It’s my pleasure to share the work of the teen interns in this semester’s Satellite High School Program. Fifteen students from all around Milwaukee spent a semester exploring and discussing art, touring elementary school students, going behind the scenes, speaking to staff, and learning about career skills. Then, the teens created final projects expressing how art can be made relevant to our lives today and how the Milwaukee Art Museum can be an icon for the city, inside and out. This post, part 4 of 4, showcases the work of these students in their own words.
The final group of students created works out of many different kinds of media for their final projects.
Nhyji
“My collage of graffiti shows different types of graffiti on the Galleria of the Milwaukee Art Museum. In this environment of the Museum, it shows meaning and artistic value. I also believe that graffiti art is the most interesting out of all other types of art. It seems almost rejected by limited use and neighbors complaining about it being on the outside of the artists’ homes. But I believe it will be able to come back and may even have its own show in a museum or gallery, or a course in school or college. I came to love graffiti ever since I bought it up as a topic in one of our Satellite sessions and will continue to grow at it as an artist myself.”
Maddie
“I made a cake as my final project. I built the Museum out of rice krispies and fondant and I painted it. I put the words ‘You are here,’ the words they have on maps, on the cake, so that the focal point is where you are. The Museum itself is kind of the focal point of Milwaukee and art in this state, so I wanted to highlight that in my project.”
Jonathan
“In my project, I decided to create a song using some samples of sound I took from the museum. I combined this song with a video of the art works on display at the museum along with some footage of other buildings that are of importance in the area. The reasons I used the footage of artworks was to show how diverse of a museum we are–from sculpture to paintings, we have it all. The footage of the US Bank tower is there to show that no matter how big it is, the Milwaukee Art Museum is still the better known land mark. In the song itself, I used samples of the crowds in the Museum along with the iPad click sounds that we used in the Satellite program. I put these click sounds in a pattern to create a rhythmic beat then I used the crowd sounds as ambient noise for my song. In the intro I recorded people saying “This is” to represent the community here at the museum and put it for the buildup of the song. I am happy to say this is one of the best experiences I have had, along with some of the greatest people I have met from the staff to my peers!”
Zakia and Meg
2. Zakia and Meg’s final project, a poem. Photo by Front Room Photography
“Throughout the year with Satellite I, Zakia, learned many things about how the museum connects to the people in Milwaukee. In turn I see how we all express ourselves by communicating with others and that’s what I like to express through my work. I decided with my partner Meg to create a poem. We both had the same idea of expressing the main two questions through words or song. Just as the last line of the poem states, ‘As the museum is a house and your hearts are the hearth’, the Museum wouldn’t be here without all of Milwaukee supporting it by coming through its doors.”
Chelsea Emelie Kelly was the Museum’s Manager of Digital Learning. In addition to working on educational technology initiatives like the Kohl’s Art Generation Lab and this blog, she oversaw and taught teen programs.