Jonathan Lee with works from the “Curriculum Lab” art exhibition (Photo by Jay Paul)
In the bustling James Branch Cabell Library, with Starbucks-in-hand VCU students scurrying past to study, Jonathan Lee explains that, for the last four years, he’s been collecting waste from the library.
During the library’s 2015 renovation and expansion, he began noticing a lot of discarded materials, some of which had a sense of history to them. “Book due-date slips with multicolored stamps and markings, stuff like that,” says Lee, who was part of the library’s expansion team. “I like [old] materials that can be reinterpreted in different ways to talk about larger issues.”
In the same way a vinyl collector rummages through “free records” boxes at music stores, Lee picked through the compactor-bound objects. He focused on small card pockets, which used to be plastered on the inside back covers of juvenile books in the library’s collection. An idea came to Lee, who is a library collection specialist as well as a visual artist: a collaborative art project, created with materials from the library and larger community, by community artists, for the benefit of the community. He called it “Curriculum Lab.”
“It’s a way to connect a lot of people through a creative initiative, but one that would do some real and see-able good in Richmond,” Lee says. The proceeds from the sale of “Curriculum Lab” artwork will benefit the ELLA program of the Richmond Performing Arts Alliance, a program using arts integration — dance, theater, visual arts and music — to teach early literacy to preschool students.
The “Curriculum Lab” exhibition, which is composed of about 400 pieces of work, each created on 3.5-by-3-inch cards, inspired by the discarded library card pockets and displayed in grids, opens at Studio Two Three Nov. 1. Twenty artists contributed to “Curriculum Lab,” including Lee himself, Matt Lively, Bizhan Khodabandeh, Aimee Joyaux and Sarah Irvin. Irvin created cyanotypes on her cards, coating the bottom of each card with a chemical that turns blue in sunlight.
“I found objects that directly related to the text on the card and placed them on top of the light-sensitive paper when I exposed them,” says Irvin, “leaving the area around the object free to turn blue in the sunlight and keeping the area under the object the color of the paper. In many cases the result became abstract, despite the object being a very literal response to the text.” By viewing the text and images on her pieces, Irvin spurs viewers to “consider [the] relationship between language, material objects and visual representation.” She is also director of Current Art Fair, where the “Curriculum Lab” exhibition will be previewed on Sept. 30, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Main Street Station.
Artist Sarah Irvin contributed a series of cyanotypes to the "Curriculum Lab" exhibition. Says Lee, “Sarah’s piece in this set is very clever. It’s a cyanotype of a pack of birth control.” Left to right, from top, the artists represented are: Michael-Birch Pierce, Nathan Tersteeg, x, Leigh Suggs, Genesis Chapman, Michael-Birch Pierce, Blythe King, Jonathan Lee, Matt Lively, Sarah Irvin, Katie McBride, Ron Lee, Tom Condon, Brooke Inman, Katie Wood, Tyler Thomas, Andrea Owens, Aimee Joyaux, Bizhan Khodabandeh and Sayaka Suzuki. (Photo by Shaun Aigner-Lee)
Pushing past a curious exhibition into the territory of “big and innovative,” Lee says, “I didn’t want to do this and just have it be a fundraiser.”
Based on the same materials that the artists used to create their pieces for the exhibition, Lee created workshops to teach visual and information literacy techniques to youth. He tested the workshops with teens at Richmond Performing Arts Alliance and Richmond Young Writers program this summer. For one of the workshop activities, the kids paired up and asked each other one question: “Who do you think you are?” They couldn’t ask any other questions; this enabled people to present themselves as they see themselves. After considering the response, the questioner then drew a portrait of the other person, which allowed them to create a more complete picture beyond physical traits of the person across from them. “We create this new paradigm between text and image that I feel is important,” says Lee. “It’s an approach to figuring these things out in a slightly different way.”
Noting that much of our time is spent as passive viewers to active streams of visual data on our computers, smartphones and TVs, Lee says that young people especially are bombarded constantly with images. “Eighty to 90 percent of the information most people get is through a visual medium,” he says. “I don’t know how much any of us, really, is able to process.” The goal is to give young people tools to break down and interpret the images they see. Without this understanding, Lee says, we run the risk of missing much, or being influenced by the message behind the images, without realizing it.
“As an artist and librarian, I think a lot about visual narratives, and the stories that images create,” Lee says.
Lee will preview the “Curriculum Lab” exhibition and host a roundtable discussion at the Current Art Fair (Sept. 28-Oct. 1) on Sept. 30, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Main Street Station.
The exhibition will go up Nov. 1 at Studio Two Three (3300 W. Clay St.), with a Nov. 4 open house, and run through Nov. 19. The artwork will be available for sale in an online store on Lee’s website when the exhibition opens.
Additional “Curriculum Lab” workshops and events are scheduled for Nov. 12 and 19; see the website for details.
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