ââ⢠Sugar Hill Childrens Museum of Art Storytelling
Carbohydrate Hill Museum Brings Fine art to New York's Youngest (and Poorest)
How can a museum ensure that information technology serves families who may not be able to beget schoolhouse lunches or new winter coats, much less crosstown trips to an arts establishment? Broadway Housing Communities, a Manhattan nonprofit, met this challenge with a daring resolution: Instead of creating programs to bring underprivileged children to an art museum, it would bring an art museum to underprivileged children.
The result is the 17,000-square-foot Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Fine art & Storytelling, which opened in 2015 at St. Nicholas Artery and 155th Street, in a neighborhood where, the museum notes, more than seventy per centum of children are built-in into poverty. But Sugar Hill is non only the just New York children'southward museum n of the Upper Westward Side; it is likewise the simply one that anchors a low-income housing evolution and that has an affiliated, tuition-free preschool.
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"Nosotros were interested in creating a true art museum for children — not necessarily the indoor play spaces that sometimes ascertain children'southward museums," Ellen Baxter, Broadway Housing Communities' executive director and the museum'southward board president, said in an interview. "In particular," she added, "we wanted to focus on nurturing the creative intelligence of immature children."
To fund the museum, Ms. Baxter relied heavily on the New Markets Revenue enhancement Credit Program, which awards federal income tax credits to investors putting capital into impoverished communities. By also using housing tax credits, she said, her organization could "course a more comprehensive oasis in a neighborhood of need": the $84 million Carbohydrate Loma Project, which comprises the museum, the preschool and the residences.
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Broadway Housing selected David Adjaye, the lead architect for the Smithsonian'due south National Museum of African American History and Culture, to create a unmarried structure for the project, which is named for its neighborhood. His thirteen-story edifice, with a subtle rose design on its corrugated concrete surface, has the museum and school at its base and 124 apartments higher up. From a distance, its playful elegance evokes children's blocks wrapped in grayness corduroy.
"In the commencement, people idea it was a luxury new high-rising coming in to actually usher in the challenges of gentrification," said Lauren Kelley, the museum's director and primary curator and an creative person herself. "And it's far from that." Full-price admission to Carbohydrate Loma, which is complimentary to visitors viii and younger and offers a free Sunday each month, is just $7.
Prototype
"Nosotros're besides a infinite that honors people of color," Ms. Kelley said. "Artists of color, artists of the Harlem Renaissance, thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance."
Just while the museum has welcomed more than 56,000 visitors and so far, it has had growing pains. At its showtime, the venerable creative person information technology most wanted to celebrate was Faith Ringgold, a Harlem native for whom the museum was to be named. But in 2011, Ms. Ringgold, frustrated by the plans' pace and concerned that they would not include a true fine art museum, withdrew her proper name and support. She has since come around — so much and so that the museum recently opened "Saccharide Hill Songbook: Select Work by Faith Ringgold," a show of her quilts, soft sculpture, illustrations and works on paper.
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"I think all children love fine art, only not all become the opportunity to exercise it," Ms. Ringgold said in a telephone interview. "This is a place where they tin see the fine art, do information technology, be inspired by information technology."
Only while picayune visitors may recognize pieces by Ms. Ringgold, also a renowned children'southward book writer, they regularly run across Sugar Hill exhibitions that are abstract or Conceptual. An intriguing paradox is that the museum focuses on both a very young population — children 3 to 8 — and very sophisticated work.
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"If it didn't say 'children's museum,' information technology could exist a museum for anyone," said Jennifer Ifil-Ryan, Saccharide Hill's deputy director and managing director of creative appointment. In fact, it has just opened two other shows that would fit in hands downtown at the New Museum: "Justin Favela: Recuérdame," an enormous deputed mural nearly United mexican states in one of Mr. Favela's favorite materials, piñata paper, and "Yuken Teruya: Cutting Copse," featuring tree dioramas made from cut and folded paper bags.
Saccharide Hill makes its artwork accessible with dual wall labels, one fix written in language geared toward adults, and the other offering information and questions for children. It also approaches fine art through storytelling — the museum offers an interactive story program every day it is open — and by encouraging exploration of artists' materials in its Studio Lab, a well-stocked infinite for visitors. Only post-obit the principles of Reggio Emilia, a progressive educational approach founded in Italy, information technology never dictates what projects to make.
Paradigm
"Information technology's really heady to see how kids approach a table full of interesting and provocative materials," said Anthony González, who directs the museum's schoolhouse programs and special projects. "When we create the presentation on the table, it has to look like dessert — and so when the kids are 10 feet away, they wait at our table and go, 'Aah!'"
Sugar Hill also has an 11-month residency program, which gives an artist a studio on the premises. Culminating in an exhibition, the residency includes monthly open-studio sessions with museum visitors. Semifinalists in the application process have to devise a workshop for tough judges: the Sugar Hill preschool students, with whom the chosen artist volition piece of work in one case a week.
Prototype
In a telephone interview, Damien Davis, who recently began his Carbohydrate Loma residency, described his latest piece of work as "all nearly exploring racial discrimination in the Us wellness care system." It is somber and difficult subject thing, but Mr. Davis, whose installations have been at the Museum of Modern Fine art and the Whitney, approaches information technology through a playful iconography: assuming, colorful solid cutouts. He intends to collaborate with children in developing work that they can handle and to which they can attach meaning.
"If this is a museum nearly storytelling, it has to cut both ways," he said. "I accept to let the children tell their own stories. My job is to dilate those stories and give those stories more of a vocalisation — a platform."
Mr. Davis's work also connects to ane of Sugar Hill's founding principles: social justice. The museum tries to teach borough engagement through everything from the books in its reading nook to the content of its public programs. As Ms. Kelley put it, "We desire to grow a new generation of socially responsible individuals," which, she said, besides means "building a new generation of really conscious thinkers."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/design/sugar-hill-museum-art-to-new-yorks-youngest.html
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