The Covid-19 pandemic has affected all walks of life, but perhaps none so much as the field of education. As classes moved online at the onset of the pandemic, educators, students, and parents were asked to quickly adapt to new mediums, methods, and expectations as learning went virtual.
Art educators faced unique, unavoidable challenges when attempting to provide students with lessons that approximated the in-class experience. The hands-on nature of art education proved to be an especially difficult discipline to translate to online instruction. A heroic effort has been undertaken by these educators over the course of the last year as they adapted their methods to a constantly changing landscape. From elementary, middle, and high school art teachers, to professors of BFA and MFA students, and college art-history instructors, art educators have experienced a year that has tested their resolve.
As we inch towards a return to in-person classes, MOCA hopes to highlight the work of these educators and showcase their achievements. “Art Education in the Age of Covid-19” will bring together a diverse panel of art educators from Los Angeles to recount and reflect on the challenges and opportunities that face teaching and learning during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
FREE, RSVP here.
Featuring:
Suzanne Hudson, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Southern California
Suzanne Hudson (MA, PhD, Princeton University) is an art historian, critic, and Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. She writes on modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on histories of abstraction, painting, and process. A regular contributor to Artforum, Hudson has contributed numerous essays to international exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. She is the author of books including Robert Ryman: Used Paint (MIT Press, 2009; 2011), Agnes Martin: Night Sea (Afterall/MIT Press, 2017), and Contemporary Painting (Thames & Hudson, 2021). Supported by a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she is pursuing research into the practical applications of art making for her book, Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process, a study of the therapeutic origins of process within American modernism.
John Ildefonso, Department of Art - Department Chair, Integrated Art Instructor, Camino Nuevo Charter Academy
John Manuel Ildefonso attended California State University-Long Beach, where he received his BFA in Painting & Drawing, and a single subject teaching credential in Art. He is a recent graduate from California State University-Los Angeles, with an MFA in painting. He regularly exhibits in the greater Los Angeles area. Currently, he teaches fulltime and is the art department chair at Camino Nuevo-Dalzell Lance High School. Ildefonso’s current artworks are contemporary interpretations of 18th-century Casta paintings and explore the impact and transfer of the Colonial-class system in Mexico, as documented by the Casta paintings, to present-day class systems in the United States. In his most recent series of works, he implements an object-defined structure to bring contemporary context to racial and socio-economic hierarchy as prescribed by Spanish-language text in Casta paintings.
Rebecca Morris, Professor, Painting and Drawing, University of California, Los Angeles
Rebecca Morris is a Los Angeles based abstract painter, whose work deeply investigates materials, form, processes, and outcomes often at an ambitious scale. Born in Honolulu Hawaii, Morris received her BA from Smith College, MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Morris’ work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany; Bonnefanten Museum, The Netherlands; The Hall Art Foundation, Derneburg, Germany; University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan; and The Berezdivin Collection, Santurce, Puerto Rico. She has taught painting and drawing at the college level in Southern California for the past twenty years and is a Professor in the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Carolina Rosas, Teacher, Walnut Park Elementary
Carolina Rosas is currently a fourth-grade teacher working for Los Angeles Unified School District, at a school located in the heart of Huntington Park. She is an alumnus of California State University of Los Angeles and has been teaching for over 20 years, incorporating art into the state curriculum to inspire student’s learning. She has been fortunate to have traveled all of Latin America, including the Caribbean Islands, and speaks, reads, and writes in her native language of Spanish. Rosas is excited to soon start her learning her native Nahuatl language this Summer.
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Virtual MOCA is presented by the MOCA Thrive Fund courtesy of Chara Schreyer.
