OCEAN AVENUE PROJECT
Out of Site Youth Arts Center
2004-05
The Ocean Avenue Project was a two-semester-long, after-school course designed to allow students to investigate and apply art techniques and ideas within the framework of urban history and their surrounding neighborhood. Many of our projects, discussions and field trips were centered on understanding how artists use their creative skills to investigate and express their ideas about their relationships to objects and places. Beyond regular explorations of the Ingleside neighborhood that Ocean Avenue passes through, there were visits to museums, galleries, artist studios, parks, and landfills.
Ocean Avenue Project 1 began with introductory drawing and painting exercises. These evolved into more complex observational studies both indoors and out-of-doors, making paintings of simple 3D objects as well as making photos, drawings and paintings of neighborhood sights and histories. The culminating project for OAP 1 was a diptych painting, based on two aspects of how students saw Ocean Avenue.
In OAP 2 we continued exploring ways to think spatially and sculpturally. We shifted our focus towards understanding physical, 3-dimensional space, and how to describe it visually. Projects ranged from basic structural form-building with foamcore to using plaster to build architecturally imaginative structures for an Ocean Avenue of the future. The final project for OAP 2 was a self-portrait sculpture, close to life-size, installed in the environment that most defined the artist.
OAP was co-taught with Leo Bersamina and Ana Szyld, OAP 2 with Ana Szyld, Amanda Herman as guest instructor, and Max Marttila as teaching assistant.