to Myrlie and Carrie Weems. After high school, she moved to San Francisco to study modern dance. She decided to continue her arts schooling and attended the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. She graduated at the age of twenty-eight with her BA. She received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Weems also participated in the graduate program in folklore at the University of California, Berkeley.

While in her early twenties, Carrie Mae Weems was politically active in the labor movement as a union organizer. Her first camera was used for politics rather than for artistic purposes. She was inspired to pursue photography only after she came across The Black Photography Annual, a book of images by African-American photographers. This led her to New York, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she began to meet a number of artists and other photographers such as Frank Stewart and Coreen Simpson, and began to form a community. In 1976 Weems took a photography class at the Museum taught by Dawoud Bey.
In 1983, Carrie Mae Weems completed her first collection of photographs called, Family Pictures and Stories. The images told the story of her family. Her next series, called Ain’t Jokin’, was completed in 1988. It focused on racial jokes and internalized racism. Another series called American Icons, completed in 1989, also focused on racism. Gender issues were the next focal point for Carrie Mae Weems. It was the topic in one of her most well known collections called The Kitchen Table series.

In her almost thirty year career, Carrie Mae Weems has won numerous awards. She was named Photographer of the Year by the Friends of Photography. In 2005, she was awarded the Distinguished Photographer’s Award in recognition of her significant contributions to the world of photography. Her talents have also been recognized by numerous colleges, including Harvard and Wellesley, with fellowships and artist-in-residence and visiting professor positions. Weems lives in Brooklyn and Syracuse, NY, with her husband Jeffrey Hoone.

Hannah Höch (November 1, 1889 – May 31, 1978) was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage. After her schooling, she worked in the handicrafts department for Ullstein Verlang [The Ullstein Press], designing dress and embroidery patterns for Die Dame [The Lady] and Die Praktische Berlinerin [The Practical Berlin Woman]. Her work at Verlang working with magazines targeted to women, made her acutely aware of the difference between women in media and reality, even as the workplace provided her with many of the images that served as raw material for her own work. Marriage did not escape her criticism—she depicted brides as mannequins and children, reflecting the idea that women are not seen as complete people and have little control over their lives. Höch was a pioneer of the art form that became known as photomontage. Many of her pieces sardonically critique the mass culture beauty industry, at the time gaining significant momentum in mass media through the rise of fashion and advertising photography. Höch also made strong statements on racial discrimination. Her most famous piece is Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser DADA durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (“Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany”), a critique of Weimar Germany in 1919. This piece combines images from newspapers of the time re-created to make a new statement about life and art in the Dada movement.

Scans of found images, drawings, family photos, and polaroids from last week were printed out onto acetate. Imagery can be layered. We had the choice of working with the images as negatives, or positives. (“invert” in photoshop) Anything that is black or dark grey on the acetate will be white in the finished cyanotype, because opaque areas will block the sun from activating the chemicals. Anything that is clear will let the sun through and be a dark indigo blue. Anything that is light grey and blocks the light partially will be a lighter shade of blue. It is kind of hard to visualize until you’ve made a few cyanotypes.

Margaret Bourke-White (June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971) was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet Industry, the first female war correspondent (and the first female permitted to work in combat zones) and the first female photographer for Life magazine, where her photograph appeared on the first cover. She grew up in NJ!!

Here is a page from Portrait of Myself, which she wrote about her career. On this page there is an amazing story about her first assignment, which Evonne M. Davis told me about many years ago.

Remember to tell your friends cool stories about artists and art when you find out about them. Pass on stories that you find inspirational. Most likely someone you tell will tell someone else.

So now here is the story:

She had her first assignment, for an architectural magazine. A big deal for any young photographer, and in an era where there were few professional female photographers, a really big deal. But the day she went to shoot, the site around the newly built building was gross, filled with mud and rocks. She ran out and bought out a local flower shop, all of their cut flowers. Then she “planted” them in the mud so it looked like they were growing. The resulting image was beautiful.

I love this story because she took control of the image, was inventive and resourceful, and just didn’t give up.

Lisa took a group picture of everyone!

and here are some of the polaroids:

Week 1 March 5, 2011: 4×5 Portrait Day

It was a sunny day, we all met teaching artist Lisa Elmaleh, who has a darkroom in the back of her car so that she can travel while making landscape photographs using the wet collodion process, using an 8×10 camera. Large format cameras are totally manual- you have to figure out the exposure yourself with a light meter. Large format cameras use sheet film that you expose one piece at a time. The usual film sizes are 4×5 inch film and 8 x 10 inch film. Here is a goofy picture with someone’s hand in it so you can see how big 8×10 inch film is.

The other major difference in using a large format camera if you haven’t before is that images appear upside down. This is actually how your eye sees, but your brain flips the image right side up for you. Thanks brain! But after a while you get used to seeing the images in the camera, and it even helps with composition because things are a little more abstract…you can see things as shapes rather than as, say, “Lisa’s head.”

Lisa gave us a talk about her work, how she became an artist, and her most recent project, which she was able to get funds for by using kickstarter. Then we started taking pictures of each other, using a 4×5 camera and polaroid film. This way we could get used to the camera, and because everyone got the opportunity to be the photographer and and the subject a few times. We also all got a chance to be the assistant, by being in charge of the polaroid.

Because there are a couple steps you need to take each time you make an exposure, it is a slower process than “snapping a picture.” It is more like drawing, where you spend more time looking at our subject than anything else. You have to explain to your subject what you want them to do, when they need to stay still…Some of us have people (a friend, a little brother..) that we photograph often, and/or have photographed for an extended period of time. They may be a muse, rather than just a subject. But even a one-time interaction with a subject can be interesting, and sometimes kind of intense.