Art & Design Maymester in New York

I just returned from a whirlwind month in New York City teaching in the School of Art’s maymester art & design field study program. The group of 32 students spent the mornings studying contemporary art history with a colleague (sometimes meeting in a traditional classroom setting and sometimes an experiential museum visit like MoMa or the Whitney). In the afternoons the group broke up into two smaller groups, with half studying curatorial studies and studio art with another colleague and the other group studying design with me. The student group was a mix of graphic design, fabric design and interdisciplinary studies majors so we looked at design broadly. Some of the highlights of our afternoons were visiting Google Manhattan studios, the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design museum (my favorite) where we had a great prototyping workshop and tour, Flavor Paper in Brooklyn and even the NYC Transit Museum. It was an intense 3.5 weeks but certainly a valuable experience (and dare I say more fun than sitting around in a classroom for summer school?)