Teen Art Project: Arts & Leadership Summer Session
June 11 - August 8 2024
TAP Summer 2024: What beauty does this place unveil to you?
In the Teen Art Project (TAP) of Summer 2024, a group of teens, guided by a group of five professional artists under the direction of the artist and educator Janaína Vieira-Marques, developed an artistic zine titled YOU ARE HERE to be distributed across Missoula. TAP is a free teen program that runs multiple sessions year round, bringing youth from across the Missoula area to collaborate on art projects working side by side with professional artists. In previous sessions, the program has produced multiple murals, ceramic pieces, and more.
TAP participants dove into the appreciation of their surroundings while creating a collaborative zine guided by the question: What beauty does this place unveil to you? YOU ARE HERE highlights the beauty in the world around us. The group visited Council Grove State Park and seven different places around downtown Missoula. This zine collects the feelings and individual experiences of the teens, inspired by the locations and by what was learned from the teaching artists. Encouraged to think deeply about the land and its history, the teens were able to delve beneath the surface and create art that reflects themselves as well as the world around them.
The teens would like to challenge you to reimagine how you view your surroundings while exploring the zine. If all lands and places are important, will you interact with the world differently? What do you see when you are walking down the street? What does the ant beneath your foot see? What do you see now, that will not be here tomorrow? Take a moment to investigate where you are, why you are here, and what you can see beyond the surface.
Thank you to the artists who have inspired the teens to create this zine, with a special thank you to Corky Clairmont, who inspired all of us to see things differently, to find beauty in the ordinary things, and to challenge the value system we sometimes apply to the land and to each other, so that we can consider all places as important.
August 8, 5 to 6 PM: Zine Release Party! Join Teen Art Project (TAP) artists, MAM staff, and funders to celebrate a zine for Missoula, You Are Here, created during MAM's flagship free arts and leadership program for teens. Meet in MAM's Art Park. Light refreshments will be served.
Artists:
Names of professional artists listed below according to the order in which they taught in the TAP program:
Chris La Tray is a Métis storyteller, a descendent of the Pembina Band of the mighty Red River of the North and an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. La Tray is an author and a poet.
Aspen Decker is an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (T̓at̓ayáqn, Ql̓isp̓é & Sqlsé), and speaker of Nsélišcn ‘Salish language’. She is an artist and founder of the organization: "Alive and Well" Séliš Education Integration.
Corwin (Corky) Clairmont hails from Ronan, Montana and is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. He is a celebrated visual and conceptual artist whose decades of work have included printmaking, mixed media, sculpture and installation.
Ladypajama is a mixed-media artist and zinester.
Theo Ellsworth is a self-taught artist, comics creator, and elaborate storyteller. He is a painter, sculptor, mixed-media artist, and illustrator.
Janaína Vieira-Marques (MAM) is a leader in museum education and outreach, and a public art specialist originally from a land of Mbya and Tekohá (Guarani) Indigenous people on the Eastern border of Brazil, also known as São Paulo.
Along with the teaching artists, the program was also assisted with the two summer education interns Otis Aiello (AAMD Education Intern) and Amare Swierc (AmeriCorps Education Service Intern).
Teens: Athena Mayahi-Barrett, Pearl Hickes, Anna Stephens, Liam Graham, Savannah Faller, Aaliyah Morales, and Magnolia Gaundry.
THANK YOU to our generous TAP SPONSORS
Major Sponsors:
MONTANA ARTS COUNCIL
MISSOULA DOWNTOWN FOUNDATION
Pizza provided by: Front Street Pizza
Zine printing provided by Advanced Litho Printing, LLC
