Upcoming Events

The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey is offering a Teacher’s Symposium on Monday, February 10, titled The Creative/Destruction Myth of the Phoenix.

A hallmark of the transformative power of art lies in its ability to promote open-ended problem-solving. Art fosters the ability to embrace ambiguity, to understand divergent perspectives, and to develop decision-making skills that thrive in a growth mindset. One that welcomes challenges and risk-taking, one that perceives effort as a path toward mastery and failure as an opportunity for learning.

In the art room, learners are notoriously compelled by self-imposed peer pressure to “look good,” to create nice-looking art. Art-making is risk-taking, to be sure. The Phoenix unit strives to tap into this vein by encouraging students to deliberately fail, or more accurately, to destroy something to recreate something new. This will challenge the learner because it presents participants with the expectation of exploring their tolerance for ambiguity. We grab the fixed mindset by the horns to tackle issues around fear of failure, comfort zones, and coveting the precious.

The workshop begins with members drawing either personal objects from observation or copying a painting or sculpture from art history. We then cover the entire sheet with a translucent coat of white gesso to deliberately destroy the drawing. When dry, the original drawing resurfaces as a ghost image that now provides suggestive possibilities for more layers of exploration. Participants can recover (redraw) the original, or use it as a springboard to transform content, narrative, and meaning.

As the group dynamic evolves, mindsets shift. Learners begin to appreciate the cycles of rediscovery and reworking as imagery and narratives change, disappear, and are reinvented. Additionally, students gain self-motivating habits as they begin to understand that it is not about the extrinsic rewards of a good-looking product, but about the intrinsic rewards of a process of discovery, inquisition, and accomplishment – not to mention the human qualities of inventiveness, joyfulness, and play.

Participants will gain a hands-on understanding of, and application for, a metacognitive awareness that kindles complex forms of problem-solving. One that readily adopts ambiguity as a gateway for the open-ended, decision-making skills indispensable to independent, critical thinking.

All of our Teacher’s symposium events offer unique professional development opportunities for art educators to come together and learn new creative skills to bring back to their classroom. The programs include:

• Presentation by the leading contemporary artist
• Hands-on artmaking workshop with the artist
• Gallery exercises exploring ways to view and interpret contemporary art
• Six professional development hours upon completion of the symposium
• Lesson plans as a take-home

Registration fees are $125 and include a light breakfast and all materials. Click here to register.

PLEASE NOTE: For any questions, or if your school needs to be invoiced in order to pay for this program, please contact us. Call 908-273-9121 ext 213 and speak with Rachel Aponte or email raponte@artcenternj.org