Return to Exploring What Matters: Art by The Met High School Interns
Teaching Artist Jonny Goldstein introduces himself to the interns and discusses his art practice as a visual notetaker and his creative inspirations.
The group visits the exhibition About Face: Human Expression on Paper to study how artists capture facial expressions. The interns then try out quickly drawing facial expressions.
To practice sketching people simply and quickly, the interns interview each other about the important people in their lives while taking sketch notes. Serenity describes those people as Kayla draws her vision of them.
The interns visit the galleries to explore how artists use basic shapes and patterns. Then, they experiment with quick ways to make objects out of simple shapes.
The interns visit the Study Room for Drawings and Prints to get up close and personal with some powerful sketches and prints, which will serve as inspiration for their own artworks.
The interns experiment with various strategies to tell stories visually. Here, Loretta draws visual notes of Ahanaf's day, hour by hour, on a linear timeline. Then, they create their visual notes expressing something they think matters.
Romello (left) and Nichole (right) present drafts of their visual note artworks to the group.
Artist in Residence Peter Hristoff introduces the interns to his work with rug weavers in Turkey.
The interns visit the galleries with Peter to discuss the various motifs in and techniques used to create Islamic art and to find inspiration for their rug designs.
As a warm-up activity, the interns paint their own visualizations of abstract concepts with India ink to experiment with representing ideas and themes visually.
They return to the galleries to sketch from artworks as a practice in creating forms from objects and elements from life. They do more sketching and note taking on the designs and motifs they see appear in the artworks.
The designing begins. The interns make initial sketches of their rug design on special graph paper used to map out a Turkish double-knot pattern.
The interns visit the Study Room for Drawings and Prints to draw inspiration from artists' patterns, designs, and symbols in works in the collection.
After honing their rug designs to incorporate motifs they designed to tell their own unique stories, the interns participate in an informal critique of their draft designs with Peter. Once complete, the designs are sent to Turkey to be woven into rugs.
The Met high school interns at work with the artists Peter Hristoff and Jonny Goldstein. Photos by Emily Chow Bluck