FOCUS: 2nd Annual Children's Photography & Video Exhibit

Opening Reception - April 29, 2009

Buy Tickets!

Magic Box Productions, Inc. opens FOCUS, its second annual gallery show of award-winning student photography and video with a reception on April 29 at 5:30 PM in The Gallery at 180 Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan.

Reception admission is $25 for general public and $10 for educators. Students and children under 18 are admitted free. To purchase tickets click the Buy Tickets link above. (Please be sure to print out your receipt and bring it to the reception.) If you’re unable to join us at the opening, we hope you’ll consider making a donation to Magic Box by clicking the Support Us link at the top of this page.

“FOCUS really gives a great ‘kids’ eye view’ of life in the city,” says Magic Box Executive Director Nelle Stokes, “from portraits of friends and family members to shots of architecture and transportation.”

The exhibit will feature almost 40 photographs, as well as original animations and documentary videos, created by elementary, middle and high school students in Magic Box programs throughout the New York metropolitan area. Curated by Stephanie Pereira, the exhibit will emphasize the relationship between the student artists and their subjects, as they contrast explorations in portraiture with the natural world and its role in an urban landscape. The installation will serve as a lesson in itself with text and photos of the artists at work to offer a glimpse into the students' creative process.

The exhibit opens to the public, free of charge, on April 30 with gallery hours from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM. For further information call (914) 630-0256.

FOCUS School Gallery Tours & Workshops
Beginning April 30 Magic Box will host school visits to FOCUS. Students will receive a guided tour of the video and photography exhibit by a Magic Box teaching artist and participate in a special hands-on photography, video or animation workshop.

Magic Box Awarded Empire State Partnership Grant
Magic Box Productions, PS 84 and New York City Center have been chosen to receive an Empire State Partnership School-wide Arts Planning Grant for 2008-2009 from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). In a highly competitive selection process, the grants are awarded to worthy proposals that pair cultural organizations with schools. Their multi-year financing enables funded programs to eventually serve a school’s entire student population.

The ESP grant will allow the continuation of our on-going partnership with PS 84 and New York City Center. Inspired by Paul Taylor’s Esplanade, this year’s project will incorporate live dance, documentary video and projected animation. The workshops will culminate in a series of multi-media presentations for students and parents. Last year’s residency, which illustrated the connections between geometry and Tango, created such enormous enthusiasm throughout the school that it necessitated two showings, with over 600 family members in attendance!

Empire State Partnerships (ESP) is a joint initiative of the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York State Education Department. It is dedicated to identifying, supporting and developing promising practices in collaborations between cultural organizations and schools. Since the program’s inception, NYSCA has allocated more than $18 million in granted funds to build and support long-term, in-depth arts education partnerships across the state.

New and Expanding Programs
Magic Box was awarded its third project grant from the School Arts Partnership allowing us to expand on a highly successful pilot program offered in 2007 at The Young Women's Leadership School in Astoria, Queens. The residency introduced middle school girls to digital photography enabling them to use art and technology as a means of self-reflection. The project advanced the school's goal of helping each student develop a unique voice and a positive self-image. Click here for student photos and further details on this residency.

Magic Box partnered with the Queens Museum of Art for "Spinning Wonder." This one-day workshop introduced children and families to the theory and mechanics of animation as participants made hand-held optical toys that create the illusion of moving pictures.

At PS 122 in Astoria, Magic Box teaching artist Samara Smith guided seventh graders as they documented the school’s first- and second-grade music residency with Lincoln Center. The older students took photos, held interviews, wrote blog-style commentary and created a series of videos for a multifaceted web documentary.

Continuing our association with The Scholar's Academy in Rockaway Park, Queens, Magic Box worked with students there to create Math of the Past, a film that used history, humor and fantasy to explore mathematics through the ages. In addition to researching numeric developments in ancient Rome, Greece and the golden age of Islam, students envisioned what daily life was like before some key mathematical concepts – such as counting, calendars and written numerics – enabling the children to appreciate the importance of to our everyday activities.

Magic Box also brought a video animation workshop to fourth grade students at PS 101 in Brooklyn. Inspired by the book The River Ran Wild, students created original narration and animation to transform the text into moving images, while strengthening key literacy skills.

These are just the latest additions to our growing roster of school programs, nearly twenty in all throughout the five boroughs of New York City.

We're honored to work with a talented group of staffers, teaching artists and board members. Over the course of the year we'll profile some of the individuals who enable us to do such great work and share their web pages and latest accomplishments.

Staff Update
We’re sad to say goodbye to two of our staffers. Lucinda Lindsey, who helped coordinate our programming, departs to pursue new projects. And Laura Brewer Davis, our office administrator, moves on to teach an adult education painting class. We’ll miss you both!

And we welcome intern Justin Dayhoff. Justin is a senior music education major at New York University whose recent work has him exploring technology integration and development in both the larger classroom and the music classroom. He recently built the New Victory Theater’s 2008-2009 season and web videos, and looks forward to exploring more arts outreach through the lens of Magic Box Productions.

Samara Smith
Samara Smith has been a teaching artist with Magic Box since 2005. Recently she took on additional responsibilities assisting with our program coordination.

Samara is a documentary media artist and educator living in Brooklyn. She has worked on a number of acclaimed and award-winning PBS and HBO documentaries including Ric Burns’ New York: A Documentary Film and Judith Helfand's Blue Vinyl. She teaches media as a visiting artist in New York City public schools while also teaching media theory and production on the college level. An adjunct lecturer at Hunter College, she will begin an additional assignment at SUNY Old Westbury in the Fall. She is completing her MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College.

Samara views art as a vital tool for social change and her recent work deals with issues of public space and freedom of expression. She strives to create projects that: focus attention upon social and economic inequalities; illustrate larger systemic problems through local examples; encourage democratic public life; and foster engagement, creativity, and critical thought. 

Among her many projects, Samara produced About Anyplace, Brooklyn, an audio walking tour of Downtown Brooklyn that uses documentary sounds, interviews and guided observation to explore the critical issues of development, displacement and public space in downtown Brooklyn. The piece was part of the Conflux Festival 2007, the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice.

Samara’s Teen in White Pants Passes Man in White Hat: The Surveillance of Everyday Life was a public art project that documented the street activity of her Brooklyn neighborhood as seen through the many surveillance cameras in the area. The video footage she captured by placing her own “spy lenses” next to existing surveillance cameras revealed the non-criminal, mundane nature of the majority of street activity - families carrying laundry or groceries; strangers negotiating space; children running or dancing. By creating captions describing the action she filmed and placing them at the location of the event, she brought attention to the surveillance cameras and encouraged pedestrians to examine the nature of public life in the neighborhood.

In describing her artistic focus Samara writes: “I’m interested in documentary interventions in and about public space. My work often asks, 'What is here? What was here? What could be here?' I ask these questions, in different ways, with different media, to call attention to the constructed environment.”

Teaching Artist News
Tali Hinkis performed at MoMA as part of LoVid, the interdisciplinary duo she formed with her husband Kyle Lapidus. Their work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. Their MoMA show featured a new performance called VideoFingerprints that uses the electrical signals from people's bodies to create live video and sound.
LoVid also has a new print edition available at Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery as part of Fragments, a series of mini masterpieces by exceptional contemporary artists. All the works are fragments of larger pieces by the same artist and were created especially for this unique project.

This summer LoVid are artists in residency at Cue Art Foundation. Stop by their studio to see what they’re working on.

Brian Buckley’s Color Light Sculptures are available in Limited Edition prints at the prestigious June Bateman Fine Art gallery in New York’s Soho area (by appointment) and online at www.junebateman.com/.

Jessica Lauretti’s work as a Filmmaker and Musician can be sampled at www.jessicalauretti.com.

Alicia Ernst
Alicia Ernst is a freelance editor and producer living in Manhattan with her husband, John Katzman, and two children, Daniel (12 years) and Lyra (10 years). She was formerly an editor at Mademoiselle Magazine, and the Director of Research and Development at The Princeton Review. In addition to Magic Box, Alicia is on the board of Ice Theatre of New York and The Dalton School Parents Association, and is active in political and arts fundraising. Alicia has a BA in Political Science from Wellesley College and an MA in Instructional Technology from Columbia University.

Our thanks to the following for their generous on-going support of our Galley Exhibit at 180 Maiden Lane: Cushman & Wakefield, Pearl Foundation, Premier Mounts and Sharp Electronics Corporation.
Legal assistance provided by Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP.