Citation Needed

Citation Needed is a year-long collaboration between the 14th-Street Y and artist Ari Wolff, designed to create project-based arts experiences for children and expand the scope and reach of youth voices through printed matter and book arts. Weekly workshops are grounded in offering techniques for artistic play within printmaking, xerography, book arts, drawing, writing, and comics. Coming from a framework inspired by concrete poetics, Reggio Emilia pedagogy, and socially engaged art education, this project seeks to invite spontaneous, process-based making that encourages creative agency and the expansion of access to children and young people’s art beyond typical school/afterschool settings.

3rd-5th graders work on on-going individual book projects, primarily using typewriters, drawing, and xerography. During the workshops, youth artists are encouraged to explore their ideas around reading images, the concept of “error,” and revise, reimagine, and/or destroy (copies) of their homework assignments. At the beginning of each class, we collaboratively decide how typewriters, xerography time, and drawing materials will be divided based on where everyone is in their project work. The project will culminate in a book launch and student reading, where copies of each project will be available for purchase.

Kindergarten-2nd graders work on individual and collaborative projects and create a culminating experiment at the end of each 8-week session. The first session was focused on bookmaking and culminated in the construction of an extremely long accordion book, which the children used to measure parts of the building. Their collaborative book reached from a fourth floor classroom to 14th Street. We are in the process of measuring and submitting our book to the Guinness Book of World Records.

This project has three distinct goals. Primarily, we seek to co-create transformative arts educational spaces in which children’s thoughts, ideas, and questions guide studio-based explorations. The second intention is to offer a place where children can experiment with letters, language, and varying modes of literacy outside of a strictly academic context. The final goal is to offer a bridge into the worlds of our young people.