Visual traces of communal creative activity
- frida@artyardbklyn.org
- Jun 13
- 12 min read
Updated: Jun 14
As the school year winds down and summer peeks around the corner, we’re buzzing with excitement at ART YARD BKLYN! This week, we proudly present exhibitions of artwork created by elementary students in our ART YARD Art Matters school programs. In Advanced Studio on zoom, Cammi Camacho taught her first-ever class titled Reading Emotional Abstraction, while in our in-person studio at BWAC, Rainy Lehrman returned to lead a collaborative session on steam bending wood. The evening was beautifully captured in a stunning observational painting by Evelyn.
AYB Artist Briana (Cammi) Camacho took her first foray into teaching Advanced Studio on zoom session very seriously. Her approach was to get personal & share a working method which she finds inspiring.
Cammi explains she aimed: “to use this session to meditate and focus on the present - What do all of us feel now and how can we convey it onto paper but with no visual representation -- only forms , color, and lines. Some inspiration on how to execute this task was taken from abstract artists Jackson Pollock and Mark Bradford.
“Every good painter, paints what he is.” ~ Jackson Pollock
Mark Bradford starts with familiar objects as tools and builds his pallet with surprising materials like curling papers and torn boxes of hair color.
I often start off not knowing what to paint, and have found my most productive action is to just do it. What I feel inside will eventually make itself known.
I started off the class with an open discussion, posing the question: Is abstraction a universal language, or a cultural construct? The answers were varied and I think we all expanded upon our preconceived notions.
For the artmaking prompt I asked participating artists to portray an emotion using only forms, colors, and lines, avoiding non-visual representation. Responding to an emotion that was rendered through a book, a text, scripture, or quote. Students were encouraged to respond in a very personal way using their preferred methods and materials.
Suzanne, and Mich found hope in the chaos around them referencing books and music.
Ajula who joined us from Rhode Island conjured up the natural world in her pencil drawing.
Ed’s piece was simply a horror… inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy (a mournful rhetoric of what might or might not an armless and legless creature living in an urn outside an eating house. A tragic, compelling and mysterious vision of consciousness trapped and struggling inside the boundaries of nature.) Ed managed to call up a nightmarish dread in all of us!”
This session had us working from a contemplative frame of mind, several share their thoughts on the process and the artwork they created.
Jacob tells us: “My piece is made on the back of a cereal box. I initially began my abstraction by responding to the text, but eventually I started drawing feeling associated with the digestion of food.”
Richie explains that his drawing, Untitled (The Storm), is ss the closest to abstraction as I could get, this was made experimenting with some new line types to capture the overwhelming & seemingly negative influence of the mainstream media on the general public year by year.
There were several approaches that I was going for in terms of its form; a hurricane, the Inferno by Dante Aligheri, a swirling drain of some kind, or the beginning of the same cycle.
The song that I worked off of was 'Words I Never Said' by Lupe Fiasco & Skylar Gray, which I found to get more & more relevant decade after decade pertaining to the sensationalized hysteria that has persisted for all that time.
However, the light at the top would show that media itself is not inherently evil or wrong because it's a matter of finding facts & hope."
Leah “felt pained by the current events throughout the world and in my country. For this assignment that is what I painted. No music, no noise, just my feelings on the paper being guided by the brush.”
I (Meridith) too worked from an emotionally charged place, contemplating the year anniversary of the death of my Beloved Cat Rik with great sorrow.
Vera explains: “This piece shows two types of brain waves—theta (creativity) and alpha (inner peace, relaxation)—moving toward and converging at the darkest point of this void space. At this meeting point, you see the beginnings of something new forming.”
Sigrid states: “my piece captures the feeling of being in a room. enclosed, safe, trapped.”
Travis expounds: “My piece, Reassembled Reflections, is an emotional abstract born from spontaneous linework, music, and thought. After watercolor made the paper too fragile, I cut and re-collaged the piece—transforming it into a layered reflection of chaos, movement, and renewal.”
Fatima shares: “For this exercise, I took inspiration from the artist shown. I worked on a canvas I started painting a while back but transformed it by using a variety of painting techniques, Including taping certain sections, layering paint, and working through line, shape, and color. I also was inspired by music as I was working which influenced my speed and overall mark making. After critique, where others saw a heart shape, I finalized my piece by thinking about the strongest/most painterly parts and pushing the rest back to emphasize certain areas. I enjoyed the intentional exploration this lesson encouraged.”
Adji writes: “I want to thank Cammi for a great class on abstraction. My painting wasn’t based on a traditional literary work, but rather the tentative organization sheet for the upcoming school year. I’ll be teaching a different class and a lot of my co-workers had interesting comments/opinions. I wanted to represent the duality and complexity of my emotions. I’m excited to meet my new students. It’s going to be hard, but beautiful, and absolutely worth it.”
On Tuesday TJ and I arrived at BWAC early to set up for our Advanced Studio in person session on Collaborative Steam Bending with Woodworker Rainy Lehrman. Evelyn also came early to organize their materials in order to paint the session in action.
Rainy soon rolled in with her cart of supplies looking a bit like a big mysterious moving version of a Francis Picabia machine painting! She explained that she made the larger steam chamber earlier in the day from a discarded cooler and a device for household steaming jobs (maybe I should make the reference that Beverly Hillbillies jalopy!).
Rainy describes the session: “Using air dried NYC urban lumber, we explored the fluid potential of lignins, an organic polymer that makes up 30% of a tree. We examined lignins on a micro level before we began to manipulate the wood by softening it through exposure to steam. White oak, Sugar Maple, Sweet gum and Black Walnut were put into our make-shift steam box as well as a simple aluminum pipe.
We anchored long strips of quarter sawn white Oak to the pillars of our space and began to respond to one another as our lines became intersections. After snapping several strips right away we found the red oak to be quite brittle. The maple and sweet gum were amazing to work with and both had amazing warm tones. As students learned to pre-bend and use their bodies to support and hold the strips of wood in tension before binding with corsage. Soon two distinct vessels began to emerge.
When we finally began to steam the walnut there was a much better understanding of how the compressed on the inside of the curve and expands on the outside of a curve. The walnut bent wonderfully and had the most beautiful red and purples streaking through a rich darkness when it was wet. The two wall vessels are now being stabilized and glued together in my own studio, where they look amazing on the wall.
This group is so much fun to work with! Thank you Meridith and AYB.”
Evelyn continues: “On Tuesday, I (Evelyn) was delighted to create The Steam-Bending Workshop, a painting from live observation of AYB Advanced Studio participants at work with Teaching Artist Rainy Lerman. As the two sculptures took shape around square columns near the stage at BWAC, I used a diagonal perspective to create a composition that captured the action. Working in acrylic paint on a 22 x 28 inch canvas, I chose a palette of earth tones (raw umber, burnt sienna, and yellow ochre)—which, as Rainy pointed out, echoed the colors of the wood from a sampling of local NYC trees that participants used in the session.
During critique, participants spoke eloquently about their experience of camaraderie and collaboration during the session, and I was overjoyed to hear that they feel a sense of that experience in the painting. I felt it, too, as I watched the flow of people from the steam chambers to the columns, the rhythm of the process as people cycled between stations. Painting figures in motion is a unique challenge, one I’ve grappled with in my paintings of live musicians; here, I found myself blocking in the basic shapes of a figure while one artist knelt at the steam chamber or affixed a piece to the sculpture, then finishing the figure while another artist occupied the same position. While eagle eyes can glimpse familiar AYB participants in the painting, several of the figures are really amalgams of multiple people.
As Ed noted, with figures in the foreground on the righthand side of the painting and receding into the background on the left, the composition echoes the drawings created during The Portrait Ouroboros lesson I taught a couple weeks ago. The Steam-Bending Workshop is a sister to those drawings in several ways, building on the idea of capturing visual traces of communal creative activity. In the painting, figures and setting are unified by the earthy palette and misty atmosphere, the latter both an effect of the ephemeral moving figures and an evocation of the steam drifting through the room. The viewer steps into my shoes, an observer of the action, but no less a part of the whole.
Congratulations to the young artists of PS 17! This Wednesday's exhibition opening was a success.
Evelyn enthuses: "Dennis, Leo, and I (Evelyn) are especially proud of our docents Julianna, Justin, Nathleen, Nyelle, Wadia, and Aliyah. These 6th and 7th grade students greeted visitors, explained the projects on view, and answered questions throughout the event.
Use arrows to scroll through images from the opening
We welcomed the school’s Principal, Dr. Brower; Assistant Principals, Mr. Bernero and Ms. Campbell; art teacher, Mr. Pyrzanowski; and classes ranging from Grades 3 through 8. As students and adults moved through the space, I heard many conversations around the crux of the Magritte painting that inspired one project—The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe), 1929—recitations of the school’s pledge, which inspired the text in Gia’s library mural, Learning Garden; and favorite artworks pointed out by visitors. The projects on view included works inspired by Keith Haring, Jasper Johns, the sound waves emitted by musical instruments, dragons from around the world, the vowels, and diverse landscape and still life pieces by our After School students. Visitors leafed through the portfolios presented on tables nearby to get an expanded sense of the work students completed this year. We appreciate all the enthusiastic and supportive comments left in our guest book!
Dennis reports: “After a long day of tour groups visiting our exhibition in the library, we hosted our final after school session in the art room. The younger students were given a special treat by the school (being the last day of the program) - they were taken to the auditorium for a screening of the film "Mufasa" (quite a promo as this was the school that performed "The Lion King" a few years back). Our docents (who all participate in our after school program) returned to the art room with us and Teaching Artists Leo Emabat and Marina Soliman worked with them on creating giant medallions - several made pizzas! - with pencil, watercolor paint, and markers. Too bad the exhibit was over - these would have displayed beautifully - instead, students took their pieces home with them.
I will need to stop by PS 17 at some point next week to organize supplies and go thru work that was not displayed in the exhibition (we have LOTS). We fulfilled our agreements with the school by delivering various projects in addition to 22 Wednesdays of classes and after school sessions, installation of an exhibition, and docent training- those projects included the library mural, the game room mural, and participation in the Women's History Month celebration.
Managing Director Dennis Buonagura reports in on school events for the week:
"Another opn'in, another show ..." wrote Cole Porter for his 1948 musical "Kiss Me Kate" - and this truly was our week of openings and shows.
At PS 6, our partnership school on St. Paul's Avenue in Jersey City, we hosted visitors from many aspects of the education world. Dr. Magda Savino (Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Division A), Maureen Betz (Supervisor, ELA, K-5), Maria Amerouso (Supervisor, ELA, K-5), Tanya Carneiro-Velez (Instructional Specialistm K-5) and Kristin Guarini (Instructional Specialist, K-5) - all from the Jersey City Board of Education - and all received tours by our expert docents. Dr. Savino wrote in our guest book "each year it gets better and better" - what a compliment! Of course, Principal Apruzzesse and Assistant Principal Faccone were present throughout to support our event (as they always do).
Use arrows to scroll through images from the opening. Including docent tours and VIP guests!
Also included in "visitors from the education world" was Coach Bobby Stewart - the founder of King's Knight Chess Club - with whom we share alternating days in room 314. When we're not conducting our program in that room, Coach Bobby teaches chess! It was a busy opening and I sadly didn't get a photo of Coach Bobby but here's what room 314 looks like on one of the days that ART YARD BKLYN is not in it!
Our terrific docents (Nilan, Hattie, Joshua, Milan, D'Marco, and Sanidhya) gave dozens of tours - to many teachers, parents, and mostly 5th and 4th grade classes. It was very busy - they had a few breaks (with snacks and drinks, of course) but overall were busy for a full 3 hours. They sure have a lot of stamina (cookies, grapes, mozzarella singles, etc. do help!). They not only led tours but helped hang some extra work and put work in portfolios and greeted guests at the door. It's funny how they start out a tiny bit shy - then gain lots of confidence - but turn shy again when it's time to give a tour to their parents!
The docents will continue tours throughout the remainder of the school term.
Teaching Artists Evelyn Beliveau and Leo Emabat were on hand to help direct the docents and offer insight to our programs - and special thanks to our assistant, Litzy Duran, who created each project signage at home during this week and arrived at the school extra early to install. This event couldn't have been possible without their hard work and dedication to art education and our Jersey City exhibits.
Other Art News
Congratulations to AYB Artist Marley Haynes on her recent performance in MS 839’s production of You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown! Marley, who dazzles audiences with her 100-watt smile, embodied the essence of a soaring kite with airborne leaps and balletic form—bringing her passion to the role. Her joyful presence and expressive movement captured here is a photo by Justin Weiner.
As a belated birthday celebration, ART YARD Artist Liv Collins treated me (Meridith) as her guest to a painting day at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. We walked the rose gardens, pausing to sniff and admire colors. With our eyes peeled for a shaded bench, we wound our way to the Shakespeare Garden where we set up our painting supplies and jars of water.
Photos from Brooklyn Botanical Gardens painting excursion
AYB Artist Ariel Abdullah, who works at the garden, spotted us at the end of her work day, adding another level of ART YARD BKLYN connection to the day.
Congratulations to AYB Board Member Cecile Chong who appears in this week’s View From The Easel in Hyperallergic!
Cecile also invites us all to her upcoming exhibition: SPHERE NOT The Global Immersive Sensory Experience on view at Kates-Ferri Projects, 561 Grand Street, Manhattan, from June 19 - July 16, 2025. Hope to see you all at the opening reception Friday June 20, 6-8pm!
An update on my lilliputian verisimilitude. Wow, maybe I need to rename my exhibition. Note spool of golden thread for scale. (As Neah would comment: IYKYN!)
We’re thrilled to share that Free Inside and I (Meridith) have work featured in the first annual Pride Gallery Wall at BLICK Art Materials, located at 650 6th Avenue, Manhattan. This celebratory exhibition, organized by Assistant Manager Christopher Ramos (he/him), highlights LGBTQ+ artists and allies in honor of Pride Month.
“It is a project that is near and dear to my heart,” says Ramos, “and to have the outpouring of love and support in putting this show together means the world to me.”
The exhibition is open to the public Monday through Friday from 10 AM to 7 PM, and Saturday through Sunday from 11 AM to 6 PM.
❤️🧡💛💚🩵💙💜
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