Successful Opening for Picture This! – Our First Exhibit of Student Work

Chelsea HS student work on exhibit.

FREE!
8:30 am - 5:30 pm • Mon. - Fri.
180 Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan
(between Front and South Streets near South Street Seaport)

More than thirty elementary, middle and high schools from every borough of New York City are represented in Picture This!, our exhibit of children’s photography, animation and documentary video currently on display in The Gallery at 180 Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan.

The exhibit was curated by Millie Burns, Director of the Hewitt Gallery of Art, and includes works chosen from hundreds created during Magic Box school residencies.

The April 2 opening reception was attended by more than a hundred guests including student artists and their families and teachers, along with funders, arts and educational professionals, and friends of Magic Box.

Response to the exhibit was overwhelmingly positive. Arlene Jordan, Education Director at New York City Center commented: “Picture This! is an extraordinary exhibition of original student work in photography, video and animation. The moving and still images I witnessed are powerful. Magic Box teaching artists know how to convey their artistry and inspire creativity and voice within each child.”

William Kasuli, Director of the Arts in the NYC Department of Education Office of Strategic Partnerships & External Initiatives, noted: “One of the best ways to reach students is to let them speak ... and this … project invites us into their homes and their hearts. One can not put a price on the importance of this work.”

Picture This! has been featured in The New York Times, Time Out New York Kids and New York Family.

Chelsea High School student photographer Desdamona Ivey in front of her work with teacher Kiri Bermack & Magic Box Executive Director.

Picture This! School Gallery Tours & Workshops
October is Arts & Humanities Month, and Magic Box will join the nationwide celebration as we host a series of school visits to Picture This! Students will be inspired by the work of their peers as they receive a guided tour by a Magic Box teaching artist and participate in a special hands-on photography, video or animation workshop.

National Arts and Humanities Month is a coast-to-coast collective celebration of culture in America. Coordinated by Americans for the Arts, it has become the largest annual celebration of the arts and humanities in the nation. Communities across the United States join together to recognize the importance of arts and culture in our daily lives.

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.

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.