MAPLEWOOD/SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — Advanced art students at Columbia High School recently had an opportunity to push their personal and artistic boundaries thanks to performance-drawing demonstrations by CHS Artist-in-Residence Jennifer Wroblewski.
With performance drawing, the act of creation is turned into part of the art itself, forming a show for spectators. After seeing live demonstrations from Wroblewski and videos of other performance-drawing artists, the students from the AP Studio Art and AP Art 4 classes were given an opportunity to create their own pieces to be exhibited in the Domareki Gallery at the high school, and visitors from the school and the community were invited to visit the gallery as the students crafted their creations.
Wroblewski is an artist, curator and adjunct assistant professor at the SUNY Purchase School of Art and Design. Her work is comprised mainly of large-scale drawing installation and performance. She is a recipient of a 2009 NYFA Fellowship in Drawing, Printmaking and Book Arts, and her work has been reviewed and discussed in the New York Times, the Brooklyn Rail, Hi-Fructose and the Star-Ledger. Group exhibitions include “Timeless: the Art of Drawing” at the Morris Museum and “Contemporary Mark-Making: Blurring the Lines Between Drawing and Writing” at the Alpan Gallery.
Wroblewski’s work with the students started the last week of September, when she initially met with them and spent some time showing them YouTube videos of different performance-drawing artists.
The following week, on Oct. 6, Wroblewski conducted her own demonstration of performance drawing in the Domareki Gallery, allowing the students to see the process in person, and to participate in an in-depth discussion about the artwork.
“We talked about the diminished role of drawing the world. If you think of drawing for architecture or design, we’re still drawing, but because of technology we don’t use drawing the way we have culturally for thousands of years,” Wroblewski said in a recent interview with the News-Record.
“Drawing was probably the first human language; you can still do it and make the art about the act of drawing itself,” Wroblewski continued.
After discussing the art of drawing, the students made a series of proposals to Wroblewski based on how they felt about drawing. Armed with background knowledge regarding the process, the students then took to the Domareki Gallery on Oct. 8 to create their own pieces.
“I wanted them to understand drawing as something much larger than an aspect of describing something,” Wroblewski said. “It can be a performance or a behavior or a ritual, I just wanted them to disentangle drawing behavior from all of the things they normally associate it with. An implied part of the process is that the outcome did not matter. The only thing they should worry about is the performance.”
In an interview with the News-Record, Mara Rubin, the school district’s fine arts supervisor and Ellen Weisbord, the CHS AP Art teacher both expressed excitement about the work the students produced, but more importantly, about the students’ willingness to rise to the occasion for a project that required them to show vulnerability and trust in both themselves and their peers.
“Many students submitted their proposal ideas via email,” Weisbord said. “We asked them to do a minimum of half an hour, although some students used all three hours. We had to be able to balance floor vs. wall space, music vs. no music, and also the size of the pieces the students were creating.”
Due to the fact performance drawing is many times more concerned with the process of creating the piece than the actual finished product, Weisbord also arranged for Columbia’s film teacher to record the students at work. The video will be played in the gallery during the exhibit.
Altogether 17 students participated in the project, their pieces ranging in size, medium and inspiration. One thing common to every student experience is the challenge to explore what their art means to them.
“We just kind of threw them into this. We weren’t sure how they were going to rise to the occasion but they did,” Weisbord said. “This was one of the highlights of my teaching career, and I don’t say that lightly.”
Rubin echoed this sentiment, attributing the impressive results of the demonstration to the safe space Weisbord created for them.
“Ellen really created an opportunity for them to be very vulnerable and very challenged. The only way to fail was simply not to try and not put their whole selves into the experience,” she said. “One-hundred percent of them had a great time, and we’re expecting that this will open them up to greater possibilities.”
The students’ artwork will be on display in the Domareki Gallery at CHS through Oct. 23.