WITS Begins 20th Year at The Menil Collection

Since 1989, Writers in the Schools has partnered with The Menil Collection for the purpose of providing a meaningful and inspirational experience for youths and an opportunity to muse upon the adventure.  For many children, this encounter with art is the first of its kind in their young lives.  The collaboration between The Menil Collection and WITS also gives children a rare chance to visit the collection in the morning before it is open to the public.

On a sunny and seasonably warm morning, a busload of middle school and high school children arrived at The Menil Collection for a tour.  The beautiful and modern building that houses the famous collection was nearly deserted and the locked doors still displayed a CLOSED sign, but not for long.  Little did these young students know, they were about to have an entire wealth of masterpieces and antiquities to themselves, if only for the morning. 

As soon as the kids were lined up and separated into two groups based on age, we all filed into the museum.  As a brand new addition to the WITS staff, I jumped at the opportunity to witness the project and to observe the creative process in action.  We were accompanied by fellow WITS writers Rick Brennan, Glenn Shaheen, and Jennifer Aguirre as well as some visual artists who led the respective groups through the collection.  After a quick review of museum decorum, proper standing distance from the art, appropriate voice levels etc., the two groups began a walkthrough of the galleries of The Menil Collection.

Earlier that morning, Karl Kilian, Director of Public Programs for The Menil Collection, told a story about Dominique De Menil.  Apparently, during the construction of the building for The Menil Collection it was presumed that hard woods would be used for the flooring.  Dominique De Menil had a different idea.  She felt that the floors should be constructed of soft wood because she wanted every person who stepped foot inside the museum to leave a permanent impression.  It occurred to me that these children would do the same and that perhaps the museum would make a permanent impression on their lives too.  I began to feel as though I was part of something truly extraordinary.

Once each child was armed with a pencil and a clipboard filled with lined paper, our first stop is the surrealism collection.  The artists and writers attempted to give a crash course in the genre.  The children were gently encouraged to think about these pieces of art as the products of dreams and the subconscious.  I had a preconceived notion that the concept of surrealism might be difficult to explain to a person who had never seen a Salvador Dali or a Rene Magritte painting.  For that matter, it seemed difficult to explain anything that is ostensibly the combination of dissimilar or unusual objects and concepts or the reconfiguration of human or other natural forms to create work that hints at the unreal or the impossible.  I stood corrected as every child seemed to enjoy, if perhaps not fully comprehend, the idea of surrealism. 

The children giggled as they passed two Magritte paintings, Le Viol and L’evidence eternelle.  These two works dealt with the human form in a disjointed, abstracted manner.  Le viol employs the elements of the human anatomy to create a face, while L’evidence eternelle uses several small canvases to create a life size portrait.  Other works by Magritte seemed to enthrall rather than amuse the children.  The paintings in which Magritte used nature and played with the art form of the landscape to create beautiful and surreal scenes were the works that truly seemed to grip and inspire the kids. 

The next stop on the tour was the traveling exhibition called NeoHooDoo, Art For A Forgotten Faith, a compilation of a number of contemporary artists who explore religion, culture and identity in their work.  Before we stepped into the gallery we passed some artifacts from the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest.  Glenn Shaheen primed the kids for what they were about to see by asking them to be on the lookout for similarities between these artifacts and the work in the NeoHooDoo exhibit.  I, like the kids, learned from Glenn’s instruction.  I immediately saw similarities between the native artifacts and a piece titled 2010 by Brian Jungen.  Jungen used golf bags stacked upon one another and assembled in interesting ways to suggest the form of the totem pole.  I found that I greatly benefited from the guidance of the artists and writers.  The students soon made the same connections I was making, and more importantly, connections of their own.  I was thrilled to think that one doesn’t need a lifetime of experiencing art to appreciate it or understand it.  The success of the collaboration between WITS and The Menil Collection is lively proof of that.

As a group we studied Storm at Sea by Radcliffe Bailey.  I was amazed to see the kids slowly understand that the use of materials in this piece was central to its concept.  A sea was constructed out of what appeared to be scrap wood.  A lone ship floated in the maelstrom.  The piece evoked the concept of a shipwreck.  The children then connected the use of broken, littered wood as an element of a shipwreck.  This boat, in a sense, floated on a sea of wreckage.  For me this was a fascinating idea and one that the students also seemed to be attentive to. 

After our quick tour of the exhibit we got down to the business of writing.  We all sat on the floor of the gallery in front of David Hammons’ Untitled, a circular assemblage of glass bottles.  The kids were asked to recall the found objects that had been used in the other pieces from the show.  Glenn then read aloud “Ode to Tomatoes”, by Pablo Neruda.  Neruda is a gifted poet and this poem in particular is alive with colors, shapes, and sensations.  It was an excellent poem for the children to hear before writing.  They were asked to write an ode of their own, about anything that they liked.  Glenn suggested writing about a piece from the show, an element from a piece in the show or anything at all.  I also participated in the exercise and wrote an ode of my own.  I wrote an ode to insoles because my feet were hurting from standing all morning.

A student named Melody wrote a rather unusual and wonderful ode.  Her poem was about an abstraction, which immediately drew me in.  She wrote an ode to coming and going.  I was thoroughly impressed as I listened to her read her poem.  She discussed life in the context of the ideas of arrival and departure.  She seemed to hint at great existential truths while displaying a commanding use of language.  In retrospect, it made my ode to insoles seem positively pedestrian.  I was in awe of the power and significance that a trip like this can hold for a youth and I found the experience to be truly enlightening.  For me it seemed as though every child took something meaningful away with them as well as a record of it on paper.  And to my surprise, so did I.