Talent Agency Students and Teaching

Students that enrolled in Talent Agency's programs come from every ethnic background, some are recent immigrants, some are physically and intellectually disabled youth. These are teens from the most economically disadvantaged backgrounds who cannot afford expensive pre-college art programs. There were a lot of LGB and transgendered teens that found a second home in Talent Agency. I got to know most of these student pretty well during this summer intensive, some returned for the fall programming. I usually never know the full extent of the challenges a student faces when they are in Talent Agency because when they are there, they are there to learn and make their art. The few times a student has opened up to me I have gotten to know not only what they have overcome, but what they actually want to accomplish, which can be limited by the scope of considerations they have had up to the point of joining the program. When they know their skill can applied in so many different ways, that's the best feeling. Both of you see and can obtain a better future.

Pictured above is one of the four openings I helped put on with Talent Agency, its kind of blurry because I'm usually running around chatting and enjoying the show. These shows are important not only because we get to meet the families, show off our accomplishments, and enjoy the art, but they're important because this is often a students first encounter with the audience of their work. Included in the conversation about college is conversations about what the art world is and what we see our roles in shaping that world.

I developed relationships with family’s and caretakers to encourage this sense of college readiness and to get to know my students better. This is harder to quantify because parents often only came to the end of the semester art shows. Unlike public education where there were often parent teacher conferences or other administrators and teachers making contact with students, we had to facilitate and encourage this contact on our own. I got better at developing these relationships over the course of my time at Talent Agency.

Conversations about college and post-high school graduation for families that are economically disadvantaged can be tough, but Dorene and Yvonne knew many routes to funding. Once a student showed promise with their portfolio and talked with college recruiters and counselors they were often offered financial help. My job usually consisted of teaching the students and preparing work for their portfolios but I did gain familiarity with the proper routes for college readiness, financial aid, and portfolio preparation.

Programming at Talent Agency

Programming at Talent Agency is diverse, the bulk of the program consists of college level studio courses. The foundation of these studio courses is drawing, lots of drawing. I taught drawing and painting during the fall of '15 and the spring, fall, and summer of '16 in various capacities.

This is me teaching painting in the warehouse basement in the Fall of '15 for the first time. I had three students that day, and Asal is assisting me to the far right. Students were tasked with a simple monochromatic painting, this was not their first time painting but it was their first time painting using higher quality materials. Golden paints are donated to the program and students often paint on un-stretched canvas which is a rarity for this age level.

Drawing programs are on Fridays. They are colloquially called Art and Pizza Friday, held from 3:00 pm- 8:30 pm on a rolling acceptance basis. The pizza provided was to make sure students had something to eat, and it broke up the continuous two hours sessions. The format was usually centered on a single exercise expanded int more challenging prompts as the night went on. Often it w as still life, drawing the model from life, or an unusual challenge that applied students representational skills to creative improvisation.

This took place during the summer '16 art intensive where students took drawing in the morning for 3 hours before departing to work on their concentrations. The student pictured here is having trouble starting her composition and I am drawing on a sheet of paper with her to problem solve some approaches to the exercise. I often work best with students one on one, I illustrate concepts in lectures but do not hesitate to offer completely differing approaches and techniques if they are relevant to a students progress. Tanisha was a student that struggled with representational drawing but loved drawing with established patterns, i.e. hearts, flowers, and manga. Breaking established habits was as hard as instilling basic skills in students, after working with high school aged students for a little over 7 years I have built up strategies for combating a variety of stubborn drawing ticks that stifle creativity.

On Saturdays from 10:00 am-3:00 pm. students are instructed in a variety of media with focus on creating a body of work for the portfolio in the student’s chosen concentration. These include painting, illustration, digital design, sculpture, fashion, photo, etc. I was in charge of teaching painting and assisting with various other disciplines. I have a mastery of common 2-D dry and wet media but also dabble in ceramics, sculpture, digital illustration, and photo. I have taught these media to a variety of ages and by far the hardest to teach can be painting, it requires a lot of discipline to acquire command of the skill set desirable to most beginner students. These means of production are easily achieved by other means, so philosophically and technically painting is difficult to encourage good artistic habits and deep investigation.

Students who studied painting with me, as is often the case, would be able to attend only one or two Saturdays in a row. The program encourages students to stay with it and will only provide services to those that are serious and commit time to the program. Other mitigating factors often lead to the best attendance one could hope for in this student population so I had to be flexible in how I taught lessons. Students often required intense individual instruction and I had to balance different projects and timelines with the constant need to scaffold knowledge from previous lessons.

Among more traditional projects I taught specific skills and more creative approaches to paint application. Drawing was approached similarly, traditional drawing from life was the foundation for more creative approaches later on. This adherence to drawing as the foundation built better illustrators, photographers, and sculptors because sketches diagrammed out plans for more ambitious work. The process of bending subjective or impulsive movements into more objective representations builds a discipline in students to consider their output objectively. Students that walk away from a drawing class with representational drawing skills have a sense of command to their voice even though they may struggle to find challenging or innovative things to say. giving students the sense that they can make what they see gives them the knowledge that they can make what they do not see in the world.