T/AP is back from Spring Break! This week we experimented in printmaking with artist Joshua Goode. Beginning the day with a short presentation about relief prints, Joshua explained how prints are not like paintings or sculptures—the printing process results in multiples, and they are rather cheap to produce. Joshua reviewed printmaking from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance to Modernism, providing examples by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Käthe Kollwitz, Pablo Picasso, M.C. Escher, and Al Held, among many others.

Our field trip to various art-related venues in Dallas this past Saturday proved to be a whirlwind adventure! We were welcomed into several different types of art spaces and learned a great deal about each of them in the process. A private collection, galleries, studios, and an art foundation were our visits for the day.

Joshua Goode has joined T/AP as our final artist and mentor of the 2012–2013 class year, and we are very excited to have him with us. Working in various media, he is an artist interested in not only creating an art object, but also harnessing its setting as an integral part of the work. As he discussed his own art practice, we learned that much of his inspiration is autobiographical, often dealing with his family and personal history.

Our last day with Rebecca Carter was all about WORK! WORK! WORK! Working with the computers in the lab or with the art materials, the teen artists got down to business completing their mock-ups for the signage project.

All of the students had the opportunity to submit their mock-ups to MAP—Make Art with Purpose—which will be choosing entries for an upcoming signage project later this year.

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.