What Becomes: Toward a Collaborative Pedagogy
I attended my first ceramics class in 1980 as a two-year-old on my mother’s lap. She was part of a neighborhood group of women that gathered to cast and paint ceramic figures and small collectables. I glazed a ceramic bear ornament that still hangs on my mother’s Christmas tree. My childhood Christmases revolved around objects made in these workshops including an elaborate nativity set and small evergreen lamps that lit our bedrooms throughout Advent.
When I began investigating ceramics independently, I applied my efforts to everything but slip casting, having relegated that type of ceramics to 1980’s kitsch. Wheel thrown and altered pottery, hand-built figures, ephemeral installations and wall hanging works captured my interest and shaped my early teaching years at the University of New Mexico. My personal pedagogy favored original works and foundational skill development and I addressed mold making only occasionally. I discouraged mass production, highlighting Richard Notkin as an example of artistic integrity for students interested in the casting process.
Today, my work as an artist and community organizer takes me into classrooms and communities all across Albuquerque. Many of the city’s community centers are stocked with plaster molds much like those my mother and her friends cast years ago. When my program assistant Will Geusz suggested that we utilize such molds in our free after school clay workshops, I was opposed. Some of the molds represented problematic stereotypes I didn’t want to introduce to elementary students and I clung my old pedagogy. I remember Will saying “still, it’d be fun to see a huge pile of these things.”
I visualized a heap of abandoned remnants, traces of a collapsed society and the image stuck with me. I imagined what conversations these odd objects might spark about American culture then and today. The idea of collaborating on a community-based project seemed like the perfect antidote to long hours writing grants and working alone in my private studio.
So, one fall evening in 2015, I gathered the clay artists I knew as former students and colleagues from UNM and those I met through my work at Harwood Art Center. We met for drinks in my yard where we passed around samples of our work and discussed current projects. Will and I pitched the idea of doing a community driven sculpture project together utilizing the city’s abandoned plaster molds. We found a few interested collaborators from the artists gathered there and a new collaboration emerged. Our team included a mix of former students and colleagues each with resources and networks to support the project. Jane Gordon and could provide access to UNM’s kiln yard as an adjunct faculty in Ceramics. Chris Casey was a former student of mine at UNM who worked as a glaze technician with Coyote Clay where he had access to glazes we could use for free. Teresa Larrabee was a former student who worked at New Mexico Clay, where she could get us clay discounts. In addition to his work as my art education program assistant, Will Geusz excelled at teamwork and community outreach.
We met under the banner of the Desert Dwellers Clay Collective where we refined our plan to create stacks through a simple press molding process. We built the project around an intuitive and easily learned process in order to engage large groups of people of all ages and abilities. We planned to leverage our collective resources and run our project on the cheap at Harwood Art Center’s 25th Anniversary celebration on Saturday, March 5th, 2016. We decided to call the project “What Becomes”, a nod to its experimental nature.
We visited craigslist, community centers, and an abandoned pile behind New Mexico Clay to gather odd plaster forms. New Mexico clay donated 300 pounds of their Super Sculpt clay and our team collected other tools and materials from around our own studios. We were given the basement theater at Harwood Art Center as a workshop space. We set the stage with sculpture stands beneath a spotlight. Below the stage, Chris set up his portable slab roller and we prepared work stations for pressing clay into molds and decorating forms with slips and stamps. Chris and Will demonstrated pressing molding clay into the plaster while Jane, Teresa and I busily attached finished objects into a large sculpture at center stage.
A few hundred participants transformed 300 pounds of clay into sculpture over the course of three frenzied hours. The energy was electric. Devices were pocketed, and people of all ages were eager to roll up their sleeves to join in. Many participants gravitated toward various owl molds, a trend from the 70’s that has re-emerged in recent visual pop-culture. Some participants pressed a mold titled “little boy blue”, re-interpreting it affectionately as Oscar Wilde. Female figures and dolls were scrutinized for their messages about women and girls. Eagle molds sparked conversation about the bird’s significance in both Indigenous cultures as well as the culture of American Nationalism.
By the end of the night, we’d found $40 in the tip jar, a series of sculptures too heavy to move and a shared sense of surprised joy. Chris admitted, “that worked better than I thought it would.” We wrapped our work and left the Art Center exhausted. We returned the next day with our trucks and friends to help carry three sections of sculpture each weighing about 100 pounds each up the stairs of the basement and onto our truck beds. We transported the sculptures to Jane’s studio in UNM’s Sculpture facility to dry. Jane and I met to bisque the sculptures and later Chris joined us with “junk” glazes from Coyote Clay, bright candy colors that we used to coat large sections of sculpture.
Interested in carrying the project forward in a more sustainable form, Jane and I wrote a grant proposal to the Fulcrum Fund of 516 Arts, a program of the Andy Warhol Foundation. We won a small award for supplies and artist salaries and prepared for a new series of workshops based on what we had learned on March 5th. Our collaboration lost Will Geusz to an adventure in New Zealand and lost Teresa Larrabee to the start of her graduate studies. We invited Chris Casey and Helen Atkins, my new program assistant and a talented emerging artist to join us as paid artists. We kept time-sheets, saved receipts and recorded in-kind donations and discounts on supplies from New Mexico Clay.
I had two objectives for What Becomes throughout the duration of our Fulcrum Award. I wanted to take the project down to a more intimate scale and create individual stacks in an art therapy context. I also wanted to expand the project’s community engagement by creating one large stack over the course of one day in a public space.
On December 4th, 2016, our team led a workshop for six youth and three adult mentors at the New Day Life Skills Academy. New Day is an organization that provides housing and social services to youth between the ages of 11-24 who are experiencing homelessness. With the help of New Day Life Skills Academy Coordinator Cesar Gonzalez, we transformed a classroom into a temporary clay studio. We laid tarps beneath work tables and set out bags of clay, various plaster molds and tools. With Cesar’s encouragement, residents began to trickle in, hesitant and quiet at first. Some of the youth were visibly impacted by trauma and I suddenly doubted my long-held conceit that clay is inherently healing. What did I really think a clay workshop could achieve?
We made a short introduction to the process, working side by side with participants while they warmed up to us. Eventually, the air seemed to lift, and youth began to soften their guards. Someone’s phone softly volunteered a playlist. Youth would disappear only to return with a friend, introducing them to the project as we had done. Participants grew increasingly interactive, asking for help and swapping plaster molds. Some youth started to share their stories while we worked. A few of the youth seemed especially drawn to animal molds and worked on their sculptures with tenderness. Soon, it felt like any teaching environment, any space where people come together for a common goal. Trauma receded into just one of many experiences in a room that also included collaboration, curiosity, care and nervous laughter.
Each artist chose a glaze color from test tiles and wrote their first names on an index card marking their finished sculptures. Later, Jane and I bisque fired and glazed the sculptures back in her studio at UNM. I returned to New Day for a community meal on January 20, 2017 that drew together twenty-eight youth, mentors and community partners. I arrived early and with Cesar’s help, we placed one sculpture as a centerpiece at each dinner table and draped a small cloth over the top for an unveiling Cesar planned. Then I took my assigned place at a table with youth residents and other community partners. Announcements and introductions were made, sculptures were unveiled, and dinner was served, made by youth in the Life Skills Academy. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see that only one of our youth artists was in attendance that evening. Cesar said youth move quickly in and out of New Day, which is a free will shelter.
The experience was formative for our team. Whether by clay’s magic power, or by the power of collaboration, something in that afternoon was healing for our team and hopefully for the team at New Day as well. Our workshop spoke to the challenge and importance of connecting communities that are often separated. In the end, it wasn’t the art object that held the most importance, but the experience of co-creating and connecting.
The process became the focus of our second workshop during our Fulcrum award cycle. On Sunday, April 30th, 2017 we set up a sculpting station on the shared patio between Zendo Coffee and Sidetrack Brewing in downtown Albuquerque. From 8:00am to 9:00pm, we converted 350 pounds of clay into a large-scale community sculpture with the help of 48+ participants of all ages. When people asked what we were doing with the finished sculpture, we stated that we were going to exhibit it and then recycle it. People were no less eager to join in.
Friends, former students and colleagues stopped by with their families, having heard about the project. Other patrons approached us curiously, asking if they could join. People ordered a beverage and took a seat at large picnic tables line with tools, molds and clay and got to work. In this setting, with a favorite beverage in hand and the sun shining brightly on a cool spring day, participants spent more time on the project. After they pressed and released their forms, they took their time adding details and sculpting props before delivering objects to be contributed to the sculpture. I received these offerings like blessings, surprised again by the simple joy of making art with my community.
As the day drew to a close and patrons began to vacate the outdoor patio, we wrapped up our sculpting marathon. We had an exhibition planned for the following Friday at the Sanitary Tortilla Factory, a Gallery and Studio Facility down the street. On Monday morning, gallery owner Sheri Crider brought over her hand-wheeled forklift. Together we raised the sculpture atop its pallet and carefully wheeled it across an ally, over a busted parking lot, onto a stretch of sidewalk and around the corner into the gallery.
On May 5th we celebrated an exhibition of this Ephemeral Stack in an unfired state along with glazed sculptures from our first workshop back at Harwood Art Center. The What Becomes exhibition also highlighted individual works from each of the four artists on our collaborative team. Our reception served as a community celebration, with many of the participating artists in attendance. As a whole, the exhibition highlighted the duality of being an individual within an increasingly connected community. Each of the four artists create distinct bodies of work, different from each other, and different from the work we created in community. And somehow, each of these distinct bodies of work complemented and highlighted the collaborative work.
The work of community is not about overcoming difference. In my experience, the work of community is about inviting difference. This often requires leaving our well-worn tracks and tolerating discomfort. It’s uncomfortable to try to connect with someone from an entirely different set of experiences, at a different stage in life, from a different culture. Some attempts at connection fail and leave us feeling a little ashamed or more isolated. But sometimes, even where connection is tenuous at best, there is a moment of recognition in our shared humanity. In other cases, connection come easily, and we can forget that each person is a mystery, a complex set of experiences, hopes and fears. We can make assumptions about those who share traits with us and fail to investigate what really shapes those we claim as community. What Becomes drew me out of the solitude into a challenging and rewarding exchange with friends, acquaintances and strangers across my city. With our hands busy in clay, our hearts softened and our minds opened. In collaboration we found ways to let our differences shine and take turns seeing and hearing each other.