February 10 marked our third T/AP meeting with Rebecca Carter. We started the day by viewing Jenny Holzer’s installation Kind of Blue, 2012. As a textual work, this particular piece from the Modern’s permanent collection offered the teen artists an example of how to approach, design, and execute their signage projects.

Rebecca led the students in a discussion of the Holzer installation—its formal qualities, its siting in the gallery near reflective surfaces, its two-story viewing space, its color, and the text itself.

On Sunday, February 3, the teen artists spent quite a bit of time with Rebecca Carter discussing ideas for their upcoming signage projects. As requested, the teen artists provided photographs of signage they each came across in the past week. Spending the first part of class narrowly focusing on the signage present in the photographs really got things in gear. The relationships between image and text, the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated words, and the effectiveness of fonts and typographic choices became the conversation for the day.

This past Sunday marked the first of several with our newest artist mentor, Rebecca Carter. We began with an introduction to Rebecca’s past and recent work, discussing her installations and the subjectivity of the self and body. Especially relevant was her focus on split subjectivity—the subjective difference between “I” and “me.” Continuing her presentation with a quick dabble in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, she showed us her work concerning text and textiles.

Sunday, January 13, turned out to be a very special day for the teen artists. They were afforded the opportunity to engage with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in a way that only a very select few artists and patrons can: the teen artists were permitted to draw on the museum's walls!

Happy New Year! It is 2013, and Teen/Artist Project is back in action. For our first meeting after the winter break, Gregory Ruppe (a leader of the Fort Worth art collective known as HOMECOMING! Committee) joined us to teach our teen artists about casting from molds. Joining Greg for a presentation on his work and exhibitions, we learned of some of his motivations as an artist: exploring cross-cultural idiosyncrasies, cultural myths, and obsessiveness (to name a few).