So
with the Museum as a kind of learning lab, we kicked off our first project.
Students toured an exhibition of artworks that focused on life in the suburbs.
Then I worked with them on writing ekphrastic poems. Additionally they created
their own artworks about growing up in suburban communities.
The
success of that pilot meant the Museum was able to develop an ongoing program.
So I created the role of writer in residence at the KMA and have served in this
capacity for more than 10 years. I teach and manage the museum’s Thinking
Through the Arts (TTA) program, which has been recognized by the New York State
Council on the Arts. This program has become foundational to the museum’s
ongoing relationships with schools.
We
have a diverse exhibition schedule that ranges across cultures and history. I
helped design the TTA curriculum to fit our exhibitions’ content. I supervise
and maintain the program’s partnerships
with schools and visiting artists. I’ve personally taught thousands of
students. Using concepts, materials and themes from the exhibitions, students
in elementary through high school learn to observe, analyze, think critically
and create in response to artworks at the museum. Recently we’ve started to
expand the TTA program into a nearby maximum-security prison for women, though
the pandemic has delayed things.
But what about my
writing? This long residency is uncommon! It has offered me an artistic home,
with space to grow as a poet. I am lucky to always be learning about artists and
their habits and styles. This invigorates my writing. I work with a team of
incredible museum educators who challenge and motivate my pedagogical practice.
Plus I really love visual art. I love how artists play with materials. I am
inspired, for instance, by the way the painter Joan Mitchell uses colors and
thick daubs of paint on her canvas. Several of her paintings were in the KMA
galleries last year. For me words, sentences, syntax and so forth are like
materials. The many artists whose work has been installed in the Museum’s
galleries over the years urge me to take up my palette of words when writing.
Eventually I even wrote a book. My poetry collection Mothers Over Nangarhar was
published last year. And my book launch took place at the Katonah Museum.
Hopefully I’ll be here another decade. And hopefully I can continue to create
among the paintings, photographs, sculptures and multi-media works that come to
live, as I have, at the Museum.
Pamela Hart is writer in
residence at the Katonah Museum of Art where she teaches and manages a visual
literacy arts in education program. Her book, Mothers Over Nangarhar,
was published in 2019 by Sarabande Books after winning the Kathryn A. Morton
prize. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in
poetry in 2013. In addition, she’s an editor for Afghan Voices, the Afghan
Women's Writing Project and As You Were: The Military Review. Her
poems have been published in various online and print journals.