Author Archives: Jen Lehe

About Jen Lehe

Jen Lehe is CMA's Manager of Strategic Partnerships, overseeing programs for learners throughout their lives. Jen directed the IMLS-funded Making Creativity Visible initiative and launched the Leaders in Creativity fellowship to build teachers’ capacity to advocate beyond their classrooms. Jen holds an Masters in Arts in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BFA in Photography from NYU. When she’s not at CMA, she’s gardening with her pit bull, Chompsky.

Learn at Home Creativity Challenges

Posted on by

Learn at Home Creativity Challenges

At Columbus Museum of Art we love collaborating with teachers. It is so exciting to see the remarkable ways that educators support purposeful learning, and we love to amplify the amazing practices happening in contexts all over our communities. In this time of #learnfromhome, we’ve been sharing just some of these exciting ideas to cultivate creativity with #teach4creativity and #myCMAatHome – if you are a teacher, we invite you to use those hashtags on twitter to find ideas and to share how you are sparking imaginative and critical thinking.

We are also sharing a resource packet developed by artist, art teacher and CMA’s first teacher-in-residence, Jason Blair. Jason has been one of CMA’s thought-partners for years, first by joining and later helping lead our Teaching for Creativity initiatives. 

When Ohio schools moved to online instruction, Jason was ready with these dynamic ways families can foster creativity. Each week we will share one of his creativity challenges on Twitter, and you can find the whole resource packet here. 

While Jason’s audience is children learning at home, you may find these challenges are a great family bonding experience – or a fun way to add interest to your next Zoom happy hour! 

What is a creativity challenge?

What: Creativity challenges are short prompts inviting imagination. They are often playful or contain unexpected juxtapositions (e.g. Design a feast for dragons). Creativity challenges are generally meant to be completed quickly (5 to 10 minutes) so that no one feels too intimidated to create. However, you might also think about how to build on a challenge prompt, especially if the creators want to take the idea further.

Why: As a recurring routine, especially when coupled with regular reflection, creativity challenges foster a culture of creative thinking and problem solving. They are quick and often fun; whimsical prompts set an unintimidating tone to help people “dive in.” Over time, they help people build comfort with ambiguity. While playful, challenges prompt us to do a lot of wondering and figuring out, and push us to represent ideas in different ways.

How: Begin with a collection of prompts (some Creativity Challenges can be found at makingcreativityvisible.edublogs.org) and open-ended, non-precious materials such as clean recyclables and scraps from craft projects. Keep work time short to emphasize that this is to be a draft rather than a finished product. Over time, you and others will get the hang of what makes a good challenge and you can devise your own.

For more about creativity challenges, including downloadable lists of prompts, check out CMA’s Making Creativity Visible resources site.

– Jen Lehe is CMA’s Manager of Strategic Partnerships, overseeing programs for learners throughout their lives. Jen directed the IMLS-funded Making Creativity Visible initiative and launched the Leaders in Creativity fellowship to build teachers’ capacity to advocate beyond their classrooms. Jen holds an Masters in Arts in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BFA in Photography from NYU. When she’s not at CMA, she’s gardening with her pit bull, Chompsky.

 

Creativity and the Age of COVID-19

Posted on by

You’ve probably seen the quotation going around social media: “If you think artists are useless try to spend your quarantine without music, books, poems, movies and paintings.” It’s pithy and it rings true – how many of us are getting lost in books that have long sat on our shelves, watching that show everyone’s been talking about, or playfully recreating museum masterpieces in our living rooms? These experiences provide us with much needed diversion and stimulation at a time when we are cut off from many of our standard outlets.

This, however, is only part of the story of why we need art and artists now more than ever. The bigger reason has to do with what creativity can do for us.

Experiencing and creating art enables us to see the world in different ways. When we look at a painting, or listen to a piece of music, or attend a performance, we are experiencing a momentarily different world. The artist is showing us something we have never seen. In turn, we bring our lives and experiences to that moment, creating something totally unique. Artist and viewer, connecting across time and space, create a temporary world with its own rules. If just for a moment, we feel as much as see that the world could be otherwise.

To be sure, creativity lives in all domains, not just the arts. Creativity is the process of using imagination and critical thinking to generate a new idea of value. When we create— whether a painting, a poem, a new recipe, or a solution to a daily challenge – we are imagining a possibility and applying critical thinking until we find the right way that bring that idea into the world. At Columbus Museum of Art, we embrace artists as models of creativity because they constantly imagine and create in the face of ambiguity and with a desire to shake off status quo ways of being. To “think like an artist” is to question everything, embrace complexity, attend to human needs and impulses, and have the courage to forge a new path through – and into – uncertainty. And we are living in very uncertain times indeed. Happily, we are surrounded by examples of people making new paths by walking, with creativity, through this ambiguity.

Creativity is musicians livestreaming powerful performances from their homes or playing curbside concerts from the backs of pick-up trucks;

Creativity is photographers creating quarantine porch portraits in exchange for donations to non-profits;

Creativity is neighbors creating signal systems  to help communicate with those who live alone – and creating sidewalk chalk obstacle courses to bring each other cheer;

Creativity is the grocery clerk devising a zero-contact system for elderly patrons to get what they need;

Creativity is teachers staging socially-distanced parades  around their students’ neighborhoods to say “we miss you;”

And creativity is everyone from scientists at Columbus-based Battle coming up with a new way to sterilize PPE masks to the quilter next door to asking, How can my talents help protect those on the front lines?

Through creativity we not only imagine new possibilities, we create something out of that vision. We ask “what if,” we embrace a guiding “why,” and we act. It is our individual and collective creativity that will see us through this storm. Art, artists, and our own creative impulses give us hope and agency to build new worlds around purposeful possibilities. What could be a more remarkable gift and a more worthy provocation for our times?

– Jen Lehe is CMA’s Manager of Strategic Partnerships, overseeing programs for learners throughout their lives. Jen directed the IMLS-funded Making Creativity Visible initiative and launched the Leaders in Creativity fellowship to build teachers’ capacity to advocate beyond their classrooms. Jen holds an Masters in Arts in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BFA in Photography from NYU. When she’s not at CMA, she’s gardening with her pit bull, Chompsky.

 

Art and Poetry: Playing with Words

Posted on by

A lot of people tense up when they hear the “p” word, but poetry is just another way to play with words, sounds, images, and ideas. At Columbus Museum of Art we have a special tour called Art and the Language of Poetry. We love to help people who may not think of themselves as poets to look closely at art to think differently, wonder, imagine, and write poems inspired by art. (If you really want to impress your friends, there’s a word for poetry inspired by visual art: “ekphrastic poetry”).

There is no wrong way to write a poem, but this is a method I like to use to just dive in. You don’t need any poetry knowledge or prior experience to use this approach.

In honor of National Poetry Month try it out and share your creation on social media with #myCMAatHome so we can see how you are playing with words!

Step 1: Pick an artwork. At the bottom of this post, we have some visitor favorites from the CMA collection, or you can browse the CMA collection to find another.

You may also choose an artwork in your home – by you or by another artist. I chose John Sloan’s Spring Planting, Greenwich Village because it makes me think about how I am re-starting my own garden right now.

Step 2: Observe, Describe, Interpret, Question We always start museum experiences by looking closely and describing what we see. One way to do this is to take a sheet of paper and divide it into 3 sections and write “I Notice…” at the top of one. Look closely at the artwork you’ve chosen and describe what you see. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, complete sentences, or writing something that sounds like poetry. Just write what comes to mind.

Once you’ve written a lot of noticings, start a new section with “I Think…” Start piecing them together and fill in the “I Think” section with what you think might be happening, or what the work makes you think about. Then, write “I Wonder…” and record what questions the artwork brings to your mind.

If you are trying this out in a group, you can also do this out loud, but be sure to have someone jotting down what people say.

Step 3: Select Read through what you wrote, and circle the words or phrases that seem most juicy, important, or interesting.

Step 4: Arrange and Rearrange Once you’ve selected the juicy words, recopy them onto scraps of paper so that you can easily rearrange them. You might also change the words slightly so they flow differently.

Take some time to physically move the words around, playing around with different sequences. Don’t worry about rhyming or grammar – that’s not what poetry is about! You don’t have to use all your juicy words.

And viola – it’s a poem!

Watcher in the window, watcher on the fence
Smiling, supporting; leaning, indifferent
Lone tree in the corner
Nothing but dirt.

Many visitor-poets like to title their creations (maybe I’ll use the discarded phrase “Not Dressed for This”). You might also like to recite your poem to others, remembering that the way you read your poem aloud adds a new layer of meaning.

And yet more poetry
As I was observing this artwork, I realized that although it is an urban scene, nature plays an important role. This made me think of a haiku, which evoke nature and follow a structure of three lines — two lines of five syllables and one line of seven syllables sandwiched in the middle.

Since you’ve already looked closely at, thought, and wondered about the poem, try writing five phrases of five or seven syllables on slips of paper, so that you can mix and match them. Remember: writing a haiku is not just about the syllable count, but theme. Haikus should evoke nature.

So, after creating, sorting, and rearranging five- and seven-syllable phrases evoking nature, you’ve got a haiku!

Big city quiet
Flap, gaze, bask, grow–unaware
Trees rise, unperturbed

So try this way of playing with words, and share your creation with us on social media by tagging us @columbusmuseum and using #myCMAatHome.

Ready to try? Here are some CMA visitor favorites if you’re looking for inspiration to get started.

– Jen Lehe is CMA’s Manager of Strategic Partnerships, overseeing programs for learners throughout their lives. Jen directed the IMLS-funded Making Creativity Visible initiative and launched the Leaders in Creativity fellowship to build teachers’ capacity to advocate beyond their classrooms. Jen holds an Masters in Arts in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BFA in Photography from NYU. When she’s not at CMA, she’s gardening with her pit bull, Chompsky.

 

Center for Art and Social Engagement Debuts

Posted on by

Center for Art and Social Engagement

 

We at CMA love asking “what if.” Imagining is one of our favorite pastimes. A couple of years ago we asked ourselves, what if we took the experimental spirit that fuels our Chase Center for Creativity and applied it to art that speaks to social issues relevant today? What could creative activation and social engagement look like at the museum?

These and similar questions had been churning through our minds for a few years when we got the exciting news that CMA had been awarded funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Museums for America program to launch the Center for Art and Social Engagement. 

We had long been experimenting to foster visitor conversations about social issues through art, but the IMLS funding would kick us into the next gear.  As you might imagine, the news was thrilling and a little bit scary.  Now came the hard part.

The first step was asking ourselves, what do we mean by ‘social engagement,’ and how do we hope visitors – and the museum – will be different as a result of this initiative?  These early conversations were exciting, but broad; our imaginations were pulling us in a million directions. So almost on a whim, someone suggested we pull out CMA’s primary book of social commentary art, In the Eye of the Storm: An Art of Conscience, and open it to a random page. We opened to George Tooker’s Lunch and began, as museum educators always do, to notice. We surfaced dozens of ideas that could point us toward a theme. The one that rose to the surface was isolation. The work is packed with figures, apparently seated in rungs, slouched forward and looking down. Although they are crowded together, each seems alone. Some appear to be holding sandwiches, one a cup of coffee. Visitors sometimes remark that the posture and feeling of disconnection reminds them of people on their cellphones. 

I don’t want to say too much, because I don’t want to limit how you explore the work on your own. Suffice it to say that for us the work evoked personal isolation, as well as, social exclusion. Our noticing surfaced the loneliness of being near others but feeling alienated from them, and it raised the sociopolitical question of who “gets a seat at the table.” 

Both isolation and alienation impact us all of us, in different ways, that are personal, social and political. 

We are living in times characterized by superficial connections and profound loneliness; a recent study found that 1 in 5 Americans “always” or “often” feel socially isolated. Moreover, while the rights movements of the past decades have achieved undeniable gains, persistent power imbalance means that massive inequities remain a societal toxin. 

When you visit the Center for Art and Social Engagement, we hope you will have the courage to consider your own experiences of loneliness, isolation, exclusion, and to imagine the lives of others. We have mined the collection to find works that speak to different aspects of isolation and exclusion; we encourage you to slow down with them. We will also be launching a special tour and hosting creative encounters with artists around this theme – so stay tuned for program announcements.

We also hope you will build connections with other people through experiences in the Center. We have included games – some familiar, some created especially for CASE. These will help you connect with someone you visit the museum with or perhaps a stranger you meet in the gallery. Some will also help you think differently about some of the structures that push people to the margins and limit their wellbeing. 

Lastly, we hope visiting CASE will inspire you to take action, for yourself and for others. We have crowdsourced some tips for fighting isolation, and included local resources for mental health and other kinds of support, as well as, organizations that combat social exclusion and that need your help.

Loneliness and exclusion thrive when we are afraid to name them. We hope this inaugural installation of the Center for Art and Social Engagement will help us break those taboos, build new connections, and engage in new, creative, relevant ways. 

The Center for Art and Social Engagement is funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. 

 

 

 

 

 

-Jen Lehe, CMA Manager for Strategic Partnerships.