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Teaching Exchange
The paintbrush lay in my hand. Its touch was unfamiliar and my fingers struggled to know how to grasp it. The brush had a long, thin, wood handle and half an inch of fine hairs, the color of barely burnt nutmeg, huddled together at the end. I dipped that end into the dark purple paint I had mixed-I had taken great pleasure in mixing reds, blues, and black until the perfect hue emerged-and brought it to the large piece of paper attached to the easel in front of me. What an awkward feeling: my hand, so far from the action, the nutmeg hairs getting all the fun, reliant on my ability to turn a wooden stick the right way to produce something on a surface several inches away, knowing I had no control over the paint drops that dripped out of my reach.
My colleague, Olga Hubard, and I had entered into a voluntary teaching exchange, in which we took each other's class during the fall 2010 semester. She was teaching Introduction to Painting, and I was teaching Video as Art. Each week, we debriefed our experiences as learners, as teachers, as people making art. I was fixated on the materiality, on the feel of the tools and paints, on how much I did not know, and how much I treasured the freedom that the space of not knowing afforded. . . .
The Muchness of Fromness
I remember Charlie's face at the exact moment he pushed it through the center of the 3-foot-by-3-foot poster he had created and artfully unfolded as he narrated a poem about his life, each square its own work of mixed-media art. Charlie had arrived in the US from China just before starting his master's program earlier that fall term. He had been in New York City for less than two months, and he was still reticent to speak up during whole-class discussions. Yet, the fullness of his personhood came alive when he performed his poem for the class. He prepared and brought in tea eggs for the potluck that accompanied our "Where I'm From" multimodal poem showcase, and he incorporated them into his self-portrait performance.
George Ella Lyon's iconic poem (Lyon, 1993) served as inspiration for the...