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Educator Resource: Art Activities Wander With Us

As part of the exhibition Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967 – 2017, we encourage you and your students to wander with us by participating in these entirely unexpected art activities. Each of these activities relates directly to work in the exhibition and challenges students to see the world around them in a new way. Each of these four activities includes an open-ended prompt as well as two artworks from the exhibition to serve as inspiration and accompanying text from the exhibition didactics to help connect the featured artwork to the prompt. These activities include:

• Watch Where You Walk • Draw Your Route • Create a Dialogue • Make Lost Objects Found

Check out examples and share your completed art activities with us on social media by tagging the Art Center and using the hashtag #ArtCenterChallenge!

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Activity: Watch Where You Walk Document a walk. Share where you’re going and where you’ve been. Consider this new and unique perspective and explore how it changes the way you see the world around you. Inspiration from the exhibition

Richard Long (British, b. 1945) A Line Made by Walking, 1967 Gelatin silver print on paper Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Richard Long’s work is a poetic and communicative response to nature, and continues a British tradition of artistic landscape explorers that goes back to (John) Constable, (JMW) Turner, and (William) Wordsworth. Particularly concerned with movement—the changes in natural elements due to weather and time, as well as his own movement through the landscape—Long continues the aims of his forefathers, as well as those of his contemporaries in the land, conceptual, and performance art genres. – Written by Laura Burkhalter

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Nancy Holt (American, 1938 – 2014) Trail Markers, 1969 / 2012 Inkjet prints on archival rag paper Courtesy of the Estate of Nancy Holt and Parafin, London Trail Markers, a series of twenty inkjet prints made from Instamatic color transparencies, systematically depicts the orange circles on rocks and fences that guide visitors along walking routes in Dartmoor, a national park in Devon, England. In the summer of 1969, Holt photographed these previously painted marks, demonstrating her longstanding interest in human interventions in the landscape as well as her participation in the new conceptual photographic strategies of the time. – Written by Whitney Tassie

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Activity: Draw Your Route Find a creative way to share the path of your journey. There are many ways to find inspiration in the paths you take. Illustrate a map of significant locations, spell out a message on your daily run, or physically leave a mark of your path in the space around you. Find a new way to document your everyday journeys. Inspiration from the exhibition

John Pfahl (American, b. 1939) Bamboo Lightning, Penland, North Carolina, 1977 Photographs on paper Courtesy of John Pfahl In his Altered Landscapes: Lightning Series, photographer John Pfahl’s constructed lightning bolts strike through the center of his images, connecting foreground to background in compositions of diverse American forests, salt flats, and swamps. The artist literally marks the territory where he has journeyed, with tape and string outlining his chosen symbol. – Written by Natalie Fleming

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Greg Stimac (American, b. 1976) Portland to Sacramento 2009 Photographs on paper Courtesy of the artist Road trips are an American rite of passage and US Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, and Route 66 are the paved veins connecting more than 3.5 million square miles. Having taken on mythological status in the American imagination, we document our adventures in various ways: photographs, videos, mix tapes, little souvenir spoons you can pick up at rest stops. But the bugs on your windshield are certainly documents too, reminders of where you have been, free keepsakes that you can’t easily even wash away. – Written by Natalie Fleming

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Activity: Create a Dialogue Spell a word, craft a sentence, or discover new meaning from found language in the world around you. Choose a street corner to observe font in the wild or pay closer attention to street signs on your way to school. Create something new from the language you discover. Inspiration from the exhibition

John Baldessari (American, b. 1931) and George Nicolaidis California Map Project Part 1: California, 1969 / 2000 12 archival inkjet prints Courtesy of John Baldessari Baldessari conceived of the map project from the seat of an airplane as he took in the aerial view. He thought it might be interesting “to see the landscape like a map and to actually execute each letter and symbol of the map employed on the corresponding part of the earth.” In this example, each letter spelling CALIFORNIA is made with found and ephemeral materials, such as a telephone pole and faked shadow to make an L. The mapmaker’s aesthetic decision as to where to place the letters following the conventions of cartography is imposed on the real world as Baldessari plays with the relationships between a schematic representation and reality. – Written by Joshua Fischer

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Tel Aviv workshop with Todd Shalom and Nisan Almog Haymian Courtesy of the artist In his participatory walks, artist Todd Shalom invites participants to notice the world around them in new ways. One of those practices involves creating a sentence from “found” words on a street corner. See the practice in action via video here.

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Activity: Make Lost Objects Found

Find inspiration in discarded items and create something new. Explore the environment around you and find ways to transform found, discarded, or forgotten items. Inspiration from the exhibition

Marie Lorenz (American, b. 1973) Gyre, 2017 Porcelain, string Courtesy of the artist For more than a decade, Marie Lorenz’s handmade boats have taken her on journeys across North American waterways. For Gyre, Lorenz created 50 molds from the objects she has collected over the past ten years including some from her trip down the Erie Canal. The result is over 1,200 porcelain sculptures threaded down from the ceiling. As the sculptures were removed from their molds, they were manipulated by the artist; no two objects are alike, making the water bottles, food containers and other discarded items slightly unrecognizable at first glance. – Written by Hannah Cattarin

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Michael x. Ryan (American, b. 1956) Roadstains #3: Coke spill from Parked Car on Potomac Ave.,Chicago, Fall 2004, 2007 Wood relief: Finnish and Baltic plywood and latex paint Courtesy of the artist Road Stains started on the streets and sidewalks of Chicago, early in the morning and late at night, where he meticulously traced the discovered liquid contours of the small disappointments of a dropped Coke or beer dripping from a block party’s keg. Ryan transforms splats and splotches of these incidental moments into cataclysms of undetermined scale. Once he discovers a worthy road stai n, he traces it onto Plexiglas and then returns to the studio to create a wood relief. Painted the color of the gallery wall, the relief’s explode upwards in defiance of gravity. – Written by Ross Jordan