Leah Nelson leading a hip-hop dance workshop at Free First Saturday.
One of the highlights of my job coordinating family programs is working with local artists to develop creative and engaging learning opportunities for youth. Leah Nelson, a Minneapolis-based dancer, choreographer, producer, and teaching-artist, has been an amazing educational resource not only to the Walker, but the local art community. I asked her to talk about her role as a teaching-artist:
My relationship with hip-hop education and the Walker was reinforced after the Hip-Hop Moves Festival in 2003 and has continued over the past three summers when I’ve taught the Hip-Hop Moves dance class to youth.
With the youth classes it’s been great to see the progress young movers have made after returning each summer for an intensive week of hip-hop and funk dance and culture. The encounters between the students and teaching-artist team I work with in my company Nubia, (a performing arts collective), have created exciting environments encouraging strength, stamina and creativity as well as some excellent dance moves.
My interest has always been to encourage learners of all ages to find access to the depth of culture that hip-hop has to offer. Unfortunately the current media-driven images and highly charged environments portrayed today do not give due props to the richness and community-oriented beginnings hip-hop has to offer.
I love any opportunity I have to bring this understanding and increase my own knowledge – to participate with potential b-girls and b-boys, grafitti artists, DJs and MCs. As often as I can I organize and mostly collaborate to reap the socially jubilant rewards of programs like B-girl Be : A Celebration of Women in Hip-hop at Intermedia Arts and workshops like Hip Hop 101 happening at the Walker in April. Hip-Hop 101 is for young ones who don’t often have access can try out their skillz at the turntables, on the mic and on the dance floor … they can even get some writing technique … the idea is that these morning sessions are infused with all the tools representing the elements – and understand that its more than a “bling” thing.
Last Saturday’s March of Madness: Bands on the Run! was so fun that we needed a whole week to recover from the event.
Next week we will be posting footage of the eight bands that played during the day-long, scavenger hunt/roaming music festival. Check back for footage of Skoal Kodiak at the Stone Arch Bridge Pavilion; Brother and Sister, Synchrocyclotron, and NOW in the Gesthsemane Church Sanctuary; and The Chosen Few at the Gesthsemane Ballroom.
The first installment is Mike Mictlan and Paper Tiger of Doomtree at the astroturf covered Parade Ice Stadium. Check it out.
The godfather of the March of Madness, Michael Gaughan (of Brother and Sister and Now), is already planning his next event (Michael mentioned gathering inspiration for the next scavenger hunt by watching Gleming the Cube and Thrashin’). Get on his mailing list to be the first to find out about the next scavenger hunt.
Arty Pants goers this week got to investigate primary colors, but instead of using paintbrushes we used squirt guns, toothbrushes and toy trucks. Kids got to take aim at their paintings and watch the blue paint drip down the page where it would meet up with some red to make purple. Swirling toothbrushes across the page made textured designs, with red and yellow lines of paint crossing to create vibrant orange pictures. I could definitely tell that the joy of creating and the thrill of discovering how colors mix was in the air as I watched a boy plunk his toy truck down, saturated in blue, and drive it a across an already yellow page. Sure enough, a moment later his head popped up and he cried out “I’ve made GREEN!” He was no longer only an artist, but an inventor as well.
I’m at a loss for words trying to describe yesterday’s scavenger hunt. Fun and awesome are two words I could use. Certainly, Michael Gaughan’s scavenger hunts have been some of the most unique in the Twin Cities, and yesterday was no different.
As a participant, I took quite a few photos. And so did a lot of other people. So I uploaded my photos to my Flickr account and created a group with the Walker’s Flickr account. If you took photos and are a Flickr user, add yourself to WACTAC group, then add your photos to the pool. Rather than just creating a group specifically for this event, I’m making it a bit more extensible down the road.
If you’re not a Flickr user, just drop a note in the comments here and I’ll link your photos in this post.
Edit: Now with youtube goodness:
Many thanks to the young artists and families who participated in the Cinema Evolution art lab activity at the March 3 Free First Saturday. Thanks to guest filmmaker Michelle-Mehri Mousavi, who documented the kids and their artwork, we now have a video collage of the fun. 
At the March 3rd Free First Saturday art lab activity, families created their own film still using collage and drawing materials. Guest filmmaker, Michelle-Mehri Mousavi captured kids and their artwork on camera and produced this short video. (A high-res version is coming soon!)
walker-art-center-ci_180e3c.mov
In conjunction with the Walker Art Center’s newly opened exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council (WACTAC) created a postcard project to encourage visitors to respond to Kara Walker’s challenging work. The postcard invites visitors to reply verbally or visually to one of three prompts:
What are you suppressing?
What does power look like?
Retell a history
To weigh in on the exhibition and share your musings, pick up a postcard from the Bazinet Lobby and create your reply on the back. Responses will be selected by WACTAC and posted on the Walker blog.
Many of the responses in this installment are from a 1-3 grade Art Lab from Whittier Elementary School. Although they didn’t see the Kara Walker exhibition, they were able to relate to the questions on the postcards.
By Arnaundia
By Terrance Berglund
By Elizabeth Gonzales
By Minnie
By Don Siegel
The Walker blogs are among some of the more well regarded in the museum world, and we’re always working on making them better. With that in mind, we present to you a survey. It consists of 11 quick questions that will help us understand why you read our blogs. Your identity is totally anonymous. Down the road, we will be sharing some follow-up analysis on the new media blog.
The full survey is below, in this post, but if you have problems you can visit our dedicated survey page. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader or browser without javascript support, our survey should work, as it does not require javascript.
