Artist Pays Visit To Community Roots Charter School

Quick, what do the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, a woman’s prison in Hilo, Hawaii on the Big Island, and Fort Greene’s own Community Roots Charter School have in common? Give up (of course you do!): they are all connected to renowned contemporary visual artist Jane Hammond.

On Friday, May 13th, Hammond—whose work is included in both the Met and MoMA’s permanent collections—brought her Community Project to CRCS’ second-grade art class. Working with Robyn Jordan and Liz So, the local charter school’s art co-teachers, Hammond collaborated with 24 burgeoning Bourgeois, Johns, Picassos and – well, Hammonds—on a compelling art project that has been presented all over the country, including Cleveland, Tucson, and Queens as well as Kona, Holualoa, and Hilo in Hawaii.

This project grew out of Hammond’s idea that introducing a visual vocabulary defined by a handful of simple elements allows creative minds to develop their own personal and imagined narratives. Students interpret and then assemble these components into a verbal narrative that they then transform into representational drawings. 

The Community Project allows Hammond to act as facilitator rather than "artist;” in fact Hammond’s goal is to uncover the artist in all of us and to highlight the endless (and delightful) unpredictability of the human imagination.

At Community Roots, students were presented with five elements— tree, water, rope, fire and clown—and asked to create both a narrative and a finished drawing. For CRCS student Tommy Keaney, his completed work represented a “clown using a rope to pull a tree branch that was burning out of the water.” Other 2nd graders generated their own fantastic association of these disparate parts; their inquiring minds translating the imagery into subjective and entirely wonderful drawings.

The Community Project dovetails with CRCS’ core educational focus on enticing students to gather information from a variety of sources and then draw their own conclusions, in this case literally. Jordon, their art co-teacher, explains: “CRCS students learn interview skills from an early age, so they were comfortable asking Jane questions about why she chose to be an artist, where she gets ideas for artworks, and about the kinds of media she works in.”

Jordon appreciated the approach Hammond brought to the class and her work: “Jane was so open about why she cares about her work, and its meaning in her life. She stirred students' ideas and enthusiasm for their own artwork." 

For Hammond, this process-driven experimentation is yet another avenue for her creative expression. Due to the increasing scale of her projects, she has become comfortable collaborating with others, including her long time partner, Craig McNeer. McNeer assisted with the Community Project, and is involved with other Hammond works, including The Fallen, a memorial to US soldiers who gave their lives while serving during Operation Iraqi Freedom. It is this connection with all too human concerns that informs Hammond’s art and drives her interest in the creativity inherent in all of us, no matter what our circumstances.

For Hammond, visiting Community Roots was an ideal forum for the Community Project: “The kids were delightful. They were bursting with questions at the interview and filled with ideas about how to combine the five images into one drawing. No one lacked for an idea and they all got right to work."