This month Shawna had the team help her demo a few Mizzen activities! They gathered to create a call for art for the fall conference using the Teens Curate Teens Collection. The collection is a series of 6 activities, empowering teens to curate their very own art exhibition. The activities begin with developing a theme and end with the students opening the exhibition. Shawna will be using these activities to guide her process of creating an art exhibition for the fall conference, engaging her team along the way. 

This month she had them work on the first two activities in the collection, Developing a Theme & Creating the Open Call for Art. When developing a theme, the activity really focuses on teens brainstorming topics or issues important to them. Since the Network team is not teens, they decided their focus should be on afterschool. With some brainstorming, they decided they wanted their theme to be focused on their celebration of 35 years of the CT Afterschool Network. They didn’t have to do much research on this topic, but recommend you have your students do some research related to the topics and issues they are interested in. 

Since they decided on their theme, it was time to choose a title. This is where Shawna turned to Jamboard, a great way to collaborate virtually, since they were all on zoom. For in person though, she’d recommend giving students post-it to write their ideas on, that way it’s easier to group common themes and see where the majority interests lie. Here were some of the titles the team came up with.

They ultimately decided they loved the play on words and phrasing of “For the Love of Afterschool”, and briefly discussed their curatorial statement, which describes their theme. In order to complete your call for art, you’ll need to finalize your curatorial statement, so that people have a clear idea of the types of things to include in the art you’d like to receive for your exhibition. 

Identifying the location for the exhibit was easy for the team considering they host the conference every year, so they moved on to deciding criteria for inclusion and logistic information for artists, regarding dimensions, types of art, and timelines. Once they got through the logistic stuff, it was time for creativity! Creating the flyer and social media posts! They explored the inspiration resources Mizzen had to offer; Adobe & Canva and chose a really cool template that they felt could be adapted to fit their colors and branding. Marla worked her Canva magic and… 

made this ↓ into this ↓

Once they had their visuals, they were ready to discuss their outreach plan and move onto next steps. Part of their outreach plan was determining when to launch, so keep an eye out for the release of the Networks call for art coming May 31st! And then, get your program together and create an awesome piece of art so Shawna and the team can demo the next activity in the Teens Curate Teens Collection, Selecting the Artwork. See you next month!