Exercising Creativity

The Dia Art Foundation is meeting the challenges of offering educational opportunities during this difficult time with innovative programs. In late March of this year, Dia launched a new blog—diaart.blog—after its various sites closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The blog contains Artist Prompts, a series of interactive exercises designed by artists. At first glance, the activities seem to be geared towards children, yet there is a sophistication and ambiguity to them that suggests that anyone can participate. I spoke with Alex Vargo, Dia Beacon’s Education Program Manager and Meagan Mattingly, Director of Education, to learn more about the Artist Prompts. The exercises are just one part of a larger museum education program that employs artists to work closely with students in Beacon, New York’s school district. I was curious to learn more about the artist educators and their role in creating the Artist Prompts.

Bel Falleiros, Diana Mangaser, Mollie McKinley, Hannah Verrill, and Audra Wolowiec work with Beacon K-12 students in the classroom as well as on site at Dia Beacon. They are multidisciplinary artists whose work encompasses photography, sculpture, drawing, performance, sound art, video, installation, social practice, and architecture. This year the Dia Beacon AEP (Artist Education Program) could not be fully implemented due to the closure of schools in March. The artist educators were left with a challenge to create something that could be done from home without any special art materials. They needed to design projects that would adhere to Dia’s education program founded on experiential, inquiry-based learning and also move kids away from screens and Zoom classes. The Artist Prompts are a tool for teachers to use with their students as needed. Most of the prompts created this spring are centered on introspection and mindfulness, encouraging participants to focus on their surroundings and themselves. In some cases this spring the artist educators were able to engage directly with students online. However, there was no guarantee that the prompts would be seen by all the students in the program. When Dia decided to include the Artist Prompts on their blog, the project became public and was shared with a wider audience beyond the school programs.

There is an experimental quality to the Artist Prompts, and the artist educators I spoke with commented that Dia encourages them to use the same experiential, time-based strategies that would be used in the classroom, translated to online media and asynchronous learning. A collaborative support system was created to help the artists work together to figure out the nature of the exercises. As the COVID situation progressed, the exercises were designed for the blog, and not just for young students. The artists realized that the project needed to be for a wider audience and would have a life beyond its original intention.

The Artist Prompts have simple yet intriguing titles such as Home-Body, Tracing Seasonal Change, Sound Drawing, and Soft Structures. Each prompt is an exercise that almost anyone can do at home with minimal materials. Introductory text for the prompts explains “These artist-designed prompts encourage people of all ages to connect with their surroundings as they relate to the body and find ways to be creative within the home.”

The prompts rely on text and sometimes sound to guide participants through a series of exercises that involve movement, drawing, writing, controlled breathing, meditation, and contemplation. Some prompts encourage the listener to create drawings or structures at home. Others are about exploring one’s living space or the world outdoors, while others encourage listeners to focus on their bodies and movement. New Artist Prompts have been posted every few weeks through July for a total of 13 exercises at the time of this article.

The first two Artist Prompts appeared on Dia’s blog on April 1 with the titles Home-Body and Meditations. Artist Prompt: Home-Body was designed by Bel Falleiros, a Brazilian artist with a degree in architecture whose work focuses on land identity and the diverse layers of presence that constitute a place. Falleiros starts the prompt with warm-up exercises that involve taking a series of deep breaths followed by a drawing exercise, all accompanied by a suggested soundtrack of music by the Brazilian guitarist and singer-songwriter Tiganá Santana. The first exercise of the prompt is “Draw the Body from the Inside,” which asks participants to close their eyes and navigate inside the body, thinking about how it feels from within. The next step is to draw the shapes of the inside of the body with their eyes closed.

Artist Prompt: Meditations was designed by Diana Mangaser, an artist-architect based in Newburgh, New York. This prompt contains three distinct exercises, including drawing a vessel filled with water at different times of day; collecting round objects, laying them out in order of size, and drawing one of them; and selecting five differently shaped foods and drawing them on a plate.

Many of the prompts have to do with observing one’s surroundings and were designed for an audience that is sheltering in place or spending a lot of time at home. Artist Prompt: Tracing Seasonal Change, designed by Hannah Verrill, asks participants to create a paper journal and observe nature and the coming of spring through a window or outdoors. Participants are instructed to describe observations with words and drawings in the journal, a practice that should be repeated daily or weekly as the earth comes back to life in the spring. Verrill is an artist and educator who works with the body and movement, video, text, and installation to create performance events. 

The prompts reflect the individual interests and practices of the artists who designed them. For example, the interdisciplinary artist Audra Wolowiec’s practice includes sculpture, installation, text, and performance with an emphasis on sound and language. Artist Prompt: Sound Drawing instructs participants to close their eyes and listen to the sounds around them. They are encouraged to draw the sounds that they hear with a pencil on paper, focusing on creating marks that describe the sounds. The prompt asks: “What happens when you listen to music? Can you draw your favorite song?” and goes further by suggesting that the drawing could become a score related to reading musical notes. The prompt asks participants to play their sound drawings, so that each mark makes a sound.

Mollie McKinley’s prompts include the recorded sound of her voice. In Artist Prompt: The Art/Life Dissolve: An Exercise on Making Artworks out of the Everyday, she encourages participants to make a household task into artwork, just by doing it a little differently. McKinley guides us through the process by describing how she has chosen to make her dishwashing chores into an artwork. The prompt is also written out in the blog so listening to the recording isn’t necessary, but the artist’s soothing voice definitely adds something to the exercise. McKinley is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is concerned with the body, nature, time, and transformation (see Mollie McKinley: The Survival Language of Beauty). Like all the prompts, The Art/Life Dissolve is written in language that a child could understand, but it can also be used as an introspective and meditative exercise for adults.

Some of the Artist Prompts mention contemporary art, literature, and music, allowing users to broaden their understanding if they choose to follow suggested readings and links. There are some references to works in Dia’s collection, but overall the prompts exist outside of the museum. One doesn’t need to have knowledge of any specific artwork to relate to the prompts. Yet in each one there is a subtle message or tone that is very reminiscent of the works on view at the various Dia sites. The minimal works in Dia’s collection are naturally thought-provoking and introspective. The prompts extend this message into the world without being heavy-handed.

There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the reopening of schools this fall and virtual education will continue for the foreseeable future. One artist educator I spoke with commented that Dia’s Artist Prompts will be useful into the next school year. For the general public, the prompts will remain a great way to focus, engage, and decrease stress—something we may need in the months ahead.

Top image: Audra Wolowiec, Sound Drawing