"A Year with Children 2021" is the result of the Guggenheim’s Learning Through Art (LTA) program, which engages students in grades two to six from across the five boroughs, encouraging these young artists to explore impactful art and ideas through their own unique perspectives. LTA has served New York City public schools for 50 years, and the featured pieces in this exhibition are the result of an unprecedented year in the program’s history, marked by a global pandemic that nonetheless could never diminish the accomplishments of LTA’s teaching artists and the New York City classroom teachers they collaborate with to reach students in new and engaging forms every year even when they can’t be together in person.
 
LTA students embark on an extended exploration of processes, materials, and techniques to express their singular artistic visions, incorporating multimodal approaches, including text, music, games, and collaboration. By understanding foundational concepts, students are able to experiment with a variety of forms of expression to consider essential questions, such as “How can we portray different sides of ourselves through art?” or “How can we express and access our emotions through art?” They develop responses through a process of seeing, dialogue, and creation. The works in this exhibition express that process.

Installation view, "A Year with Children 2021", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, April 30–June 21, 2021. Photo: David Heald

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A Year with Children 2021

In this track, Director of School, Youth, and Family Programs Greer Kudon talks about the origins of the LTA program, and teaching artists Jeff Hopkins, Joey Hauk Weiss, and Diane Matyas discuss their experiences working with students.

TRANSCRIPT:
Diane Matyas: Art is about lifting your life higher. I mean, we are just carbon, right? [Laughs.] We’re just some smudges. We’re a very tiny entity. Yet we have so much emotion, feelings, passion. In particular, we’re attracted to things. And what we wear, what we sense, what we think is important comes out, hopefully, through art.
Joey Hauk Weiss: There was a student today who—we we’re making collages of buildings—and wanted to make a collage of a dream he had had that was of abstract shapes. And I certainly was not going to say no to that. It was just a really interesting idea in the first place. It looked a bit like a Russian Constructivist painting. It had floating shapes, and it was interesting.
Jeff Hopkins: There was a student who was new to the country and was really self-conscious about speaking in front of his classmates. He would make these beautiful origami figures but never spoke to me. For much of the year, we communicated through art. He would make drawings. He would show them proudly. Then one day we went out to do a sketching, like a neighborhood-walk sketching, and we were walking around. And we were going to go in one direction around the corner, and he grabbed me and he said, “Mr. Jeff, don’t go that way. That’s where I live.” 
He spoke. And I said, “Wow, wow.” Part of it was that I think he finally built up enough of a rapport where he knew he could say something, and all was going to be good. And I was going to listen to him and respect him. And what happens is the art allows for a type of connection between me and a student. 
Greer Kudon: I’m Greer Kudon, and I’m the Director of School, Youth, and Family Programs at the Guggenheim.
H: I am Jeff Hopkins. I am a teaching artist with the Learning Through Art program.
W: My name is Joey Weiss. I went to school for painting. I knew I was potentially interested in teaching, and I decided that I wanted to do more of it.
M: My name is Diane Matyas. I am an artist and a teaching artist. It’s about response to the world. That’s what visual art can be, or music is: the response to the world that you’re living in. So that’s a high-priority problem to solve.
H: The more I do this and the more experience I have, the more I break it down to something very simple, which is that art is a very human thing. There’s a need for humans to make things and to create things and respond to the world around them. And children, in particular, have that need. They’re processing so many things in the world, and in their lives, and in their families, and in themselves. And ultimately, it just comes down to the fact that as human beings, we need a way or a place to do that. And art can be that thing.
Ultimately, I know and understand all of the research in the art-education field about why the arts are important and why they have significant impact on the way students learn, and the way they think, and the way their brains function. And I believe all those things. But what I see is that children come alive, and they wake up, and they breathe, and they feel when they make art. And I think that’s just part of being human. And somehow, the art allows them to tap into that. And that is what I love.

To read the full transcript, visit: https://www.guggenheim.org/audio/track/an-introduction-to-teaching-through-art.

Installation view, "A Year with Children 2021", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, April 30–June 21, 2021. Photo: David Heald

An Introduction to Teaching Through Art

Hear Guggenheim staff member Christa Stephens and her 13-year-old son, Kayo, discuss the impact arts and music education has had on him, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests.  

TRANSCRIPT:
Kayo Stephens: We had to do a black-and-white portrait of ourselves, so we took a picture in black and white originally, and then we had to use pastel. We were given a black pastel and a white pastel. And basically, we had to emulate the light and the shadows and everything, which was quite interesting. I really liked that project. It was quite fun.

Christa Stephens: This conversation was really special because it was a moment, just the two of us being able to really delve into a subject that we don't really talk about, you know? You just go to the museum or, you know, I see his artwork from school, but I don't often ask him, you know, “How did this come about?” or “How do you feel about it?” 

Kayo: Basically, the idea was that we had to choose a celebrity or someone famous, and a good picture, put it in black and white as well.  We had to use three tones—gray, white, and black—to reproduce that picture. Using the black and the gray was really interesting because you get to see the difference in the shadows

Christa: It was nice to actually hear the reasoning behind what he’s doing. I think just that he appreciates his teachers. He appreciates the work that he’s being given. He's thoughtful about it, I think. He’s like thinking about how he wants to do these different assignments that he’s given.

Kayo: One thing that I did like about art is how it wasn’t that much of a structured, like really, really structured class—like math, like French class, like those kinds of classes. But having art, it was more like a creative process, so you could take more time to do your project.  

Christa: His school is very art and music focused. I’m so grateful for that because it’s given him an excuse and a reason to really hone that skill. 

Kayo: We had to create a sculpture at first, and it had to be three-dimensional. So what I did was I created a face, and the face was double-sided. So the first side expressed things about social justice and civil rights. The person had an eye patch with the Black Lives Matter fist on it. And his eyebrow and his other eye with the LGBTQ+ rainbow flag. And on the other side it was about COVID-19. So basically, the character had a mask. And in his eyes, it was written, “two million,” because two million people died from the COVID-19 at that point. There’s still more, sadly. 

And the one thing that both had in common was I’d put tears. I’d done makeshift tears out of playing cards on both sides of the face, because showing how angry we were—how angry 2020 has made us, and how people in power weren't doing anything about it.

Christa: Being African American, the news was quite dismal with relation to the number of people affected from minority communities. How it was affecting minority communities in the beginning, we didn't know. 

Then from March, fast forward to that summer, George Floyd was killed. So again, being a Black woman and Kayo being a Black male, there were a lot of feelings around what was going on. But I didn't want to hide him from it—hide it from him, I should say. I wanted him to know what was going on and understand what was going on. 

He was 12, so he turned 13 in September. In retrospect, I think it was okay because I feel like having that reality helped him to be aware of what was going on. But it was definitely a decision and something that I had to think about—and my husband as well. How much bad news do we want him to see every day?

Kayo: I was able to express how I felt about today’s world and about chaos. And how chaotic today’s society is.

To read the full transcript, visit: https://www.guggenheim.org/audio/track/a-mother-son-conversation-on-the-arts-during-challenging-times.

A Mother-Son Conversation on the Arts during Challenging Times

Listen to audio about exhibitions and artworks at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark building is home to a collection of modern and contemporary masterpieces.