Child’s Eyes
ProjectArt Teaching Residency Project
2022
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As a culmination of my one-year New York-based teaching residency with the non-profit ProjectArt, I created sculptures after ten of my students’ self-portraits that they created during my online weekly classes.
Of the many qualities that drew me to these portraits -- their instinctive expressions of character, their effortless formal integrity -- that which made the strongest impression was each one’s gaze. Each student rendered their own eyes in a completely different way, which, with each sculpture, demanded of me a different approach. Translating their portraits into three dimensions convinced me that it’s still possible to create clay portraits that are fresh and surprising, that visualize human character without adhering to anatomical realism.
As well as introducing new possibilities into my existing practice, the act of producing sculptures after student drawings meant affirming their expressions. Amid all that I had imparted to them about the value scale and spatial relationships, about the interaction of colors and lines, I didn’t want it to be lost on any of them that they already possessed the spirit with in themselves to create art that is worthy of attention. At the close of the residency period, I gave each student their sculpted portrait, meeting them in-person for the first time at their local library in Queens. I hope these sculptures will serve as a reminder to students as they grow up, moving from instinct to knowledge, that so much of what they seek they already have.
A final aspect of this project involved building the alcoves to house some of the portraits. I conceived of these, in part, as a sculptural answer to the space of the page in which students situated their drawings/paintings of their faces and upper bodies. These alcoves also recalled the Zoom squares through which I these encountered students. Yet while the Zoom squares feel incidental, the alcoves, with their arched tops and facades incised with patterns, lend the portraits within them a certain reverence.
These sculptures were exhibited as part of the ProjectArt NYC Virtual Show, “Inspired: Communal Creative Works” as well as part of a house show in collaboration with a friend, the musician Miles Hewitt. The sculptures were shared and handed off to the many of the students at Forest Hills Library in Queens, NY, in mid-June, 2022.
