In July, Art from Ashes collaborated with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA Denver) to host a youth art workshop series in July, combining AfA’s Phoenix Rising writing prompts with screen printing and wheatpasting.
We kicked off the four-day collaboration with a two-hour Phoenix Rising workshop, where youth wrote and shared poems they wrote in just three minutes, then created collages inspired by those poems in a group-brainstorm session. The rest of the week was spent engaging with more writing prompts and translating the poems into a visual art project. Zachary Davidson, the MCA Youth Program Manager, demonstrated the screen-printing process to participants who then co-created designs, screen printed them onto paper, and individualized the templates with visual elements of their powerful poems.
On the last day of the workshop, the youth wheatpasted their designs, complete with poems, collages, and drawings onto the gallery walls within the MCA Teen Space, creating a temporary mural. The youth had jointly chosen to create triangle-shaped designs that they arranged to create a larger, organic piece combining all of their art and poetry in one work.
The creativity and inspiration in these workshops was immense, and one youth even shared with AfA facilitators that the experience was one of best they’d had in recent memory. In addition to the poems written, the youth engaged in conversation with each other and with facilitators about issues that were important to them, including ending gun violence and ending body shaming.
Youth poems are on display in the MCA Denver Teen Space, which is open to the public. When museum visitors entered the space during the workshop, youth participants invited them in to check out their creations, and even asked visitors if they’d like to do a poetry prompt!
On July 28, the community was invited to the teen space gallery’s opening night, which showcased art from all of MCA’s summer workshop series (ours being the third of three). Instead of MCA’s usual B-Side Fridays, the evening was a teen takeover, with youth bands playing to celebrate the gallery opening. At intermission, youth poets Venn (age 15), Mario (age 16), and Maui (age 13) shared their three-minute poems on MCA’s beautiful rooftop stage.
