The Learning Zone

This Wednesday, the Learning Zone launched a student exhibit featuring visual and new media work from students and graduates of OCAD University’s Art and Design Education Lab (ADEL). Curated by Pam Patterson, Leena Raudvee, Marta Chudolinska and Daniel Payne, the work in Artists Teaching represents the anxieties, pleasures and challenges the artists have encountered as emerging art and design educators.

“In speaking to art and design education, one tends to reference curriculum, the students taught, the educational contexts, and teachers’ pedagogy; but what about our own unique experiences of, and affective, experiential and aesthetic responses to teaching and learning? Our process as artists inextricably intertwines art making and multileveled learning. We are responsive to and responsible for our own personal and project development and their realization. As art and design educators we reflect on our teaching moments and in doing so inform our art practice; this is a reciprocal and complex relationship.”

Pictured above, fourth year illustration student Hudson Christie used the remnants of his students’ art to create a symbol of how he learned to teach, the Ouroboros, or the serpent eating its own tail.

In addition to Christie, the artists featured in Artists Teaching are Megan D’Angelo, Nazli Nahidi, Hareem Qureshy, Peter Rahul, Julia Sardinha, Angela Stoilkova and Cassidy Tam. Above, fiber artist Tam’s installation — made of silk, wool, cotton, natural dyes and water-soluble fabric paint — aims to trigger multiple senses while raising awareness of the endangered bumblebee.

As a partner to the Artists Teaching exhibit in the Learning Zone, Teaching Artists is showing the work of OCADU faculty JJ Lee, Mei Lee Ogden, Amy Swartz and Natalie Waldburger at the University of Toronto’s CWSE Gallery (252 Bloor St. W, 2nd floor). The work in this sister exhibit addresses the complexity and playfulness of the art and learning relationship. Both exhibits run until November 29th.

To book an exhibit in the Learning Zone, visit the submissions page for more information.